Call Of Duty Black Ops 7, however im hearing Battlefield 6 is also in the same boat.

A lot of gamers tend to also be teenagers/young adults who just want to play a game with their friends in their social group. I was a kid once too after all so its understandable. However its the “just want to play with my friends” crowd that enables the industries worst practices by being consumers who think of yearly video game release hype cycles as vehicles of social interaction instead of caring about games as an art form thats being slowly degraded by corporate cuckery over time.

Black Ops 7. Its got plenty of shaming going on for other reasons already but this is the first time ive seen this message.

Honestly, my favorite people are the ones who love to talk and are horribly desperate to babble to potential listeners. I’m not much of a talker but I absolutely dont mind looking you in the eyes and nodding my head as you talk about your hobby or current going ons.

In bigger social groups I noticed this weird thing fellow humans tend to do where they all want a slice of being the talker/ center of attention and constantly cut off eachother or tune out current speaker waiting for them to shut up so they can start their monkey babble turn.

This behavior absolutely infuriates me and I refuse to take part in it. I would rather just be silent and let you say your piece than interrupt the flow.

As a knock on effect people subconsciously notice I’m not competing with them for talk time and am sending them constant listening signals like looking in the eye nodding head “mhm got you” stuff. This seems to really go a long way with making friendly with talkative types with minimal effort.

Paid products can be enshittified. Also, its not just the quality of products that are getting enshittified but the concept of ownership over usage and access to digital data.

• Slowly raising sub rates with that boiling frog tek.

• No longer providing means to purchase local copies of data on a CD-ROM when you did before, just to pigeon-hole buyers down a subscription only access to the cloud.

• Not offering a one time lifetime subscription in your sub-only model.

It used to be that you bought something and owned it physically or at least owned a private copy of the data that could be cracked/ stripped of DRM so you could truly freely own and distribute. Now they all want to be digital landlords where you own nothing and pay a little more each month through the good old boiling frog while pinning price increases on inflation. The mid-term result is a 100$/year to rent out digital access to a dictionary when before you could buy a cd copy.

Also, I don’t buy the “academic quality things should be incredibly expensive because its meant for scholars and university libraries” argument. Fuck that grift man. I know server infrastructure. It cost less to update a database or serve thousands of visitors than you might think especially for simple database lookups sent through https.

It also cost practically nothing to distribute a digital file. So, Free digital access to educational and reference materials output by universities realistically should be a right in any sane society. Im sure Oxford University gets enough tax breaks and gov subsidy they could do it without impacting the stock holders precious quarterly figures. That entire 12 volume OED set + SOED takes up 500mb and can be fit on every modern tablet and phone. It sure as hell could be fit on a CD ROM years ago when they made that. The only reason its not is greed and maybe the dopamine rush scholars get from filtering the plebs.

Also, the 1921 version of Merriam-Webster dictionary has entered public domain and is available for local download in stardict format here https://github.com/ahacop/websters-dict-1913-stardict

Double reminder that local offline copies of wiktionary.org dictionaries are available in Stardict, Tabfile and Kindle formats for download here: https://github.com/Vuizur/Wiktionary-Dictionaries

Sure! Heres links.

The full Unabridged 2nd edition (comes in 2 parts): https://archive.org/details/stardict-Oxford_English_Dictionary_2nd_Ed._P1-2.4.2

The Smaller condensed SOED edition: https://archive.org/details/soedrich-star-dict-2022-11-11

While your at it download the torrent link file themselves too in case these archives ever get taken down. I get the impression Oxford is particularly aggressive with takedown request so please consider seeding to keep these alive and easily accessable for others.

Oxford English Dictionary is directly funded by Oxford University. Im pretty sure a world class old money university can afford to subsidize public access and periodic updates to a digital dictionary database without putting it behind a subscription based paywall. At least they could try to offer a lifetime sub option.

Well, that sure is an option, though one that I would rather not take, like ever.

Coincidentally a copy of the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary 2nd edition stardict is currently available for free on the internet, only requires approximately 200-300mb of storage space, can be installed on my e-reader or pc software of choice for potential automated database retrieval / RAG, ect ect.

In case anyone is wondering you can download a stardict of the shorter oxford english dictionary (and most of the other dictionaries mentioned in this thread!) and have a local copy then use software like stardict or svdc to look up. I actually put up a copy on the internet archive earlier this year. Good timing huh? https://archive.org/details/soedrich-star-dict-2022-11-11

Does your kid like minecraft? Make a game with them on the minetest/luanti engine. For a base game you can use Minetest Game or a minecraft clone like Mineclonia and follow this modding book. Have the kid make 16x16px textures in gimp and you can rtegister some modded blocks Its as easy as this:

minetest.register_node(“default:stone”, { description = S(“Stone”), tiles = {“default_stone.png”}, groups = {cracky = 3, stone = 1}, drop = “default:cobble”, legacy_mineral = true, sounds = default.node_sound_stone_defaults(), })

https://www.luanti.org/en/

https://rubenwardy.com/minetest_modding_book/en/index.html

A fun weekend project was to set up a local model to tool call from openweather and wolfram alpha through their API for factual dataset retrieval and local weather info.

Someone In our community showed off toolcalling articles on local instance of Wikipedia through a kiwix server and zim file and that seems really cool project too.

I would like to scrape preprints from ArXiv and do basic rag with them. Also Try to find a way to have a local version of OEIS or see if theres an API to scrape.

So I guess my solution is to use automation tools to automate data retrieval from wiki’s and databases directly. Use RSS, direct APIs, scrapers and tool calling.

I didnt know they had that many E’s for shoes, my condolences.

Eh. Meme consumers are riding a pointless high horse on this one. On one hand yes there is arguably a human aspect to manual creation thats lost and theres still plenty of screwups in generated details if you look closely. On the other hand memes and edited silly cat pictures are not high art, they’re the low effort fast food quick consumption equivalent of images. We call them shitpost, I mean come on.

The whole point of an image is to activate a series of neurons in your brain that excite certain patterns to convey information to you. The whole point of a meme is to do this to convey humor or a poorly vieled political message with little creation efforts and high resharability.

In the beforefore times you had to actually paint and color by hand on a piece of paper, make models and set pieces out of materials like clay, cut up printed pictures to stitch them together.

Then we could digitize everything, create models and animations with clicks of the button, edit images easily through software, and share our creations effortlessly. This lead to the rise of the Internet’s first generation of memes with stuff like the dancing baby and flashgrounds references and caption memes.

Now its completely effortless with machine learning models trained to create images/sounds/videos from simple sentence instructions. It probably my takes a minute for someone to instruct image models to boilerplate an acceptable picture through typing a few keywords, or import an existing image and instruct edits. All without the need to learn the ins and outs of image manipulation software, 3d modeling software, ect.

Why spend an hour to make an edit in gimp for maybe a few dozen people to look at it once, go “heh” and immediately forget about it as they doomscroll past.

Unlike most jerkasses with an armchair opinion ive actually cooked some comics and memes in my day for the internets consumption. Sometimes Ive spent way longer than I should have in gimp just to make a funny edit. I’m happy these tools exist to let people engage with visual creation on their own terms. If you don’t have time or hardware for learning gimp to crop a meme I won’t be on my high horse telling you that your bad and your images are fundamental wrong just because you had a computer/model boilerplate it for you from some keyword prompting. Fuck em, they get the slop they deserve to consume.

I’ve pumped at least a few hours into at least 90% of the games I own, gave each entry a fair shake, and either moved on or come back to it now and again. Its the rare exception that the game is so up my alley I can pour endless hours into it without the experience getting boring.

I don’t care about achievements or even completing it. I play games mainly to try out a new experience and get the brain working in different ways. Some of my favorite games I can pump many hours into and have completed, rougelikes especially are infinitely replayable. But others are once and done experiences I got my fill of over the course of a couple of hours and have no desire to come back to. Theres no shame in being the later.

I always wondered why Alien UFOs wouldn’t hide in plain sight as an airplane except for the fact that the blinking lights would surely alert air control that an unregistered plane was in air space right? But I dunno its an interesting idea and your story kind of aligns with the concept

What is ‘the internet’ to you? I think this term means different things to different people. I imagine to people born in the latest generations the internet is social media and productivity corpo sites. To them the internet is youtube, tiktok, twitter, reddit, their bank, and whatever slop services they subscribe to magically beamed into pocket computer through technomagical nerd shit like “5g” and processed through “microprocessors” and other stuff they’ dont care to really understand because its all abstracted away.

I was born early enough for the internet to be nothing more than two computers barely powerful enough to run a GUI calling eachother up through telephone wires to share goofy web 1.0 blogspam. I remember when low res images were the norm and when pre-google youtube was just coming into being. When AOL and Myspace and Newgrounds/flash games. I remember being a kid and loving computers because I never knew what new cool website was on the horizon to discover and play with. I remember that people used things like newsgroups and pre-craigslist to meet up for transactions.

This is the internet, to me. At least what it once was and what it can be again. People using the digital landscape to freely express themselves with their own hardware. To come together to share in hobbies and interest and passions.

We could have that again if we all bought into a standardized radio based mesh network that could host personal sites while acting as a routing node.

But I don’t know if the general public will ever be pushed to partake in this network. They would have to be squeezed very hard to try alternatives to the common way of things.

Those pillows look like fake velvet microplastic fiber in that shot. If so, please consider switching your bedsheets and pillowcases out for natural fibers like cotton, hemp, or linen. Breathing in those fibers isn’t good for you or your cats.

Also applies to pants pockets. And the rage becomes trancendant when you just feel/hear the fabric rip at the seams creating a hole.