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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Gacha can be moderately acceptable if the math is fully documented and enforced. If you know it will take <= 180 pulls to get Raiden Shogun, and each pull costs $3, then it’s just a $540 DLC with extra steps and the tease thst it might be cheaper if you’re lucky or have banked pulls.

    But transparency is key-- the developer should be expected to offer a calculator or lookup table for any RNG item, especially if it’s some combination of multiple drop mechanics or hsrd-to-convert currencies that dissuades back-of-the-envelope estimates.

    Even in Vegas, the slot machines are required to disclose their payout rate.

    There’s also significant differences in the gacha appeal factor. If there are no leaderboards or PvP, and the game mechanics can be completed with F2P only, that is inherently less pressure to spend then on a game where you regularly get your ass handed to you by a someone with a Black Amex and all seven-star limited banner units.



  • I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.

    Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P




  • I suspect the American left focused on LGBTQ+ issues because it was a “safe” mission.

    Increasing official tolerance there was no threat to their donors or the wealthy in general. Nobody had to pay more in taxes or submit to meaningful government regulstion to enforce “don’t explicitly fire/assault/refuse to marry someone for being gay/trans”. Arguably those policies could have ecen come out of broader expectations for “stay out of people’s personal lives” rather than making special cutouts and declaring a marginal group.

    Looks impressive, accomplishes very little. Pretty much sums up the Democratic party for the last 50 years.









  • GNOME always seemed to be a solution chasing a problem, particularly once the licensing fears for Qt/KDE were settled.

    But now it’s one of the things Red Hat seems to impose on the world. Feels like everything controversial comes out of them or Canonical. I guess they have the commercial cash to prop up things like GNOME and Wayland and systemd and snaps until they gain traction, while more community-focused products can’t break the world for no reason.


  • I sort of liked GTK back in the day when it was still the Gimp Tool Kit first and foremost. When it was 1999 and your other choices were a broken Lesstif, an early C++ centric Qt, clumsy Tk, and pre-Cambrian Xaw, it was nice to have something full-featured and tasteful.

    Now I hesitate to pull in a GTK app because it won’t theme right (I want to use the same bitmap fonts I liked in 1999, but apparently Pango stopped supporting them) and runs the risk of convincing the package manager to dump several gigs of GNOME crud on my drive.

    I gather even the GIMP itself no longer tracks current GTK-- it’s become solely in service to GNOME and their absurd UI whims (* * * * client side decorations)








  • Fundamentally, I’m not sure Qualcomm is the brand I’d trust to lead the world off of x86.

    I understand nobody actually likes Qualcomm products in the cellular space, but they’re stuck with them due to patent minefields. That’s not really a great vibe to bring in when trying to compete against known-quantity x86 vendors.

    I figured we’d see homogenous CPUs-- either in the same socket or as an addon module, so you can cast off some stuff to ARM or RISC-V but keep big x86 for games and heavy closed-source software, then flip to RISC-V main with x86 addon cards, and finally emulation.

    Sort of thinking about a Pinetab-V, but even the flaky, doesn’t suspend right 20% of the time, wigi was weird on every OS except OpenBSD, Ryzen 2700U it would replace demolishes it. The Lichee Console looked neat with the EEE PC sizing and Trackpoint, but it’s way pricier.