I find Widelands to be slow and relaxing; but also challenging and engaging.

When I was young, I really valued the idea of technological progress. It was almost axiomatically the goal of humanity. Getting greater abilities to do more things more easily… it seemed like the ultimate goal.

But now that I’m older, I’ve seen what happens with technological power like that, and it isn’t great. Yes, we can do more things more easily than before. And what is the result? The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world’s resources are depleted.

• People can now connect instantly and effortlessly with anyone anywhere in the world - and the result is that enormous numbers of people shun their local peers and instead have shallow parasocial relationships with strangers who’s job it is to advertise products to them.
• Clothes are cheap and easy to create - and the result is mountains of waste created by fast-fashion low-quality throw-away clothes largely made from slave labour. Similarly for many products, in particular plastic products are now choking the world in waste.
• Cars are more efficient, and production quality is high - and the result is massively oversized monsters, completely negating the efficiency benefit and instead increasing the amount of space and maintenance required to handle the increased size and weight of the machines. The streets are basically filled with cars and spaces for cars, with less and less space for people to do people things.
• Half-decent AI has finally been created. It’s a long-held dream come true… except that the outcome isn’t quite what we hoped. There’s a lot to say on this topic, but just to keep it snappy, I’ll oversimplify it by saying that people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination.

Our silky-smooth hyper-connected ultra-convenient world is not leading people to be happier, or smarter, or kinder. And it certainly isn’t helping humanity survive longer. We’re burning out fast.

A lot of what we have superficially looks like ‘progress’, but in full description it looks more like a dystopia. Things are easier, but perhaps the good things were already easy enough; and so the main effect is that exploitation and manipulation got easier. Even when we agree that we’re going in the wrong direction, the messages are still muddied enough that we accelerate rather than change course.

Anyway… I don’t agree with my younger self. I no longer think that technological advances are intrinsically good. I think taking things a bit more slowly might have been more wise. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think a core part of it is that money corrupts. Unfortunately, money is very tightly intertwined with most of what we do - so that’s a pretty difficult problem to fix. So I won’t go into more detail about that now!

You should know, it is possible that other people find this comic funny even though you don’t. And no matter how much you ‘explain’ why it isn’t humorous, you can’t undo the fact that other some people have found it funny. So then, what do you think people learn from your explanation?; Probably something about you rather than something about the comic.

Nar. A statement and its converse are not equivalent.

Partially so, but a lot of adult pain is due to bad posture, and weak muscles from lack of exercise. (Weak muscles don’t directly result in pain, but it does mean that stuff like “looking in the mailbox weird”, or sneezing, or lifting something off the floor can result in stuff going wrong.)

I find it amusing that they “use cookies to give you the best possible experience”, but then ask you to pay to not have them.

Yeah, cars suck.

I use to follow a subreddit called /r/degoogle, which was nominally for conversation about how to remove and avoid using google products. … But I ended up leaving because in pretty much every thread there was a whole lot of posts shitting on any and every suggested alternative, mostly for not being hardcore enough. It was as if the only acceptable approach was to never use any electronic device ever again. Firefox of course was constantly under fire for taking money from Google; which apparently made them worse than Google themselves. … Anyway, I strongly suspected that people were deliberately trying to destabilize the group so that it couldn’t grow or become functional. I had no other explanation for how counter-productive the bulk of the conversations were, and it would certainly be an easy and potentially useful group for pro-google people to target.

I’m less convinced that it is happening here though, but I’m certainly more suspicious of it after that experience with /r/degoogle. I reckon probably why we see a lot of any Mozilla stuff here is just that the audience on Lemmy is very interested in what Mozilla is doing - and negative news always gets more traction than positive news.

Yeah. They’ve done a good job. Strategically its so that Steam can’t easily be crushed under Microsoft’s enormous boot. So it’s a good forward-thinking commitment that everyone can benefit from. (Everyone except Microsoft, I suppose.)

My latest favourite is missing: Note Taking Apps:

• xournal++

Joplin is good for organising text-based notes, so I’m not surprised to see that on your list. But xournal is a for mixed drawing / hand-writing / text, etc. So it’s a different use-case to Joplin. (It would be perfect if Joplin supported xournal notes; so that you could write with xournal and then organise with Joplin. … But that hasn’t yet come to pass.)

Free food, but confined to a tiny unchanging living space where your entire purpose is to be observed by others; vs no free food, but more person freedom. Which do you think is better?

It was easy to predict a downward slide as soon as they merged with Activision.

Using full names like that might be fine for explaining a physical rule, or stating the final result of some calculation - but it certainly would be cumbersome and difficult for actually carrying out the calculations. In many cases we already fill pages with algebra showing how things can be related and rearranged to arrive at new results. That kind of work would be intractable with full word names for the variables, partially because you’d be constantly spilling off the end of the page trying to write the steps; but also because having all that stuff would actually obfuscate what you are trying to do - which is algebra. And during that process, the meanings and values of the pronumerals is not as important has how they interact with each other. So the names are just a distraction.

For setting up an equation, and for stating the final result, the meanings of the variables are very important; but during the process of manipulating the equations to get the result you want the meanings of the letters are often ignored. You only need to know that it is something that can be multiplied, or inverted, or subtracted, or whatever. Eg. suppose I want to rearrange to get the velocity. I don’t care that I’m dividing both sides by the air density times the drag coefficient and the area… I’m just dividing ρCA, which is an algebraic blob whose interpretation can be saved for some other time.

I wouldn’t read too much into it. Using “he” instead of “it” is a mistake that a person might make if English is not their first language. It’s pretty easy to imagine that someone working on a browser would not be interesting in messing around with the pronouns in their build instructions. They made an error, and they didn’t think the error was important (which in itself was another error). But it is fixed now. Surely no harm done. They were not actively trying to impede anyone’s progress or deny anyone’s rights, or even say anything negative about anyone at all. They simply made a mistake in their use of pronouns in their build instructions. The mistake is now fixed. And although its fair to take it as a ‘warning’ that maybe there are objectionable views lurking in there, it certainly is not evidence of such views. I really don’t think it’s fair to hang this mistake over them. I’m sure that pretty much everyone in this thread has made worse mistakes throughout their lives. I know I certainly have.

There are real problems transgender people are having, ladybird browser must be low on that priority.

Are you trying to tell me that Ladybird inadvertently referring to a computer process ‘he’ instead of ‘it’ is not a high priority problem for transgender people? What could possibly be worse? :p

(But seriously though. I find it really weird that people are still upset at Ladybird about this. It makes me wonder if there’s some social manipulation going on. Like, is anyone actually upset about this, or is it just an excuse to attack the devs?)

Is this because they used “he” instead of “they” in the build instructions? … They changed that and acknowledged the mistake. Surely that’s enough. It’s the fucking build instructions. I think we can probably find it in our hearts to forgive them.

[edit] Just in case people think I’m joking. I’m not. As far as I’m aware, the critical incident that that has resulted in people calling Ladybird devs anti-trans is that they wrote ‘he’ instead of ‘they’ in the build instructions. That’s what caused the original outrage. And as far as I’m aware, there have been no other incidents. But please, if there is something of substance that I’m not aware of, post about it here.

The tides will turn though. I’ve been denouncing google for years, and I’ve find it quite striking how the pushback has disappeared recently. It use to be that any negative comment about google was met by a small army of google fans. That just isn’t the case any more.

Sure. I very much like having offline installers too. I’ve got a heap of them saved on my computer, and on an external drive. But Lutris and Heroic Games Launcher are clients. So I’m not really sure what you mean.

Thanks for the info. That sounds like a decent system. The idea of unpacking into a place of my choosing, and running without an additional launcher kind of appeals to me from a software-simplicity point of view - even if installing the game is slightly more hands on. But I don’t think I’ll do it that way myself, mostly because I don’t really want to further entrench Steam. Valve does a lot of good stuff … but their dominance in this space still makes me uncomfortable. (And the fact that they don’t let you disable the “what’s new” advertising bar on the library page is a big red flag for me.)

When I was first getting started, I briefly tried Lutris - but was put off by two things. The first was that it felt very complicated. I was new to Linux at the time, and I’m being asked helps of config questions about how to install which-and-what components in order to use such-and-such runners or launcher or whatever… basically just a heap of stuff that I didn’t really understand. And when I tried using a recommend ‘gold rated’ auto-setup to install something, it just froze. So that was disappointing. I decided that maybe I’d try something else.

I’ve seen Lutris recommended in a lot of places; so apparently it’s pretty good. But at the time I used it, it wasn’t really what I was looking for. I think a lot of people praise Lutris for the way it lets you have case-by-case special configurations for all sorts of things, which might allow you get some stubborn stuff working. But for me, it felt like more things I could break. I’ve got enough games that I’m happy enough to just say that if it doesn’t work then I won’t play it. So I guess Lutris wasn’t for me. [edit - Bottles also had a lot of config choices to get started; but I was lucky enough that what I picked worked first time; and I haven’t looked at the config since.]