A 45 minute "round table" with multiple rando masto instance admins? That doesn't sound like enough time for the table to get very round.

It sounds more like 5 minutes introduction, 30 minute presentation by Meta, 10 minutes Q&A. But oops our presentation ran just a bit long, and I really do have a hard stop at noon so we really only have about 5 minutes for questions thanks for all of the valuable feedback we'll be sure to circle back offline.

The title of this post is at best misleading and at worst simply wrong. From the source that OP linked in a couple other comments here (emphasis mine throughout):

Since the start of July, the app's downloads have fallen by almost 30% compared to the preceding two months, according to data from app performance tracker Apptopia. ... Twitter has gained usually 15 million to 30 million users a month since 2011, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It gained just 10 million users between August and September of this year. ... Visits to the web version of X, which still operates as twitter.com, fell since the start of the year, with global web traffic down 10% in August and US traffic down 15%, compared to a year ago, according to an analysis by Similarweb. ... So far in September, daily users are down to 249 million, a roughly 2% decrease... Monthly users are down by about the same percentage, now at 393 million users from 398 million in July.

That is emphatically not "loses over 30% of users in two months." That is, though, "signs of slowing growth" and "signs of the most recent round of dramatic announcements wearing off and folks moving on with their lives" which is why Musk is doing his best to get back into the news cycle.

Maybe OP should go ahead and update the post with a more accurate title to avoid spreading misinformation.

I dunno, 'game company commissions study to ask gamers to self-report about how gaming isn't a waste of their time'?

I'm in my mid 30s and have played video games my whole life. I also participate in some gaming communities online and my real-life friends are about 50/50 with regards to gaming. And if asked, yeah, I would probably self report that video games have had a positive impact on my life.

But have they? I'm not qualified to say. I don't have any actual data in front of me. I do know playing video games often makes me feel good, but I can say that about lots of unhealthy habits.

Was pumping 150 hours into Tears of the Kingdom better for me than the couple weeks of workouts I skipped? Is it good that I drank more beer during that time than I normally would have?

Would my life have been more or less improved if, instead of talking about video games online I had been practicing guitar and finding an open mic night to play at?

Would it have been better for my mental health and hand-eye coordination instead of playing Elden Ring to have gone to Home Depot, bought some wood, and built the shelves I've been putting off building in the basement to ease some of our storage issues?

If video games really were an unqualified good, would "my loser boyfriend stays up all night yelling into his headset about Overwatch/CoD/Fifa/Fortnite" be such a common stereotype?

I'm not suggesting video games are bad (or even that the sometimes-unhealthy way I engage with them is bad), but I am suggesting that "gamers say gaming is good for them, actually" does not provide useful data for analysis or discussion.

did you know a release of a new fully open source LLM called OpenLLaMA just got announced by the Researchers at Berkeley AI Research?

I didn't know that. Have you created a post about it in this community? I don't see one.

But it's not an invitation from an owner/occupant. I say it's no good. Or at least not directly, of course just like with regular police the warrant is useful in coercing an actual invitation.

On the other hand, the implicit invitation offered by the welcome mat by the door does provide entrance.

Y'all're great!

DMVs are sometimes where states will dump troublesome or underperforming employees they can't outright fire.

On the other end, the DMV is one of the places where employees have a job interacting with the public for sometimes-complex transactions. And, generally speaking, the public is dumb, unpleasant, and unprepared. Especially when dealing with low-level government beaurocrats who are telling them something they don't want to hear.

Seriously. I realize people have Feelings about DRM and always-online stuff, but this is an article about a game that was never especially popular or active entering maintenance mode after a couple of years.

They aren't shutting it down, they aren't making it unplayable (though of course either of those things could happen at any time etc etc) - they just are no longer producing content for a game almost no one is playing anymore anyway.

It's always interesting when someone is like "I wish I could go back to using smaller sites/forums or try some more open/ethical platforms, but I can't because all of my family are on Facebook."

Remember just 20 years ago when most of your family wasn't anywhere on the internet and that was just fine? I recognize that I'm saying this as a semi-isolated weirdo on some relatively obscure corner of the Internet, but it's okay to not be in constant passive contact with everyone you've ever met. Yeah it's more work to keep in touch with the folks you actually care about if you can't do so passively via Facebook, but that's how it always was. Email exists, texts and phone calls exist, meeting up exists.

If there are people you care about you can still keep in touch with them without using the same social media platform as them. Just like in the 90s you didn't need to read rec.models.railroad to keep in touch with your model train loving uncle.

I get that these connections (whatever one might say of their quality or tangibility if the interaction is just "look at picture, press like button") are important to people and one of the positives of platforms like Facebook, but if you're going to bemoan not being able to seek alternatives solely because the entire world isn't switching with you, it's important to realize that is a choice and not a requirement.

Okay. If the article is misleading or wrong, it shouldn't be posted. If it is found to be incorrect after posting, is it better to fix the title and let the comments sort it out or to fully delete the post?

I'm sure that's what's happening in some cases, but I will say that every single person I know that takes stimulant drugs to treat ADHD need it to literally function on a day to day basis.

And no, I don't mean "function as an overworked cogwheel." I mean "remember to eat food regularly and in reasonable quantities." I mean "be able to remember to and stay focused on exercise to stay healthy." I mean "not be so constantly burnt out trying to catch up with chores that they have the energy to go out with friends." I mean "being able to provide more than sporadic, partial attention to their family or romantic partner." I mean "being able to fully enjoy their hobbies or other passions because they can focus long enough to actually take part."

I'm not suggesting there aren't people either abusing prescription stimulants for "the grind." And I'm not suggesting that some people aren't prescribed stimulants improperly when maybe therapy would be a better solution or even when there is no real problem to begin with. But I am suggesting that prescription stimulants have changed millions of peoples' lives for the better, including the at least 5 I know personally.

The trouble is that, as always, leadership fucked around and now workers are finding out.

Leadership overextended while money was cheap, now money isn't so cheap and the bills are gonna start coming due so they need to cut some "dead weight" which is largely gonna mean cutting workers to save on salaries and other liabilities.

And as always this is gonna make them look profitable enough to stay above water for a couple years until interest rates come down and money is cheap again. And that's when the cycle starts over.

The worst part is there will be no accountability for that leadership because this isn't a sign of incompetence. It is a sign of a system working as intended.

This mystery deal that fell through is a convenient precipitating event to point to, but this was always the going to be the eventual outcome of the way these companies operate.

You can see it happening...well everywhere but especially in tech and adjacent companies over the past couple years. Maybe next time it'll be another industry, but at some point folks are gonna get addicted to free money again and get all shockedpikachu when it stops being so free and they need to pay it back.

Over the years, I've become one to keep my media use as legit as possible. No judgement on anyone who doesn't, but for a variety of reasons I have chosen to.

For retro games, that means my process is:

• Evercade - I'm a huge fan of the Evercade ecosystem and if a game is available there I will play it there first.
• NSO - For games not available on Evercade, my next stop will be Switch Online.
• Collections - If a game isn't available on NSO, I'll see if it's available via a collection. Think Castlevania Collections, Arcade Archives, Namco Museums, etc. For these I'll typically check reviews before picking it up and make sure the games play well as that's not always a guarantee.
• Unlicensed emulation - Only at that point will I fire up a game on my raspberry pi.

Though honestly I can't really be bothered to tinker with shit as much anymore these days, so often (but not always) by the time I arrive at unlicensed emulation as the solution I'll just decide to play something else instead.

Broadly speaking it sounds a bit like Antitrust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)

But I haven't seen it in quite a while so I'm not sure how well specifics line up.

Not to mention, even if these are somewhat legit studies and findings, is there also proof that "activating different parts of your brain" is a good thing or effective in dealing with panic attacks?

Yeah, my plan is PS5, too. I was worried because been playing these games on PC almost literally my whole life, from BG1 and IWD through to PoEII and DOSII. But I don't have a PC that can play any sorts of games right now, so it's gonna have to be PS5.

Watching a few let's plays and streams, it sounds like controller support is solid. So despite not being what I'm used to, I'm confident it'll be a solid experience.

Here's part 1 of a 4 part podcast series about Wim Hof and the Wim Hof Method https://ohnopodcast.com/investigations/2020/7/19/ross-and-carrie-cool-off-with-wim-hof-part-1-iceman-edition

The trouble is, many hackathons these days aren't "programming tournaments." They are advertising for a company/group or a way for that company/group to solicit new business ideas.

This goes double for the blockchain space where everything is about appearances and hype.

So as others have said, I don't think you should be upset about the "politics" of the winners, but rather about the actual purpose of the "hackathon."

Not really into travelogues like this (and this was no exception), but I will say I love me an Amtrak trip.

In 2015, I rode from Portland, OR to Boston, MA. Took 5 days, through Sacramento, Chicago, and DC. I was traveling alone so every evening in the dining car I was seated across from a different Giant Train Nerd and got to learn about the engine on the current train, the type of track we were riding on, who owns or owned the land, really interesting stuff.

Both before and after that I've taken trains between Boston and NYC several times, and taken the Auto Train (which carries your car!) between DC and Florida.

Every trip makes me wish I had the leisure time and the country had the infrastructure such that I could avoid even more plane travel and take a train instead.

So I definitely get the urge to write a meandering travelogue about just such a trip. But as you can see, the same information fits just fine into a reasonably-sized internet comment.

Agreed. OP should be working on critical thinking skills in general and not specifically focusing on logical fallacies.

Logical fallacies and argumentation theory in general certainly have their place. But unless you're taking part in a debate club or otherwise getting really really deep into these topics, they may do you more harm than good in thinking critically and having productive discussions.

The reddit (and, previously, slashdot) obsession with logical fallacies has been almost entirely as a way to prevent critical thinking and end discussion rather than promoting either.

I guess my reaction is partially because I never see articles like this for my other hobbies and while I don't see articles like this about video games often, I do see comments around the internet about this fairly regularly.

I don't hear people saying "playing board games helps me with strategizing" or "playing guitar has really improved my hand-eye coordination and playing in a band has helped my ability to cooperate with others."

Maybe that's because gamers tend to feel more defensive about the hobby as it has historically been disparaged. People are more likely to picture "CoD yelling person" when they hear you play video games than they are to picture "wonderwall at parties person" when they hear you play guitar.

But, on the other hand, D&D players and Marvel nerds seem to have largely moved on from "but it's actually really cool and fun and not weird at all." Maybe video game players should consider doing so as well.

I guess I don't see what the incentive would be for this, or even what it realistically means in this case.

Do you mean like relicensing the backend and frontend with a closed source license? I don't see what the incentive would be for that unless they wanted lemmyml to be the only instance in existence (which runs counter to it's raison d'etre) and to make secret/proprietary/commercial extensions to it that are difficult to develop in the open.

Or I guess unless they wanted to start charging instance admins for the honor and pleasure of running their software, which at least right now would be the quickest way to ensure nobody runs their software.

My wife got on stimulant meds after her diagnosis a couple years ago and they were life changing for her. She was having trouble getting them for a couple months during the shortage and that was tough on her.

Like another commenter mentioned, you'll probably wanna avoid caffeine for at least the first couple of weeks if you're taking the stimulant meds. Once you adjust, you may be able to do caffeine again, but you may give yourself a real bad day if you aren't careful.

There were lots of games back then. And many of them were as bad or worse than the shittiest shovelware and template swaps we've got today.

Thing is, most people don't remember the 200 Action Games 3 disc pack at the bottom of the bargain bin cause they sucked.

I'm not disputing that there is more "stuff" these days by raw numbers, with the barrier to creation and distribution of games and such dramatically lowered by ubiquitous and easy to use tooling. But I bet the ratios of good games to shitty games won't have changed too terribly much over the years.

I like to explore the "Selling Right Now" feed and "Discover" tool on Bandcamp, or browse through the "you may also like" on albums I already own. Since I buy almost all of my music there these days anyway it's pretty convenient.

Yes, as long as the two instances in question are federating with one another, then posts and comments are all federated.

I've been enjoying the Evercade Piko Collection 3 cart recently. When new carts come out I like to try out every game and go in-depth on a least a couple games so I have a reason to come back to it later after there's a new shiny out.

So I've been playing and streaming 40 Winks (I'm about halfway through now), enjoying some Radikal Bikers, and loving to hate the hilariously bad Sword of Sodan.

I'm playing through the Switch re-releases now and they're great. The mapping controls leave a lot to be desired versus the DS originals, but it was never gonna be as good as that magic.

Many of these have the same underlying external cause of money no longer being free so they can't keep the merry-go-round going for their debt and/or their investors are no longer content to just pour more money into the engine.

I gave away my NES, 3DS, Dreamcast, N64, and all related games and peripherals a few years ago cause they were taking up too much room for stuff I barely ever used.

I've already played these games on (3)DS back in 2013 or so, so I agree it's the best way to play em. But I just don't have the time, money, or space to be a retro game collector (outside of Evercade) anymore so I'll make do with playing these games on Switch.

I've never run a Lemmy or kbin instance, but have run a mastodon instance and am familiar with distributed systems in general.

Probably both the source instance and the destination instance have a queue of federated messages to process and the message needs to be sent to the destination and processed into the destination database respectively before it'll show up on the destination of the worker threads get overwhelmed.

I'd imagine that recently with the influx of users, activity, and the size of the federation, a number of instances probably sometimes have some pretty deep queues to work through at times.

Ten hours isn't ideal and hopefully isn't common, but doesn't seem out of the question in the case of connectivity issues or spikes im activity.

Oh, interesting. I also initially read it as a thinly-veiled threat but I think you're right it was more of a "will i be assaulted". Still a weird thing to say.

The trouble with single-party rule is when they get too comfortable. MA has been essentially a single-party state for a long time now. Rather than continually doing good (or bad or anything at all) the legislature has grown lazy and corrupt.

The MA state legislature is one of the least transparent legislatures in the nation. Many legislators are firmly in the pocket of corporations and special interest groups. Our public transit is actively crumbling. And they have sent hardly anything of consequence to the governor's desk this year.

Single-party rule - no matter the party - is bad news. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that they were able to FUD the ranked-choice voting initiative out of existence in 2020, so there's no end in sight.

Yeah, it's not for everyone a lot of folks prefer emulation on steam decks, anbernics, retroids, pis, etc.

The things that drew me to Evercade are:

• Licensed emulation. Lots of folks don't care about this, but I'm happy to pay for my media when I can. In cases of indie/homebrew releases, devs get paid which is great. In cases of retro releases, rightsholders get paid which is sometimes just someone with a piece of paper saying they own a particular IP. Which is maybe less important than paying the people who directly made a thing, but in the way our society is structured, imo it's also important to pay people willing to keep something commercially available as long as they aren't trying to gouge you.
• Curated library. I mean, part of this is just because not everyone will license to Blaze so they need to pick and choose. But back in college when my roommates and I built a mame machine, or later when I was emulating on a raspberry pi. I would mostly play the same handful of games over and over again. I love that I hadn't heard of like 70% of the Evercade library and hadn't played like 80% of games in the library until they came out on carts. So much discovery. I also love the fact that not all the games are all-time greats - average and below average games deserve a chance to be preserved, played, and loved as well.
• The community. I probably should have listed this first because I'm not sure if I would have gotten as into Evercade if it weren't for the community. The folks in the discord are great. Lots of really chill and knowledgeable folks to chat games with, a few colorful characters to keep things interesting, and Blaze themselves are pretty active and transparent in the chat which is really great to see. There's a weekly games challenge (often but not always high score related) that one of the moderators runs that has lots of us playing the same games at the same time which is always fun.

Anyway, definitely no judgement for you wanting to enjoy games the way you want - that you are enjoying them at all is the important part. Just wanted to share a little bit about how Evercade works for me for folks who may be curious.

I dunno. For someone just starting to want to think critically during discussions of when reading things, asking them to get serious in the academic pursuit of logic and argument theory might not be the way. For one, it's probably just asking for them to get stalled in the sort of dunning kruger zone of identifying fallacies and stopping there.

Especially when such behavior is already endemic to the internet and many platforms have feedback loops designed to reward this behavior. Just dunk on 'em and move on - watch the upvotes and retweets roll in.

I definitely don't want discourage OP from learning anything, but I do want to be careful in what direction we point a beginner.

I think maybe learning to find good sources of information and verify claims might be a better first step. That doesn't give OP any shortcuts I'm discussions, which is good. Then they may begin to notice different patterns or forms of discussion and at that point they can start to classify them and learn about them if they see fit.

Continuing to work my way through the Duke Nukem 1+2 Remasters on Evercade. So much love went into these its ridiculous.

Right? I'd never heard of either of these games before, but after playing the Goodboy demo and watching some YouTube videos of Witch n Wiz, I'm pretty excited for this cart.

Number 1 for me are the Duke Nukem Collections for Evercade coming in November.

I played tons of duke3d as a kid so I'm excited to revisit it. But even more, I never got a chance to play the original DOS side-scrollers, so I'm pumped to get the new remastered versions. Even cooler that they're the first Evercade exclusives.

Right, but "just use cameras" is what I mean by "niche peripherals."

Other than the Wii, no modern consoles have had an installed user base for Move/Kinect/Camera type stuff to make it worth it for many developers to get involved. And even the Wii was just mostly shovelware waggle games, though as I mentioned there were some Wii Zapper games that approximated lightguns.

I think at this point we're past the sorts of external cameras and tracking necessary for lightgun things even more than we already were. This sort of stuff has already moved to VR and I don't know that we're gonna get them back in the physical realm any time soon.

Let's say you run a moderately successful flea market. You own a moderately sized field. You employ a staff of accountable organizers to vet and select your vendors to ensure they aren't selling anything you don't want at your market (say Nazi paraphernalia, guns). You have security staff and volunteers at the event itself to ensure vendors and customers are safe - they ensure vendors aren't selling anything they shouldn't be, they ensure customers don't try to steal or assault your vendors, they make sure nobody accidentally sets the field on fire, they manage the parking lot and portapotties.

A collective of artisans admire your success and buy up an adjacent field. While your flea market focuses on second hand and vintage goods, they want somewhere to sell handmade things. The organizers of your event work with the organizers of that event to share strategies and ensure both markets can reasonably remain safe and popular. Since they by and large hold themselves to the same standards as you, you agree to share a parking lot and build paths between your two fields.

A local farmers co-op eventually joins your meta-organization in the same way to offer fresh meat and produce.

Now you have a bustling megamarket. The billionaire that owns the local mall sees a drop in revenue due to folks going to the fields for secondhand clothes, fresh produce, and local art. People aren't shopping with you as much anymore.

The billionaire comes up with a plan to recapture the market. Open air markets in fields are popular now? The billionaire buys the rest of the farmland around your fields and flattens it. They pour a paved parking lot with a dedicated interchange with the local highway. They promise a mix of big corporate vendors and allow smaller vendors to set up their own tents and sell right alongside everyone else.

You think, wow this is a great opportunity to grow all of our markets even more. You start building pathways from your field into the billionaire's field so customers can easily get between your markets.

But soon, you start to notice something. People start parking at the billionaire's field because it is paved and has easy highway access. Some of your vendors have started pulling out of your markets so they can go set up at the billionaire's field so folks see their tent before they have spent all their money. Vendors who don't move start having to pull out as the market is no longer worth their time or money. With fewer vendors, even more people avoid your fields and stay in the billionaire's field.

And you start to notice something else. The billionaire started posting folks at the oath between your fields. Your markets have a few vendors the billionaire and their corporate vendors deem unsavory - erotic art, microbrewed beer, that sort of thing. They won't allow in any customers who have bought anything from those vendors because they run a family friendly establishment. Soon, the people who still come to your side of the field are avoiding those vendors.

You notice an additional thing. The billionaire isn't as diligent at vendor management as you are, especially with the amount of resources they're using making sure nobody is carrying around erotic art from your market. While the side of the field near the parking lot where all the corporate vendors are is bright and shiny, you've noticed some questionable things happening near your side of the field. The antiques dealer is selling Nazi paraphernalia. The information tent for the local gun club has started to sell firearms with no background checks. The carnival toy vendor is secretly selling opiates. Folks who shop there keep trying to get into your markets and your security folks are having a hard time keeping a handle on things. You don't have the resources to screen everyone who comes in. You end up having to fence off your paths to prevent folks coming from that market from causing harm to your vendors and customers.

But by this point most of your customers are accustomed to using the fancy parking lot and shopping with the corporate vendors. They're confronted with a decision: do they just keep going to the billionaire's field and get their clothes from the TJ Maxx tent or are they willing to make two stops so they can still peruse the cute vintage clothing?

Driving all the way around the fields to get to the other parking lot is pretty inconvenient so don't bother. Eventually you can't make the property tax payments for your field and you have to sell. The dream is done. The billionaire buys up the fields and expands their market.

Now rewind. You are an enthusiastic customer of the farmer's market. How do you feel about the billionaire's plan to buy up adjacent farmland?

(I was not able to work in a metaphor for meta "extending" activitypub with "new features" that aren't part of the spec and forcing the rest of the fediverse to comply or get left behind)