• 0 Posts
  • 140 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023




  • I had so many good times on forums back in the day.

    The personal nature of them was great for being social and making friends, but it was also good for the quality of the content for and user behaviour too.

    When everyone recognises you and remembers your past behaviour, people put effort into creating a good reputation for themselves and making quality posts. It’s like living in a small village versus living in a city.

    The thought of being banned back then genuinely filled people with dread, because even if you could evade it (which many people couldn’t as VPNs were barely a thing) you’d lose your whole post history and personal connection with people, and users did cherish those things.




  • The worrying truth is that we are all going to be subject to these sorts of false correlations and biases and there will be very little we can do about it.

    You go to buy car insurance, and find that your premium has gone up 200% for no reason. Why? Because the AI said so. Maybe soneone with your name was in a crash. Maybe you parked overnight at the same GPS location where an accident happened. Who knows what data actually underlies that decision or how it was made, but it was. And even the insurance company themselves doesn’t know how it ended up that way.







  • I have a portable monitor that I’m pretty pleased with.

    It has a magnetic cover that goes over the screen to keep it safe, and that same cover folds and goes on the back to act as a stand when it’s in use. Power and video are via the same USB-C cable.

    Nice and slim and stays in my bag most of the time but when I want a second screen I can whip it out in two secs.

    A screen that attaches to the laptop sounds convenient initially, but I feel like in practice it would be a hindrance and make your laptop clunky and bulky.



  • tiramichutoBooks@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    I can easily see both sides on this one.

    In one way I have little sympathy. It’s the same as parents complaining after they show their child a violent anime, that it was a ‘cartoon’ and so it must be for children - having made that snap judgement without investigating the contents in the slightest.

    On the other hand, as the article rightly suggests, there are established conventions in the publishing industry and this book defied them.

    They are conventions I personally kinda hate, because they are the reason every Crime paperback looks the same as each other, and every Sci-Fi book is instantly recognisable as that genre on the shelves. But the conventions do exist.

    In mass-market publishing terms, sparkly happy cartoon = children.

    The publisher and author totally knew what they were doing here and they did it anyway. It’s wilfully misleading.

    Whether established standards should be enough to absolve a parent of the responsibility to understand what they are giving to their child, though, you decide.





  • tiramichutoGames@lemmy.worldToday's featured article on Wikipedia: Outer WildsEnglish
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    For real. It’s an amazing game that just can’t be the same again once you know all its secrets.

    I bought it for two of my friends, and they both ended up hating it lol. I don’t blame them, but I think it’s very much to do with the mentality of how you approach the experience.

    One friend just got plain stuck and gave up. The other found it frustrating that they were doing the same thing several times over, and just wanted to rush as quickly as they could to make progress.

    Personally, I enjoyed the slow pace of discovery. I loved that feeling of being a true explorer, discoving facets of lost civilisation. Watching in melancholic awe as a world crumbled around me. Finding just a small piece of new information was always a joy, and made it feel worthwhile to get there, even if I’d done 90% of the journey before.

    Slowly getting richer in a game where the only currency is knowledge.