I started up a new city in Cities Skylines 2. Trying to build a city mate up of little pit stops along the highway with no industrial zones at all. It's been an interesting experiment so far! The game does track the jobs generated by retail and city services, so if you balance it just right you can have enough work to attract residents and use the highway connections to just barely generate enough sales for the commercial zones to stay profitable. And the city as a whole is getting closer and closer to a positive balance in the budget, so I might just pull this off...

Great video! I loved how, since the game has no choice acting, OneShortEye got a bunch of his friends to provide voice work for his game clips. Really makes it a more entertaining watch!

First, try to understand what's actually being said here. Sometimes I call myself fat because I'm above my target weight. But in my case my self-esteem is just fine: I'm a former gym rat who knows where I am, what I need to do to get back in shape, and that I'm still okay if I don't get there. Saying "I'm fat" is a light jab at myself and a reminder to take steps toward my goals, nothing to worry about.

If your GF is calling herself fat more hurtfully (which is sadly common) the issue is not how fat she is or isn't. That's just a symptom. The issue is whatever negative feeling is prompting her to tear herself down. Arguing with her about whether she's actually fat won't help with that, and might even do more harm than good. Maybe ask her how she's doing, remind her that you love her just the way she is.

I've got about 100 hours in and I really enjoy it. Performance isn't great and it's gotten a bit crashy now that my city is really big, but the game itself is a lot of fun.

I find your resistance to offering thoughts on the things you share in a forum strange, because you seem friendly and well spoken. Just a quick sentence describing what this video was and why you wanted people to see it probably would have got you my upvote instead.

Joseph Anderson may have millions of views, but I'm not in those millions. I never heard of the guy until you posted this. So all I had to go on was that its something about Lies of P and it's 48 minutes long. That's a lot of time to spend on figuring out whether a random Internet post is worthwhile or not. Cute cat pictures can stand on their own, those only take a second to look at and tell if they're good or bad, but a long form video really needs some context before I can say whether I'm interested in seeing it or boosting it to other people. And if I don't have the context to say whether the post is good, I'll downvote it to make room for the posts that are definitely good.

I downvoted it for the total lack of context. The video title is opaque at best and clickbait at worst. Neither OP nor the video's creator offer any description of what this "critique" is supposed to be. Are we roasting the game? Are we defending the game? Are we trying to give a more fair and balanced treatment than others have? From the post, the video title, and the video description I have no idea what this is or why I should give it any of my time, so I consider it spam and I downvote.

Generally, when videos get posted to a forum like this I want to see OP chime in with why this video is worth our time. If you're posting it, you should already have watched it, so you're the first person in this community who can tell us what's good or bad about it. That's incredibly valuable! Even a one sentence blurb about what made you post this particular video here is a huge help to people looking for info about this topic, especially when the video is 48 minutes long.

I put a couple hundred hours into the first one, and I agree with you 100%. There are some performance issues and we don't have the pile of assets and subsystems that come with years of DLCs and mods, but the fundamental city building experience is a ton of fun. 50 hours in to CS2 and I'm not quite done with my very first city yet!

I can tell I'm really into a game when I end up ditching the objectives to just screw around. If I'm following the quest arrow I'm probably just in it for the plot or for some completionist urge, but if I really like the game I'll start wandering off the main path to just enjoy the environment and satisfy my own curiosity about things.

I've occasionally ended up on Reddit accidentally when following a search link. Which immediately blasts me with notifications and pushy requests to browse in some other way than I want to. After using Lemmy for this long, which lets me peacefully do my thing my way, it comes off as really rude even before I get to the comments.

At this point, I've actually started actively avoiding Reddit links in my searches. I can generally find the info I need somewhere else without getting yelled at by the website.

I actually use M365 and OneDrive. I still get periodic pushes to use these services on Windows 11. The upsell pressure from my OS is getting really bad.

I vote on every post I see. That combined with the "hide read posts" setting means I always see new stuff on the front page.

I upvote any post that I want to see more of in the community it was posted to. Posted game news in a gaming community? You get an upvote, whether or not I actually like or care about that game. I also upvote anything I don't have any particular reason to downvote. It's my default vote.

I downvote any post I want to see less of. Clickbait titles or misspellings are an automatic downvote. Off topic posts are always a downvote. And any post that comes off as salty gets downvoted, especially if the post is salty about being downvoted. I just don't want to see any of that, so I use my vote to discourage it.

The planned session can wait. These moments are gold...

It's there a major anniversary for The 7th Guest coming up or something? Between this article resurfacing, the VR Remake, and the industrial rock cover album on vinyl I'm seeing a lot of T7G content lately. And I'm here for it!

Agreed! Especially since the behavior on clicking a thumbnail isn't very consistent on mobile. Sometimes I click the thumbnail and it expands the image. Sometimes it follows a link. Sometimes going back from a link takes me back to the same Lemmy page I was on, but other times it reloads the page and I can't find the post I was looking at anymore. An option to open all links in a new tab would really help me not lose the post I was looking at when I clicked.

Hashtags are also a good place to start! For example, if you're looking for science content you can follow the #science hashtag. Once you have those posts coming in to your feed, start following the people and hashtags you're seeing on the posts you like best. It'll start snowballing from there.

Also, don't worry too much about following too much at first. Get that feed populated, then pare it down later. Filtering is pretty powerful too, so a lot of times you can get the good parts of a hashtag and filter out the bad parts instead of the all-or-nothing following of some social media.

Prior to the API fiasco, Reddit Inc had demonstrated a pattern of promising changes to the mods which they failed to deliver timely if at all. They've acknowledged this pattern, promised to do better, then failed to deliver time and again. That part isn't new.

Then the API changes were announced and the Reddit community gave Reddit Inc the loudest and most decisive rebuke they ever have. That was the feedback conversation. And Reddit Inc went forward with their plan unchanged. No concessions were made. No concerns were addressed or alleviated. Reddit Inc was informed of what this decision would break and they went ahead and broke it anyway.

As a former mod, there is nothing left to discuss. There is no reason to believe Reddit Inc will act on anything that doesn't agree with what they've already decided to do. I'm not going back to that kind of abusive relationship. They had their chance to listen to feedback and made it clear that they won't.

Technology Connections has a video on exactly these devices that dives into how they work and what they can and can't do. TLDW; you're not wrong about the physics of cooling a room, though in some cases this little thing might make you feel a bit cooler.

@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social is the author of the SMBC webcomic and he posts funny stuff pretty frequently.

@davidrevoy@framapiaf.org does art with open source tools, including the open source Pepper and Carrot comic.

@SmudgeTheInsultCat@mas.to posts dumb memes constantly.

@Popehat@mastodon.social posts smartassed yet accurate commentary on current legal news.

"The paths divide the players from the rules. But we're the ones who chose to plaaaaaaaay...

...the game."

I figured it would be that unique CRT visual quality that kind of enhances the pixels. Never even considered that the sounds would also come out more the way the designers intended. Cool!

As I recall, both games also had secret music tracks on the disc that weren't in the game, but were really excellent. Playing those games as CDs blew my mind back in the day!

Well that's as authentic a retro experience as it gets!

The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour remain top-tier for me. The music was half the experience, turn it up and just enjoy that creepy vibe while solving puzzles. And they're all on The Fat Man's Bandcamp now!

Also, there's an industrial rock cover album on vinyl currently looking for funding on Kickstarter. I'm super excited!

Nope. I quit cold turkey on June 30 and haven't been back. Well, not on purpose, at least. Sometimes a Google result sends me to Reddit, but when it loads I just close it and move to the next result. Lemmy works fine for everything I used Reddit for.

No problem. You do good stuff!

I just use the mobile website. It works and doesn't harass me to use something else, which are both huge improvements from Reddit!

I use the term "autocomplete on steroids" because it gets across a vaguely accurate idea of what an LLM is and how it works to people who are thinking of it like sci-fi movie AI. Sorry if it came across that was my whole reason for considering them not intelligent.

LLMs do seem to pass a lot of intelligence tests we've come up with. Talking with one for the first time is a really uncanny experience, it's a totally different thing than the old voice assistants. But they also consistently fail at tasks that would indicate an understanding of a topic. They produce good looking equations, but the math underneath doesn't make sense. They hallucinate facts that don't fit with the rest of what they themselves are saying, but look similar to the way right answers are written and defended. They produce really convincing responses, but when they fail they betray some really basic failures to understand what they're saying.

I feel that LLMs are brute-forcing the tests people designed to measure intelligence. They can pass the bar exam, but they also contain thousands of successful bar exams to consult and millions of bits of text to glue those answers together with. But if you ask the LLM to actually do the job of a lawyer, they start producing all kinds of garbage that sounds good but doesn't stand up to scrutiny when someone looks up the hallucinated case references.

The Space Quest Historian does YouTube videos about classic adventure games with full playthroughs, historical deep dives, and creator interviews. He also actually hangs out here in the Fediverse: he's on Lemmy as @SQHistorian@lemm.ee and on Mastodon as @sqhistorian@dosgame.club.

Also, SQH's band Error 47 does industrial rock covers of retro game music and is criminally under-subscribed. They're currently working on an album covering The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, which I'm really looking forward to.

I've also been really digging Quake Speedruns Explained lately, which is a really chill dude talking about one of the oldest and most competitive speedrunning scenes around.

Part of the problem is that AI research likes to use terminology that sounds like what people do, when that's not what the AI actually does.

Large language models are not intelligent in any sense. They are autocomplete on steroids. This is a computer program that was fed a book someone wrote, then mathematically tweaked to be able to guess the next word in a sentence in a way that resembles that book. That's all it does. It does not think or learn in any sense we'd apply to a human.

To me, LLMs sound like a massive plagiarism engine, and I think they should need to get a license from the authors whose works they used to make the LLM under whatever terms that author wants to give, just like a publisher needs to get permission to print a copy of the work. But copyright law has no easy "bright line" for what counts and what doesn't. So the courts will have to decide whether what the AI "creates" is similar enough to the original works to count as a violation, or if the AI and its results are transformative enough to count as something new.

I try to ask myself what the motivation of the FOMO is. Does it come from me, or is the platform/game/whatever designed to make me feel that way?

If it's coming from the design of the thing, and I notice that design, that can immediately change my attitude toward it. It's not "I want to play one more game" anymore, it's "this game is pressuring me to play one more game." Does the game have my best interests at heart? Am I comfortable with being pressured by this game? I find those questions really reframe the FOMO and help me step back from it.

If the FOMO is actually coming from me, now it's a question of priorities. If I'm spending time watching one more video on this platform, there's something else I'm not going to get to. So the question for myself is "out of all the things I can be doing right now, is this the thing I want to do most?" Sometimes the answer is yes! I might take want to catch up on the latest news if I haven't checked in today. But if I've been doomscrolling for hours, the answer is probably no. And framing that as a choice between a bunch of activities instead of the simple FOMO choice of one more click makes that easier to see.

Lemmy scratches the Reddit itch for me. It doesn't have all my old niche communities yet, but it's got enough for me to log on and see what's happening in the Internet.

Also, I haven't been pestered to use an app since I got here, which is so nice. Reddit was getting more and more aggressive about that before I quit.

Nice! Always good to see the Steam sale helping us find good games while it empties our wallets. 😉

Lemmy doesn't track overall karma. I think you're good. Bring on the cute and funny!

I'm trying my best to remember that all those things that somebody definitely already posted when I was on Reddit might be my job to post here. It's refreshing!

The worst thing about the API changes is the long string of broken promises that got us here.

Reddit said for years that they would provide the tools users needed to moderate their subs (which the mods do for free on their own time). Reddit has failed to do so. Third party devs using the API did that.

Reddit also had years to make their site actually work for people with disabilities. Reddit has failed to do do. Third party devs using the API did that too.

Reddit said that they would not touch the API. Then they changed their mind and announced they'd be charging for it, but they'd work with current devs. Then they announced a price that was totally out of line with what other businesses charge and what was realistic for many apps to pay. With only one month to make those changes before the new pricing went live, despite knowing that many third party apps use a yearly subscription model.

Reddit's CEO said he'd do an AMA to address concerns with the new policy. During that AMA he answered only 14 questions while ignoring the highest-voted questions. He was also caught astroturfing and lying during that AMA.

Reddit said they would not interfere with the ability of redditors to protest the change. Then they threatened to remove entire mod teams if they didn't get back to business as usual and replace them with mods who would run the subs the way Reddit wanted them to.

So, yeah. The API change by itself is doing a lot of devs dirty with an unrealistic price and unrealistic timeframe. But the worst part of it is the heap of broken trust that it sits on top of.

This article's evidence that the #TwitterMigration failed is that when he shut down his server, 25% of the servers he notified didn't respond back. I'm not sure that means what the author seems to think it means. It's not like every user has their own server. And when you let anybody build a server in a network you're going to see a lot of failed launches. Honestly, with the explosive growth Mastodon had, retaining 75% of all those new servers is pretty impressive to me.

Mastodon did not immediately replace Twitter worldwide. That's fine, growing that fast wouldn't be sustainable. But it did get a ton of new users, a lot of visibility, and enough activity to provide content for anybody who signs up. Onboarding kinda sucks, but once you follow enough people and hashtags it absolutely scratches the same itch Twitter did for me. I'd hardly call that a failure just because it didn't instantly become the next social media monolith.

Numberphile has done a bunch of videos with Neil Sloane about some of the sequences in the OEIS. Neat stuff!

I haven't played any of those either. There's a lot more adventure games on Steam than I thought...

Oh, those are both under five bucks too. Great deals!

I've heard some really good things about that one!