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

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  • A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.

    I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.

    35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.

    I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.

    Edit: Okay yall… I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it’s really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.

    But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:

    • I’m a mobile dev, so I don’t mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I’m going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
    • Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
    • Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn’t logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
    • Even if I was already logged in, it’s an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I’m not sure it would’ve improved much.
    • Even if I was on Android, I’d probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
    • Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved… I didn’t ask for that, and swarming people with “have you considered doing it the right way?” when they’re just making a basic observation doesn’t create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.




  • The only thing I hate about Winter is not Winter’s fault, and it’s basically what you said:

    Work is somehow perfectly scheduled so that you’re inside, staring at a brick wall for 90-100% of the daylight hours for 5 out of every 7 days.

    Winter is beautiful in ways that are completely unlike the other seasons, but unless you’re very fortunate you only get a few glimpses of it.

    I feel like if you were designing a society to make people suffer, that’s how you would do it.



  • I take it from your exasperation that you want a game to “just be good already”, from the very start. So I’ll exclude anything that takes too much thought or investment to start having a good time.

    • Deep Rock Galactic
    • Tunic
    • Pacific Drive
    • Gorogoa
    • Hardspace: Shipbreaker
    • Hand of Fate 2
    • FTL
    • Styx: Shards of Darkness
    • House of the Dying Sun
    • Hitman Go and Lara Craft Go
    • VVVVVV


  • Found a neat quote from the judges in the Sony v Connectix case:

    “For this reason, some economic loss by Sony as a result of this competition does not compel a finding of no fair use. Sony understandably seeks control over the market for devices that play games Sony produces or licenses. The copyright law, however, does not confer such a monopoly.”

    Now, it’s worth noting that Connectix actually produced their own BIOS, so this is not quite the same as the common emulators of today.

    But still: The idea that copyright does not confer a monopoly on hardware to play your games would be a very spicy take from a court in 2024.





  • Recently had to cancel Xfinity. Had to wait for a text chat so I could schedule a cancellation appointment. They didn’t call at the requested time. I called instead to make an appointment for them to call me back.

    30 minutes of waiting and questions about what it would take to retain me as a customer or who could take over my account. I told them up front that Xfinity isn’t available at my new address but they had to ask all the questions anyway.

    All of this nonsense meant I was 6 days into the billing cycle, so they had already charged me for a full month and held onto the remainder until the next month.

    Ugh.

    I fully expect that, just like the rest of the account management parts of Xfinity’s site, the page that serves the “cancel” button will be horribly slow to load, frequently broken, and borderline unusable, while the upselling pages remain lightning fast and reliable.


  • The Switch is ARM and uses several components from FreeBSD and Android. It would not be surprising to learn that they have the ability to compile system components like Virtual Console for an ARM Linux with stubs for Switch-specific stuff.

    The SNES Classic is also ARM, and has much less going on than the full Switch OS (Horizon). That could be the core of what they use for the museum displays, considering there’s an ARM version of Windows too.

    Either way, devs gonna dev. If you can’t get feedback at your workstation and always have to deploy to your target platform to test anything, you’re gonna move too slow to catch and fix bugs or build flexible enough systems to prevent them.

    So much of dev testing is about trade-offs between rapid iteration and thorough fidelity. You need access to both.

    From my own experience, I’ve done stuff like:

    • built mobile apps that can also be deployed as desktop apps or web apps for the sake of dev testing
    • built testing tools for car systems that fake out sensor input
    • built HTTP wrappers for cloud-deployed services to allow them to be run locally
    • faked out camera feeds for AR apps

    It can get janky, cuz not everything works the same way, but most of what you work on is not platform-specific anyway and a good architecture will minimize the portion of code that only works on the target platform.