OpenStars

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.

DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.

Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)

I think a lot of shows are AWESOME, but then late-stage capitalistic enshittification happens and they become… far less so, and often quite TERRIBLE even, though ostensibly still have the same title, even though nowhere near being an identical show.

One super-good example is Stranger Things, where the first season was really quite good! So many homages to nerd culture like E.T. and D&D - it was fantastic!:-) As I read though, the pair of creators had 2 rules: never use CGI, and absolutely do not “sell out”, i.e. a story should want to be told, not sold merely for the sake of cash. So after the first season where they made it b/c of their love for the craft, you can guess how the subsequent seasons played out (I believe one of the pair even quit over it).

Arguably a better example is The Walking Dead - it started off REALLY good, but then… well… it too “sold out”. Actually I keep trying to force myself to get through it, I even started watching it over again from the start (a couple times now) thinking that would help, but have yet to accomplish this feat.

Another is Designated Survivor. It had some big-name actors, most of whom quit (I think the show was sold to a different network… or something?), and the last season was just terrible, limping along before they finally put it out of its misery and ended it.

The really fantastic shows - like Star Trek - had to prove themselves, then the creators were given leeway to subsequently make great sequels and spin-offs and even entirely unrelated titles. Fun story: Gene Roddenberry even created shows after his death, as his wife took his unfinished notes and lead their creation under his vision, like Earth: Final Conflict.

TLDR: why offer you a good show when they can offer you a crappy show that they made for a tenth of the price, yet charge you the full amount?

(though stupidly enough, they also seem to be trying to offer us even more terrible shows that cost 50x the price to make, and yet somehow suck all the more for that!? anyway it all seems to be based on greed + arrogance - they want to make money, but they do not want to put in the effort to actually earn it, e.g. by paying the actors a decent wage)

But the anti-romance dialogues were pretty fun too… (choose one person, then the others get mad at u:-P)

Kotor also encouraged replays with all options so that you could try the variety of romance situations:-).

A study on astroturfing on Reddit, written in the style of Reddit by an astroturfer - oh the delicious irony? :-P

There have always been such (it is human nature) - but right now they feel bold enough to speak and act, whereas previously they had been too afraid and embarrassed to do so publicly.

In South Carolina, various KKK-like groups said in advance that they wanted to kill people, wrapped barbed wire around baseball bats (in order to better kill people with), showed up to kill people, then actually killed people, then bragged about having killed people… Oh right, but the other side was not successful in securing a permit for their peaceful protest, so you know, there are “many sides” to every issue I guess.

Misinformation/brainwashing techniques are powerful. Like if you believed that a particular type of human was the root of all evil in this world, then you SHOULD want them dead, under those circumstances… right? You do not bc you know better, not just about that one group but more fundamentally that it is ideas that bring about evil, not people. But the people killing people do not know that, and it is to the advantage of others who seek power, and want to use the army of sheeple to advance their own agenda, for those sheeple to not know that either.

Think of it from the LLM’s perspective - in the general pool you have common English, you have less common variations such as this, and then you have whatever the heck people like Kid Rock are doing…

Bawitdaba, da bang, da dang diggy diggy
Diggy, said the boogie, said up jump the boogie

People have covered most of the bases here. The hardest part is that if you don’t go back soon, you will find that door is closed to you - at least to finish what you started, without having to start mostly over again. College can definitely be worthwhile, but whether it is worthwhile TO YOU is the issue. Also, once you get used to receiving a paycheck and not living on like Ramen… it is next to impossible to go back to being poor and spending every waking moment (and beyond) studying, especially for some undefinable end goal. But on the other hand, I’ve seen it done with like 15-year gaps in-between dropping out, joining the army/navy/whatever and then going back to finish up. Definitely think through all the angles here, b/c you don’t want to do anything that you will regret later - including wasting more time chasing something that you don’t really want to begin with.

That’s a good point but I thought it was different servers, like one had “telemetry” directly in the name? Unfortunately I really don’t recall bc it’s been too long and I didn’t have time to finish delving in the first place, nor since. I don’t want to spread misinformation so let me know if you think I might be doing that. Mostly I’m saying that if Blockada chose to mark their checks home as “bad”, enough to block them upon a default installation of that app, then they surely had some reason to do so, even if ultimately it turns out to be harmless.

On a scale of 1 to 10 for severity, this might be just like a 1, but that’s still not 0, and some people just prefer to stay away from an app that has demonstrably chosen to ignore user consent. Even if they clearly state that they felt they had good reasons for doing so.

Yes, it is sad, but we do what we must. :-P

I doubt it is just that - the sending of such info is enabled by default for one, and even after disabling it, for several years now Firefox has continued to connect to the server regardless. I have not personally delved into the source code to verify just how “friendly” such a check is, which has already been asked to be halted, but ad blocking software such as Blockada (Android) has decided to mark it as “bad”.

If this feature was opt-in only, and functioned respectfully, it would be an entirely different matter, but as it is, user consent seems to be at least partly ignored. I am sure that those stats are useful to the developers… but that is not and will never be the point, for many people.

Asking the right questions here!

I have had it with all these doucheshit snakes on this twatboy plane!

(from another comment) just doesn’t work…

I don’t even have Steam installed on my computer, but maybe I should do that just to check this out, thanks for sharing!:-)

FF5-like job system, on steroids - woot!:-P video review.

Thank you for the suggestion! I tend to like more adventure types, like Breath of Fire or even Zelda, more than war-themed ones (although I made an exception for Destiny of an Emperor b/c it’s based on real historical events, even if loosely), but I see where this game was done REALLY well, so a very solid thought!:-)

I see why you mentioned it: the intention behind it does seem exactly like the Lufia series, really putting in the time to tinker and make it RIGHT, like it tries to go beyond a mere “game” for enjoyment, possibly crossing over into a master of its CRAFT (whether it actually reached that lofty ideal seems highly debatable, but in any case the attempt alone is worthy of some respect imho).

I am just leaving this out there if anyone wants to learn more: Suikoden II - The Best RPG You Never Played.

Except those last few levels, virtually impossible on impossible mode with the free-tier heroes:-(. I tend to like the original and Frontiers much better, though ironically Origins was one of the most “balanced” of them all, and that was neat to experience as well:-).

e.g. archer towers should shoot singly, fast, and at high range, while barracks hold the line and are focused more on defense, right? Nope, the former do AoE magic bombs instead, while the latter shoots arrows into the sky. And artillery should focus on offense and hit AoE in as wide an area as possible, right? Nope, there are tanky bears and the shots hit only a narrow space. I’m cherry-picking these examples, but you get the idea - every tower does stuff that overlaps with what you would think other tower types might do instead, which makes for some fun thinking to deal with the foes.:-D

I absolutely loved it. I wanted to try each of the Dragon Quest series and started from the 1st (single-player), then 2nd (three dedicated characters), and 3rd (party-based with classes), and watched like the development of how they handled keys (single-usage & type, up to dedicated & multiple types), and inventory slots (to shift something you have to give it to someone else, or else everything below it to someone else and then back again), and so on. 4 was the culmination peak of it all before moving to a different console iirc in 5, with such an enormous storyline moving over several chapters each with entirely different characters, until they start merging later on. The auto-battle feature was truly horrific and you may want to read a guide or else you can get stuck in the final battle, like I am talking full-on idiocy i.e. casting insta-death spells at the final boss, entirely uselessly. For someone who likes grinding and story though - and why would you play an “older” JRPG like that if you do not!?:-P - it is a fantastic game. Poor graphics, especially by today’s standards, but a fascinating into the past when it must have all been so “new”. On the other hand, everything I am saying here is in regards to the NES game, so if you are playing a re-release somewhere, a lot of that could have been improved.

If not, other alternatives to get a feel for JRPGs without needing to grind as much are Chrono Trigger (very short game, heavy story, very easy progression that makes grinding entirely optional, one of if not THE best game of all time in fact! bad gfx but think of it as a “choice” as in comic book style and it makes it more bearable, plus it’s even true b/c they were really bad even for its day), or Dragon Warrior/Quest 7. Another thought that does require a bit of grinding but is still old are the Lufia series.

"They" are us. As we change things, they get changed:-). Slowly but surely… it's happening!

"Alpha" males - ftfy:-P

Plus the second graph shows the average number of instances went down compared to yesterday, which was itself down further from the day before.

This “wave” is looking mighty sus.

https://kbin.social/m/anothereden - a JRPG nostalgia gacha game