experbia

I went through a Second Life land trading phase quite a few years back. Properties like this were very valuable to advertisers. Because of advertisers, it was possible to be a niche real estate mogul for weird useless little virtual properties like this that could earn you an actual meaningful real-world income. Second Life had (may still have, I’ve not been back in a while) its own advertising industry and multiple adtech networks. A despicable inevitability of having completely free content creation tools and also an economy that can trade with real money. People trying to sell their creations want people to pay in game currency to get their things, so they can extract the value to real money. They want people to know about their products, so they turn to people who will accept in game currency to blast awareness of their products everywhere. Those advertisers want land, which they need to buy. Probably from another player.

So, the first thing I thought of when I saw this plot was “BILLBOARDS!!!” and I hate it.

Take me to the Internet.

I’ve been working through my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 - it’s fairly enjoyable, I’m glad I ignored it outright until well after big patches rolled out. There’s something very satisfying about blowing up enemies through a camera.

I’ve also picked up Dwarf Fortress (Steam) for the first time. It has a lot of depth but has been fun to learn and try and figure out. I just flooded a section of my fortress by digging into an underground river.

My chill-out puzzle game has been Can of Wormholes and it’s pretty fun! It’s weird for sure… but definitely fun.

I’m glad to hear Wargroove 2 is worth it! I really enjoyed the first and I was worried when I heard about a sequel.

hell yes, Badly Broken Code is such an amazing album

I was top 0.05% for Battle Tapes. it’s good shit. Weight of the World is where it’s at, but it’s all good.

HONK JESUS HONK

everybody on Earth will know

hahaha holy shit, he believes. he really believes his own shit. he really views “X” as being of planetary importance. he’s actually living in his daydream, where Mars (by his hand) and Earth are networked (by him) and his “X” has somehow supplanted the Internet and spans between planets. his principal operating perspective is a delusion. wow. like, all the time.

Nope 😂 though, despite their decision obviously having nothing to do with me, I did find it to be somewhat flattering and a bit reassuring that the fine Valve engineers seemed to make similar decisions to me.

I use Arch for all my computers, including my “critical” systems. I only do full upgrades when I know I have the time to troubleshoot something broken, but rarely need to do so.

More than this, I actually use Arch as the OS for thousands of computers for my work that end up in customer hands, who expect stability. I’m not sure at what point it stops being Arch, though - I pin the package repositories to internal mirrors with fixed package distributions from specific dates to control the software that goes to them, so it’s not really rolling release anymore I guess - I control the releases and when updates go out.

Arch is what you make of it. My Arch project desktop pc is constantly shifting and breaking and needing attention as I continually improve it and play with things. My Arch laptop that runs my life and work and is the most important computer I own is a paragon of stability and perfect functioning.

that sounds great. abstractivus, the machine overlord.

I’ve always said that Starfleet is, first and foremost, a jobs program.

It gives purpose to people who can’t find their own, in a time where your needs are provided-for by default, and seeking personal fulfillment is the purpose for most people’s lives.

Drones would cut out the human driving a shuttle over to inspect an anomaly or object themselves, robbing them of a sense of accomplishment and achievement. Starfleet is about that stuff, so that’s a no-go unless nobody wants to do it and it needs to be done anyway. We see that a lot, too. They do have probes and sensor stations and stuff, after all, usually in really boring and unfulfilling locations.

They have excessive, ridiculous redundancy. They have people doing jobs the ship computers could (and often, in times of need, DOES) perform very well on its own. There are several recorded instances of entire starships being successfully maintained for extended periods of time by a single individual (who does go insane due to isolation every time, because plot).

it never ceases to amaze me how stupid we all are as a civilization.

we’re opting out of it, but nature will continue. this will be a very curious and fairly hospitable world full of interesting xenoarcheological mysteries… in the distant future, to a visiting spacefaring civilization.

do I have a case against either my institution, the professor who threw it out or OpenAI?

This all seems like such recent technology, I can not imagine this question being very answerable except via the long way: a courtroom. I suspect it would take someone trying in order to set precedent.

I’ve made a point to learn and understand commonly “mocked” languages. The reasons they’re ridiculed for are often very tightly related to the reasons why they’re powerful in unique ways.

It’s hard to defend some parts of PHP, but it doesn’t deserve the hatred it gets. Its standard library is a self-contradictory mess, yes. But it’s backwards-compatible with previous language versions to a fairly remarkable degree. This backwards-compatability might seem strange now, but not that long ago, this guarantee meant it could evolve very rapidly as a language and ecosystem without risking losing users to a continual barrage of updates necessary to keep atop of, lest your application fail. I think this is the reason it overtook PERL as the first major “server-side” dynamic website language of choice.

It has that goofy dollar sign variable syntax, yes. I personally think a special syntax for variable access vs function calls is one of the reasons coding beginners found it slightly easier to use - you didn’t need to keep so much track of name collisions and stuff. $thing is always a piece of data, a noun. thing is always a keyword or function, a verb. You can thing($thing), it’s OK, they’re different. You’re verbing a noun.

It could grow fast and be picked up quick, so it’s no wonder to me it persists, ever-improving, in the midst of all these extremely popular, extremely modern languages in use today. Wikipedia, Facebook, WordPress, Slack, Etsy, indeed even kbin, the piece of Fediverse software I’m writing this on now.

This is great. This is how it always should have been.

Organization of any kind needs a Twitter page or subreddit? No, they need their own official, self-controlled Mastodon instance anyone can see and listen to and interact with, even without accounts on that specific instance. They need their own kbin or Lemmy instance to make and administer their community on and have control over, everyone can still participate even without signing up for accounts on that specific instance.