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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I have small hands and still fingertip basically all the time, and I have all my life. I don’t use a small mouse either (G502)

    I hate how smudgy and uncomfortable it feels to have reduced fine control when my palm comes into contact with the mouse. It feels icky and frustrating. I know plenty of people palm grip with low DPI and big mousepads to achieve fine control, but that seems far more exhausting than just developing stamina in the forearm.



  • Pokemon is how a lot of people got into games to begin with. It was a new and innovative experience from their perspective. Pokemon Red/Blue was a competent game with some fresh ideas, but through luck/marketing it became the launch point for a massive population of people into the gaming industry.

    So now you’ve got a few factors playing into Pokemon hype:
    Nostalgia (you never forget your first)
    Production value (this made money, pump more money in)
    Incidentally a formula that favors expansion (just add more Pokemon)

    These factors are enough on their own to carry a franchise for a while, especially for an otherwise ignorant audience that doesn’t play anything else (just like the people who just play FIFA games and nothing else). But at some point, it becomes too obvious even to the most zealous supporters that the formula is, well, a formula, and it’s not changing or improving, and even they finally begin to criticize the product. It’s easy to have a favorite pokemon out of 150, maybe even 450, but now there are over 1000 and it becomes exhausting even for die-hard fans. Even the number of types has exploded to 18 without actually having any interesting interactions to justify them, it’s just more for the sake of more.

    Plus, the most recent releases have been impressively lazy, again so much so that even megafans can’t nostalgia their way out of it.

    All this together makes for a history of a franchise that was one vehemently defended but is now seen as an embarrassing phase one went through as a child.


  • It always works out fine for them. I don’t know why anybody says imperialism or colonialism are bad or destructive, seems to me that Britain and France and Spain and Portugal and the Dutch are all doing fine. Really weird how maps of their empires seem to overlap a lot with parts of the world that currently or recently experienced a lot of, idk let’s call it “troubles?” They must be dumb or smth


  • Xfce is a great example of how solving a problem in the best way results in low adoption.

    People tend toward extremes. There is something in particular they really want, and they will gravitate toward the product that gives them the most of that thing.
    I want total control over configuration: KDE Plasma
    I want maximum performance: LXDE
    I want something that looks good and I don’t want to think about it: GNOME/Cinnamon

    Xfce isn’t on this list! It’s not the best at anything. But it’s pretty good at everything. It’s an overall best (in my opinion) but because it’s not beautiful, nor lightning fast, nor incredibly flexible, nobody will ever take it as their first choice. And the majority of people make a first choice and then never change, as whatever they start with is probably good enough for them. I’ve tried all of the DE’s listed above, but I’m the crazy guy: that’s a lot of work and churn! Any and all of them work well enough, why bother installing 5 separate environments?

    If you want to develop something and have people adopt it, then your goal is to have a killer sexy feature at the expense of all else, rather than to be satisfactory in every metric.


  • dreadgoat@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlHow though?
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    11 months ago

    This particular version is more about the characters depicted (Denji and Power from Chainsaw Man), who are famous for being endearingly stupid.

    The more earnest versions you tend to see on TikTok are mostly posted by, or at least targeted at, actual kids who don’t yet understand how vision works. Nobody on Lemmy is under the age of 30.


  • dreadgoat@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlNani?
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    1 year ago

    Not really, topic markers are… uh… and case endings… analytical instead of… wait a minute
    Der Hund ist rot; 犬は赤いです
    Ich esse den Hund; 犬を食べる
    no it can’t be
    Der Knochen des Hundes; 犬の骨
    fuck
    Ich gebe dem Hund einen Knochen; 犬に骨をあげます


  • dreadgoat@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlNani?
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    1 year ago

    “Cat red” makes Japanese sounds way more vague than it really is, you’re just not bothering to attempt to transliterate the grammar structures because it’s too hard for English speakers to understand without a half-hour lecture.

    It’s “Cat (topic marker) red (basic copula)”, which obviously carries a lot more information than just “cat red” to a person who intuitively understands what those weird grammar markers signify

    Japanese not having articles is just as weird as PIE languages not having things like topic markers.


  • dreadgoat@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlBoo this man
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    1 year ago

    Ford is one of the most fascinating people in recent history, it’s a shame to boil him down to “antisemitic car man”

    Reading through his wiki is like :D D: :D D: :D D:
    The guy was the definition of a mad genius. An authoritarian anti-war socially progressive union-buster. That description doesn’t even make sense, but that’s who he was.



  • Looking at each piece in isolation it’s hard to see the real world value. You have to put it all together. Let’s do the airline ticket example.

    Real world today, the information involved in purchasing a ticket is controlled by three parties: The customer, the airline, and the financial institute (assuming you didn’t walk up and pay cash). Anybody involved here screw up or be malicious. You lost your ticket. The airline had a database malfunction. The bank/creditor improperly recorded the transaction. All parties are aware of these potential failures, so there are contingencies in place in case of a missing ticket, a ticket that can’t be found the system, a bad or missing financial transaction. But these backup plans also open the door to fraud, so there need to be even more plans on top of the backups: How to verify the integrity of a seemingly real ticket, protocol for re-verifying a financial event, etc.

    It’s simple because it’s familiar, but it’s really ridiculously complicated and error prone.

    Let’s introduce NFTs and blockchain.
    You buy the airline ticket and the following things happen:
    The bank performs the transaction and records it to the blockchain, which is decentralized and owned by no one, so it is verified by all parties before anything else happens. Bank errors are now impossible.
    You and the airline perform a mutual authentication, which generates an NFT proving existence of the ticket and attaches it to your identity. From your perspective, this would be unlocking your phone and clicking “approve.”

    Now you approach the airport kiosk and there’s a problem.
    Airline has no record of purchase - well, the blockchain does, so it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
    Airline can’t match your ticket to their database - You show them your NFTicket, which their system verifies is a valid, unspoofable, immutable ticket for what you say it is. Again, it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
    Conversely, you say you have a ticket for today, they say it’s for tomorrow. You inspect the ticket, it is in fact for tomorrow. You fucked up, no further argument.

    The only way any of this goes wrong is one of the following:
    Multiple forms of your identification are stolen - phone, password, biometrics. Obviously a lot harder than nabbing a CC number.
    Multiple parties lose their records at the same time. Possible but unlikely.
    State-level villains sabotage the entire system. Possible, sure, but this is an apocalypse-level event and probably an act of war.

    It’s effectively impossible for someone to steal or fake a ticket or transaction in this system, and because of that, anybody who has receipts is automatically proven right and you don’t need to jump through any more hoops or threaten to sue anybody. It’s complex behind the scenes but it makes life for businesses and consumers braindead simple. There are so many layers of trust in action that no individual party can reasonably claim something did or did not happen just because THEY messed up.


  • It’s not the cryptocurrency itself that prevents fraud, it’s the surrounding technologies such as blockchains and NFTs.

    Using NFT to own the address to a PNG is hilariously stupid and worthless, but what it’s actually great for is receipts. If I buy a donut and get an NFT proving that I now own the donut (along with metadata about where and when I purchased the donut) and months later I am on trial for murder, I can prove to the court with absolute mathematical certainty that I couldn’t have killed anyone at that time because I was eating a donut halfway across town.

    Using blockchain similarly is great for proving your transaction history. Maybe I somehow faked that NFT about the donut? Well, I couldn’t have, because it was months ago and blockchain history is cryptographically impossible to spoof.

    These are obviously contrived examples, but when applied at scale it becomes an extremely powerful way to verify truth. Yes, I did in fact buy those tickets, here’s my NFT, now let me on the plane. No, I did not spend $3000 on knock-off accessories, here is my blockchain. The odds of someone being able to fake these is extremely low.

    But, again, this will never come into practice, at least not in the near future. As @beefcat pointed out, implementing these systems would be expensive for the established financial institutions, and would present new challenges for them to create new processes for handling. An awful lot of work to create something that is stronger and safer when there is little motivation for them to do so.


  • Technology rarely advances for reasons that benefit the majority. It advances to make a few people rich, kill people very efficiently, or to increase profit margins on porn sales (see item 1, I guess).

    If you think about the really good applications of things like crypto, NFTs, blockchain, etc., you quickly realize that they are things that aren’t marketable or profitable for the entities that would need to implement them. If all the banks and credit companies bought into something like blockchain or NFTs, then transaction fraud and identity theft would disappear overnight… but what would THEY get out of it? The only way it’s ever going to happen is with coordinated government mandates, and nobody running for office has the faintest idea of what crypto tech is other than “dumb way for the nouveau riche to waste their money”