downvotes come at a “cost”, whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.

I think it's the complete opposite. Platforms with downvotes tend to be less toxic because you don't have to reply to insane people to tell them they're wrong, whereas platforms like Twitter get really toxic because you only see the likes, so people tend to get into fights and "ratio" them which actually increases the attention they get and spreads their message to other people.

In general, platforms without upvotes/downvotes tend to be the most toxic imo. Platforms like old-school forums and 4chan are a complete mess because low-effort troll content is as loud as high effort thoughtful ones. It takes one person to de-rail a conversation and get people to fight about something else, but with downvotes included you just lower their visibility. It's basically crowdsourced moderation, and it works relatively well.

As for ways to reduce toxicity, shrug. Moderation is the only thing that really stops it but if you moderate too much then you'll be called out for censoring people too much, and telling them not to get mad is just not going to happen.

My idea for less toxicity is having better filtering options for things people want to see. Upon joining a platform it would give easy options to filter out communities that are political or controversial. That's what I'm doing on Lemmy, I'm here for entertainment, not arguing.

That just because I'm a programmer that must mean I'm a master of anything technology related and can totally help out with their niche problems.

"Hey computer guy, how do I search for new channels on my receiver?"

"Hey computer guy, my excel spreadsheet is acting weird"

"My mobile data isn't working. Fix this."

My friend was a programmer and served in the army, people ordered him to go fix a sattelite. He said he has no idea how but they made him try anyways. It didn't work and everyone was disappointed.

I have. Disappointingly there isn't much difference, the people working in CS have a 9.59 avg while the people that aren't have a 9.61 avg.

There is a difference in people that have used AI gen before. People that have got a 9.70 avg, while people that haven't have a 9.39 avg score. I'll update the post to add this.

Web development feels like it's stuck in the early 2000's. I've ranted a lot about it over the years but I just don't know how everyone is okay with it. I'm sure tons of people will disagree.

HTML is bad. The language itself feels unintuitive and is clunky compared to modern markdown languages, and let's be honest, your webpage just consists of nested <div> tags.

CSS is bad. Who knew styling can be so unintuitive and unmanageable? Maybe it made sense 25 years ago, but now it's just terrible. It's very clunkily integrated with HTML too in my opinion. Styling and markdown should be one easier to use language where 50% of it isn't deprecated.

Javascript has been memed to death so I won't even go there. Typescript is OK I suppose.

And now for my hottest take: ~10+ years ago I saw web building tools like Wix and I completely expected web development to head in the direction using a GUI to create, style, and script from one interface, even allowing you to create and see dynamic content instantly. I've seen competitors and waited for "the big one" that's actually free and open source and good enough to be used professionally. It never happened. Web dev has just gone backwards and stuck in its old ways, now it's a bloated mess that takes way more time than it deserves.

The Godot engine is actually a pretty good option for creating GUI apps and it's exactly what I envisioned web dev should've been this past decade. One language, intuitive interface, simple theming and easy rapid development... Shame it never happened.</div>

Compiling to bash seems awesome, but on the other hand I don't think anyone other than the person who wrote it in amber will run a bash file that looks like machine-generated gibberish on their machine.

Fiiiinally some good news on GameMaker. I honestly don't know what they were thinking with a subscription just to use the engine, their main audience is indie devs that are just starting out so they just chased them away to engines that are free to use like Godot, Unity, Unreal, etc. You can't even export web games in Gamemaker for free unless you upload it to Opera's website.

I briefly used gamemaker 2 and it was a pretty good, polished engine. Shame Opera sabotaged it so much. It was becoming clear that Godot was quickly taking its users, so the timing of this announcement is good.

inexperienced big brain developer see nested loop and often say "O(n^2)? Not on my watch!"

complexity demon spirit smile

This hits too close to home.

The goal isn't really to be a quiz, but rather just to see how susceptible people are to AI generated art. Many of the images I chose are intentionally vague, 80% of people so far got the line art sketch wrong, and that's with knowing that many of these are AI generated. The results are definitely interesting to see.

A "don't know" option would ruin the point since most people would just choose that. I want to see where people lean towards.

Sure, but keep in mind this is a casual survey. Don't take the results too seriously. Have fun: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MkuZG2MiGj-77PGkuCAM3Btb1_Lb4TFEx8tTZKiOoYI

Do give some credit if you can.

I still can't understand why Google keeps hyping up Bard and then releasing it at a poor state just to ruin their reputation. First, we had:

• Bard 1, which was hyped up to be the ChatGPT successor. It turned out to be really bad.

• Bard 2.0, a massive update that was hyped up to make Bard so much better. It turned out to still be pretty bad (but in fairness it was a minor improvement).

• Google Gemini, their massive response to GPT 4 that was, on paper, the best LLM in the world. They finally integrated it into Bard last month and... It's still not great. I could not tell an immediate difference between this and the old Bard. Oh, and the videos they used to advertise Gemini Ultra were fake.

I'm not going to armchair analyze a hugely successful company, but from my point of view it really shows how mismanaged Google has been in the past decade. Failed projects upon cancelled projects upon increasingly frustrated employees.

/rant. Anyways, you should consider using Perplexity if you want something with search capabilities, I've had decent success there. Claude is also significantly better than Bard, but they made free usage very limited lately. Might be a good option if you're willing to pay.

Good read, and I think you might want to look at OnlyOffice. It's open source and while it is kindof a shameless Microsoft Office clone, it does seem to support LaTeX when adding equations. Not sure how well it works as I don't use it though. The slides app is pretty decent, the only bone I have to pick with it is that there aren't many animation types and most of them are very basic. Otherwise, might be what you're looking for.

Edit: I just tried it and it seems to work pretty well. Select LaTeX, type your equation, then select professional in the dropdown menu and it'll show the equation.

I feel for you. A few people said the human art I put in the survey were lackluster but I thought they were pretty good, not everyone is an S-tier artist.

77% of people guessed this was AI generated, and a friend of mine kept saying it was weird and inconsistent so "I doubt a real artist would put random food in the back"

It's actually a cropped image of https://www.deviantart.com/tsaoshin/art/Strawberry-Taiyaki-Cat-905271835 . I wouldn't want to be an artist right now.

Right? Who gives a shit about user experience anyways? When someone has an issue, you just tell them to man up and figure it out.

No, it's not always obvious which is the "main" community and there are many communities that died due to lack of traction, often because there are duplicate communities that also lacked traction. Community following would not only help unify communities and unify comments in crossposts, it also encourages decentralization by making 5 useful communities instead of 4 dead and 1 active.

It's not insane or narcissistic to want to reach a big audience. The same audience, across multiple instances, without effort. It's social media 101. Saying who cares to that is a great way to see a dwindling userbase. Maybe you can't feel it because it doesn't directly affect your usage, but it does many others, and providing an optional solution is not a bad thing to consider.

I'd also like to take this moment to show that this is the most popular issue in Lemmy's github, getting over twice as many likes as the 2nd most liked issue. Everyone convincing eachother in the comments that nobody cares about this is clearly wrong, and are being so in an insanely toxic and dismissive manner. Thanks.

I know this post probably wasn't intended to be malicious but it is insane you wrote this without realizing how it's emanating privilege and not understanding why people can't find a job.

I graduated over a year ago from my CS degree. Excellent GPA, with honors. I've been learning game dev since college and have been (sort of) doing it professionally since graduation. I've done a 4-month internship, two mediocre part-time jobs, some freelancing, and I still can't find a proper job. The industry is collapsing and the job market is flooded with talent that have a dozen years of experience. Combine that with the fact that I live in a poor country where there aren't many game dev jobs and companies are scaling down work from home, and finding one is a nightmare.

Let me get this straight. The blog post says you've been working for 10 years, maybe more. You already have insane amounts of experience and a past history with companies.

So what did I do right?

Maybe working in the industry for a dozen years has something to do with being able to find a job easily. If you had <5 years of experience you would have struggled to reach an interview. If you did reach an interview, someone with a more stacked CV would take that job instead. This has some "Why don't millennials just buy a house?" energy.

Has it ever been better?

Actually, yes, by a big margin. Back in ~2011 mobile games were actually trying to be great. Games like Edge Extended, World of Goo, Bounce Boing Voyage, Zenonia 2 & 3, etc.

I remember early Humble Bundles being full of exciting games for mobile, now you'll be lucky to find just one of them that isn't filled to the brim with MTX or ads.

I have been obsessed with this game since it came out. I've already put in 60 hours and got 14 games cherried (which means 100%ing them, getting a true ending, or beating a difficult challenge).

I'm writing an incredibly long blog post where I review every single game in the pack. Excited to finish & share it once I'm done playing through everything.

Why? Automod is just a tool, the issues people have with it is how overzealous the mods using it are. If you're moderating a community with 10,000+ people you can't expect to filter and manage everything yourself, so a bot scheduling posts and filtering potential spam/low effort content is necessary.

Technically you're right but the thing about AI image generators is that they make it really easy to mass-produce results. Each one I used in the survey took me only a few minutes, if that. Some images like the cat ones came out great in the first try. If someone wants to curate AI images, it takes little effort.

It's a two part story:

1. The mobile market mostly targets kids and boomers and their resistance to microtransactions has been basically non-existent, making the market quickly become predatory and full of spam

2. Modern app stores have become abysmal, making it impossible for smaller games to see the light of day. 99% of google play is a dumpster fire, and the 1% that is decent isn't published by a multi-billion dollar company so you're unlikely to ever see it. There are good games out there, but the way the algorithms and ads work makes them constantly pushed down in the list. This isn't "a problem" to a company like Google because they're making bank off of all these ad spaces.

Anyways, most good games are paid, but here's a list of stuff I've enjoyed playing on mobile:

• Fancy Pants Adventures

• Bloons TD 6

• Dicey Dungeons

• Dead Cells

• Slay the Spire (but the mobile port is rough on small screens)

• Knights of Pen and Paper +1

• The Enchanted Cave 2

• Let's Create! Pottery

• BAIKOH

• Data Wing

Probably a lot more I forgot. Have at it.

Hell, probably.

It saddens me deeply that consumers (gamers) just don’t give a flying fuck about this and continues to pay a premium for Nvidia cards.

It doesn't help that AMD isn't competing that much price-wise. Their only saving grace is higher VRAM, and while that is nice, raw performance is becoming less relevant. FSR also does not compete with DLSS, it's strictly worse in every way. They also barely exist in the laptop market, I was just considering buying a new gaming laptop and my options are an RTX 4060 or paying more for the one laptop with a weaker AMD GPU.

I would argue Intel is shaping up to be the real competitor to Nvidia. They had a rough start but their GPUs are very price-competitive. Their newer integrated GPUs are also the best currently, they're good for gen AI, their raytracing performance trumps AMD, and XeSS is a lot better than FSR. If I were in the market for a new GPU I'd probably grab the Intel A770. I'm looking forward to their next generation of cards.

FWIW not everyone using source control is a programmer. I've seen artists in game dev using GUI tools to pull new changes and push their assets.

Make sure you get a laptop with a modern Ryzen processor since the battery life (and performance on battery) is often a lot better than Intel. There are a lot out there that fit the bill like Lenovo's yoga/ideapad lineup. Just be weary of two things:

• Some 14" laptops may have soldered RAM or SSDs making them impossible to upgrade
• Don't go off of processor names, they're often pretty misleading. For example a Ryzen 7 7730U is significantly worse than a Ryzen 7 7840U.

Oh hey! I made the highest rated post on that sub for recommending alternatives a while back. Glad to see people are still having discussions there all things considered, I expected the sub to get nuked after I left Reddit. Welcome home! I should probably go back and update the post with some more modern info then...

I would say so, but the sample size isn't big enough to be sure of it.

Better late than never. It's going to take a while for people to get used to not needing the dotenv package.

DALL-E 3 is the only model that gets text right. It usually yields consistent results but can still jumble on words if you ask it to say too much. It's a big step forward regardless.

• git pull

• git add *

• git commit -m "Some stuff"

• git push

And occasionally when you mess up

• git reflog

• git reset HEAD@{n} (where n is where you wanna roll back to)

And occasionally if you mess up so hard you give up

• git reset --hard origin/main

And there you go. You are now a master at using git. Try not to mess up.

Levelhead is a fantastic mario-maker esque platformer. The official campaign is a little over 10 hours long and is pretty good but its main draw is its incredible level editor and infinite number of quality levels online. I can't recommend it enough. Sadly it never got as popular as it should have but there's still a massive backlog of online levels to play.

Someone else mentioned Distance and I agree. It's a futuristic racing game with some horror elements. The campaign is short, but there's a great amount of levels in the workshop. The multiplayer modes are also pretty fun if you can grab a few friends (there's split-screen too).

Inkbound is launching from early access soon and while I wouldn't say it's the greatest roguelike out there, it's a lot of fun and very unique. It's essentially a co-op turn based RPG where you and other players play all your turns at the same time. I've played a lot of singleplayer too and the game feels well balanced there.

Voxelgram is Picross 3D for PC. Must-have for people who like nonograms.

Done, column B in the second sheet contains the answers (Yes are AI generated, No aren't)

We have a big conference every year where I live for the tech industry. It's hit or miss depending on the person presenting, and it's usually a miss. Many talks can last over an hour when they could've been a much shorter youtube video and are just there to pad time. Also 95% of the people are there for other motives. Looking for investors, trying to get hired, browsing the booths, etc. Despite being very crowded it's very clear most of the people don't actually care about the talks and do anything else on their phones.

I think in-person conferences can be great experiences when done right but I really got anything out of it. For all the talks about networking with others they give very little opportunities to do that. When everyone is looking for opportunities from other people it felt almost like a competition to try and talk with companies and important people, and it usually boils down to them asking for my contact info so they can flush it down the toilet. I don't know, I just have a bad experience with them.

Unfortunately it seems like google forms resizes the image to fit the forms. If I had known this before I would've used something else, but oh well. I've stretched the images as far as they can go now, which seems to be around 740x740.

It's just not very good compared to any other kart game. Aside from the fact that it's very dated, the driving is slow, the levels are wide and uninspired, the racing itself is very simple. SRB2Kart is another open source karting game and it's sooooo much better.

Total missed opportunity to write this in Emojicode, but I love it nonetheless.

The fun part of this game is hearing such differing opinions, I had someone explain that Block Koala was their favorite. I personally didn't gel with Planet Zoldath, it's conceptually neat but I found it very tedious. Glad you enjoy it though!

No, the AI didn't try to copy the other art that was included. I also don't train the model myself, I just tell it to create an image similar to another one. For example the fourth picture I told it to create a rough sketch of a person sitting on a bench using an ink pen, then I went online and looked for a human-made one that's of a similar style.

I made a guide a while back explaining everything. It's easier than it looks, you'll just use a manager like Lutris or Heroic and download the newest version of Wine-GE, then your games should work.

God DAMN it

This is really cool. It seems to be getting hugged to death though, I'm getting a lot of server errors when I attempt to open most apps.

I'll post it on Lemmy once it's done. I'm still not entirely sure which gaming communities would be most suitable but it'll definitely be in !blogging@programming.dev :)

That said, UFO 50 is truly massive, so it'll be some time before I finish this thing. One of the games I haven't started yet is apparently a 20+ hour JRPG, so that'll be fun.