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:
“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.
One of the worst stretches so far!
Desire for my body not to atrophy and wither away earlier than necessary. My hobbies and work are generally very sedentary, so I need to go out of the way to be active.
There are fun aspects - with weight training or running, you can track the numbers and watch them improve over time; it’s RPG-like improvement fantasy. Sports let you focus on the game aspect and not notice the physical part as much. Walking lets you explore your environment.
This was my problem too. Each instance feels very island-like, I search for things and when no results come up I’m not confident if it’s not on the platform or the instance just doesn’t know it. Guess it’s up in the air how much that’s a real issue vs perception.
YouTube really, really benefits from the combo of centralized structure and having monopolized video for many years.
Yes! Libraries are free, and awesome. Unless you don’t have one near you. Even then, used books can be had pretty cheap, and you can often find ebooks given out free or cheap. Plus stuff like Gutenburg and Standard Ebooks for older texts. Doesn’t take long to build up a stack of books you have no hope to finish reading!
Local mom ‘n’ pop specialty shops are going to be the best, if you happen to have one nearby. Usually you get a fair deal near market price, without the bloat from eBay and Paypal taking cuts.
Thrift stores and yard sales have occasional great deals, but for the most part everyone knows if their item is worth something these days, so almost only junk goes there. And even if the donators don’t realize, I think most thrift stores will filter valuable items out and sell them online.
From what I’ve heard, most instances are behind Cloudflare and let them handle bot-blocking for UI traffic.
Other accounts are clearly labelled as bots (at least when looking through Voyager), I assume it’s something you can set when making an account or using the api.
But I mean, as for your question… yeah, there will be/probably are bots here. I don’t see a way to be on the internet now and be sure other parties are human. The blatant ones get banned, and if they’re not obvious enough I guess we can stay in ignorant bliss.
Not necessarily. I still see recently made AI posters and profile pics all over the place that have a distinct slop veneer. So maybe not old, but using a cheap model or some common or older ai tool.
Agree with your point tho - a lot more is possible these days. We all probably consume a lot more slop than we think, even images and video.
People need to decide for themselves whether they’re worried about the quality/utility of the thing, or the provenance and the effort put into it. For some of these things, even if the quality isn’t there yet, it will be soon.
Personally I don’t care much about how nice the image is, even if it doesn’t scream ai at the top of its lungs. Let’s have something human-made. Of course then that opens up other questions of trust and authenticity.
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.