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Natural Inspiration
  • I’m from Vesterålen in Northern Norway and this is giving me huge home vibes.

  • Mom has a Bachelor of Facebook.
  • ‘Collectivizing power from the wealthy’ also known as… democracy? Is the anti-communist just saying the quiet part out loud here?

  • Avengers: Doomsday, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom. May 2026.
  • Sure, and that will be great I’m sure, but an evil version of a character we’ve just been introduced to won’t hit the same.

  • what is with child names like Aiden, Braiden etc?
  • So I’m guessing it’s a combination of dun/den/tun etc being a common suffix in a lot of historical languages, and ‘ei’ being an extremely common diphthong worldwide just… leading to a lot of similar-sounding names that also converge in spelling in modern English?

  • Avengers: Doomsday, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom. May 2026.
  • MCU doesn’t really have a ‘proper’ Reed Richards, so the alternate universe Evil Reed from Secret Wars couldn’t work that way. The only brains of the MCU that could fill that role in that plot would be either Stark or Bannon, and the latter is a) still alive and b) already his own foil and his genius isn’t really played in the same way anyway. B-list alternative would be Hank Pym but he’s not been central to the MCU in anything like the same way as the other two.

    Honestly I think it might work pretty well story-wise. Though actual reason is just… well, money. And the course correction aspect previously mentioned in these comments.

  • Strawberry Music Player 1.1 released!
  • I’m sorry, but ‘crash when pressing Ctrl+C’ is a hilarious bug.

  • Tech Bros Invented Trains And It Broke Me - YouTube
  • AoE2 soundtrack is a timeless masterpiece. Still have the CD from the Collectors Edition somewhere.

  • Long Covid teachers join forces to sue ministers
  • At the same time, when you are repeatedly exposed to the single most contagion-ridden work environment in the country outside of actual medical facilities, and you can point at stats like 56% increase in sickness rates, you would have to be actively dry humping the letter of the law to not just go ‘well… yeah that’s fair’.

  • Tokyo District Court Rules AI Cannot Be Issued Patents; Law Recognizes Only ‘Natural Persons’ as Inventors
  • Would be cool if they did constitute prior art, though. That would leave them in the public domain by default, as far as I can see.

  • The US has so much space
  • You can do that and still not get all the way through Nordland county (!) in Norway 🤷

  • Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place?
  • I live in the UK, but am from Norway. I know a few librarians though, and I know that community libraries are usually (or at least often) interested in projects that can connect their communities and help them with outreach. Something like this certainly could do that, and with libraries existing in most communities there is a built in network for broader proliferation there.

    I’m also just very keen on the idea of libraries having a central role to play in the future of the broader fediverse ecosystem.

    Edit: It may be key to pitch this to them not as a platform, but as a decentralised community network.

  • Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place?
  • Loving this concept. May I make a suggestion? Show this to and discuss this with your local library. That strikes me as a good potential partner, and a model that can be replicated in most places to potentially help with everything from hosting to community resources access.

  • You can't sue us for making games 'too entertaining,' say major game developers in response to addiction lawsuits
  • Engagement is merely the ability to, or the degree to which you are able to, maintain interaction with something (a system, a game, a fidget toy, whatever) over time. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment, although you can use entertainment as a means of achieving or increasing engagement. However, entertainment is hard. People are entertained by different things to different degrees, and respond to their entertainment in different ways. Engagement on the other hand is a fairly simple behavioural matter and that's a whole field of science (which is mostly bollocks, to be fair, but its lessons can be very effective when applied at scale).

    Source: I used to be a behavioural engineer, specifically a gamification specialist. Engagement was the oil I was employed to extract, and entertainment the excuse my field used to pretend what we were (and still are) doing isn't just social manipulation at scale.

  • You can't sue us for making games 'too entertaining,' say major game developers in response to addiction lawsuits
  • I really, really need people to grok the distinction between engagement and entertainment.

  • A post may receive a hundred replies and host a fat and exciting conversation tree, but if one moderator doesn't like it then it may be locked or deleted. Is that immoral?
  • Gonna ignore all context for the purposes of answering / contributing to a discussion of a kinda valid underlying question:

    There is a disconnect between moderation and membership in an ostensibly democratic social media structure. How could that gap be bridged?

    The way I see it, this is basically the representation vs delegation debate, though here it is arguable whether there is even representation. From this perspective, you can draw on a couple of hundred years of theory and practice to arrive at potential structures.

    For example, you could have a system where members of a community mark themselves as willing to moderate it, and all members select a willing delegate essentially their ‘moderating power’ to. Mods are then selected by number of delegations, which would be a fluid process because users can redistribute their ‘votes’ at any time. This would make mods immediately answerable to the members.

    To make the system less vulnerable to hijacking you would probably need some kind of delay in there so that you wouldn’t suddenly get a mass influx of new users delegating to the same mods to take over the community, and there would likely need to be other measures in place as well. But it would certainly be a neat experiment!

    (Just to note, I am not saying the current moderation model is necessarily bad, just figured it would be interesting to consider alternative approaches and have a look at what possible problems there might be in both the current model and any such alternatives.)

  • Dead Space 2, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Battlefield 1943 and Crysis 3 will have their multiplayer shut down on December 8th
  • Removal of dedicated server functionality in favour of matchmaking was always going to be a horrible, horrible idea. And this is honestly the least of its negative consequences. Even before that there was the requirement of multiplayer servers to be set up through 'official channels' of various sorts, which has this same problem because those are still platforms with maintenance costs that companies will eventually cut.

    It's the same platforms vs protocols issue that the fediverse is addressing, just in a different sphere of the internet.

  • TIL The Goodhart's Law: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
  • It's pretty well established academically that basically the only way KPIs can actually work toward their intended purpose is if they are changed often and determined by the people doing the work that is ultimately measured. Ongoing measurements should only ever be used as indicators - hence the term *key performance indicators_ - and should never be used as targets. What that means in practice is that you should generally ignore all the individual metrics, and look across all of them instead to see if you can spot trends and anomalies, then investigate these qualitatively with the workers who ultimately produce those data to figure out what is happening and if any intervention is necessary.

    The problem is that the higher up you get in the hierarchy, the less of that kind of work there is to do and you end up chasing the people below you for nice numbers to plot into your presentations to make it look like there's a point to your job's existence.

  • TIL The Goodhart's Law: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
  • Alternative (and generally easier to understand) formulation: Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

    See: grades, GDP, workplace metrics...

  • language hot take rule
  • People huffing and puffing about other people not using words the way they expect: "God this wind is terrible, we need to abolish wind or at least make it blow in a different direction"

  • Baldur's Gate 3: Act 3 Bugs and Missing Content Becoming a Problem as More Players Near End
  • Honestly, the game is amazing 95% of the time. But Act 3 feels a bit too packed and a bit rushed at the same time. I’ve not been able to complete it because the game consistently crashes for me at a particular point on what amounts to ‘the final run’.

    The fact that instead of just leaving the gsme until patched I instead chose to start over with a second character says something about how good the game is otherwise.

  • BJHanssen BJHanssen @lemmy.world
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