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Games that stuck with you
  • Life is Strange's writing is trope-y and often not that great, and my neurospicy ass doesn't even relate with pretty much any of the nostalgic tropes about teenagehood (as far as I'm concerned these were the worst years of my life, by far, and any piece of media that wants to make me relive them is very unlikely to make its way onto my computer).

    However the game manages to more than make up for all of that with an enthralling story that fully immerses the player with compelling gameplay, meaningful choice-based storytelling, great artistic vision, and ground-breaking character acting. The whole thing is expertly calibrated to deliver emotional gut-punch after emotional gut-punch.


    Hellblade is just straight-up amazing and the Melinda Juergens' character acting is hauntingly raw and poignant.

  • Russia's LGBTQ+ community is turning to Telegram as the government cracks down on them
  • People, observe the rhetorical devices of tankies. They do not engage in meaningful discourse. They answer with non-sequiturs framed as innocent questions. They present themselves as free speech defenders, yet they use this free speech to defend the most oppressive regimes in the world, though most often implicitly as their whole thesis becomes an obvious sophism were it to be explicitly stated:

    America bad, therefore Russia/China/NK good.

    It's the exact same rhetorical devices that /r/The_Donald used during the '16 election, only with a different goal. It's the methodology of people actively working against their own self-interest, shitting all over rational discourse because they found themselves in a self-reassuring echo-chamber of anticonformism.

  • Worst is UTC vs GMT
  • There are good sides to DST, such as coming home “earlier” (by the sun clock but not by the social clock) from school or work and therefore having more hours of daylight during the free time after work. These positive effects may go beyond subjective feelings. A study has shown for example that activity increases with longer evening daylight (Goodman et al., 2014) – albeit with small biological effect sizes (≈6% difference in the daily activity between the Standard Time of the year and DST, adjusted for photoperiod). Interestingly these results of the above study were culture-specific: a significant increase was mainly observed in Europe and to some extent in Australia, while no significant effects or even slightly negative effects were seen in the United States and Brazil.

    Fucking duh. This is the sticking point for me, and I am disappointed that the article doesn't mention the effect of latitude here. Very easy for muricans to say "DST is not useful" when these fuckers never get pitch-black night before 6pm or full daylight before 6am ST.

    Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary. ST robs every office worker of one hour of useful daylight. That's it. That's the whole argument for permanent DST. Businesses will not change their opening hours, so permanent ST means a net loss of one active hour in the day for every office worker. Permanent DST in Europe means someone working 9-6 would not have to drive home at night for 4 months of the year and could maybe even take the dog for a walk in the evening sun.

  • What’s the worst piece of technology you’ve ever owned?
  • The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down

    I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).

    So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.

  • That is an act of cruelty towards the poor pokémon
  • I wouldn't recommend sway to someone who isn't actively looking for a tiling WM, I would recommend finding a good spotlight equivalent to use on KDE as that will still be less customization work than it would require on barebones sway (which is hardly usable).

  • That is an act of cruelty towards the poor pokémon
  • It's not as bad nowadays that apps yielded to GNOME's bullshit. Back when GTK2 apps were still common... Urgh. Plenty of apps were broken without it for no good reason.

    I like opinionated UX - I use sway - but GNOME's approach is incompatible with "general use" and only works (for now) because of canonical's weight and ability to impose their vision as the only vision.

    Also they didn't replace the tray with a better way to manage background apps, so they can suck a dick on the UX front.

  • That is an act of cruelty towards the poor pokémon
  • The fucking system tray. Which literally every other DE and mainstream OS out there supports because some apps depend on it and break if it doesn't exist.

    Last I checked GNOME devs said "no, we will never support it, because we've DePRecATeD the tray in GTK".

    It's functionality so basic I have 3-6 apps which depend on it at any time on my work machine. Anyone saying it doesn't fall under "basic functionality" is either a GNOME dev or a troll.

  • Someone escaped the Matrix
  • The kind of farming that makes any money isn't slow work.

    It is, however, tangible work with tangible results. Unlike spending months changing the polarity of nanoscopic silicon structure for the non-appreciation of an utterly clueless salesperson whose braindead ideas will have left the world in a worse state than you found it despite anyone's best efforts.

    I should seriously get into woodworking. Kidding. Sorta.

  • Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid
  • Greenfield nuclear is (probably) not economically relevant.

    Refurbishing existing NPPs has a LCOE on-par with renewables and gives breathing room for variability issues that will otherwise be absorbed by fossil fuels until that eventual transition to storage/smart grid.

    Any discussion of nuclear's costs/profitability that does not distinguish between greenfield and existing/refurbished is agendaposting since most of the costs of a NPP are upfront.

  • Mapping for people, not cars
  • Plenty of villages where I live that are absolutely unsafe for anyone to walk around. There is no requirement for a road outside urban limits to have a sidewalk, even if it is a major 90 km/h (55ish mph?) road that happens to be the only way to get from village A to the school in village B.
    Cycling through the countryside, I have straight up trespassed through someone's property because there was no legal way to get from point A to point B, walking or biking, and not die.

    Obviously not comparable to the US where even city centers are majorly unsafe, but still. Most rural areas are fully car-dependent.

  • Too much of a good thing? Spain's green energy can exceed demand, country is looking at storing capacity or buyers to solve electricity oversupply
  • Anything to do with seawater needs to deal with corrosion (e.g. offshore wind/tide generation). Also intuition tells me the balloons would be waaay bigger than reasonable.

    Compressed air I assume is possible, as are many many other things (gravity, heat, springs, etc.). The question is which is cheaper and grid-scale; a 1 GWh pressure vessel would certainly be a sight to behold.

  • Too much of a good thing? Spain's green energy can exceed demand, country is looking at storing capacity or buyers to solve electricity oversupply
  • I'm no hydro specialist but my understanding is that in the Alps/Pyrénées, the hydro capacity is essentially maxed out because any additional projects will be denied on environmental grounds (flooding valleys is, as it turns out, not amazing for the environment). Maybe there's some pairs of existing artificial lakes that could act as batteries, IDK. But I wouldn't expect this to magically solve every issue.

    In Belgium we have one such installation thanks to a fortuitous topological quirk, but no plans for more. Still, 10 GWh is not nothing and already helping a lot to absorb renewable fluctuations.

  • for all the "anti-authoritarians" out there
  • The kind that rails on "anti authoritarianism"? Or do you have a charitable interpretation of "authoritarianism" that is somehow compatible with democracy?

    I also fail to see what any of that has to do with capitalism, which I have neither defended nor mentioned yet you brought up.

    Goddam arguing with tankies and their endless litany of non-sequiturs is such a pointless exercise.

  • for all the "anti-authoritarians" out there
  • Typical Stalinism/Maoism: Anyone who opposes my implementation of Marxism is an enemy of the proletariat and can be persecuted to any extent. These people agree with the mainstream idea that communism can't be implemented democratically, but come to the conclusion that democracy must be abolished.

    This meme is an open dogwhistle to tankies and thankfully meaningless to anyone who hasn't fallen into or interacted with this small subsection of the far-left.

  • Being Agile
  • What kind of non-agile bottom-up software projects have you experienced? Bottom-up waterfall? I guess it's possible in theory but that would be a sight to behold.

    My only point is that in most situations, upper management are fools that should be left to their devices and should never get a say in development methodologies. By definition if upper management imposes Scrum, it's a self-defeating prophecy.

    Waterfall Agile Scrum
    Top-down Can be great (esp. with rigid requirements like fintech, for safety-critical systems, or integration with traditional engineering processes with rigid schedules and feature sets) but will probably be more expensive Bad managers trying to make-up for their own lack of foresight Can't exist (but some companies pretend very hard)
    Bottom-up Probably can't exist (but I haven't seen anyone try) Yes Yes

    Your average tech company should be somewhere in the bottom-right, but bad managers are trying to pull the needle upwards to justify their existence or make up for their incompetence. But they still call that "Agile" (which can be true by some definitions of the word) or "Scrum" (which that isn't, by definition).

  • Being Agile
  • Good software does not come out of companies without a bottom-up approach to software development. Top-down approaches are either terrible or extremely expensive.

    Agile development is something that at my company we fought for, not against. It's literally impossible to fight against actual agile development since it has to come from the workers. Agile is not scrum, and neither are a collection of ceremonies. It's just a framework to give agency to developers.

  • Being Agile
  • Scrum is not the be-all end-all, but in organizations that cannot implement scrum effectively, no system could hope to achieve anything meaningful either.

    Scrum aims at empowering workers to remove power from clueless MBAs and meritless CEOs, if they don't want to play ball then the idiocracy will win every time regardless.

  • Kagi silently removed all references to Google's index from their website

    Hi!

    Kagi had a rough couple months on the PR side, and a comment from another Lemmy user arguing that they aren't using Google's index set me off... because I had just read a couple weeks ago on their own websites that they primarily use Google's search index.

    Lo and behold, that user was "right": No mention of Google whatsoever on Kagi's Search Sources page. If that's all you had to go off of, you'd be excused for thinking they are only using their internal index to power their web search since that's what they now strongly imply. The only "reference" to external indexes is this nebulous sentence:

    > Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information [...]

    ... Unless one goes to check that pesky Wayback Machine. Here is the same page from March 2024, which I will copy/paste here for posterity:

    > ## Search Sources > > You can think of Kagi as a "search client," working like an email client that connects to various indexes and sources, including ours, to find relevant results and package them into a superior, secure, and privacy-respecting search experience, all happening automatically and in a split-second for you. > > ### External > > Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek and Brave, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Wolfram Alpha, Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, Yelp, TripAdvisor and other APIs. Typically every search query on Kagi will call a number of different sources at the same time, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user. > > For example, when you search for images in Kagi, we use 7 different sources of information (including non-typical sources such as Flickr and Wikipedia Commons), trying to surface the very best image results for your query. The same is also the case for Kagi's Video/News/Podcasts results. > > ### Internal > > But most importantly, we are known for our unique results, coming from our web index (internal name - Teclis) and news index (internal name - TinyGem). Kagi's indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and "small web" discussions surrounding a particular topic. Kagi's Teclis and TinyGem indexes are both available as an API. > > We do not stop there and we are always trying new things to surface relevant, high-quality results. For example, we recently launched the Kagi Small Web initiative which platforms content from personal blogs and discussions around the web. Discovering high quality content written without the motive of financial gain, gives Kagi's search results a unique flavor and makes it feel more humane to use.

    ---

    Of course, running an index is crazy expensive. By their own admission, Teclis is narrowly focused on "non-commercial websites and 'small web' discussions". Mojeek indexes nowhere near enough things to meaningfully compete with Google, and Yandex specializes in the Russosphere. Bing (Google's only meaningful direct indexing competitor) is not named so I assume they don't use it. So it's not a leap to say that Google powers most of English-speaking web searches, just like Bing powers almost all search alternatives such as DDG.

    I don't personally mind that they use Google as an index (it makes the most sense and it's still the highest-quality one out there IMO, and Kagi can't compete with Google's sheer capital on the indexing front). But I do mind a lot that they aren't being transparent about it anymore. This is very shady and misleading, which is a shame because Kagi otherwise provides a valuable and higher quality service than Google's free search does.

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    azertyfun @sh.itjust.works
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