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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I think it’s worth reminding people where the general left wing FOSS conscious was before AI. Every week we’d see an article that was the antithesis of ownership, from celebrating the end of Disney copyright to loopholes in trademarks and the like, it was the heart of a lot of content.

    There is a fantastic foreword foreword in The Picture of Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde about art for art’s sake that I think about a lot, which really boils down to a litany for art for art’s sake, (and by extension education for education’s sake), that is overlooked in favour of being for the sake of profit or capital.

    I am of the opinion that in response to AI, we have drifted from a left wing overall movement that rejected ownership in this way, to a protective, defensive style that is largely that stance of a neo-luddide, without any awareness of what ended that era, which was an insufficient boycott and misspent manpower.

    I want to say, I’m someone who is overall against AI, I’m not sure how to prove it, any any time I try to explain points like this, people claim AI wrote my comment.

    AI is evil, and has enormous destructive capacity, but making the walled garden of large capitalist software irrelevant in favour of FOSS solutions is a huge win, even in regards to being a result of AI.

    I’d rather the water, electrical and creative debt that is incurred by AI is paid off by programs like this, than see companies like Adobe operate, particularly considering they literally changed their TOS to train their internal AI on user data.

    Either way, your data is being used to train AI, regardless of if you use Photoshop or Photocraft, but one is FOSS, and openly made with that data.



  • I was dual booking between Linux and windows 10 on the year better Win 10 end of life being announced and coming into effect.

    The reality was that I was just familiar with Windows and it was easier to boot straight into that.

    In my first month of only having Linux installed (Bazzite), I shamefully relied on LLMs to help me actually configure the deeper parts of my setup to actually make it how I wanted, which I felt I needed to escape windows.

    But that’s literally the opposite of choosing the lesser of two evils by most people’s book. There is very little incentive to learn a new OS when you’re already familiar with one.


  • Yeah, it’s pretty acceptable in any activity where those with interest in it are predominantly of one gender, because the sample size inevitably biases them to win.

    I often think about the surprising accurate assumption that many women in game development are trans women, sometimes used in transphobic rhetoric, but there is an obvious through line between people who are socialised male but feel out of place ending up in less social, online hobbies (coding and gaming) due to that blend of expectations and ostracization.

    I’m a teacher and it’s pretty obvious from a young age how almost all gendered skills are entirely that way due to social expectation.


  • That’s exactly it, we expected better. Regardless of if one likes his music or hates it, he’s built a brand on being a decent human being. Basically every story of him before this week has been one of positivity, I’m pretty sure his rider has always been something like a glass of water and packet of crisps, he’s donated a lot to good causes and generally stood up for those who need it.

    Billionaires are parasites on society, and Kraft is the kind of man who influence global politics and facilitate ethnic cleansing to line his own pockets, and nobody is surprised by that.

    Sheeran showed that the moment anything is on the line, his entire brand of kindness can be bought. I actually believe he thought he was making the non-decision in this, but that was clearly motivated by a desire to keep his brand out of a situation that is basically a for-profit genocide.

    Unless he gets up on stage tomorrow’s show and makes a statement with some balls, his entire persona dissolves, and that is his brand. Sadly we all know he won’t.




  • As a teenager, I played a lot of the early Assassin’s creed games, but fell off the franchise around Origins, when they stopped releasing to steam and kept it on the Ubisoft store, and in general fell away from gaming in general in this era.

    Eventually I pick up Assassin’s Creed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla together, probably about 3 years ago and play each. I put about 60+ hours into the first two, and somehow put 200 into Valhalla, basically just mentally switching off and getting 100% of the content, which is a lot for Ubisoft game.

    Perhaps it filled a good ‘get home from work and crash’ need for me, and the experience wasn’t wholly bad by any means, but it’s so bland. I’ve dropped off the franchise entirely now, after being an obsessed fan a decade ago when I was younger and more naive. The entire game basically has 0 positive memories attached, basically no memories at all, good or bad.

    I tend to hold off calling anything that’s not AI slop, but this game needs to be an exception. Assassin’s creed doesn’t deserve all the hate it gets, if you ever boot into the historian exploration mode and just walk around ancient landmarks hearing the development commentary, the respect for the historic is monumental across all the games, and in the gameplay there are lots of interesting aspects amongst everything else, but that everything else is very much the problem. Slop is the perfect word, it’s blended pulp where the quality of the ingredients vary from gourmet to rotten, and I was the pig at the trough.

    I could honestly give e the exact same feedback for the Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga game. I have find childhood memories but that game doesn’t have an ounce of passion in it.

    These games aren’t helped by the fact that the 3 games I played through after this era were Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium and Hollow Knight, which IMO are the three pinnacles of what games as a medium can be.



  • I’m actually pretty lukewarm on the Witcher franchise. I’ve read all but the most recent book, tried the show for 2 seasons, and played all the games. As much as people hype this franchise as some sort of rival to A Song of Ice and Fire or Lord of the Rings, it absolutely falls short.

    That said, the Witcher 3 specifically deserves all the love it gets. I actually boycotted it for a few years after release because the graphic downgrade it had after the early gameplay trailers came at a time of extreme manipulation of this sort from other studios, but eventually picked it up with both DLC in a sale, approaching it with a lot of cynicism.

    Not only does Hearts of Stone tell what I’d consider the best witcher story, Blood and Wine is a fantastic post-game to the franchise in its vibrant pageantry romp through a riviera; it’s just a happy environment to end Geralt’s story in.





  • I played and modded Skyrim at the wazoo back in the day too, and haven’t touched it in a decade. It still holds a really special place in my heart in a worldbuilding and lore space that nothing I’ve played since, newer or older has sated quite as strongly, including other elderly scrolls games.

    I’ve just started replaying it, as there is basically an entire story’s worth of high quality expanded mod content to explore, plus the original game has faded to a point of re-enjoying it. I’m probably going to introduce my partner to it with my own riff on the Gate to Sovngarde modlist.

    The thing is, I don’t care for the next game. I have no trust in Bethesda to make something that scratches the itch that Skyrim did, I don’t expect it to be moddable in the same way looking at the creation club, and I literally expect it to be an objectively boring game.

    If I want more of the elder scrolls experience I fell in love with, I have it in the old games.





  • Funnily enough I actually have Firefox open by default whenever I boot up my PC.

    I have no taskbar or desktop items. I always default to a specific workflow of pressing the windows key (or whatever we call it for Linux), and searching for everything. I have since early windows 10.

    I realised that 90% of the time, I was opening Firefox, so now it just opens. I have a pretty minimal toolbar setup for it, so it’s basically just an address bar that automatically focuses when I start typing.

    One day I’ll set up something where I have multiple search hotkeys for web search, file search, application search, music etc, that will sort of replace this.


  • 27 here, back to university too for similar reasons and seeing the same thing.

    I don’t actually blame the lecturers or teachers. A huge part of higher education is self motivated learning with access to people who are incredibly knowledgeable, who also happen to be your teachers / lecturers.any lectures are there to guide the topics of independent learning.

    Until a certain point, the purpose of most education was education itself. The matter half of the 20th century into today has seen a shift of the purpose of university being for employment on the other side. This is an enormous difference, it no longer appeals only to people who are passionate about the subject. If 70% of the lecture theatre is there not to learn but graduate, it changes the learning itself. People by nature want to optimise their tasks to get their goal; if the goal is to be as educated on the subject as possible, then you’re motivated across the board. If the goal is to get a job and the degree is a checkbox in the process, or even if you’re going because “that’s what you do”, then the motivation is to pass. There is no bare minimum to learning, there is to graduating.

    The goalposts move on difficulty too. Universities are for-profit companies, who sell qualifications. Inevitably the difficulty of the qualification will creep downwards, as the expectation of difficulty from the learner does the same.

    I think this has been happening for long enough that in all but the most prestigious or passionate corners of higher education, the staff and teachers also first entered higher education in establishments where everyone was motivated by either employment or profit.

    Don’t get me wrong, I do believe plenty of people in higher education are motivated by education for the sake of it, but it’s no longer the default expectation.