Chobbes

For some reason I find it really unlikely that Google would support a product for 10 years. They don't exactly have a great track record...

At the risk of sounding super ignorant the desire for plastic to biodegrade always seems really short-sighted to me? I understand that there are problems with plastic pollution for the ecosystem and that there may be health concerns with microplastics and whatnot... And that we probably shouldn't make so many disposable items that we do want to degrade out of plastic (and that we should probably not have as many disposable items in the first place)... But plastics are also kind of miracle materials and ideally you want them to not break down in many use cases. Like, wouldn't it be bad if all of a sudden we have bacteria that will eat through blood bags and plastic structures?

It seems like this article is mostly talking about studying microbes to design plastic eating enzymes that will help efficiently recycle plastic in the future, and that sounds super cool and very useful. But the whole "we should have bacteria that can quickly break down plastic in the environment" angle that I hear about a lot seems kind of risky to me because one of the reasons plastics are so awesome is that they're very resistant to degradation... Maybe I'm just ignorant, though.

"Ah, finally some fresh air"

I don't think the first Cities Skylines shipped with bikes either? Wasn't it part of the After Dark DLC? Or maybe that was just bike lanes? I hate the DLC for Paradox games... It's so confusing that I think I'm just not going to buy their games anymore.

I guess you're just talking about one person, but I think Cities Skylines was received quite well in general? I just remember a bunch of praise for Cities Skylines (in contrast to Sim City 2013 which a bunch of people had a meltdown about).

Maybe I’m just naive, but I feel like it doesn’t really make sense particularly in the internet era. I can understand the argument that patents and copyright can allow people to profit off of their ideas and all, and maybe it would actually discourage anybody from making anything otherwise… But I just don’t really buy that? It seems like patents and rights often end up being held by large corporations instead of creators anyway, and they have incentive to iterate anyway? I dunno.

But in some sense copyright and patents only benefit the owner of them and everybody else suffers as a result. Technically speaking it’s better if everybody can have free access to books and knowledge and works of art, and it’s beneficial for everybody in society if anybody can create things based on other designs and works. Like I don’t really benefit at all from E-ink having patents which stifles innovation in the field just so that they can turn a profit for years before anybody else can… Maybe you can argue that they wouldn’t have invented it unless they were incentivized by being able to weaponize the legal system as a result of their patent findings, but I kind of doubt that… They’d still have a good product that people would want anyway? Maybe I’m just being idealistic, but it seems a huge shame that we can’t imagine that humans would want to create and better the lives of ourselves and others without profit motives, you know? It’d be nice if we could just support each other and work on making cool and better things.

Which RFCs are you referring to?

Hell, I’d settle for thunderbolt peripherals working reliably. Maybe it’s just a Linux problem (or maybe I don’t know what I’m doing), but I’ve never had a thunderbolt dock “just work” as advertised.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes RAM getting “wiped” is a “feature”, e.g., you don’t want somebody to be able to pull information from RAM after you shut off your computer… but that’s not really what it’s designed for (and you can recover data from powered off RAM in some lucky cases). It’d be sweet if we could have fast non-volatile memory. Having a computer use 0 power when suspended and not having to worry about hibernating to disk would be sweet! I do kind of wonder about the security RAMifications of that, but I guess it’s not much worse than having a laptop suspended currently.

I’m surprised how many fellow xmpp people I see on here, because I feel like matrix has a lot more of the public consciousness. It’s nice! I’m pretty happy with xmpp, though I wish I could find some larger communities.

I loved the first one, but couldn’t get into the second. Didn’t really like the other characters too.

Oh boy, Myst… Overall I think I enjoyed Myst, but mostly I enjoyed the books in the library and the world(s). I completed Myst without a guide and I think in terms of early point and click adventure games it’s on the straightforward side… but it can be a real pain to notice some areas and some things are needlessly obtuse, and frankly I didn’t like most of the puzzles. Honestly, I can completely understand why people wouldn’t like Myst, it’s far from perfect…

Riven, on the other hand… is kind of amazing. There’s a few things that are needlessly difficult to spot in Riven, but it’s a little easier to navigate because there’s more frames. Riven is gorgeous, though, and the puzzles are a bit more interesting. I don’t think everybody will love Riven, but it holds up a lot better than Myst does.

You'll almost certainly be perfectly fine. AMD cards generally work a lot smoother, and the open source drivers means things can be well supported all the time and it's great.

On Nvidia, in my experience, it's occasionally a hassle if you're using a bleeding edge kernel (which you won't be if you're on a "normal" distro), where something changes and breaks the proprietary Nvidia driver... And if Nvidia drops support for your graphics card in their driver you may have issues upgrading to a new kernel because the old driver won't work on the new kernel. But honestly, I wouldn't let any of this get in the way of running Linux. You have a new card, you'll probably upgrade before it's an issue, and the proprietary driver is something we all get mad about, but it mostly works well and there's a good chance you won't really notice any issues.

This was my immediate thought as well. It's unfortunate, but there will probably always be people who abuse online platforms like this. It's totally okay if you're not up to the task of moderating disturbing content like that --- it sounds like it can be a really brutal job. I don't know what the moderation tools on Lemmy are like, but maybe there's a way to flag different kinds of moderation concerns for different moderators (so not everybody has to be exposed to this kind of stuff if they're not comfortable with it). And maybe there could also be a system where if user's flag the post it can be automatically marked as NSFW and images can be hidden by default so moderators and other users don't have to be exposed to it without warning (though of course such a system could potentially be abused as well). But beyond that I'm not sure what else you can do, aside from maybe limiting federation.

I host my own XMPP server and I like it (super lightweight and easy to set up), but good god the people that work on XMPP stuff seem to not want it to take off at all. They all complain that everybody is using matrix for some mysterious reason and when you explain that you can’t in good conscience get your friends to switch to it because there aren’t really great iOS apps it’s just a hissy fit about how people should use android instead… which is just not very realistic. Really wish XMPP had a good cross platform client. The client situation is improving rapidly and OMEMO finally mostly works everywhere! But it’d be really nice if there was a consistent client between platforms.

That all sounds really critical, but I really do like XMPP and I really hope it gets better and gains more traction again! We really need good federated chat again, ideally just associated with an email address or something… because the current chat ecosystem is a mess!

I'd agree that "it gets better later" isn't a good way to promote a game, but I dunno that a game has to be good (or at least at its best) from the start. Totally understandable if people don't want to, or can't invest the time into something that doesn't grip them right away, but at least for me a slow start can be really nice, especially when a game ends up unfolding in unexpected ways later on. I can enjoy that kind of pacing, and sometimes it's rewarding to have something start off kind of painful for one reason or another and become something much greater. At least personally I think a "weak start" can end up making the full experience better overall, as it's kind of a part of the journey.

But of course, if you're not enjoying it and you don't want to continue and you want to refund it... That's totally reasonable! A game that's a slow burn is probably a much harder sell and not going to appeal to as broad of an audience, and I think that's okay.

Prosody is amazing and I’m still astounded by how easy it is to get XMPP up and running. That’s great stuff!

The variety is really great. If your partner isn’t as into games it makes for a good jumping off point for finding out what kinds of things they do like.

Yeah, and I mean I really want people to be better about masking when it matters too... But I think it's best to not get too mad about the people who are trying and making some questionable tradeoffs of comfort / effectiveness or whatever. I don't understand all of the weird things people do with masks, and it'd be nice if we could actually talk to people and say "hey, are you wearing a mask to protect yourself or others? I think this is making it a lot less effective!" and have people be receptive to that, because there probably are some people that just don't think about it too much and don't realize... But it's difficult to have those conversations without it feeling confrontational, especially when the whole thing has become such a contentious issue.

I'm sure it's a mix of things. Some of it's probably a lack of understanding, and sometimes it's a "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" situation. They might have their mask on and ready to go for situations where they might want to mask up or where somebody else might want them to mask up... Or... Whatever. Maybe even some people take it off to talk (which is frustrating) because they think it's easier to communicate that way and worth the risk to themselves and others and they'll pull it back up after because it still does limit exposure overall? I dunno. Maybe I shouldn't speculate too much. I guess I've been on the other side of this where a bunch of people were complaining about people wearing masks outside alone because it's "stupid and pointless" and I've definitely done that when going between places because it was just easier to keep the thing on for me (especially since I try to have it fit really well).

I dunno, I don’t think the point of all art is to be “fun”. There’s plenty of examples of games that aren’t necessarily fun but do something interesting in some sense or inspire other emotions. Exploring a bunch of dead and boring planets may not be fun and maybe it’s not compelling or worth doing in Starfield, but I think it can be interesting to have something more “boring” most of the time to have other moments stand out… and sometimes something being boring or painful is part of the experience and it wouldn’t be as worthwhile without, like for example particularly difficult games can be pretty painful to play through, but sometimes having gone through the painful thing is a huge part of why you care about the experience.

Of course not everything is for everybody, and more “boring” experiences in general are probably not what the average person playing video games is into… but there’s plenty of us who like a good boring or tedious or painful slog every once in a while :). Maybe it’s rewarding, maybe it sets the atmosphere, maybe it’s meaningful in some other way… I get it, but I think it’s a little sad to reduce games to “just supposed to be fun!” It’s an awesome art form and I love seeing other creative things done with it.

It’s insane to me that they’ve dropped every other API… They should really support Vulkan.

I really want to like playing games on my phone, but I absolutely hate it for similar reasons. I guess some people might pair Bluetooth controllers or something which might make it better for these kinds of games, but still… either way I have yet to find a touchscreen based game that I actually want to play. The closest I’ve gotten is chess and go.

Thanks :). I've actually been looking for the RSVP stuff and I wasn't sure which RFC to look through (wasn't sure if it was in the CalDAV one or the iCalendar one... and they're weirdly huge). I appreciate you pointing me in the right direction!

Also was curious how they were implementing reactions in e-mail. I actually think it's a good feature, and it's one that's slowly been making it into XMPP and stuff. Emoji reactions and stuff sound kind of dumb and like a "whatever, who cares?" feature, but I find that on platforms like slack they're actually a really good way to deal with quickly confirming something / finalizing decisions / quickly gauging the opinion of a group. I think a huge problem with e-mail and instant messaging is that they can be quite noisy, so having a "quiet" way to respond without having a thread explode is actually pretty welcome in my opinion.

This is what I’ve been saying for years. Siskin is pretty good these days, but it’s still not perfect (push notifications with OMEMO have no content). It’s really hard to recommend XMPP to people when the iOS experience is kind of bad (with omemo, anyway).

YEP I DID. This was meant to be on the post about degoogling… I feel like I keep having a problem with Lemmy where I end up on the wrong post when I click? It’s super weird… Am I the only one that ends up on the weird sports post all the time when I didn’t go there?

It's a bit odd... I guess people just want to feel justified in their own beliefs about the thing which manifests as anger. But I think there's often perfectly reasonable justifications for these things too... Like, Uber and Lyft both required drivers to mask, so it's perfectly reasonable for them to just keep the mask on between picking up passengers, and in that case it really wouldn't be useless... Maybe somebody is picking somebody up or just dropped somebody off and feels more comfortable keeping the mask on in the meantime... Maybe it's just easier to put the mask on at home and they don't want to fiddle with it during the day... Or maybe it's completely pointless, but it doesn't harm anybody so who cares?

Honestly, I've just found the response to COVID (particularly in the USA) really depressing to the point where I just don't want to be around people anymore. I guess just all of the selfishness and vitriol about the whole thing really took a toll on me.

I’ve been having a great time with games on NixOS. Steam just works when you enable it. I believe you can specify extra libraries for the filesystem hierarchy hackery, but I haven’t needed to yet. One thing you should know about (if you don’t already) is steam-run which is a simple command line tool that automatically wraps things in a normal FHS. Super convenient for the occasional binary :).

I switched to iOS from android a while ago, but conversations was an AMAZING app and I wish there was something even half as good on iOS. That said… isn’t it the case that conversations is a paid app on Google play, and only free on fdroid? It’s totally worth the $2 or whatever it was on Google play, but I feel like it’s a hard sell for normal people who are used to free chat apps? Did you have any problems with that, or has the situation changed since I last looked?

I still cannot believe the Google I/O where they killed Talk and said “we’re consolidating all of the Google chat applications into hangouts. There will only be hangouts” and then the very next Google I/O they announced TWO new chat applications (allo and duo), whose purpose I never understood, and then every year since they’re like “everything is Google meet now… no, not that Google meet, the other Google meet” and I have absolutely no idea what’s going on and nothing makes me feel so old and out of touch like trying to follow Google’s chat ecosystem.

That’s a bit of a shame. I don’t personally find jingle that important, but it’d be great if it worked… Also OMEMO on converse is sort of in a weird state I think. AFAIK it still depends on a JS libsignal library that’s deprecated.

Oh, I totally agree that conversations is worth the $4 or whatever. I just have a hard time convincing friends to switch over to a new chat application to talk to only me when it’s not even free for them, you know? And if it’s a less technical person getting them on fdroid is a tricky proposition too. I don’t begrudge conversations for charging, but I do think it would be easier to get people on XMPP otherwise.

Ah yeah, another fun fact is that Snikket on iOS is a rebranding of Siskin. On iOS Siskin seems to be the best option right now with the one caveat that push notifications won’t contain the content of OMEMO messages (I think the plan is to design and implement an encrypted push XEP?). Conversations is probably the best xmpp application out there, so I’ve been tempted to run it on Linux via the Android runtime in the past. These days I’m pretty happy with Dino.

I feel like we need something like converse.js on all platforms or something. Just something decent and consistent so you can recommend it to a friend on a different device and help them / understand their perspective, you know? I think converse.js has a desktop app via electron now, which seems like a start.

This was kind of my experience too. I didn’t really use it for too much and everything about it was slow and felt icky, so I just haven’t bothered with it since. I think the only thing I really used it for was Nextcloud News for RSS, but I’ve since switched to FreshRSS, which I’m happier with. Actually, that’s not true… I used the WebDAV stuff to sync papers with iOS from git annex for annotation, and I kind of miss that, but not enough to set everything up again. It just felt heavy.

I’ve tried travelling to Canada with it and failed to have working data. Your mileage may vary, but I was disappointed.

Yeah, exactly. Legal protections only really seem to work if you’re already a big enough corporation to afford it, so it doesn’t seem like patents and copyright really support independent creators as much as we would maybe like. It seems more often than not to be weaponized against progress for the sake of personal gains… and that just sucks. The only potential argument for these protections is that people wouldn’t invent or create things without them… Because all things being equal they benefit a select few people (rights holders), and otherwise serve no benefit to anybody else, often leading to stifled innovation and less competition.

Let's go one further and just... basically ban all cars. Almost nobody should be driving all of the time in a city, and when you start to think about how many problems and how much of a nuisance cars are it seems painfully obvious.

Yes, there's problems that we'd need to solve in order to do this, and some things would just be a little less convenient... But cities would be so much safer, quieter, and have much better air quality if fewer people were driving. Bikes are very effective for getting around for most people (especially if you don't have to worry about cars murdering you), e-bikes make it a little more accessible, and you can't tell me we couldn't have an absolutely bitching public transit system if 1) we didn't have to account for so many cars, and 2) even a small fraction of what everybody spends on their own personal motor vehicles went towards public transit infrastructure.

Sometimes we need cars to haul stuff, it totally makes sense to have motor vehicles for emergency situations and stuff, but pretty much nobody needs a giant SUV to commute to an office job by themselves. The amount of huge cars you see driving around with only one person is super depressing when you start looking for it.

Not everybody is running containers, or is constrained by the performance of those containers, I guess?

I think the primary aspect where Macs are more appealing than Windows machines for many programmers is just that it's a unixy machine and many of the tools that you'd care about from Linux / *BSDs / whatever are easily available. I guess this is maybe different in an era with WSL, but that's a relatively new development, and since I've only used Macs and other unixy machines before I have no idea if that's a viable option personally and I'd be skeptical...

In terms of "why a Mac over Linux?" I think it's partially a matter of Macs being well supported and that most people don't seem inclined to fiddle with Linux on their primary work computer.

Beyond that, though, I think MacBooks are just nice laptops with fewer compromises than most other laptops in my experience. They have good build quality and pretty much every aspect of them is pretty solid... Good keyboards, good chassis, good battery life, good screens, good trackpads, good speakers, good performance. I think it's actually pretty hard to get something that's as solid all around, I feel like with pretty much everything else there's something that stands out to complain about. Like I love my Thinkpad, but god I wish I had an Apple trackpad, or an Apple silicon chip and the performance / watt that comes with it.

I don't think bicycles and walkable cities are a stupid pursuit at all, but I do agree that often times bicycie infrastructure isn't given the care or respect it deserves! That said, I think sometimes these changes are incremental progress that can get better over time... Sometimes you end up with bike lanes that aren't great to get to for instance, but they'll eventually make more sense when the network expands (and each additional bike lane makes this exponentially better). Plus, I get the sense that drivers often don't have a good sense of how much other transit infrastructure is used and relied upon by other people. I've often heard complaints about having to wait for trains at lights, for instance, and it's a bit silly because the trains have hundreds of people on them, so they really should take priority, even if the traffic waiting at the light looks bigger because it's so much less space efficient. I suspect in a similar way the usage of bike lanes is often underestimated because they're quite efficient at getting people through in a small amount of space with little congestion. Bike lanes support some pretty serious throughput, so even if they get some pretty heavy use they might seem empty and unused... You just never really have a traffic jam or anything on them because they're so effective at moving people through.

I’m a Canadian living in the US and the fact that you haven’t burned the health insurance companies to the ground is still astounding to me. Like the situation in the states is so fucking dire and depressing, but I guess there just isn’t “one unifying event” for people to rally against… Like I think if you took away public healthcare in other countries you could organize some push back, but when it’s the status quo it seems a lot harder to rally everybody at the same time… especially when people literally can’t afford to strike and the culture is so individualistic. Also I feel like in America there’s a very low tolerance for inconvenience? There’s a lot of “well I agree with what these people want, but they should protest in a way that I can completely ignore”, which, I mean, I understand… it sucks when unrest happens and ruins things for you… but also seems really short sighted and counterproductive.

I dunno, I’m probably just ignorant, but it just seems so hopeless? Like nobody ever does anything… I don’t do anything either (I especially don’t want to protest while living abroad when I can get deported lol). Getting a critical mass of people to protest seems super hard… especially when protesting is kind of scary and hard, and you have to work all the time.