• 3 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle



  • I’m sort of peeved that boardgames has gone from a “hey, I get to sit in meat space not staring at a monitor and doing something fun with friends” into a consumerist dog and pony show.

    I feel like part of the problem is that the people participating in and boosting the consumerist aspect are the ones with the shiniest toys to show. Like, sure, 1830 is an awesome game (even if I still can’t get a regular group to play it), but you won’t get more upvotes for showing off your 100th game of 1830 than your first game of <insert the newest game>.

    An look, I like having new games. I enjoy the feel of new puzzles to try. But in the end, it’s as you say, the best part of the games is getting together with friends and doing soemthing fun for a few hours. Having a collection as a backdrop in my video calls is not the point of buying games.



  • My process used to be:

    1. Read the rules before everyone arrives
    2. Play the game and have fun
    3. Read the rules again
    4. Email everyone with everything we played wrong

    Now that I have kids I don’t always have the luxury of reading the rules the same day we play the game, so what I usually do is I read the rules a few days in advance, which means I won’t remember as much when the time comes to play, so then I end up complementing that with a rules explanation video.


  • If some random dude comes in and opens a new instance, and then it comes out that this dude willingly associates with white supremacists, is a known creep, and even had a hand in an actual real life genocide, everybody would defederate without a second thought.

    But suddenly that dude is Facebook and has a shit ton of money and everybody is just wait and see.


  • The problem with this is chatgpt is shit at facts. You ask it a question and it might just give you bullshit, and you tell it to provide a citation and it will happily invent one. There’s no easy way to verify whatever it says to you, other than going to the source, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of this exercise.





  • The reason is that Meta is an extremely harmful company. They’ve enabled the worst kind of people in their pursuit of “engagement”. It’s no exaggeration to say that Facebook enabled a genocide. So if people are (correctly) quick to block instances where fascists congregate, why would Meta be treated any differently just because they have a ton of users? They enable fascists, they provide them with a platform. And now they want to bring that platform to the Fediverse, which has been a place that has traditionally been anti fascist.

    And that’s just assuming they’ll be good citizens and won’t do an embrace, extend, extinguish thing, which we all know they will do whenever they feel secure enough in their position to do it. So rather than waiting until Meta is already integrated and it’s harder to do it, the idea behind all this is to prevent the issue from coming up in the first place.





  • I think Charles Stross does this pretty nicely, although his science part is not very hard science. So he’s basically not predicting anything, his science fiction is more of the “ok I know this is not real but what if it were” variety.

    The Laundry Files series is “what if Lovecraft was right and there’s magic math that can summon the old gods”, but then add to it that we do have a way to do tons of math stuff in the form of computers. So of course what happens? Well, there are spy agencies tasked with controlling this, because we can’t get rid of computers, too important, but also, we can’t let that magic math run wildly.

    The Merchant Princes series is “what if there was a way to travel to an alternate dimension”. So what happens? The dudes from the alternate dimension, who are the ones that discovered the secret, and come from a medieval-like world, use that to smuggle shit. They can go near the border, jump to the other side where the border doesn’t exist (or at least doesn’t exist right there) walk a couple of miles, and then jump back to our world. They of course build a massive criminal empire on our side. On the other side, they bring our advanced tech gadgets back and they are a hugely powerful merchant family. There’s also all the implications for security. You can jump inside any building as long as you know exactly where it is on the other side. And the shit the US government gets up to when they discover this exists is pretty disturbing (especially when you consider that it makes sense given what was done in the name of the war on terror).



  • I don’t think the interesting issue is why not centralization. There’s tons of better explanations out there, but seriously, just “Elon Musk” is enough to explain why centralization is bad.

    But the post does raise an interesting issue IMHO, and it is the lack of good explanation as to why federation between different platforms with different paradigms. Why federation between different Mastodon servers is obvious. Why federation between Mastodon and Calckey and whatever else is obvious too. Same with federation between different Lemmy instances, or between Lemmy and Kbin. It just makes sense. What is not clear is why we want/need/like federation between Lemmy and Mastodon. Sure, you can post in a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but it sucks. You can follow a Lemmy community from Mastodon, but the experience isn’t great either.

    I do think there are good reasons for this, but I haven’t thought enough about it to articulate it properly. My thinking is that while a Mastodon-like service federating with a Lemmy-like service doesn’t seem to make much sense, Mastodon federating with a Facebook-like service does make sense. And I’m not sure if a Facebook-like thing federating with Lemmy makes sense, but I can definitely imagine something sitting somewhere in the middle between those two. And also, perhaps more importantly, we don’t want to erect artificial walls between the different ActivityPub services. Sure, the Mastodon-Lemmy integration sucks, and maybe it shouldn’t exist, but probably nobody will use it much, exactly because it sucks. But if we add a thing saying “no you can’t do it”, then we start needing to define borders between different services. Is microblogging different from blogging? What about a Facebook-like wall? Or a tumblr-like feed? Are those different enough from each other to be different services? Who wants to be the one defining those borders? I think the current solution, where anything is possible and integrations that don’t make sense just don’t happen organically, is the best.

    But still, that is a way more itneresting question than just “why federation”.


  • I don’t even think it’s a difference with Reddit. Reddit also has community duplication. Sure, maybe not as bad, but it’s there. Compare /r/meirl to /r/me_irl. The only difference is that in Fediverse you’ll see the same community name in different instances, but is it really that much more confusing than the meirl case?

    There is, yes, a lack of discoverability for communities. Maybe we need a “recommend me a community” community. Like “I’m looking for a Spanish speaking science fiction community”, and people can say “oh, yeah, try this one”.

    Other than that, the main advantage Reddit has in this area is that it has had a more or less stable population for a very long time, so which community wins out out of an initial set has already been resolved, while this is younger (yes, it’s been around for a couple of years, but most people here haven’t) and therefore that process is just starting to play out.