This is 100% my cat. She’s an adorable gremlin who I can tell absolutely loves me, but she’s also figured out exactly how long my reach is and will always settle down on a nearby piece of furniture JUST out of touch. Little rascal.

All these “why are people using Bluesky and not Mastodon” topics are starting to give me a headache. You’ve been told and on some level, I have to assume you understand the reasons, but are simply unwilling to address them. When people say, “it’s difficult to use” instead of understanding why they think that way, you just dismissively wave your hands and say, “no it’s not”.

If you want people to use Mastodon, you need to SHOW people the power of federation while HIDING all the rough bits. People want to go to where the friends, writers, artists, scientists, etc. they want to follow are and sign up for an account there. Simple as. In this way, they very much want at least the appearance of centralization. I don’t want to have to get balls deep in an instance’s politics to understand their moderation, who they’re federated with, if they have the funds to operate into the foreseeable future, and how to migrate my data if any of those things goes sideways.

Your initial post and response here describe my position as well.

Simply put, to follow individuals, you have to be where those individuals are. On Lemmy here in looking for topics and discussion, those are much easier to decentralize.

I was thinking about this the other day, one of my favorite analogies is seconds.

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is … 31,688 years.

The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It’s utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/elon-musk-richest-person-trillionaire/index.html

This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He’s still on track, by 2027 no less. There’s no telling how directly and flagrantly he’ll benefit from a Trump win, either.

It’s been used many times before, but I like the analogy of ordering food. If I go to a restaurant and order risotto, I haven’t made the dish, I’ve only consumed it. I want you to focus on that word “consume”, it’s important here.

Another idea I’ve seen recently that I like was a summed post something like this:

• People use AI to write a 4,000 word article from a 15 word idea (introduction of noise)
• Others then use AI to summarize the 4,000 word article into a 15 word blurb (introduction of more noise)

I know I’m using a lot of analogies here; from food to writing and now the visual medium - but stick with me. Completely sidestepping any lofty notions of soul or humanity, let’s look strictly at what’s being communicated in a visual piece of art generated by AI. It’s an idea, one containing neither your specific style (the creative process) or vision (the final product), though you may feel you get a close approximation after several iterations and a detailed/complex enough prompt. If you wanted to convey the idea of “eagle perched in a tree”, you’ve already done so with that phrase (or prompt in this respect). By providing an AI-generated image, you’ve narrowed my own ability to interpret down into the AI-generated noise now taking up space between us.

The reason you’d use AI-generated art is because you need to fill space, like the thumbnail to go with an article. An empty space to dump things into. While I can’t ever claim enough authority to define what exactly art is and is not (nobody can), I can say with absolute certainty that no matter how far the tech evolves, to me PERSONALLY, AI will only ever generate content, not art. There is already more art in the world than I could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes, I neither want nor need this garbage.

We could explain it to you, but you’re not interested in understanding.

Same on all accounts. Got the original NES Metroid for my birthday when I was a kid and impacted my taste in games forevermore. Of course I’ve played all the Castlevanias as well and Hollow Knight is a masterpiece.

It’s hard to properly compare because I’ve played Super Metroid more times than I honestly remember and have only made it through Dread 1.5x (at best). There are so many cool rooms in Super (and even later games like the Prime series) where I play them and go, “Oh, this is the room with X!” where X is a cool encounter, maybe a friendly/non-hostile creature, or an entertaining set piece. Dread doesn’t really have that, the areas check off zones like flavors of ice cream, the music is not memorable, and creatures are often used across multiple zones, further diluting any uniqueness to the areas.

It’s best summed up by this screenshot I took of Dread (I added the red outlines around the black space myself to highlight my point). Notice how the foreground has no character or texture and all the detail has been pushed into the background, which is essentially the negative space you traverse through. My eyes don’t really hold on this area, they capture the boundary of the play space and then navigate through it, passing over a lot of the inconsequential stuff in the background. Again, compare to Super.

Also the EMMI stealth sections are so incongruous with the rest of the game you could cleanly slice them out entirely (while redistributing any of the power ups of course) and the game would be the same. In fact I rather hate them because instead of taking my time to explore and soak in the environment, I’m just chased through a very samey looking area.

Oh and finally, it’s a small point and I don’t want to make too much out of it, but like … the game opens with SPOILERS beating her so hard she loses her abilities. That’s weird, right? Kinda oof, IMHO.

Metroid Dread still kinda … bothers me. At the risk of sounding overly contentious, am I the only one who thought it was like a 7/10 action game and a 5/10 Metroidvania?

I won’t go into it all now, but I feel like the difficulty spike is a knock-on from the lack of collectibles. While you can argue about the usefulness of previous collectibles in Metroid games, in Dread they’ve been pared down to Missile Tanks, Energy Tanks, and Power Bomb Tanks. To make discovering those limited things more valuable, they pumped up boss difficulty so you’d either have to come in with a sufficiently high stockpile or perform a counter.

I’m not sure if that’s 100% accurate and I may be generalizing my own experiences too much, but otherwise there’s just not really enough excuse for me to go out of my way and collect all those Missile Tanks unless I’m specifically going for a completionist run. Seeing yet another +5 Missile Tank tucked away somewhere just doesn’t make me go, “Wow, I need to get there!” but increasing the boss difficulty to a point that requires it also makes it feel less optional? Anyone agree?

certified Dread disdainer

1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
2. Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.

I know it’s a 45 minute Youtube video, but I love Tom Nicholas and all his stuff is fascinating and worth watching. Check this out as he does a sincere deep dive on it to get an honest answer and it’s pretty enlightening! It’s actually evolved even in the short time since its inception on the internet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmzyGNXxwdo

Check out https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/, lightweight note-taking app with interesting scripting function built in.

Even if that’s not your cup of tea, it has the option to save your notebook to a single sqlite file, so I take that as good enough proof it’ll work for your similar purposes as well.

Other backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

WTF, no, this is worse in every way. So instead of being involved with the people and topics I choose, it’s instead left up to an algorithm? Somehow even more opaque than usual because of AI involvement.

This isn’t solving any problem, this is yet another mask to push content in front of people.

So it could possibly be construed to “Microsoft’s Dirty Operating System”, yeah?