Can’t tell if trolling, quipping, or honestly asking…

I feel like some people who don’t want friends are often people with low self esteem who have decided their hypothetical future friends will abandon them, or not like them, or whatever, and so they convince themselves that they “don’t want that anyway” as a way of protecting themselves from future pain or embarrassment. In those cases, dating aside, the person should work on their self esteem.

If it’s not that, one could try casual hookup apps. These rely on a certain amount of work, and there’s no guarantee, especially if one lives in a less populated area, but it’s possible.

And the third option for someone who doesn’t want anything social and just wants sex, is sex work. This is exactly what it can be for! The only trouble is that in most places it’s illegal, which pushes it underground, making it both difficult to find and potentially dangerous… but this is the niche it’s meant to occupy.

But honestly… at least consider that it may be the first case, and see if you can search your feelings to figure out “why”.

Well… That’s actually probably fair as stated.

BestBuy etc don’t sell Apple’s products on commission, they bought them from Apple for a wholesale price, they’ve got them in a warehouse and on shelves right now on their dime, and the only way they make that money back is by selling them.

And the only way Apple makes money from a product being sold at Best Buy is that Best Buy will likely buy more stock to replace the stuff they sold, and they’ll buy that from Apple.

So if it was banned everywhere it would be unfair to the retailers that already paid Apple for a product they now can’t recoup, and it wouldn’t impact Apple at all because they already made their money from Best Buy.

This way the retailers can get their money back, but can’t get any more, which means only Apple is impacted.

The only other way that’s semi-fair (but would be extreme) would be for Apple to be forced to do a recall or something and reimburse all the retailers the money they had already spent. Doable, and definitely more of a punishment for Apple, but a lot of extra work for everyone if the outcome of this is that Apple settles and then everyone can just go back to ordering more again.

Ooh! That’s great to hear! A real glowing review… I’ll probably snag some before next Christmas!

Has anyone here tried https://tru-tone.com/

The ads make them look like the colours of my youth, but ads can make anything look like anything…

I’ve never been a Twitter/microblog user, but here’s how I gather it worked, presented in the order in which it was developed.

Do you ever think “oh, that’s a funny/interesting thought I had”, but there’s no one around to tell? Or not enough people and you think it had more potential than that? Microblog. Unlike a forum, you just dump in out into the void as-is. It’s a broadcast. Like if every account was a personal /r/showerthoughts.

From there we make it so I can subscribe to my friends. Now when they post their funny thoughts, or even just being like “I feel like tacos tonight, anyone in SF down?” I’ll get their post. Now it’s kinda like open group texting. Except I don’t choose who sees my random thoughts, they self-select. I just broadcast things out there and whoever might be interested might be interested.

That was basically all that microblogs were, at the beginning. A stream of non-topic’d stuff I said, and you can follow me if you want to hear more like it.

But sometimes I’m surrounded by strangers, like at a conference. At these points I want to know what random people I don’t follow are all saying about FooCamp. Search already exists so I can see all tweets with the word “cat” in it, but I can’t find a way to fit FooCamp organically into every post, so hashtags get invented as a social convention to say “that was my message, but here are some other keywords for search purposes”. Later they got linkified and so people started putting them inline, but originally they were just at the end and just for extra categorization.

So now the tool does two things. I can just broadcast out any thought I have without having to care about where to put it, etc. It all goes on my feed and anyone who has chosen to care about me will see it. And I choose who I care to receive broadcasts from because they’re cool, and it doesn’t matter what they’re talking about. But also I can tag a particular message with some categories, and that will allow strangers to see my messages if they happen to be looking for messages in that category, but obviously a single message can be in multiple categories.

Then later famous people and governments showed up, and people followed them because they love go hear what famous people talk about. But if you don’t follow them, then you don’t hear from them.

That’s basically it! So it’s kinda like the opposite of a reddit/lemmy/forum/usenet model. Rather than topics that have content posted by people, it’s people who post content that sometimes has a topic. Like a large group-chat (among friends or colleagues) where you’re not really sure who is in the chat, but you don’t have to care. You can prefer one over the other (I know I do), but fundamentally they’re not trying to solve the same problem as lemmy, they’re just a totally different model for communication. More like a friend group than a discussion group.

I don’t know the answer to the title, so I’ll answer the body. The answer is “it depends”.

If you’re talking to someone in a technical setting, then servers are the physical machines. The computers themselves, sitting in a room somewhere. Or maybe a virtual server that pretends to be a physical machine, but runs on a real server that sits in a room somewhere. Whereas a website is some location you can put into a web browser and get content that “feels” like it’s all one thing.

The reason this distinction matters is because you can host multiple small websites on a single server. For example there’s no reason a particular machine couldn’t host 10 different lemmy instances, if it’s got enough processing power.

But on the other hand a popular website may have its work spread across multiple servers. Maybe I’ve got a database server, which is a machine that only runs the database. And then maybe I have a few different web servers that actually serve “the webpage”, but I’ve also got a cache server that stores part of the webpage and serves that when it can, etc. Websites like Facebook or Twitter are considered one website but have thousands and thousands of servers.

But if you’re talking to someone in a non-technical setting, yeah they’re basically the same.

Also, while we’re at it, there are some individuals who are friendly and flexible and could probably make a relationship work with many people. And some people are stubborn grouches that couldn’t even mesh with themselves if there was an exact copy.

Also, one third of all people live in China or India alone. So of those 3ish billion people, there’s a 1 in 3 chance they live in India or China and likely don’t speak English. It’s so wild that a lot of people’s soul mates grew up in the same neighborhood they did, were exactly the same age, and went to the same school…

Depends on what you want. I’ve been liking Godot, but I’m an “Open Source” person. There’s definitely more of a community around Unity or Unreal.

But Godot is free in both ways and relatively user friendly, and since you’re uninterested in hiring a hundred people, using a tool that you like is fine, even if it’s not the most popular.

There’s a course I’ve never used called Learn GDscript which teaches the inbuilt language for Godot (GDScript) in the browser with fun interactive tasks. It looks neat, but I’ve never tried it myself. You can use other languages with Godot, but I recommend the GDScript. It’s very similar to Python and is well integrated into the engine.

So from there it’s about screwing around! Like other people have said, you’re not going to whip up the game that’s in your head in anything like the time frame you probably think. Even if you think you’re being realistic, it’s probably even worse than that. But I don’t say this to discourage you, I say this to prevent you from discouraging yourself!

If you can get a game where a green circle goes through a maze and then text shows up on the screen that says “you did it”, that should be viewed as an accomplishment! It’s simple, sure, but it’s something you did. Try to break your game’s features up into micro chunks that are playable. It’s easy to spend 6 months working on something and making progress, but not in any way you can show friends or whoever, and can’t even really “play” yourself. That can be demotivating. Try as much as you can to have something playable as often as possible. It will feel much more like real progress if you constantly have something you can demo.

And also don’t underestimate how much a bit of art and sound effects can change an experience. Silent 2D boxes is fine to test things out, but even a free art and sound effects pack makes a huge difference in how fun a game can feel. It can make even a simple premise suddenly feel like a game.

Good luck, have fun! Oh, also once you’re done tripping over your feet, maybe try a game jam! They’re good exercise.