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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • They tried to jump right into the “popular thing drives high demand for popular spaces in popular thing” and skip the whole “make thing popular” step, banking on their name and people thinking it’ll make them a ton of money.

    Though tbh I can’t say that was necessarily the wrong move (at least not if their entire goal is maximizing gains), since it wasn’t going to get popular like they wanted in the first place, so skipping that step and going straight to fleecing those dumb enough to throw money at it might have made the most sense.

    That said, I think they put more money into it than they got out of it, so I doubt that it was deliberate. Zuck probably just thought if he paid people to make it, users would just flock to it and it would be as popular as fictional VR worlds are, despite missing the tactile VR system they tend to use or the whole “VR world is popular (or the focus of everyone’s life)” being a plot point rather than the consequence of someone building the world and people choosing to spend their time and money there.

    Also, I’m in the demographic that probably would have been the most interested (like as a user of VR, not someone looking to just make money from it), but their offering didn’t even raise enough curiosity for me to check out what they made. There is an anti-meta bias in play, but even if it had been offered by a separate entity, I still wouldn’t have been interested because it sounded enshitified from the moment of concept.






  • I stopped using it once I found out their entire business model was basically copyright trolling on a technicality that anyone who answers a question gives them the copyright to the answer, and using code audits to go after businesses that had copy/pasted code. Just left a bad taste in my mouth, even beside stopping using it for work even though I wasn’t copy/pasting code.

    And even before LLMs, I found ignoring stack exchange results for a search usually still got to the right information.

    But yeah, it also had a moderation problem. Give people a hammer of power and some will go searching for nails, and now you don’t have anywhere to hang things from because the mod was dumber than the user they thought they needed to moderate. And now google can figure out that my question is different from the supposed duplicate question that was closed because it sends me to the closed one, not the tangentially related question the dumbass mod thought was the same thing. Similar energy to people who go to help forums and reply useless shit like RTFM. They aren’t really upset at “having” to take time to respond, they are excited about a chance to act superior to someone.


  • On Super Mario Wii U this happens. My daughter used it to see how to get through levels she was having trouble with. It’s frustrating to watch, though it showed me I was wrong that levels basically needed the run button to be held to make it across the gaps.

    And then you can either accept that the ghost beat the level for you or go back to trying.

    But, the thing is it’s not very difficult to do this with specific games. You can just record the inputs as they come in and replay those, which is how replays or saved games often work.

    Seems like they want to be able to do this for arbitrary games, which requires a much more sophisticated system that can understand what’s on the screen, what the goals are, and how to achieve them using just video and audio feedback (and maybe hint documents from the makers).








  • Don’t ban aftermarket exhausts completely, just the ones that optimize for loudness or dirtier air.

    I’d like to see devices that detect when a car is running too rich or lean (bad cases I can smell right away, so it should be detectable at a range), along with enforcement and seizing vehicles where they deliberately mess with those, especially if there’s a switch or function present that can switch between legal and illegal modes to pass emissions tests and then go back to spewing out unburnt fuel or a much higher number of nitrous oxide compounds.


  • Windows comes with its own set of challenges in the form of wanting things set up differently from how MS wants them set up and not wanting to be nagged about using their shitty programs and services. I got to the point where any time the OS or software initiated some kind of contact with me, it would annoy me even if it might have been helpfull because I’m so used to those being from the marketing department.

    Like I’ve noticed that Linux can do things without annoying me even if that thing used to annoy me on windows just because I don’t have that expectation that it’s trying to sell me something.