Windows: Just four blue squares
Apple: Same shape, no colour whatsoever
Linux: 🏳️⚧️
The blanket term "AI" has set us back quite a lot I think.
The plant thing and the deepfakes/search engines/chatbots are two entirely different types of machine learning algorithm. One focussed on distinguishing between things, the other focussed on generating stuff.
But "AI" is the marketable term, and the only one most people know. And so here we are.
"Spectacle Fighter".
In the late aughts, game critic Ben "Yathzee" Croshaw came up with that term to describe games like Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, beat-em-up type games where the point is less "can you get through" and more "how high can you get that combo meter? How COOL can you make yourself look while beating up all these fodder enemies?"
A few years later the industry coalesced on an agreed-upon term for this subgenre -- And called it "Character Action".
Yathzee has just accepted defeat and uses the term everyone uses, he has to, he works in games media.
I refuse. Character Action is a dumb, DUMB term because every action game is a character action game, because there is ACTION and CHARACTERS in all of them.
Whereas "Spectacle Fighter" was perfectly descriptive of just WHAT made those games special. You are FIGHTING, and the objective is to LOOK SPECTACULAR.
I feel like the problem is less with the technology itself and more with some of the stuff within and around it. So let me list my favourite bugbears:
Here's the thing about buttons and knobs: they are definite. When you press them, you KNOW you pressed them, you can use your finger to feel for them without activating other stuff by accident. Back in the day with my cheap-ass chinese MP3 player, I could change tracks and playlists without taking it out of my pocket just by using tact and muscle memory.
Nowadays with my smartphone even something as basic as skipping a track requires me to take it out and unlock the screen. It's like. Sure, the phone does a lot more stuff, and can stream stuff from the internet so I don't have to download every track (even if I keep a local library for my favourites in ogg format), it has bluetooth for wireless headphones, a lot of good shit -- But that little bit of user experience is just dead and buried.
Heck, my older sister tells me she used to text her friends in class without taking her phone off her pocket. Imagine! IMAGINE typing a text on one of those old phone number pads, just by muscle memory and tact! It may not be the ideal user experience, but holy shit, it was possible! Try doing anything even close to blind typing on a modern smartphone.
Another point: when something goes unresponsive on a device with just a touchscreen, you experience a confusing and annoying experience as all you have feedback-wise is the screen and sometimes it freezes and you're swiping and tapping and just praying something happens.
When a computer with keys and buttons goes unresponsive you can do the three-fingered-salute and that usually gets it to do something, and because the keyboard is a physical object, it can't be hidden from you by a crashed OS.
Nowadays even kitchen appliances are dropping buttons and knobs. My parents' dishwasher is all touch-buttons, sometimes they brush against it while walking around the kitchen and lo and behold, their butt pauses the washing cycle. Something that wouldn't be an issue with a much cheaper set of regular-ass buttons.
To say nothing of cars and the horrid security issue that fusing a tablet to the dashboard and replacing every control with just that has proven to be.
Used to be, Windows 9x let you change every colour of your UI right from the built-in settings app and came with a dozen colorschemes built-in, and Windows XP came with three built-in themes and could with just some changing around (you replaced like ONE dll file, a single copypaste), support themes that totally changed the look of the OS. Nowadays you get "White" and "Black" and that's it.
And like, that's windows, a corporate-ass proprietary system for corporate jerks -- But even Linux -- Linux! the darling of nerds who like to change everything in their computers (like me!) has caught this illness -- And you'll see people defending this. Saying that having no theming support and only having users be able to change highlight colours if even that is the "right way" to do it.
On the note of customization -- In the back-then times, chat applications let you set fonts and colours to give your messages "your look", and your friends could do the same. -- Fuck! The application me and my mates used for playing RPGs by text back in the early 10s supported not just font colours, but also complete rich-text, and would let you set different colours for like, things said by a character vs. narration, resulting in an utterly beautiful formatted text.
Don't get me wrong, we use Telegram/Discord for that now and having a fully searchable archive of everything that we did and talked about is great and I wouldn't trade it for the world. But the most customization you get is -- Setting a profile picture. The most formatting you get is bold/italics.
Webforums would let you have an avatar, a user title under the avatar (that many forums let you customise!), and a signature. Nowadays with things like Lemmy you have to squint to see a person's username.
And like, it's not like there is something about the modern technologies unto themselves that prevents these bits of customisation: Computers are better at drawing shit on screen than ever, internet connectivity has only gotten faster, and we figured out 'sending some markup codes to make rich text' as a thing way back in the 80s. We lost all that simply because the people making the applications don't want to have it.
I feel like for every neat thing that new technology provides us, it takes three steps back for entirely human and not at all technological issues. ^read:^ ^capitalism^
A Brazilian RAINBOW boa that had been assigned male at birth gave birth to 14 babies.
In the middle of June.
Happy ***ing Pride Month
Went away from my computer for a bathroom break. When I came back I noticed it took a very long time to wake up. But that was the least of my worries, as Plasma seems to now be really bugged out:
Two things: Window decorations (like the ones at the top with the buttons to close and such) do not render properly. That's the simple part
The other, weirder one, is harder to explain in text so I made a video -- The short version is that whenever I mouse over any icon in a panel, be it a tray icon or something on the taskbar thingie -- it seems to jump to the top-right corner of that panel. Though only visually (as in, to interact with it, I still have to click the blank space the icon once occupied)
I have also noticed that icons within qt6 windows do not show in the proper place
These persisted after reboots.
Other info:
Extra details about system (idk maybe it helps?):
Things I have already tried:
Things I have not tried:
I have also posted this to the kde bug tracker. Posting it here to in hopes of getting an answer sooner :P
EDIT: I gave it some time to see if it would stick and it did. So. "Going into the Plasma Renderer settings and switching it to OpenGL" was the solution to my issue, even if I have no idea what caused it, I at least seem to have fixed it
Personally, I feel like you can have fun on fedi, but it all depends on the accounts/communities you follow. My Sharkey feed AND my Lemmy feed are both full of memes, fandom nonsense, and shitposts. If you only follow serious communities and people that talk about serious news, you'll have a serious time.
That said, one thing that I thought was unpleasant about the fediverse, and then realised was a feature rather than a bug is... The fact that you can run out of fediverse content. After 2 hours on Lemmy, I have functionally read all of Lemmy (or, well, all the communities I care to read), and maybe 1 more hour to join conversations I'd like to join.
Compared to the seemingly infinite content stream of The Other Sites (tm), this initially struck me as bad and weird, but then I realised... I actually prefer it this way. Doomscrolling a fedi site/app is actually not possible, and that has done wonders for my mental health.
As someone who was just about to downvote (and then lost interest) it's just that I'm. So. Fucking. Sick of SystemD discourse. Yall have been at this for 15+ years now. Let it fucking go. Fuck.
You see it all started when some dumb motherfuckers decided to leave the relatively plentiful African Savannah for the dead-land that was the desert. Then they had to invent agriculture and it was all downhill from there.
The community told me that using Arch would turn me into a cute femboy. It's been a decade and I'm still as large and hairy as I was back then.
My question is who should I sue for this false advertisement?
I'm so traumatized by how tech everything goes, that I read "Firefox is going to try (...)" and immediately braced for some dystopian bullshit.
Then saw "Wayland" and relaxed. I have no hot takes about Wayland lmao.
My parents' old place had the bat towels and the bat box.
Bats would hang out in our garden eating bugs and such. But they'd sometimes get confused, flop into the house, and get stuck. We live in a third world country, there isn't some organization we can call to properly care for the bats, but we're not stupid and we know that handling a wild animal is bad for us and the critter.
So. Old beat up towels. Toss one on the floor next to the crawling bat. It'll cling to it. Lift the towel from a distance. Gently drop it in the box. Put the box next to a tree. Bat will find the tree and find its way home.
Honestly at this point y'all should just get the fuck out. Where to? Anywhere honestly. You'll probably find the third world preferable to a post project 2025 Murica.
Russia's been having a major brain drain issue as all people with functioning brains either have escaped or want to escape the country. I don't see why Americans should do any different.