Think of it like email. We don’t exactly worry about degradification of email. Instead we have to worry about gmail, or proton mail, etc becoming awful.

In the same way, it’s less that Lemmy might go downhill, more that maybe individual instances could. In which case, there are various degrees of how to avoid an instance. Leave, unsubscribe, block, defederate, etc.

For example, Meta created Threads and tried for a while to integrate with Mastodon. But Mastodon is still pretty much the same afaik. Many instances defederated from it, other people just ignored it, some people I’m sure were happy to communicate with a wider crowd.

Of course, the idea breaks down in a couple ways. Communities and communication on ActivityPub isn’t really the same as email. But mainly, email is kinda bad these days because of big actors, bad actors, and just ubiquity. Not sure how to prevent automated spam from clogging up every communication channel.

The Castlevania soundtrack adaptations from The Megas. Or if you’re in a classier mood, just classic Castlevania tracks directly.

I’m sure they try to dress it up in some palatable way on either side. But if they’ve ever said AI would save them money, that would mean because they aren’t paying as many humans.

For my 2c, I think it’s a good idea. If you don’t, and it gets any use, attackers or contributors will.

It’s a little bit of a lose/lose. The target audience is very anti-LLM, so some people will hate it. It’s that or leave low-hanging-fruit bugs in there.

Either way, make sure to include an AI disclosure and explanation front-and-center. If I see a new project posted any more, I immediately write it off as low effort, vibe-coded slop until I have a reason to think otherwise. But using LLMs is not necessarily equivalent to slop imo.

Billion with a B. You love to see it!

Thanks! I was wondering too.

Alternative tvtropes link, since that’s where I thought to look: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BottleEpisode

“I wish games with anti-cheat had Linux support!”

Monkey’s paw curls

Here’s a random weird one that stuck with me for some reason. I was a young child whining about getting ready, how I hated socks. And I grumbled, ‘who even invented socks, and why??’

My dad responded “Mr. Socks, and his feet were cold.” Which is 100% false, but I feel like that silly answer told me a lot on how to think about stuff.

Good call out! The touch screen is generally pretty unpleasant to me now as well.

Wii and some Wii U stuff too, there’s a whole era of games on Nintendo platforms where devs felt it was necessary to use input or display gimmicks. Once in a while it was essential to a game, but frequently it was shoehorned into an otherwise pretty traditional game.

Some of that could be fixed by smaller scale mods or cheat codes, but you’re right that some might take big changes that need a decomp.

On the flip side, there are still projects out there that don’t (or at least claim not to) use AI approaches. Here’s a list I saw the other day: https://backloggd.com/u/WumpaGem/list/game-decompsrecomps-that-arent-vibe-coded/

For sure, I get that. I started off very much in the “it’s just a tool” and “AI as normal technology” camps, and over time I’ve become more and more jaded.

Ultimately what I appreciated about decomps was moreso the effort that went into it, rather than the result. But it totally makes sense if sometimes people care more about the result.

I used to think the decomp projects were really cool, even tho I didn’t really play them. But lately, the influx of AI-driven decomp projects, the whole concept has lost its luster to me.

Coffee

I get it, it’s an acquired taste. But I sure don’t like it.

Short answer, not really.

To elaborate: passive income is a result of already having a lot. It could be being born rich and investing, it could mean working really hard (and/or getting really lucky) and building a company or brand and living off other people running it.

But it sounds like you want it to be easy; it won’t be. Otherwise, everyone would do it.

Plenty of things, but the first that came to mind was the same as OP. The Steam Frame looks really cool, but at the price it’s a whole thing.

Same for other electronics - a Framework laptop, building a new desktop (good luck to me there), a Steam Deck.

Lots of newer video games. It’s easy to turn down some of them, because I know I haven’t made time to play a lot of what I already have. Likewise for books in general, where money isn’t a bottleneck but time and space are.

Pokemon cards - just recently had a mini-convention day here in town with a bunch of collectors/vendors selling. Made me really want to go back and fill out my weak collection of WotC classics, but the price (vs how much I care) is a bit prohibitive.

Sure, tl;dr as I understood it:

• Person lists keyboard on Facebook Marketplace
• Gives Meta AI assistant full, ‘always-allow’ permission to handle the listing, respond to messages about it
• It accepts a lowball offer from someone, tells them to come pick it up at the seller’s house without informing seller
• Buyer shows up at the address, waits a while, gets annoyed, leaves and gives negative feedback
• Seller responds in an amusingly earnest way to the bot like ‘bro you gotta never do that’
• Meta says it’s probably seller’s fault for giving instructions somewhere
• Buyer and seller eventually make up and keep doing business

“You gotta never do that ever again” is a great line, gonna have to enter that into my vocabulary lol.

existing users who haven’t used it for six months will also be barred.

Wow, that really is awful. If I don’t use Reddit every six months I’m permanently kicked out of it? (Am I reading that right?)

I rarely go there, but when I do want to look up something I like to have the option.

(pls don’t pretend like new reddit exists, thx)

That really bothered me at first! Kept thinking ‘why ever have a different time sig? No need for 13/8 (or whatever) when you can just sprinkle in double dotted 16th notes tied to 8th note (or whatever).’

Over time I slowly realized that it’s not about technically being able to write it, but rather describing what usually happens. (Tho I still don’t really understand, intuit, or hear any of it well.)

On its own, paying for verification isn’t a bad thing. You pay, they do some work to confirm the app meets a certain standard, users can download apps with relatively low worries. It’s dubious that they do a good job of verifying trust and safety at all, but conceptually it’s not a bad setup.

The problem is when they also hold platforms and prevent alternative means of trust. Stuff like Steam and Epic? Whatever, they ask a fee for their store, if not worth it buy games elsewhere. But Apple? Our store or you can’t run the app on your little computer. It’s gross and unacceptable. Google really wants to be that too.

The justification is that a significant portion of users can’t be trusted to make decisions about which software (distributors) to trust. Like yeah, I know it’s pretty safe to download from F-Droid or install an app image or whatever from Blender’s website. But imagine a scammer on the phone giving your grandfather instructions to install a keylogging bank app. To be fair, it is hard (if possible) to know what’s really trustworthy once you get past mainstream app stores and applications.

But what prevents abuse from platform owners? Nothing, that’s why they’re actively abusing the trust they’re given.