• 3 Posts
  • 381 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The dog whistle of “maybe it’s not for you” is pointless, since all we’re doing here is talking about preferences and opinions of design. Whether something is “complicated” or “poor design” is very subjective across many fields. It’s easy to laugh at someone pushing at a “Pull” door, but less so if there’s a pushbar there and they don’t speak English.

    I could easily be facetious and suggest “Maybe Windows is just too complicated for you” but that’s similarly needlessly talking down to people’s intelligence. The topic only came up because it’s frustrating there’s no operating system out there that:

    • Has wide support
    • Doesn’t nag you with AI features
    • Designs its filesystem paths in a way that is consistent, informative, and readable between devices, regardless of user preference or configuration.

    For now, issues like the last one are what keep me on Windows, and I’m not even claiming they’re easy to solve.



  • While it might be suitable for server environments with 400+drives, all home setups will have fewer volumes than there are alphabet letters, so it’s a suitable setup there.

    Someone else identified how you can run an extra command to identify actual location of a file, and while that’s useful, it’s an extra step that’s unnecessary when the design of the location string itself also identifies that. Unless you can tell me which drive /home/supra-app/preconfiguration/media is on - without running something different. (Vs windows: C:/Users/Someone/AppData/supra-app/preconfiguration/media) That’s what the design of WWW URLs was for - you never have to ask which domain a website is on, and it can even inform you about whether a site is trustworthy.

    I don’t think you’re helping your case by showing there’s no drive location convention at all. A friend plugs a USB device in your computer while you’re busy in the kitchen. He’s fine if he just uses a UI autopopup, but if he needs the full path, he has to ask you where you’ve set up auto-mounting, if you have at all.


  • This is what’s made me a little more okay with digital video games. The chance that some bizarre event will lead to that game becoming unplayable is non-zero. But, that’s the case for physical game discs as well.

    I’m upset at events like The Crew’s removal and hope for more laws to make such things unlikely. Still, I’m generally accepting that by and large, publishers don’t try to delete or remove access to people’s games. There’s no specific motivation in it for that particular evil.

    Movies, however, I’m reticent. I liked being able to buy a few cheap movies on digital services, but Sony’s mass deletion of their library makes me hesitant to continue there.




  • I know the filesystem is simple to Linux users, but the semantic form of physical drives getting a letter always made more sense to me.

    I have three drives in my computer. So they’re labeled C:, D:, and E:. You can’t place a file on “The Computer” - it’s stored on some particular drive. If I install a game on the E drive, and then later somehow remove that drive and bring it somewhere else, that game remains on that drive, even if it’s no longer E.

    On Linux, as best I understand it, if I have three drives, two of them are at /dev/hdd0 and hdd1. But they’re not actually there, they’re accessed at /media/hdd0 after mounting them (or at least, that’s the convention, and if it’s someone else’s computer, good luck). Then you either begin every game installation path with that annoying prefix, or you start configuring a dozen symlinks. If you place an item in /home/documents/notporn, then who knows which drive it’s on because you don’t know what symlinks someone set up to make that folder.

    Windows does have symlinks too now, which has been nice for hacking a few installation directories, but I appreciate that it’s an exception, and everything else follows relatively logical division of space, rather than this hybrid system where the filesystem isn’t just stored files but also devices, programming concepts, and more.


  • I don’t think customer support can be resolved by free market forces. If someone has purchased the product, has a problem, and is trying to contact support to resolve the problem, they’re a bit too far gone on the model of free consumer choice, and that instance won’t affect the free market.

    I feel like we need legislation that, when a customer has a problem, they must be able to contact the company for a refund or resolution, AND, communication with an “AI” does not count as that communication.









  • Here’s a story for you. I’ve only really held a gun once, at a camp riflery range (very small calibers). I still end up doing a fair amount of gun research for understanding gun debates / safety practices, research for fiction where characters have to talk about guns, etc.

    I have had to correct other Reddit users that are gun owners, about the workings of basic single-action revolvers, in a very deep/long thread. I briefly doubted myself and checked my own sources, and yes, I was correct and the gun owner was persisting off the idea I was wrong. I’m sure there’s some responsible owners out there, but the fact there are so many bull-headed idiots about their guns, who still say they’re responsible, should scare anyone.

    The specific topic, if you’re interested, was on the situation where an old-style revolver is loaded and cocked by an inexperienced user, who then wants to safely decock/unload the gun without firing it (at that point, the cylinder is locked so basic approaches won’t work). Feel free to look it up - the approach needed there is pretty damn stupid.


  • I can’t claim I’ve never been part of a live service trend. I played a lot of Dead by Daylight (probably still will, just feeling it’s in a downturn) and bought into cosmetics and new characters - likely for a decent amount of money over time.

    Honestly, once a dev has a formula that’s successful, it does make sense to just slowly iterate on the formula, give it out for free, and sell cosmetics, instead of trying to find a reason to write 8 new levels/characters and call it a “sequel”. But I can also admit most games have applied at least a few scummy practices to get that in place, and it victimizes a lot of players.

    I will also remind people not every single DLC item is scummy. It’s worth evaluating each for yourself, as well as using basic consideration to ignore the ones you don’t want (and don’t complain about them if the game never visibly advertised them to you). For instance, Witcher 3’s extra story content would technically count as DLC - and most say it’s worth it.