Aaron

Nobody has mentioned one of the top purely technical reasons companies are reluctant to open source things: support.

I worked for a company that opened a UI design framework and people loved it, but the moment you have an outside audience, you can’t just make breaking changes or pivot the direction. You have to be sure your thing is completely stable before you open it up.

They felt they couldn’t move fast enough while supporting the open one, so they forked it and just maintained the public one so the private one could change faster.

There are costs to support. I’m not saying companies shouldn’t do it (Google does, all the time), bit smaller companies may not be able to afford it.

That’s only true when you use a generally accepted definition of the word “improving.”

When you use the capitalist robber baron definition, he’s spot on!

Throughout history, people have always been driven to create, and others have always sought out creative works. For that reason, I don’t think we’ll necessarily “stagnate culturally” in a broad sense.

However, at least in the US, we’re already standing at the precipice of making creative work practically impossible. Our extremely weak (by peer nation standards) labor protection laws and social support systems tends to strip life of everything but the obligation to work.

Our last bastion of hope for structural protection for creativity is the possibility that anyone could both create, and profit from it. Copyright law was, originally, intended to amplify that potential.

I usually point to stock photography as an area where people used to be able to make at least modest money, but nowadays you’d be lucky to make poverty wages. The market was flooded by cheap, high-quality cameras, and thus cheap, high-quality images. AI will do the same thing for many other mediums.

What has me really concerned is that the majority of really cool makers and creators I watch on YouTube are Canadian. I’ve convinced myself that this is because someone living in Canada can take the very real risk of sinking their life’s energy into starting a YouTube channel because at least they know that if they get cancer, they have somewhere to go.

Not so here in America. If you aren’t working for an established employer, or sitting on quite a bit of cash for independent health insurance, you’re taking substantial risk in being unemployed for any length of time (assuming you have the choice). Even if you do “make it,” the costs of self-insurance for sole proprietors is no joke!

So the only people taking their life in their own hands to create works of real cultural value are 1) the few percent who manage to get paid for it, 2) the independently wealthy and/or retired, and 3) the poor and desperate who would be just as precarious in either case.

It’s not our finest hour here, if I do say so. I hope the rise of AI helps amplify this conversation. I am truly concerned about it.

Well, of course I had to go listen again since you linked it.

STILL GOOD.

I won’t drop any spoilers because it’s a wild ride, but there is one obvious overlap (not in a main plotline or anything) that’ll make you chuckle.

I’m really new at this so I don’t pretend to actually know, but the problem I was having was massive bunching of the fabric that would make it basically either stop or turn, and because it was close to the edge I couldn’t pull it through from both sides. Does that sound like something a walking foot will help me with?

Reddit was dead from the day Conde Nast bought it. Every day since then was a roll of the dice as to whether they’d attempt to seize more profits and ruin it, or not. This happens to essentially every public or aspiring public company eventually. The need for perpetual growth warps decisions and guts the original mission in the end.

We call it “autosarcophagy” or “self-cannibalism.”

As I understand it, Reddit also took on a lot of external capital investment, which only makes the pressure to perform financially even greater. I can’t fault them for making the decisions they have to make to keep their jobs, keep their executive salaries, and so on.

Long live the sustainable, community-driven, community-funded future! Nobody can screw this up for us if we are the ones footing the bill.

Added Cosmic Star Heroine to my wishlist, thanks :)

Siiigh <adds to wishlist>

Three minutes into the game?

If you’re dying very early on, keep an eye on how the weapon(s) you choose influence your play style, and don’t forget to select an “aspect” from the dude sitting under where you start right at the beginning. “Stomper” is my favorite because it makes your dive attack basically instakill any enemy in the first few levels.

What I like to do is jump down through the first platform from where you start and walk right far enough to see what the random weapons are. If any of them are electricity, I’ll choose the “Superconductor” aspect. Otherwise, I pretty much always go “Stomper.”

Serious players advise using jump more than roll, because roll has a cooldown period, but for me I think rolling is key and I roll all the time.

Dishonored was the first game I played on the Deck; a replay for me (played on PC the first time) and daaaang was it fun to relive that adventure!

I still think they kind of ruined the Blink ability in Dishonored 2, but the clockwork soldiers are among my favorite video game enemies of all time.

I’ll tell ya, after I broke out the first time and got access to the “heat,” the game kind of lost its shine for me. Perhaps it’s because I’m such a casual and I can’t handle the difficulty, but it just didn’t have the same sort of dopamine rush toward completion anymore and I put it down.

Now I’m playing Dead Cells and it’s like crack cocaine.

That one part, with the music, with the Walkman (you know what I’m talking about) is one of the top emotional moments in gaming history for me!

Have you played the “predecessor” game that sort of exists in the same universe, “Alan Wake”? Also runs perfectly on the Deck and I quite enjoyed it. It’s weird as hell.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus was so much fun on the Deck. Constantly impressed at what this thing is able to run.

I played Death Stranding on Playstation and it kind of changed me; that first moment when you go out into the landscape and that Low Roar song starts up will live rent-free in my mind until I die.

Armadillopack! I haven’t really figured out the oil thing. I love stacking freeze dps and barbed tips arrow dps. I’ll investigate your ideas, I pretty much play every day.

Yessss! Just got a sewing machine and finished my first bag (it took me like two months on and off) and I’m never going to toss torn clothing again.

I ordered this cool graphic t-shirt and it was way too big, so I complained to the retailer and they sent a smaller one and told me to keep it. So I took a stab at taking it in, and, well, it went terribly (I need a walking foot for stretchy fabrics), but it still worked out and it’s totally wearable.

Once you start to realize that it’s not that hard to mend things… It’s like a super power.

I have a couple of really nice REI camp chairs and one of them got several holes burned through it by flying embers around the fire one night, so I patched them. I didn’t even try to make it match, I full-on chose a totally different color patch, and bright red heavy duty thread, and it looks badass.

I’m at like 60 hours of Dead Cells now and I still haven’t beaten the thing. Can’t get past the Hand of the King, but dang is that game satisfying to play.

I was never a roguelike fan until I played Hades and now I guess I’m an addict.

I read that there was a pretty fatal map rendering bug that could be fixed with some mod or patch that sounded a little arcane to apply… Any problems?

For sync a la Dropbox, check out Syncthing! I run it in Windows, Linux, Mac, my Synology NAS, and Android. Works amazingly well.

Thanks for sharing that. I am similarly divided on the subject and that’s why I won’t say that I feel “strongly” one way or the other.

I don’t think the devs have any power at all to mandate how instances are run. The software is open, so the moment such a thing happened, someone could create a fork of it and change it, and that is how it should be.

It’s absolutely fair to point out that we all participate in, if not benefit from, things that cause harm to others. @[email protected]’s mention of colonialism is 100% spot on. My reason for bringing this up was only to raise awareness. I think I’d describe it as “problematic” today, but not “show-stopping.” I hope that through our awareness of the issue, we can be faster to intervene if something does escalate. That’s all.