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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • We already have an Everything App that allows you to execute all the different functions of your phone, it’s called the operating system. The proposed app would just be a smaller, shittier OS with fewer functions and no choices. Elon is a failed Steve Jobs—which is depressing because Jobs was also a charlatan—who thinks “what if it was one thing” is actually the answer the all technology, because he doesn’t understand technology as well as he thinks. Pro tip: carrying around 1 device instead of a cell phone, a pager, an mp3 player, and a PDA is helpful. Consolidating different functions that have no reason to interplay with each other into a big mess is not.

    tl;dr it’s shit from a butt


  • Here’s a condensed version of the article:

    Language Learning Model Outputs the Same Kind of Data as its Input

    New groundbreaking journalism has discovered that when you analyze a large pluratily of a given language’s written works, you get data that reflects the biases of the people who wrote it all down, most of whom died 100+ years ago. No word yet as to when the author plans to publish illuminating, hard-hitting investigative journalism into the effects of microwaves on popcorn.




  • I’m a liberal, I can field this one. The form of protest I find acceptable is destruction of government and corporate property, but not working-class peoples’ houses and mom-and-pop businesses. Is it really so much to ask to have rioting confined to productive activities, such as trashing city hall, looting Amazon DCs, destroying private jets and yachts, assaulting corrupt politicians, tarring and feathering billionaires, and burning down police stations? The establishment has successfully recuperated progressive protest by tricking people into associating it with low-level domestic terrorism, “we get what we want or maybe your houses burn down”; what we should be doing is repeatedly yanking the choke chain on the state and the 1% so hard their eyes pop out.



  • The extent of my American education on this matter, paraphrased:

    “During President Eisenhower’s farewell address, he warned the American people against increasing social polarization and the dominance of the military-industrial complex, and then it happened anyway. Ain’t that some shit? Write a paper comparing the ways we ignored the warnings in Eisenhower’s farewell address against the ways we also ignored the warnings in George Washington’s farewell address.”










  • You gotta pick your battles, you know? The game still has content in it from 2001. The same company still makes the “regular” version of RuneScape alongside OldSchool, and while its graphics are more sophisticated, they’re also more inconsistent and have a tendency to look cheap—and regular RuneScape is filled to the brim with microtransactions. On desktop you can play OSRS using a third party client called RuneLite, which does have some graphics improvement plugins, most notably the 117HD plugin:


  • Personally I recommend Old School RuneScape.

    Pros:

    • F2P mode is robust enough to enjoy casually
    • Membership is $12.50/month and drastically increases the amount of content you can play
    • There’s tons of stuff to do in general and the writing, especially in quests, is charming and fun
    • The in-game events are generally flavor events like Halloween, Christmas, and special game modes. There aren’t any “double XP weekends” or shit like that
    • The only microtransaction is the membership bond, a token redeemable for two weeks of membership for those who don’t want to buy membership directly. You can buy bonds from the developer for $8, but you can also trade or buy them from another player using in-game money. This means you can technically “pay to win” by buying bonds and selling them for gold, but a high-level player can make gold more efficiently than that anyway so it’s a waste of time
    • Players who have membership are elegible to vote in the content polls, where the developer proposes game content updates and only implements them if 70% of the voters approve. For example, the game is getting a new skill, Sailing—but only because adding a new skill was approved by members and then Sailing beat out the other choices in the subsequent round. The devs do still put through unpolled updates for “game integrity”, like bug/exploit fixes and necessary technical changes.
    • Has easily the best wiki of any video game period, and an in-game “look this up in the wiki” button.

    Cons:

    • The developers (mostly when ordered to by their parent company) occasionally try to sneak enshittification into the game once or twice a year, till the players riot and threaten to cancel membership
    • There is always some kind of drama going on, currently the drama is that a J-mod (one of the people on the Dev team) was temp banning every player who crossed a girl he wanted to impress
    • The player base is pretty toxic by modern web 3.0 standards. However, as someone who’s played both games, it’s basically Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood compared to the League of Legends community.
    • Modern gamers might find much of the gameplay, especially skilling, to be grindy and monotonous. In other words, you might find it boring. There are ways to liven that up, but I also just enjoy a good grind sometimes too.
    • It’s low-poly and ugly, though the players actually like it that way (and I do too)
    • Addictive personalities might get REALLY addicted