Women also make up 50% of PC video game players and 54 percent of mobile game players.
I find a lot of these figures really hard to believe, to be honest.
Looking at the link, there is little I can find about their methodology.
I’m sure this “welcome kit” is meant as a helpful thing but I have to wonder if it is exactly the problem that prevents Lemmy from being adopted.
When someone joins Reddit, they don’t need to read a literal plethora of guides on how to use Reddit. It’s obvious.
What looks like a helpful thing to do is instead going to intimidate and confuse new people.
So ultimately the question is: why isn’t Lemmy obvious to use, and how do we make it so?
Part of the problem with AI is that it requires significant skill to understand where AI goes wrong.
As a basic example, get a language model like ChatGPT to edit writing. It can go very wrong, removing the wrong words, changing the tone, and making mistakes that an unlearned person does not understand. I’ve had foreign students use AI to write letters or responses and often the tone is all off. That’s one thing but the student doesn’t understand that they’ve written a weird letter. Same goes with grammar checking.
This sets up a dangerous scenario where, to diagnose the results, you need to already have a deep understanding. This is in contrast to non-AI language checkers that are simpler to understand.
Moreover as you can imagine the danger is that the people who are making decisions about hiring and restructuring may not understand this issue.
There was a prophetic podcast episode from the series Plain English a while back that I constantly think about.
In that episode the author describes how the internet is going through a revolution.
Basically 20 years ago, the internet was all about gaining numbers. Companies could operate at a loss if they got people signed up. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Uber, Deliveroo, etc. they were all about getting you in their mailing list or consumer list and who cares what happens then.
Now there’s an issue because that model is not profitable. In order to continue, all the internet is moving towards subscription.
In a sense, I don’t think of that as intrinsically bad. Patreon is a good example. The internet is now filled up with so much shit that people are willing to pay to filter it. So with Patreon, you pay a fee to support an artist to produce the content you want. That itself isn’t a bad idea.
Now that being said, a lot of “bad things” do emerge. The fact that you can no longer buy software like Adobe and it’s all subscription based. That’s shit. But that also inspired software alternatives like Affinity Designer.
I know it’s largely made up for parody but the teacher’s point is true. The “student” showed no work, but rather used an unexplained and underived formula.
But yeah “ha ha—teacher so stupid”
Vaseline is just a petrolatum jelly and a lot of creams and moisturisers have this as a component. The problem with Vaseline is that it’s basically pure petrolatum and so blocks the skin completely.
You rarely want to block the skin completely. The uses some other people noted, like stopping bleeding, is one of those uses.
The truth is that I rarely recommend Vaseline because of how limited it is on skin use.
I recommend people look into Aquaphor by Eucerin, which is only about 40% petrolatum and moisturises a bit better. I always travel with a very small container (just a tiny bit) of the stuff. It’s useful if you have any skin conditions (flaked skin, rashes, etc) that you might want to deal with pronto.
Aveeno (a very good brand for skincare) also make very similar heavy creams.
Long story short, no, Vaseline is pretty bad choice for skincare because it just blocks all air exchange. There are better choices. You often do want petrolatum…just not 100%.
Source: lifelong eczema issues
I love how so many comments and replies ascribe some form of ‘guilt’ to this, as if HP employees would feel shame. This doesn’t really mean anything to a company that size.
One of the great things about moving to the UK is that, despite all its problems, consumer protection Europe is so much better than in the US.
Eh.
On the flip side, back in the day, a lot of people bought a lot of crappy games based on nothing more than what the cover art on the box showed. The only source of info was video game magazines, and that applied only to new releases and only certain games.
Now upon release you can look up dozens of detailed reviews, even video reviews. You can watch full play through a on YouTube. You can ask for opinions in social media.
The amount of information you have to figure out if this game is for you is insane compared to before.
This is surprising advice. I would have assumed it would make people break out.
Vaseline is a poor choice of moisturiser because it does not moisturise. It blocks air from entering your pores and I would have assumed this leads to clogged pores and hence acne.
Hmm to be fair with YouTube you don’t think this is now a repository of incredibly valuable resources? If YouTube went down and we lost all videos, we would be losing many important resources, from historical documentaries no longer easily found in media, to guides on woodworking.
It’s a bit scary. Once you remove the crap, it’s an incredibly valuable library resource and time capsule.
It reminds of those stupid calculations that the music industry did back in the old days of Napster and other P2P sharing about how much money they lose.
When in actuality, I suspect that an actuary or accountant can estimate that this open sourcing of a 20+ year old game probably brings in new revenue in terms of consumers being interested in the franchise.
Nah this is changing.
This of course is what they said about tablets. Now people are replacing desktop or laptop workflow with tablets, or alternatively tablets are being designed with removable keyboards so the lines are blurred.
I know scientific researchers who now only travel to conferences with tablets instead of their laptops.
Finally, I predict that we’re moving to cloud computing. It’s the natural way. You VPN into a network and your computing is done on a cluster or on a central computer.
The same is already happening for gaming. People are connecting controllers and glasses like the Xreal Air to phones, then networking into a computer to play a desktop game on their phone.
As a scientist I briefly read the Twitter chain by the company with some description of their methodology.
Honestly I didn’t really follow it and it’s hard to critique based on buzzwords and Tweets. The person who was posting it sounds like a businessman, throwing jargon and words rather than something coherent.
Ultimately I think that people are surprised by figures like “50% of gamers are female”. It might be 30%, or it might be something else. Maybe asking the questions a certain way biases the responses a certain way.
It’s hard to glean anything based on what I’ve seen. I don’t have any skin in this game, and I don’t care either way, but all I’ll say is that it’s hard to figure out the truth based on the information available.
For a lot of academics, the preservation of knowledge is super fascinating.
That said I don’t think there is anything exceptional about video games in the larger scheme of things. Media, like cassettes and VHS will also suffer from this issue. If you’re a Star Wars fan here’s a random example. There is apparently a stockpile of Star Wars books turned into audiobooks accessible only for the disabled and blind. This stock is stored in some Congress library. That fact always interested me.
The situation for scientific research is similar. A lot of computational work done in the 60s-80s is lost because the media was not backed up or preserved. So thousands of scientific papers are not easily reproducible. I remember looking into a famous paper about climate change models published in the 70s. They recently asked the author if he still had the codes that generated that model and he basically said “heck no”. So all that knowledge is lost. We’ll never have an exact duplication of that important work from the 70s.
Same goes for a lot of the internet in the 90s. Some of it was backed up but a surprising amount is lost. Projects like the Internet Archive are so important for humanity’s preservation of data.
So yeah, the video game situation is interesting but in the grand scheme of things in the early tech era, it’s normal. A lot has been preserved via roms.
I just noticed this.
As others have mentioned the stars have been largely useless in the last little while so to be honest I’m not sure this has any impact. Even sites that try and give a rating based on fake reviews are not helpful because so many reviews are faked. The only helpful part is to try and read negative reviews.
I imagine this star fiasco is something that’s easy for browser plugins to reverse.
I would love to see AI and Machine Learning used to filter out fake reviews. This would actually be useful.
I used to root my Android phones. Then I stopped because all banking apps were disallowing launch if your phone was detected as having root.
It’s just that I fear that realisation may not filter down.
You honestly see it a lot in industry. Companies pay $$$ for things that don’t really produce results. Or what they consider to be “results” changes. There are plenty of examples of lowering standards and lowering quality in virtually every industry. The idea that people will realise the trap of AI and reverse is not something I’m enthusiastic about.
In many ways AI is like pseudoscience. It’s a black box. Things like machine learning don’t tell you “why” it works. It’s just a black box. ChatGPT is just linear regression on language models.
So the claim that “good science” prevails is patently false. We live in the era of progressive scientific education and yet everywhere we go there is distrust in science, scientific method, critical thinking, etc.
Do people really think that the average Joe is going to “wake up” to the limitations of AI? I fear not.
Interesting. Maybe I don’t know as much as I thought. Let me do some more reading…
Unfortunately here in the UK there has been systematic defunding of things like libraries.
Wait this image I’ve seen before…when I was a kid? Where is it from?
What is “obvious” is a fine point and university students still struggle with knowing what is appropriate.
For a simple distance, speed, time calculation I would expect a good student to write the units so that it’s obvious by dimensional arguments. Moreover I’d argue it takes little more effort to write eg v = d/t = …
People really underestimate the importance of clear communication and scientific clarity. A student who understands the subject deep enough to clearly communicate it is likely a top student. It’s one thing to cite that formula. It’s a whole other thing to explain its derivation or to understand that for large values of ‘c’, the formula approaches the classical limit. In these jokes, there is never a well-written response because of there were, it would diminish the shock.
Of course the whole thing is a joke, but behind the scenes, the fact that the normal person lacks an understanding of what is actually important here (the ability to communicate) leads to the mess of abilities at the university level.
It’s a perpetuation of the idea that there are these little child geniuses that outsmart their teachers. Then these little geniuses graduate high school, and realise they never actually understood the subject at anything more than a superficial level.
So at the moment my “workflow” is to completely stop accessing Reddit via mobile apps. I’ll still use Reddit via Google Searches because it remains important for finding key information.
I’m content playing with Lemmy as my main mobile “app”.
That’s true. I understand.
I’m also not a fan of the DLC and change to video game design based on such payouts.
But even then, even with fake reviews, young gamers are completely spoiled with information compared to the black hole that existed in the 80s and 90s. I’m not sure how people argue otherwise.
The fact that I can go on my phone, jump on YouTube, and watch a play through is incredible. When I was young, I had to make decisions based on what the box art looked like ffs.
Can you link an example of what you mean by the problems in image generation models?
Seconded Memmy here. I was originally using mlem and Memmy but I’m afraid Memmy has taken the league in my books. Honestly already at this point, it supersedes Apollo in some ways (like customisation of themes).
Yes.
I think with something like this you have to do a literature search. Even then it’s kind of tough because I’m sure it’s very hard to do objective tests of these traits.
You might say that any activity has similar aspects. Learning a difficult passage in music, learning to speak languages, learning to throw a basketball through a hoop, etc.
I’m not sure there is a huge amount of evidence that video games teach resilience any more than any other similar activity. Moreover, it’s easily the kind of thing that our biases set us up to believe things that aren’t there. For every person who learned resilience from video games, there might be three other people who learned poor lessons, like “I should be lazy and play video games and not study for my exams.”
With academic or professional resilience, I can’t say I’ve seen any positive correlation with video games.
I could easily argue that excessive video game play makes you less resilient to doing non-video-game challenges.
Sorry, I think you misunderstand that I’m talking about a large scale problem rather than a personal problem. Of course people can individually download videos to preserve.
Imagine losing YouTube’s videos next week. You would have effectively lost nearly two decades worth of media chronicling human and technological development (more if you take into account that YouTube has repositories of older media).
Someone described it like the Library Alexandria. In terms of density of information, I think the comparison is apt.
A good comparison that might be too old for some readers. Back in the 80s and 90s, the early internet was populated via usenet discussions. Google eventually bought this data and merged it into Google Groups. However Google Groups was disbanded. This meant that some archives can no longer be accessed because to do so requires some active component no longer in service. We have effectively lost gigantic chunks of early 90s internet history. A lot of this history was quite important in many facets of life.
Back when I looked into this, which was more than half a decade ago, it was a nightmare to figure out what worked and what didn’t. The XDA community is also hard to distangle.
Maybe it’s changed since then but I didn’t have the time to look into what worked and what didn’t.
How likely is this plugin to break under updates of the Steamdeck? Is it something that’s still very experimental?
There is already something like this via the Wayback Machine (who indeed do copies of video media but more typically VHS and other things) and things like the Russian Library genesis, which is kept in torrent format.
The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.
If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.
I don’t know anything about small US towns but these stories always remind me of stories from Jack Reacher involving small town corruption. Pretty incredible.
What is information archival on the Fediverse like? Is there any advantage to Reddit?
Also if I understand last discussions, it’s not clear how well the Fediverse currently behaves with Google searches.
This wasn’t what I read but this looks excellent.
https://archive.org/details/jonah-edwards-presentation
Another super interesting story is about Marion Stokes, who recorded around 71000 cassettes worth of television media from 1975 to 2000s. She houses them in 9 apartments. I need to watch the documentary about her. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
I remember I started reading about about this when I wondered what kind of media is “safe” for storage. It sounds like a simple question but it’s not. Digital media, unlike print media, is so easy to lose.
Thanks. Let me read it a bit more closely.
In what way does the Fediverse prevent this kind of information destruction in the future? Will it be easier to preserve data?
I find that a lot of Lemmy people are positing a vision that won’t exist, which is that there’s going to be a great migration to Lemmy. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
But the key is that you don’t need the hundreds of millions that Reddit has. You can argue that you don’t even want it.
What I want is a return to the 2000-era bulletin board-type numbers where each community would have on the order of a few hundred or thousand active participants.
Hmmm. If abuse happens, is the right idea to say that “I don’t need this community”?
I’m not sure how that HackerNews comment helps in the slightest. If my university has an obscure basket weaving community and people are getting abused in that community, should I just say “Eh we don’t actually need a basket weaving community”.
It’s also amusing to me that a commenter on a relatively obscure and niche website is complaining that that don’t need (or care about abuse that transpired on) a niche community from another website. And then this comment is echoed in yet another niche community.