I expected the bottom to say something like “instead of cloud-native scalable microservices using AI models that cost an average US household salary per day to run”, but maybe I’ve been in corporate for too long.

Sometimes manufacturers “do their own thing”. Nintendo USB-C power supply can somehow power my soldering iron at 20V, but cannot charge a laptop.

Ran into the complement/opposite of this with a cheap handheld. It cannot be charged with a USB-C PD charger, but can be charged with a “dumb” USB-A to USB-C cord, all because the manufacturer cheaped out on 2 resistors.

“AI” is a pretty bad blanket term. BirdNet / Merlin is a model trained specifically on bird calls (and some noises) built to recognize bird calls. App and logo use huge general-purpose models to create content of questionable quality.

And yes, a decent birder should never trust just Merlin ID.

This reminds me of “bugoga” from the olden days.

(Circa 2007 on bashorgru, there was a meme about writing “bugoga” into a text file, renaming it to exe and then running it. That made the cursor jump around the console and if you had a connected matrix printer, it would start going crazy - something about writing spaces to all available output in an endless loop)

Ironically the free-but-with-ads Tubi is the least bad when it comes to UI. They have categories with exhaustive lists, and even labels for movies highly rated on RottenTomatoes.

Netflix sucked for a while (don’t have it anymore). Apple TV is absolute shit now (subbed for a month to watch a few shows)

Thank you for the warning, that sounds incredibly frustrating. I see Blue Prince recommended alongside Outer Wilds as “knowledge based” puzzle games, but it does not sound fun now.

I also could not get through it and gave up. Some roguelites (Everspace) give you enough upgrades to at give you a better chance of making it to the end (and/or to breeze through the beginning), but weapons, upgrades and blessings in Hades seemed rather marginal, and I am not that good.

Destructible walls. It’s possible to destroy some walls, but that is not in the manual nor hinted at in a classic way (discoloration or cracks). You can complete the game without knowing that. It simply did not occur to me to throw dynamite at blank walls.

Invincibility toggle is nice to have, but even more of a statement of how bad the balance is. (Didn’t need to use it though - found an exploit to instakill the quarry boss :)

Not an avid gamer and play mostly indie.

Tunic. Was recommended for fans of Outer Wilds (fantastic game), but I see no similarities. Tunic’s cover art looks like a Zelda ripoff, world borrows from Hyper Light Drifter, and the game plays like a Zelda + Hyper Light Drifter ripoff, but very poorly tested, unfair, and misleading at times. I get the impression that game designers had zero external opinions and very little playtesting.

Exploration is “bump into every nook and cranny to find a way forward”. Bosses are absurdly difficult, clearly catering to the “git gud” crowd, and do not feel fair (as a counterexample, HLD felt difficult but fair). Puzzles are all backloaded to the latter half of the game, they are mostly fun, but at least one relies on a mechanic that is never hinted at nor used in the game otherwise. The untranslated manual, main gimmick of the game, is misleading at times. Midgame apocalypse / dark world is not that, it’s… Night time (not putting the spoiler because that is just absurdity)

Yes, I finished it, and got the good ending, which only elicited “Um, ok?” from me.

The shape goes into the shape press that presses the shape into pressed shape.

Ukrainians would also want to rm rf

Just a fair warning: Element (Matrix client) also had issues with notifications not appearing in time, or attachments/images not loading. (This is on a self-hosted Synapse with a handful of people and 1 bridge).

I haven’t kept up much with new developments, but last I remember, hosting the official Element Server Suite Community requires Kubernetes. Third-party servers or some install scripts are an option though.

These are so bad they cause integer underflow, making them good again.

You will make a great father.

(USA)

Less lawn care and more native plants: save money on fertilizer, save time on mowing, grass looks better too, you get fireflies and birds.

Own tomatoes taste much better. And they grow like weeds in subtropical regions of the US, so very little effort needed there.

Repair and DIY: You want to get ripped off by some person who will also put minimum effort into fixing your house or things? Or worse, company salesman who will wear you out with endless speeches until you agree? “Want it done right? Do it yourself”.

Solar power: This is MY power.

No car / smaller car / older car: Gas is expensive (ironic for Americans, I know, but it’s a common complaint)

Smaller house / apartment: Save lots of money on heating and cooling, pay less taxes and lower insurance rates.

But to even get this far, we have to somehow overcome cultural norms, such as: my neighbor(s) whose hobby is mowing the grass twice a week; people ordering shit on Amazon as the default; stupid laws about solar; wanting a bigger car, house, yard for no practical reason.

And I can’t find a good selfish argument against big tech and AI - it’s free, and most people are indifferent about external costs and surveillance.

I used porkbun, and never had to upload an ID (but I am in USA). IIRC still need to provide an address, but they mask WHOIS.

IMO the “visual concept” is a weak argument - those are very abstract shapes.

each character conveys a word or concept rather than a single letter that has no inherent definition.

And each character consists of strokes, or even unjoined glyphs, making them more eqivalent to a word rather than a letter.

they even have words that are “swapable”

In languages that I know, order of compound words mostly matters but order of words in a sentence can change a lot. In Ukrainian and Russian, it could be used for emphasis without tone, e.g. “она пошла домой” (she went home, neutral), “домой она пошла” (she went home), “пошла она домой” (she walked home). But in English, at least in conversational, non-contorted way, word order has to be preserved.

alphabets (as those are based on sound)

Well, yes, but, actually, no. Alphabets co-evolved with pronunciation. While Ukrainian and Belarusian (AFAIK) are very close phonetically to written text, Russian has a lot of a-o sound swaps, and English, in addition to a = æ and the th sound is… Well, you just have to know how to pronounce every word because they could derive or be borrowed from Spanish or French or any other latin-script language, but for some reason they keep the original spelling.

Lyrics in songs while trying to talk to someone or read something. Have to turn the music down or off. Maybe has to do with English being my second language, but I can process only one stream of audio information at once.

Did not watch the video, but really enjoyed Everyday Utopia - feminist views on labor and family, arguments against current values/ideas of nuclear family, good historical anecdotes, and very little negativity.

Love the simplicity and pragmatism of both protocol and gemtext markup (not so sure on TLS requirements though). I even use gemtext to write pages for my web site / gemini capsule.

Read about it when playing with Gemini (the protocol, not Google garbage), but just like Twitter, did not find a good use for it. Saw maybe one page promoting it.