Amarok's recent activity
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Comment on Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year in ~enviro
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Comment on Choosing a TTRPG system in ~games.tabletop
Amarok (edited )Link ParentPathfinder 2 had two goals, far as I remember. The first was to bug fix the D&D system they inherited, and they knocked that one out of the park. The other was to publish fewer and better books so...Pathfinder 2 had two goals, far as I remember. The first was to bug fix the D&D system they inherited, and they knocked that one out of the park. The other was to publish fewer and better books so well play-tested, so full of options and streamlined content, that people would pay for them even though they were free. I'd say they managed that as well.
It's not really that D&D itself is bad, it's that WOTC manages it terribly, injects politics into it, attacks their online and streaming community, and lately has been trying to pull the entire tabletop world into the virtual space, which in my book is a cardinal sin. They are doing the same things that companies like Unity, Ubisoft, Adobe, Sony, and so many others have gotten instant vicious karma for doing. I refuse to trust a management team that makes decisions that bad no matter how many times they apologize, especially when there are better options on the table. That's my rant for today. :P
There's also Nimble's combat hacks which make entire combats take about five minutes, since the attack and damage rolls are combined into one roll and the weapon types matter even more. It's compatible with anything D20. If OP wants something really simple, combat doesn't get easier or faster than this. Simple solution, just halve the amount of dice hitting the table - wonder why nobody ever thought of that before now? :)
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Comment on Choosing a TTRPG system in ~games.tabletop
Amarok (edited )Link ParentNot really, in fact I'd say it's about the same from a crunch perspective. Going through a pile of fluffy WOTC books, beta classes, and unearthed arcana errata is more complicated than just having...Not really, in fact I'd say it's about the same from a crunch perspective. Going through a pile of fluffy WOTC books, beta classes, and unearthed arcana errata is more complicated than just having a couple massive pathfinder tomes where everything is well indexed and was put together smartly from the start. WOTC does too much shovelware to line their pockets.
Skills, feats, abilities, races, etc are all carbon copies of D&D. The system is more versatile, less rigid, and has a pile of good bug fixes for a lot of D&D's core problems and failings. You can actually rely on challenge ratings in Pathfinder, and they have literally never worked in any version of D&D for example. Combat is more streamlined, hit points and death situations are handled better, action economy is much simpler, and character classes are about as well balanced as I've ever seen in any TTRPG. PF2 even managed to keep casters and melee and rogues well balanced from levels one to twenty, something else no version of D&D ever did.
Golarion is a very solid campaign setting too, big world, tons of interesting adventure hooks. The systems are close enough that a moment's head calculation can convert from any version of D&D or other D20-based games into Pathfinder, it's built for that. Simple thing to import content from other games.
I'll also add that anyone familiar enough with D&D to make a new character will find that even easier in Pathfinder, since they've dispensed with rolling dice for ability scores. It's a hard point build system that's very easy to understand, so there won't be any broken characters due to poor rolls or bad choices in class/archetype combinations. In PF2 everything (and I mean everything) is like a Feat in D&D. You can pick ones outside of your class as well, which makes for a much better option than D&D's messy multi-classing system.
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Comment on Monophonics - Sage Motel (2022) in ~music
Amarok LinkThe finest in modern psychedelic soul, far as I can find. This band came out of a time machine. Also here is the song.link for the album on other platforms.The finest in modern psychedelic soul, far as I can find. This band came out of a time machine.
Also here is the song.link for the album on other platforms.
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Monophonics - Sage Motel (2022)
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Comment on Kris Kristofferson, revered songwriter who transcended genre, dead at 88 in ~music
Amarok Link ParentHe was the lead actor in one of my fav old school 80s scifi movies: MillenniumHe was the lead actor in one of my fav old school 80s scifi movies: Millennium
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Comment on Choosing a TTRPG system in ~games.tabletop
Amarok Link ParentI completely agree, with one massive caveat. I'd strongly suggest Pathfinder 2 instead. WOTC is dead, mostly thanks to Hasbro mismanagement and WOTC being run by people who hate tabletop gamers....I completely agree, with one massive caveat. I'd strongly suggest Pathfinder 2 instead. WOTC is dead, mostly thanks to Hasbro mismanagement and WOTC being run by people who hate tabletop gamers.
PF2 is D&D, except that Pathfinder books give you vastly more bang for the buck. In fact you don't even have to buy the books because unlike WOTC, Paizo maintains a very friendly open-source relationship with their community. One Pathfinder book has more than any 3-4 modern WOTC releases in it. They don't even publish one until it's several hundred pages, built like a brick with excellent toughness. I consider WOTC products to be weak fluff by comparison.
Your biggest problem will be finding a place that has PF2 books in stock, since they can't keep them on shelves due to the demand (for over a year now).
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Comment on YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally in ~tech
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Comment on YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally in ~tech
Amarok Link ParentThat's kinda playing the game their way, though. I'd go a lot bigger - the libraries, at least in the usa, are a critical social infrastructure. They are intended to be the one place a kid with...That's kinda playing the game their way, though.
I'd go a lot bigger - the libraries, at least in the usa, are a critical social infrastructure. They are intended to be the one place a kid with just a nickle in his pocket (and everyone else) can go to get free access to the world's knowledge, and at least in the usa, that right is considered with real gravity. Free brain upgrades, this is the building where you can get as much of that as you can handle... every day. In fact they are often staffed by walking, talking encyclopedias called librarians who put internet search engines and most teachers to shame.
They are also themselves upgrading away from this 'cathedral full of books' (which take too much space to store and cost too much money to care for) into something a lot more like a cross between college learning centers and computer gaming halls. This is a giant lounge full of information and cozy chairs, desks, workstations, reading nooks, music listening booths, and in some places they aren't shy about integrating restaurants, gyms, coffee shops, bookstores, and public houses in the mix, complete with alcohol. This is a social space for curious people. The only one protected by law.
Going bigger is fun. You build them their own digital network, ultra-high bandwidth, and hey, they can rent rack space for local businesses as well as any other data center. Maybe everyone has the right to a unix shell account and an email address at their local branch there too.
You invest some real money into bringing one of the many promising holostorage technologies to fruition - they already have superman memory crystal at the Library of Congress. A government funded research sprint here on behalf of the us library system is something I won't mind supporting.
Now you can store blocks or discs of quartz like you used to store tapes in the olden days of the data center. Racks and racks of yottabytes... and something's different. These ones don't wear out (until after earth does), don't mind the heat and the cold so much. In fact the machines moving them around from rack to rack to pipe things upstairs and load media into the local hot cache mind a lot more than the discs do. This is what it would take to honestly store that much of humanity's data. We're already at (est) sixty zettabytes and that's too big for this system. But we're just concentrating on the long term archival of important shit (not your youtube channel).
The idea of building out these systems is probably less daunting than figuring out how to index it all, coordinate the archival and distribution of new media, and keep the entire network running so that it's highly distributed, with all of the data at multiple nodes. This is a spicy tech challenge. Dewey decimal has to get digital.
These discs are the data backup, so that after the world ends the next wave won't have to start from scratch again. This much data on media this strong will outlast fires, floods, solar flares, and nukes. That's something our current media cannot even pretend to do. Everything else is toast in fifty years maximum, but locking holograms into quartz crystals solves that problem.
Then there's the downstream effects of boosting this tech for libraries and commercial data centers - it'll seep into the public sphere. You can leave a petabyte time capsule anywhere you like. It should make hard drives (and rare earth magnets) a lot less necessary, they aren't ideal for this job, and the current tapes are literal toxic waste. It'd help in many ways.
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Comment on YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally in ~tech
Amarok Link ParentI am absolutely certain that Louis would... maximize the drama.I am absolutely certain that Louis would... maximize the drama.
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Comment on YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally in ~tech
Amarok Link ParentThe entire process wouldn't even take you one hour on an idle tuesday, for about $50 and precisely zero risks to any device as it never changes them at all. You plug it into the tv like it's a blu...The entire process wouldn't even take you one hour on an idle tuesday, for about $50 and precisely zero risks to any device as it never changes them at all. You plug it into the tv like it's a blu ray player or game console, you turn it on, you switch the tv input to it, join it to your wifi like anything else, let it update while you get coffee. Then you install one app from an app store over your wifi, open the app, and use it to open an .apk file you downloaded on your computer and put on a USB stick or just downloaded to the device directly. That installs the better youtube client. This is as simple as a bypass gets, since after that it self-updates. This works on all tvs, all makes, all models, all years.
If something that simple is too much work to avoid the ads (and I mean all of them, including sponsors, to the millisecond, forever) then that means the ads aren't enough of a problem for you personally that you'd want to put in one hour of activity to avoid them. That's the point where I stop taking the complaints seriously - an hour is nothing. This isn't setting up a home four zone firewall or anything remotely technical like pi holes and other enthusiast toys. It's just plugging a better brain (full android where you actually have administrator privs on the hardware you paid for) into the tv and using that device for your viewing.
Google is still creeping on your data in this scenario, so it's not perfect, but using that better youtube client will put a dent in that if you like. It does everything incognito, which is kinda de-referencing google's index and making your activity harder to see as a 'thing' rather than random noise in their collection tools.
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Comment on YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally in ~tech
Amarok Link ParentAha, found it! Had to go digging through a watch history export for that one. I'd enjoy them while it lasts because I suspect Rossman's channel is going to get nuked at some point. He is a...Aha, found it!
Had to go digging through a watch history export for that one. I'd enjoy them while it lasts because I suspect Rossman's channel is going to get nuked at some point. He is a gargantuan pain in their ass and they delete channels for far less egregious offenses.
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Comment on YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally in ~tech
Amarok (edited )Link ParentGrayjay is the new kid on the block, and what a powerhouse for an app so fresh. It's aggressively open source, and it's created by and backed up by FUTO (aka Fuck Up Tech Oligopoly) which is about...Grayjay is the new kid on the block, and what a powerhouse for an app so fresh. It's aggressively open source, and it's created by and backed up by FUTO (aka Fuck Up Tech Oligopoly) which is about as close as you'll ever see to a project that matches Tildes' own philosophy. It's backed by Eron Wolf's billions. He seems pretty generous about sharing the wealth.
Imagine that Three Cheers for Tildes could support any/thousands of websites running Tildes code, and swizzle the content from all of them together for you on your own terms regardless of what any one node wanted to impose on you. That gives you an idea what Grayjay does for sites like Youtube, Twitch, Rumble, Patreon, etc - it turns them all into nothing more than content nodes at your disposal, denying them their advertising and privacy violations. It does still support you paying the content creators, though - just cutting out the pesky middlemen. With Grayjay you can follow any creator across any platform, and probably won't even notice if one of their channels or videos gets taken down as long as it's on another one.
It's a ballsy project. I'd normally roll my eyes at something like this, but frankly, their code slaps. I sense a competent tech team. They already kicked Youtube's ass too - they have the legal resources. Youtube hates them so much that any mention of Grayjay's name on any video will immediately trigger a copyright strike on that content. You cannot even talk about it without being banned.
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Comment on YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally in ~tech
Amarok Link ParentRoku devices are notoriously unmoddable. They don't want you using anything third party. In this case your best bet is to buy something simple like an Amazon FireTV Stick or any of the...Roku devices are notoriously unmoddable. They don't want you using anything third party.
In this case your best bet is to buy something simple like an Amazon FireTV Stick or any of the alternatives for about fifty bucks. Those devices run proper Android, and so you can install SmartTube on them, which solves any advertisement problems.
For all the garbage operating systems being loaded on newer televisions, they all have HDMI input ports, and so you can plug something you control into that port to bypass the manufacturer's bullshit.
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Comment on YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally in ~tech
Amarok Link ParentIf I had my choice, every local library worldwide would have a data center under it and a digital archived copy of every single work in history. Break out the holostorage. If it's got a copyright,...- Exemplary
If I had my choice, every local library worldwide would have a data center under it and a digital archived copy of every single work in history. Break out the holostorage. If it's got a copyright, it's in the library, on release day, no exceptions. That is where the band's uploads would go (for free) to be replicated out to every other library, and corporations wouldn't even be involved in this mess.
As for accessing this data... that's not online. You have to physically go to the library or at least close enough to get their local wifi - and the street of shops that would arise around that would be something to see. Imagine putting the smart people of the world who want to learn something in close proximity to each other in that environment. Maybe even let schools and college campuses get in on this too.
This assumption that corporations have rights over this data is probably my largest pet peeve here. There are better ways to manage an information society. Youtube's business model is to lock up the world's art behind an advertisement-ridden paywall so their execs can pick up another private jet. It's fundamentally a sick, twisted mentality when looked at this way. They are middle men, extorting a tax, and they always need a little more next quarter.
I'm sure we can find better ways to get this done, and that'll get easier as storage and bandwidth continue to get better and cheaper. Pretty soon that library fits in your pocket.
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Comment on YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally in ~tech
Amarok Link ParentThe vast majority, even me, wouldn't mind a pair of skippable ads over thirty minutes of video. If it worked like that, no one would even bother to take the time to create the apps that block the...The vast majority, even me, wouldn't mind a pair of skippable ads over thirty minutes of video. If it worked like that, no one would even bother to take the time to create the apps that block the advertisements.
Even cable television was originally advertisement-free, that was the entire point of paying for television. Fast forward seventy years and we still pay for it, but are lucky to find ten minutes of content for every thirty minutes of advertisements. Go ahead and compare average running times on television shows from 1950-2020 and watch that inexorable decline in episode run time. Watch the credits speed up, watch the title segments get shorter, watch the commercial break points in the episodes become more and more frequent. Greed gets these poor saps every. single. time.
Now I get to sit back and watch Alphabet make all the same mistakes thinking they are smarter than all the saps who fell into this trap before. I swear it never gets old, and never fails to make me laugh. It's good news, it means youtube is going to be toast, and we'll get some better platforms... at least until their owners get greedy and the cycle starts again.
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Comment on YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally in ~tech
Amarok Link ParentI've watched piracy reign undefeated for about fifty years now. I think Alphabet is the one making the silly assumptions. The only thing they can do is eventually make their service so bad that no...I've watched piracy reign undefeated for about fifty years now. I think Alphabet is the one making the silly assumptions. The only thing they can do is eventually make their service so bad that no one will use it any longer, and that is always how this story ends... more times than I can count.
Only Valve ever scored a draw, because they realized that convenience is the only way to beat piracy, and they don't have to explain it to a board of vapid vulture capitalists who have no understanding of technology.
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Comment on YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally in ~tech
Amarok Link ParentMy favorite three apps. ;) On android television sets, you want the beta version of SmartTube Next. On android mobile, you want Grayjay. For the command line, you want yt-dlp. All of these work...My favorite three apps. ;)
On android television sets, you want the beta version of SmartTube Next.
On android mobile, you want Grayjay.
For the command line, you want yt-dlp.
All of these work far better than any of the official apps ever did, in my experience.
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Comment on YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally in ~tech
Amarok Link ParentI assume they are, but I rarely engage with youtube from a browser or their app. I use third party apps that keep track of everything without my needing an account. These apps strip out all ads...I assume they are, but I rarely engage with youtube from a browser or their app. I use third party apps that keep track of everything without my needing an account. These apps strip out all ads completely, most I ever see is a half-second delay in the video stream when they eat up and edit out an ad that was embedded in it.
When they first started testing this stuff, for about one weekend, those apps were a bit more wobbly than normal. I might have to restart a video, for example. After that weekend and a flurry of updates, there was no evidence anything had changed. I can and do watch whatever I like (and bypass age-gating) without ads or messages or other irritations. Even the new ads that are injected dynamically into the stream are skipped instantly.
Frankly, the only thing Youtube can possibly do here to 'win' this is to require an account to view their service. Then they can control and punish accounts that don't use their tools or run programs they don't approve of. Until they are willing to do this, nothing changes. If they were to do this, I expect they'd drop double digit percentages of their total traffic, damaging the value to advertisers in the process. Bit of a catch-22 for them.
I look forward to seeing them flail around ineffectively for a few more years over this before giving up. The winning move was to just consider it 'breakage' and never bother doing anything about the ads being skipped in the first place. So far every nickle of developer time and server infrastructure they've invested has been a waste of their money.
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Comment on English still rules the world, but that’s not necessarily OK. Is it time to curb its power? in ~humanities.languages
Amarok LinkEnglish is dominant for two simple reasons. Every time it encounters another language, it smiles, walks them down an alley, knocks them out with a brickbat, then steals all of their words for...English is dominant for two simple reasons. Every time it encounters another language, it smiles, walks them down an alley, knocks them out with a brickbat, then steals all of their words for itself. Seriously, compare the thickness of an English dictionary to other languages, and count how many of them you'd have to stack on top of each other just to reach the same height. Pretty sure the only real competition it has in that department (pushing past 1.5 million words) is with Korean and Tamil, much older and more storied languages who have done their own share of stealing.
The other reason is that business dealings and legal contracts tend to happen in English because of the specificity it supports - particularly at the level of large corporations and governments. It's become the de-facto language of trade, and that's a lot of inertia. If you aren't dealing in English, you instantly and severely limit your options for who you can do business with.
There's no reason to bother replacing it. In fact with AI enabled translations already here, it seems even more pointless. The only case I've ever heard for replacing English (and all of the rest of them) comes from the concept of linguistic relativity which I wouldn't call hard science. Even if it's right, that doesn't give us any insight on what to replace the languages with. :P
It really confuses me as well. Aerosols are a terribly half-baked solution even under the best possible scientific interpretations of what's possible. It's a non-starter.
The only geoengineering solution I've ever seen that's scientifically plausible is a swarm of solar reflectors and/or collectors at L1 between the Earth and Sol. It'll take a Texas-sized total surface area, likely in the form of a gargantuan drone swarm with paper-thin sails. They can be launched in waves over time, superior in every way to the impractical solar mirror plans common to older L1 solutions. That just got easier thanks to SpaceX's latest advancements.
Whatever is up there had better be able to collect solar energy and use it to maintain a stable orbit or it will not remain in position very long, that's the hardest part. Once deployed this gets us the ability to block up to 2% of total solar radiation, and that's enough to reverse climate change over time. Unlike the aerosols, this solution can be adjusted in real time, just pull in the sails and let the light back through.
It's just a couple trillion bucks in space technology, may as well pair it with orbital manufacturing while we're at it and get more bang for the effort. Figure out a way to beam it around without creating a death laser and we can grab a couple terawatts of extra power per year that will eventually pay for the whole smash. No way in hell that private industry provides this solution, though. It'd take a Manhattan Project to get there with any sort of speed, otherwise this is tech for 200 years in the future.
It's a lot cheaper than paying for all the climate-induced damage in the long run, so one could make the case that there are no valid reasons not to do it.