Yesterday, for the first time, I got google search results that were entirely useless. I don’t remember what I searched, but it was a relatively simple question and I was kind of in a hurry. The only results I got were video thumbnails and sponsored products… Also presented as thumbnails. Barely any text anywhere to tell me what the thumbnails were supposed to be. They even removed the choices across the top so I couldn’t select “all”.

It’s been getting worse for years, but that was the last straw for me. I don’t want to search the web on “large thumbnails”, I want “detail view”. Sometimes I’m searching for a product, but mostly I need information in the form of text written by a real human. If a search engine can’t give me that, then it’s not useful anymore.

Really frustrating. I guess I better get around to using duckduckgo everywhere.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried spacerpg4 but it hasn’t held my attention as much as I hoped.

I did find an android port of star control 2, and that is some good stuff. Really scratched the 90 gaming itch too.

I think certain places (reddit?) Have been using algorithms to find and stamp out bots/vote manipulation for quite a while. I remember at least one major wave of bans for smurfed accounts participating in manipulation.

Yesssss

Do you know of anything like this for the switch? I’m a late comer to handhelds since I developed some shoulder problems and can’t really PC game anymore.

I used to love a game called transcendence back when it was a free alpha. Top down, open world, semi-roguelike, big focus on combat with satisfying 2d physics and lots of ship customization. Less focus on trading and world interaction stuff.

I’ve looked at a couple you guys mentioned, but I’m really trying to find something that’ll scratch that 2d space combat itch on a handheld.

Dark souls 1 or the remaster is still worth playing. The map design is once-in-a-lifetime good. There is a pretty hefty penalty like in other souls games, but it’s just getting hollowed and losing some souls. DS3 is also good, maybe a more refined version of 1, but I personally don’t think the world is as cohesive with the loading screens.

The trick is to just get used to being hollowed all the time and spending souls asap when you get them. You don’t lose gear when you die, and gear is pretty important. The real progress comes from learning how to deal with each enemy though, and that comes from dying. I guess it sort of boils down to “git gud”, even though that wasn’t what I was trying to say here lol.

But how will I get emotional validation from a group of anonymous strangers?

To add a little: when a thing fails in compression (submarine), it’s usually unpredictable and catastrophic. When it fails in tension (spaceship), it starts slow and fails in a predictable way.

Tension is also much easier to calculate when you’re designing structures. Engineers will often go out of their way to make sure that tensile failure is the controlling failure mode, just to make sure that we don’t have to fuck with compression.

You’re damn right it’s too soon. My beloved dead steam controller is barely cold, and to make it worse, they’re discontinued.

I used to use Relay for reddit, and jerboa feels really familiar. It’s development really picked up last release too. Still having an issue getting back to a comment context from a reply in my inbox, but I think that’s a bug from last release and there’s a pull request already.

I had this exact same thought lol. Figured someone in the comments was ahead of me XD

Waow 😮 <3

Wow, thanks for such a detailed reply. I was sitting here thinking something like “just take what the server does and uh… distribute it”, but it’s clearly not trivial.

I’d be wary of the trades as well. I am now an engineer, previously a welder. Unless you operate your own business, a trade is super unlikely to match the standard of living that a couple JDs would be used to. Also, most EU countries have very regimented training and qualification systems for tradespeople that start when you’re pretty young.

In the US, there is a labor shortage of skilled tradespeople and manufacturing workers, so there is a huge push to get more people into it. The nasty secret though, is that there is a labor shortage because pay has not been rising and benefits are a joke.

Corporations push high school kids and laid off tech workers towards the trades with promises of good prospects, high wages, and solid benefits. The reality though, is that most of them will end up trapped in mind numbing dead end jobs where their labor and emotional/physical health will be exploited until they aren’t useful to the company any more.

Manufacturers in particular are extremely reluctant to give their floor workers a bigger piece of the pie. So expanding the labor pool is an important long term strategy to ensure that wages stay low and that they can continue exploiting their workers as efficiently as possible.

Not trying to be a bummer, but I’ve lived both sides of this. The Association of Equipment Manufacturers, chambers of commerce, etc have a very strong and widely accepted narrative when it comes to the manufacturing labor shortage, so I think it’s extremely important to spread a counter narrative when I can.

On the positive side, there are some really simple things that can be done to help alleviate the labor shortage: increase pay and benefits. We finally started to see a tiny bit of that during covid, and I’m hopeful that the trend will continue. It’s frustrating though that it takes a near collapse of industry before manufacturers will even consider raising compensation.

Seems like this post is helpful for other people with the same question, and a good basis for discussion about what the community sees as acceptable norms with regards to self promotion.

I’m not really up on the intricacies of the federation philosophy, but why isn’t it just distributed p2p style?

So there would be 1 forward facing thing that you interact with, but all of the backend functions would be spread across all the volunteer servers/instances. Like torrent seeding.

Maybe that’s not even feasible, but I’ve been wondering since I joined.

Exactly. Make it infrastructure that’s hidden away from the front end. Find some way to wrap up duplicate groups into larger categories or something, and figure out a way to migrate accounts if your home instance tanks. That would cover all my concerns.

You can do open world right, oblivion and to a slightly lesser extent Skyrim. But a huge map with not much in it just makes for tedious travel times, or lots of fast travel loading screens. At that point, you basically have separate levels.

Dark souls 1 was good too, but for a different reason: there’s nothing like opening a gate and going “WTF, how did I get all the way back here?” The way it folds in on itself makes it huge, but also gives it a very compact feeling when it comes to traveling around. I’d put it top 3 level design on my personal list.

Far cry 3 was good too. Mostly because wing suit and helicopter thing. Now that I think of it, there’s a theme here. It seems like verticality (and a way to traverse it) really helps a map feel fun. Far cry 3, BOTW, dark souls, all 3 have these huge altitude variations.

Self replying to say: I just joined !math@lemmy.ml

I appreciate your answer to my question, but not your aggressive tone. Before yesterday I had never even heard of a federated service, I’m just trying to understand how things work to make the best decision on a “home base”.

I wasn’t trying to be disingenuous, but just head off attacks from the insecure who might mistake my intentions. Thanks again for the in-depth answer.