onceuponaban's recent activity
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Comment on Have you ever witnessed the Butterfly Effect? in ~life
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Comment on Do you have a game that you love from “before your time?” in ~games
onceuponaban (edited )LinkBit of a boring answer on my end as "before my time" includes the first half of the 2000s, which puts the entire Playstation 1 library on the table and a significant part of the Playstation 2...Bit of a boring answer on my end as "before my time" includes the first half of the 2000s, which puts the entire Playstation 1 library on the table and a significant part of the Playstation 2 library, alongside any handheld from the same timeframe (and of course PC games, though I don't actually have many examples of very old games I specifically play on PC in mind, at least not ones I played recently). In fact, since I tended to lag behind quite a bit regarding game releases, plenty of the games I did play regularly would qualify. There are however outliers that come to mind:
- The Generation 1 to 3 Pokémon games
The oldest memories I can recall of playing video games in general involved the Gen 1 Pokémon games on Gameboy Color which set the stage for a long running interest in the franchise. While I no longer keep up with the modern games, I do still have a soft spot for the series. I'd also fold them together with the Gen 1 remakes and Gen 3 games on the GBA, which I also played a ton... but which were also old enough that by the time I played them I was doing it on a Nintendo DS (in fact, I never actually owned a GBA in the first place, skipping straight from the Gameboy Color to the Nintendo DS).
- Metal Gear Solid 2
While significantly newer than the above (at least regarding gen 1), it still came out way before I was young enough to play video games but it was still one I enjoyed to the point of clearing it multiple times when I did get around to playing it, which is something I've rarely done for any narrative-heavy game, recent or otherwise.
- The PS1 Gran Turismo games
Racing games were among my favorite genres as a child (and I still have an interest in them), but the Gran Turismo series was what kickstarted it. I started with Gran Turismo 4 (which I wouldn't actually consider old enough to qualify as "before my time") but I also looked back to both of the PS1 games afterward which are both pretty strong entries in their own right and I ended up clocking quite a few dozens of hours in both GT and GT2. The GT games are among my favorite overall and Moon Over The Castle registers as the anthem of car racing in my mind to this day.
Honorable mention goes to the Destruction Derby 1 and 2 games, also on PS1. While I don't think they stood the test of time quite as well as the older GT games might have, I did also play them way past their prime and I suspect they were the catalyst for me eventually getting both BeamNG.drive and Wreckfest...
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Comment on Playing DOS and Windows 98 games on a retro PC (real hardware) in ~games
onceuponaban Link ParentIt should be noted that the video in question is 5 years old, which in the ReactOS project's time frame might as well be the Neolithic. I would probably still rely more on the "intended" software...It should be noted that the video in question is 5 years old, which in the ReactOS project's time frame might as well be the Neolithic. I would probably still rely more on the "intended" software of the era than ReactOS for this specific use-case (...or any, really, ReactOS is still very much experimental), but it's definitely better now than back then.
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Comment on Looking for low-precision, mouse-only Steam game recommendations in ~games
onceuponaban LinkIf you haven't already played through it, the Henry Stickmin Collection are nice little choose-your-own-path games that shouldn't be hurt by a touch-screen only control scheme.If you haven't already played through it, the Henry Stickmin Collection are nice little choose-your-own-path games that shouldn't be hurt by a touch-screen only control scheme.
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Comment on Looking for low-precision, mouse-only Steam game recommendations in ~games
onceuponaban (edited )Link ParentJust chiming in to further support the claim that pausing is vital to the game's core gameplay loop. While you could play the game fully in real time, "No-pause" is understood by the community to...Just chiming in to further support the claim that pausing is vital to the game's core gameplay loop. While you could play the game fully in real time, "No-pause" is understood by the community to be an extremely difficult self-imposed challenge. Playing on easy but without pause is undeniably much, much harder than playing on hard with pause, and this is a game where "easy" mode is already pretty hard. That being said, FTL has been made to work on phones through other means so I would assume using Steam Link would work fine.
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Comment on Grammar errors that actually matter, or: the thread where we all become prescriptivists in ~humanities.languages
onceuponaban Link ParentSee, that is exactly why I use the "y'all" spelling, because I specifically intend to convey that I'm actually using a contraction of you and all. The similarity to the southern ya'll is a...Saying it’s because it’s a contraction of you and all is saying you don’t know the culture. We don’t say you, we say ya.
See, that is exactly why I use the "y'all" spelling, because I specifically intend to convey that I'm actually using a contraction of you and all. The similarity to the southern ya'll is a coincidence, I just want to bring a "true" second person plural pronoun back into English because y'all dropped the singular version and been using the plural one for everything ever since.
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Comment on Grammar errors that actually matter, or: the thread where we all become prescriptivists in ~humanities.languages
onceuponaban (edited )Link ParentWhile I agree with your overall point; people usually don't think of non-literal use of "literally" as "I'm including the meaning of the word figuratively in how I use the word literally"...While I agree with your overall point; people usually don't think of non-literal use of "literally" as "I'm including the meaning of the word figuratively in how I use the word literally" similarly to how someone saying "Yeah, right." to voice disagreement is just using sarcasm, not redefining "right" as meaning "wrong". Saying "literally" is being used to mean "figuratively" was a mental shortcut I failed to elaborate on, fair enough. That being said:
To summarize by way of example: Nobody has ever said "I am figuratively going to kill you if you don't stop talking about your new boyfriend."
Counterexample: myself. As a direct result of noticing this tendency, I have deliberately started using "figuratively" (or "figurative" in the specific linked example) whenever I would have been tempted to use "literally" for emphasis, and I have noticed other instances of people doing the same (I also tried "proverbially" before realizing that wouldn't match the meaning of the word except in specific cases). This is uncommon (for now?), but this does happen. As for why I do this, I figured highlighting a word that is usually only used implicitly would promote using it for emphasis instead of "literally" down the line, which would help shifting the understanding of "literally" back to what I consider to be its actual intended use.
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Comment on Grammar errors that actually matter, or: the thread where we all become prescriptivists in ~humanities.languages
onceuponaban Link ParentYeah, "word" in this context is more of a generalization of the concept of "some amount of bits a computer is capable of treating as a discrete unit" than a specific case (...until it's not), I...Yeah, "word" in this context is more of a generalization of the concept of "some amount of bits a computer is capable of treating as a discrete unit" than a specific case (...until it's not), I mostly wanted an excuse to write "word" thrice in quick succession.
Fun fact: in French, while the overwhelming influence of the English language in computer science means people will still understand you if you say "byte" (though you would need to stick to the English pronunciation as French has also adopted bit as-is and you would end up pronouncing it the same way), the standardization of the 8-bit byte led to its use quickly falling out of favor (probably because of the pronunciation issue I mentioned) and being replaced with, you guessed it, octet, alongside a lowercase o as a matching unit symbol. Alternatively, "multiplet" apparently exists as a more direct translation of the generic byte, but to be honest the first and so far only time I saw that word was 5 minutes ago before writing this while checking if one did exist.
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Grammar errors that actually matter, or: the thread where we all become prescriptivists
This subject is a dead horse on most social media platforms (I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of similar threads on /r/askreddit alone, for one), but I didn't find a thread about it...
This subject is a dead horse on most social media platforms (I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of similar threads on /r/askreddit alone, for one), but I didn't find a thread about it specifically on Tildes from a cursory search (though I did find more specific threads about some aspects of it like this one as well as the broader prescriptivism vs descriptivism subject here and even the mirror opposite of what this thread is about, that is deliberately using non-standard language in a constructive manner) and I think that it might spark worthwhile discussion.
By and large, I agree that language should be seen from a descriptive point of view, meaning a language's rules are defined by how people speak it, not the other way around. As the need to communicate evolves, so does any given living language and a rigidly enforced ruleset would get in the way of this process. By opposition, the prescriptive approach views a language's rules as defining a "correct" way (making any other way incorrect) of speaking the language to be enforced accordingly. Following either approach to its respective logical extreme would be a dead-end but I do think the most reasonably balanced way to approach this tends a lot more toward descriptivism than prescriptivism.
While agreed-upon rules are still definitely useful to establish a language's identity and defining a standard helps both with learning the language and structuring how the language should evolve (and when learning it's probably best to operate by the book at first, literally or otherwise, until you're familiar with the language enough to reliably tell when bending the rules is advantageous), getting yourself understood is much more important than strictly "following the rules", and that's before considering the cases where the rules themselves are ambiguous, or their validity is a matter of debate, which itself brings up the much more controversial issue of what constitutes an authoritative source for a language's grammar in the first place. In practice, even if there is a consensus on something being a grammar error, most are benign enough to not risk the meaning of the sentence being misinterpreted anyway. And of course, there's the issue of people ostensibly wanting to be helpful using "correcting someone's grammar" as an excuse for gatekeeping, toxic behavior or derailing conversations into a pointless grammar debate.
For example, while my latent pedantry constantly incites nitpicking on those smaller mistakes, it's obvious that someone using "Your welcome" instead of you're is acknowledging gratitude and no one would argue in good faith that this could be misinterpreted as referring to an abstract hospitality belonging to the person they're addressing. Similarly, using "irregardless" (which presumably arose as a contraction of irrespective and regardless) might be argued as meaning the opposite of "regardless" since ir- is a negation prefix, making using that word a mistake due to the ambiguity. In practice, interpreting it that way in any sentence where the word actually appears would be very unintuitive so the ambiguity doesn't actually manifest... Though the argument I see much more often against its use is that irregardless is "a made-up word" and therefore incorrect (as opposed to all the real words which are, what, woven into the very fabric of the universe?), which is silly. I personally don't use this word, but I wouldn't bat an eye if I saw it becoming normalized either.
That being said, I believe there is such a thing as incorrect use of language that actually hampers communication and therefore should be discouraged, some of which I'll give examples below. I... got wildly carried away while writing it so I made it an optional collapsible box.
Warning: long
Using "literally" to mean "figuratively"
Obligatory relevant xkcd. While I understand the argument of validating this use as a natural extension of using exaggeration for emphasis (and it's intuitive enough that I sometimes catch myself doing it), I do think the words that are supposed to mean "I am not exaggerating, using a metaphor or joking, I mean this in exactly the way I worded it" should be exempt from this. Language history is no stranger to words shifting their meaning until they're the opposite of their former meaning, and there are plenty of situations where words simultaneously have opposite meanings (in fact, enough of them that a term exists for this which has its own Wikipedia article) where I don't think it's much of an issue, but I do think this matters here, especially since this is happening to many similar words used for that purpose (such as "actually" and "genuinely"), not just "literally". Unambiguously clarifying that the meaning of your statement isn't figurative is something important enough that the words for it shouldn't have their meaning diluted IMHO.
bytes vs bits
More of a matter of technical standardization than pure linguistics, but two separate albeit related issues are happening here. First, a "bit" here is a unit of digital data, being either 0 or 1, whereas a "byte" is another unit usually made of eight bits. While you can define bytes following a different amount as some older and specialized machines do, in practice there is no ambiguity with 8 being the accepted norm and other words (including the word "word" itself, funnily enough) being available should the distinction matter. The bit/byte distinction is commonly understood and usually not a matter of confusion... until you start bringing up shortened unit names and disingenuous marketing. Despite the unit that the average user is most familiar with being the byte, shortened to an uppercase B as a unit symbol, while bits are in turn shortened to a lowercase b, unscrupulous advertisers will often take advantage of the fact bits are a lesser known unit while using almost the exact same symbol to refer to, say, network speeds for a broadband plan they're trying to sell using bits, not bytes, allowing them to sneak in numbers (in bits) eight times bigger than the values (in bytes) the customer would expect in the unit they are more accustomed to.
Using SI prefixes in place of equivalent binary prefixes
The second part (and with it another relevant xkcd) is the distinction between decimal SI prefixes and the IEC binary prefixes, or lack thereof in common usage. For context, a convenient coincidence for computer science is that the value of 1000x and 210x (equal to 1024x) are similar enough for a low enough value of x to map binary prefixes according to the usual SI metric prefixes (so while 1kg is a kilogram equaling 1000 grams, 1KiB is one kibibyte equaling 1024 bytes, 1MiB is a mebibyte equaling 1024 kibibytes, and so on) and using them to refer to data sizes, which is a lot more convenient to deal with when everything related to computing is binary rather than decimal. This also led before the adoption of those binary prefixes to the practice of "incorrectly" using the SI decimal prefixes' names and symbols when referring to binary data sizes. I'm perfectly fine with this in informal contexts precisely because it's a convenient shortcut and the inaccuracy usually doesn't matter, but this also means a company can pretend, say, a storage device they're selling has a higher capacity than it really does by mixing up the units to their advantage. Worse, a company that does want to convey the capacity of their devices to the user in good faith has another issue: MacOS defaults to computing sizes displayed to the user using the decimal prefixes (1MB = 1000kB = 1 million bytes), while Linux generally defaults to the binary sizes (1MiB = 1024KiB = 10242 = 1048576 bytes).
In which I manage to blame Microsoft for a grammar error
Not much of an issue if you stick to the correct units, but given which OS I pointedly didn't mention yet, you probably realized where this is going. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, elected to show data sizes on Windows that, while computed according to binary sizes, are displayed using the decimal prefixes, leading to 1"MB" = 1024 "KB" = 1048576 bytes, but displayed in units that imply it should be 1000000 bytes. This is a holdover from the older practice of using the metric SI prefixes' names as binary prefixes when specifically referring to bytes I mentioned above, which is nowadays discouraged in favor of the international standard for binary prefixes established back in 1999... but clearly Microsoft didn't get the memo. Is it a minor problem in the grand scheme of things? Absolutely, but I consider this negligent handling of a pretty fundamental question where a clear consensus has been established given that this is coming from the company that publishes the consumer OS running on the overwhelming majority of personal computers. As someone who is familiar with computing, I understand why the mental shortcut makes sense. As a consumer, if I buy a kilogram of something, I expect to receive as close to a thousand grams as the manufacturing process reasonably allows, not consistently end up with 976.5625 grams instead of the advertised kilogram. In any other context, "it's more convenient to pretend we count in base 10 but we're actually counting in base 2 and not properly converting the numbers back, usually to the detriment of the customer" would be seen as absurd, but the IT industry apparently got away with it. By not following the internationally standardized terms in their own OS, Microsoft is perpetuating this issue which is doing us a disservice... and I'll move on to the next example before this becomes yet another computing rant in what's supposed to be part of a thread about language, and not even the programming kind.
I could/n't care less
I'm starting to see a pattern here. Another case of "saying something but actually meaning the opposite" which I think is important to be mindful of. Granted, "I couldn't care less" is a common enough stock phrase that omitting the negation usually is recognized as such and not interpreted to mean the opposite, and there are other (and probably more intuitive) ways to convey the literal meaning of "I could care less", but given that there are generally a whole lot fewer things people care about (and therefore occasions to state it) than the alternative, I think it matters more to keep a way to mean that something does actually matter to you intact than expanding the way people can say that they don't care about something by including the exact opposite. I've also seen this used in yet another way to refer something they care about to at least some degree, but still little (with the reasoning that feeling the need to state explicitly that you are able to care less implicitly states that you cared very little in the first place) which is very similar to the meaning of "I couldn't care less" but still has makes an important distinction that I think should be preserved.
Wrong homophones (or otherwise similarly sounding words) when the correct one is not obvious
Mistakes derived from those are usually not an issue since it's very easy to tell which is the correct one... until it's not. For example, "brake" vs "break" when talking about cars, "ordinance" vs "ordnance" when the topic intersects bureaucracy and the military, and "raise" vs "raze" might lead to very unfortunate misunderstandings in construction. More generally, "hear" vs "here" can quickly make the meaning of a sentence incomprehensible especially if the mixup happens in a sentence where both are used, and "than" vs "then" can radically change the meaning of the sentence. Similar sounding words can have pretty significant differences without mixing them up being necessarily obvious, such as amuse/bemuse, persecute/prosecute or prescribe/proscribe. Ironically, the common mixups that people tend to find the most annoying to see (e.g their/they're/there, to/two/too, loose/lose, affect/effect, should or could of instead of should or could have, definitely/defiantly) aren't the ones that are likely to actually introduce ambiguity (I would suspect bad faith from anyone claiming a mixup between "angel" and "angle" is actually ambiguous, with one notable exception), or, if they do, not in a way that would radically warp the sentence's meaning (inflict/afflict is a common one and the two words are similar enough that it would be difficult to notice if the "wrong" one was used... but that goes both ways: they're so similar such a mixup would most likely be of little consequence to the overall meaning)
Leaving unclear links between clauses
While the above is mostly about word (mis-)use, another big category of mistakes that gives me a headache is made up of sentences where the ambiguity comes from the structure of the sentence itself. I would include Garden-path sentences and certain cases of dangling/misplaced modifiers in this category (though not all of them as context is often enough to clear up any possible confusion). For the former, news article titles that are too clever for their own good by trying to fit as much information in as few words as possible are notable offenders. I've actually given up trying to understand a news headline for this reason at least once. For the latter, there are already many examples out there of leveraging it for comedy, so I'll use the following as a more straightforward example: in the sentence "I need to invite my best friend, the CEO and the mayor", it is unclear whether I'm referring to a single person that is my best friend, the CEO and the mayor at the same time, two people one of which is both my best friend and the CEO and the second person is the mayor, or three different people. Ambiguities like these are something I consider important to be mindful of because they can quickly result in the meaning you intended to convey being completely warped.
Which turns of phrase would you consider to be categorically incorrect?
Did I commit one in this very post?If you chose to read through the content of the collapsible box above, do you disagree with some of my examples (or the entire premise of the question in the first place)? While I'm assuming English as the default for my own answer, feel free to talk about any other language you might know (ideally with context for non-speakers of the language).Also, since I mentioned it in the post, another optional subject: which mistakes that people seem to care a lot about (and sometimes not even mistakes, given that the same treatment is occasionally given to perfectly correct turns of phrase due to misconceptions about grammar rules) do you think aren't actually important at all?
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Comment on Why blog if nobody reads it? in ~tech
onceuponaban LinkMy take on this is that I treat my blog (and its grand total of one article so far) in the most basic meaning of the term. The word originated as a contraction of web log, meaning it's a record of...My take on this is that I treat my blog (and its grand total of one article so far) in the most basic meaning of the term. The word originated as a contraction of web log, meaning it's a record of events you keep on the Internet. With me being acutely aware of my memory being seriously deficient, having somewhere I can properly structure my thoughts in writing and access them later gives it all the purpose it needs to exist as far as I'm concerned. Of course, I could have decided to keep that "log" elsewhere, as local files in my computer, written down on physical paper, or in cloud storage, but while I have no explicit desire to build up an audience (nor set up expectations of what I'd put on there and how often, which would logically follow from that) I figured having it be publicly accessible could only be beneficial. If I put it into writing, then by definition at least one person, me, wants to remember it. Maybe someone else might?
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Comment on Seeking suggestions for Windows virtual desktop (for Photoshop schoolwork) in ~comp
onceuponaban Link ParentGiven that AFAIK Photoshop should work well enough in a non-PCI passthrough VM (at least on a machine where Photoshop runs well on bare metal) and neither this nor dual booting has been deemed a...Given that AFAIK Photoshop should work well enough in a non-PCI passthrough VM (at least on a machine where Photoshop runs well on bare metal) and neither this nor dual booting has been deemed a valid option by OP, I'm assuming they don't want to be running Windows through local hardware at all, VM or otherwise. However, if I'm misreading the situation and a Windows VM with direct GPU access is acceptable, that would indeed be a possible solution.
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Comment on a/s/l? Tildes user survey question. in ~tildes
onceuponaban Link ParentThat's fair, I personally already hopelessly overshare on the Internet (in fact you could easily find out the answer in my case just by checking my Tildes profile and scrolling down enough...That's fair, I personally already hopelessly overshare on the Internet (in fact you could easily find out the answer in my case just by checking my Tildes profile and scrolling down enough comments), an A/S/L answer on an indexed section of the Internet directly pointing to my nickname would probably be unwise on my part as well. I'll leave that to whenever the next census is where I'm at least just a data point among others.
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Comment on Just pick a static site generator and start writing in ~tech
onceuponaban (edited )Link ParentMy main gripe with it is that modern web browsers are horrifyingly complex. As more features kept being bolted on what was originally a glorified document viewer over a network, they effectively...My main gripe with it is that modern web browsers are horrifyingly complex. As more features kept being bolted on what was originally a glorified document viewer over a network, they effectively became a second OS running on top of your actual OS. Meaning they also consume a ton of resources, orders of magnitude beyond what a more carefully designed native desktop application for a given specific purpose would. On my i9 powered laptop with 16GB of RAM and a competent GPU, this is fine, and I have to admit that lowering the skill floor of UI design down to "Can you write an HTML page and some CSS?" is something I'd consider a good thing with regard to democratizing programming for the general public. But this also means a perfectly serviceable email/office suite machine from, say, 2013 is now hopelessly slow the second a web browser is needed, despite the tasks you'd accomplish with that machine back in 2013 not being any more complicated than what the layman would use their computer for in 2025.
Combine that with "native" desktop applications having become separate instances each of a web browser hiding under a trenchcoat, and you get a bunch of what should still be perfectly serviceable hardware becoming borderline e-waste for no reason. That is the part I don't like about everything becoming a pseudo-web app. Compare Discord's official client to this third party client here.
I happen to own an old 2013 laptop beside my main one with a venerable dual core AMD processor of some description (and laptop-grade, at that) and a grand total of 6GB of RAM. As you can probably guess, even thinking of running the official client would make that laptop detonate. That third party client that is optimized enough to run on Windows 2000 with period accurate hardware, though? It works just fine, as any instant messaging application should. That was a solved problem back in the days of IRC, before the advent of GUIs.
This needless buildup of spec requirements for software that still accomplishes the same purpose is to me a harmful regression of our software ecosystem. Obviously I'm not advocating to go back to the pre-GUI days and dropping Discord for
irssi(and yes, I'm aware Discord isn't just for text messages), that would be silly. However, we do have the knowledge necessary to keep our modern software working on older hardware and I dislike that not nearly enough effort is being put toward this when over-consumption of our very much limited resources to continue producing said hardware is a significant concern.I do understand the value in simplifying UI development that the webdev tech stack brings and why people would consider it to be worth it despite the above, but I also think way too many people are carelessly disregarding traditional UI development methods in favor of the all-consuming Electron and co. without considering the implications of the performance tradeoff that brings.
And while I took them as my example, this isn't just about old computers. Garbage-spec overly cheap machines do still come out of factories brand new to this day (even if that part has been getting vastly better compared to the bad old days of the 2010s). These are usually bought by people who simply can't afford any better, so this trend of ignoring the resource bloat induced by putting an entire web browser into the tech stack for each application is doing them a disservice too.
Also Javascript scares me and it's gotten everywhere, please send help -
Comment on What video game mods do you play, or have played in the past? in ~games
onceuponaban (edited )Link ParentRight, in that case it was definitely a failure to communicate my intent for the thread, then, as "I also play (game here) and here are the mods I play" is exactly along the line of comments I...Right, in that case it was definitely a failure to communicate my intent for the thread, then, as "I also play (game here) and here are the mods I play" is exactly along the line of comments I intended this thread to receive. I guess it hierarchically makes it ambiguous to decide whether you should talk about the mods you play as a reply to another comment mentioning mods of the same game (if one exists) or make your own top level comment to talk about them, but in practice there are enough mods that are elaborate enough to provide completely unique experiences compared to the base game that it would make just as much sense IMHO to dedicate a top level comment solely to that one mod rather than following a stricter "top level comments bring up a specific game to talk about relevant mods, replies bring up other mods of that game they also play" logic.
Also, nothing prevents you from leaving multiple top level comments for each subject you wish to address (say, mods you like from completely different games) if you wish to make the discussion about each more granular :)
And while I outlined these situations among other as part of the thread's intended scope within the topic's text field, I presume it fell "out of focus" compared to the top level comment I also added to the thread and ended up being a lot more prominent than the thread's own main body while also being narrower in scope. I guess I could mitigate this next time around by reminding the reader of the overall thread's scope as part of the top level comment I leave as my personal answer right after posting the thread so people aren't misled into thinking that top level comment is the scope (especially since in this specific case my top level comment also ended up being voted right to the front of the comments list, making it even more prominent compared to the actual submission's own text. The eye-catching bold (OP) marker didn't do me any favor there.
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Comment on Recommend me a racing/driving game on PC in ~games
onceuponaban (edited )Link ParentRidge Racer Unbounded felt like a casting error. I like Bugbear Entertainment's games but their wheelhouse is focusing on very aggressive racing, and the Ridge Racer series doesn't fit that niche...Ridge Racer Unbounded felt like a casting error. I like Bugbear Entertainment's games but their wheelhouse is focusing on very aggressive racing, and the Ridge Racer series doesn't fit that niche at all. The result of assigning them to a Ridge Racer title was a game that would have held up just fine outside of the IP, but with its name attached ended up being the catalyst that arguably killed the entire series, which is a crying shame for everyone involved. Wreckfest, which was also mentioned in this thread, is a much better example of what they're capable of.
Back to the topic at hand, I would recommend exploring emulation in general. There is an enormous library of excellent racing games that came out on the retro consoles, and if you're playing on a controller you already have a device well suited to experience them. The Gran Turismo series, the Ridge Racer games themselves as you mentioned yourself for that matter, the Burnout series, Rumble Racing, ToCa (the series that would eventually become GRID, itself a pretty great "simcade" game), and that's just the more straightforward car racing games that happen to be coming to mind right now.
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Comment on Recommend me a racing/driving game on PC in ~games
onceuponaban LinkTwo entries from a bit of an unexpected angle, pun intended: Super Woden GP 2 (and for that matter the prequel, both can be bought as a bundle for ~15€) and art of rally, two racing games played...Two entries from a bit of an unexpected angle, pun intended: Super Woden GP 2 (and for that matter the prequel, both can be bought as a bundle for ~15€) and art of rally, two racing games played from a top-down perspective. The former is thoroughly an arcade game (including in the "deliberately retro aesthetics in the likeness of games played on actual physical arcade machines" sense) that takes cues from the first couple Gran Turismo games and Micro Machines, the latter melds an otherwise pretty realistically simulated rally driving experience with very simple graphics and a polished atmosphere.
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Comment on Just pick a static site generator and start writing in ~tech
onceuponaban (edited )LinkI'd like to give my two cents on the following point: The trend in software development for the past decade or so has been to progressively move everything to web applications (at least for...I'd like to give my two cents on the following point:
Perhaps the biggest downside is that by design you can't create content via your browser; you need to use the desktop. Personally, I view that as a feature, not a bug. For all my talk about reducing friction for writing, I like the separation to allow me to focus when I do pull out my laptop.
The trend in software development for the past decade or so has been to progressively move everything to web applications (at least for user-facing software). First we got web apps for everything, then existing desktop applications started vanishing in favor of web interfaces, then the tech stack used for web development started sneaking into the desktop until we got to the current situation where almost every task the average user does on their computer is either done through a web browser... or still a web browser, but wearing a coat of paint to pretend it's a desktop application, something that has been frustrating me ever since.
While I begrudgingly accept that this trend isn't strictly a downgrade if approached sensibly (and it's not like badly designed software didn't exist before the Javascript Nation attacked), I do find it very amusing that you're suggesting a workflow for a task (publishing an article to a blog) that traditionally was uncontroversially within the purview of a web browser that, for once, replaces the web browser with a desktop application. And while Publii's project repository does reveal that the desktop application is one of those "browser pretending to be a dedicated desktop program" applications, I think I can cut them some slack and acknowledge this is in fact one of the cases where doing this is sensible.
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Comment on Is it okay to use ChatGPT for proofreading? in ~tech
onceuponaban Link ParentFair enough, that was what I figured was the most likely meaning but the surrounding context cast enough doubt in my mind that I wasn't actually sure, and given that a credible way of interpreting...Fair enough, that was what I figured was the most likely meaning but the surrounding context
and my tendency to hopelessly overthink everythingcast enough doubt in my mind that I wasn't actually sure, and given that a credible way of interpreting your reply meant the complete opposite of your actual answer, I felt the need to ask. Thank you for clearing it up. -
Comment on Stellantis introduces pop-up ads in vehicles, sparking outrage among owners in ~transport
onceuponaban Link ParentIt's another case of the relatively common "A bunch of the brands you recognize as having their own identity are on the corporate level folded under one massive entity" situation, especially in...It's another case of the relatively common "A bunch of the brands you recognize as having their own identity are on the corporate level folded under one massive entity" situation, especially in the automotive industry. Unlike say, Volkswagen where the broader corporate entity is itself named after one of its most recognizable brands, the name Stellantis doesn't have much brand recognition on its own, if it all. In fact, I'm not even sure they actually sell vehicles specifically under the Stellantis brand name (but you are probably familiar with at least one among Peugeot, Dodge, Opel/Vauxhall, Fiat or Jeep, all of which are under Stellantis' umbrella).
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Comment on Is it okay to use ChatGPT for proofreading? in ~tech
onceuponaban (edited )Link ParentThis comment will just become noise the moment you address it, but I did feel the need to leave it as a heads up: (folded to avoid meta clutter) The thread's title (Is it okay to use ChatGPT for...This comment will just become noise the moment you address it, but I did feel the need to leave it as a heads up:
(folded to avoid meta clutter)
The thread's title (Is it okay to use ChatGPT for proofreading?) and the last question of the post's body (Is that something you would look at unfavorably?) makes answering "yes" ambiguous. I can't tell whether you meant "Yes, it is okay to use chatgpt for proofreading." answering the title (which intuitively makes sense) or "Yes, that is something I would look at unfavorably" answering the post's last question (as this reply did, starting with "Not at all" but actually answering the title's question in the affirmative, and this one which answered "no" to using ChatGPT specifically but is favorable to LLMs in general) which would completely flip your answer.
Unless it's neither and you actually meant to answer "Yes" to both questions, considering using ChatGPT to be okay but at the same time still something you would look at unfavorably, and while I can see that being a coherent stance that would be an even more unlikely interpretation from just a one word "Yes" answer and I'm definitely overthinking it at this point.
You may know about or even have participated in /r/place, an event hosted by Reddit where any user could place a colored tile from a limited palette on a large canvas, at a rate of one pixel per 5 minutes per user account for a limited time before the canvas eventually freezes. This event occurred three times, in 2017, 2022 and 2023. An individual user (...unless making use of a bunch of bot accounts, which definitely happened too especially in 2023, but for the sake of not getting myself lost in details I won't cover that) can't do much on their own, but an organized group could manage to have a meaningful effect of the canvas, as hinted by the event's tagline:
This naturally drove people to gather in groups ...and with Reddit not exactly being well equipped for real time coordination, most of that funnily enough happened on Discord servers (with Twitch and Youtube livestreams also being a common way to coordinate starting from 2022), while Reddit itself served at most as a redirection point to the various coordination centers. While the canvas was large, at the scale of Reddit's userbase it was small enough to get filled up pretty quickly (in fact, the 2022 and 2023 iterations both had the canvas expanding over the course of the event as a gimmick). As factions emerged on the increasingly crowded canvas, some unique to the event and others being representatives of existing communities and groups, this had the kind of consequences you'd probably expect.
With the knowledge that the event would eventually end and conflict arising over what gets to stay on the canvas (and more importantly what will not), this suddenly wasn't just about messing around with pixel art anymore, it was about protecting what you've made. Now, obviously, events taking place within a glorified online mspaint are not exactly of critical importance to the world at large, but this was something that a lot of people participated in, and I do think it works well as an example of individuals being capable of affecting things on a large scale.
Most people stumbling upon the canvas probably just took a casual look and placed a handful of pixels to help maintain artwork they liked, other more invested users looked more closely into what the groups they were in were doing on the canvas and headed to the coordination servers to help out... And of course, there were the people who took up the task of organizing these coordination servers and getting in contact with other groups who did the same, and for those people the event became less of a virtual graffiti wall and more of a pretend geopolitics game (with some shades of actual geopolitics because as everyone who heard of /r/place knows, groups representing their countries popped up all over the place to the dismay of many, but I'm getting off track here).
The thing is that while by numbers the amount of organized users in these coordination centers were far, far lower than the total amount of users interacting with the canvas, this much larger group of less organized people are much more likely to engage with something they can recognize, such as helping complete an artwork in progress or spread a pattern like a country flag or a grid of some sort, than to create one of their own. Part of the game was therefore to manage to establish enough of your desired artwork that the broader userbase would recognize, and hopefully contribute to it. Properly leveraging this effect (often jokingly referred to within the coordination centers as "the hivemind") allowed groups to punch well above their weight compared to what they could achieve on their own. Even within the coordination servers, plenty of people were content with simply following the instructions of whoever decided to take charge so long as their plans didn't wildly differ from the overall group's intent.
A common practice among the organized groups was to set up pixel art templates that could be distributed to the whole group in the form of a browser userscript that highlighted desired colors on specific positions of the canvas, allowing people to contribute to the exact same artwork much more reliably and enabled much more effective defense against groups trying to wipe it out (or simply natural decay from people placing random pixels). So long as someone could provide pixel art for it, one could potentially secure a desired artwork on the canvas simply by convincing an established group to add it to their template, and many alliance networks were formed on that basis. If you took part in the diplomacy layer of this event, you could potentially single-handedly influence the canvas in ways one wouldn't expect someone to be able to in an event where millions took part.
And, speaking from experience, the barrier for entry wasn't high. While many well known content creators obviously took advantage of their existing reputation and audience of dozens of thousands (if not more) to massively impact the canvas for better or for worse, I, despite being otherwise pretty much a nobody as far as the Internet in general is concerned, can point to many artworks particularly over the 2022 and 2023 iterations of the canvas that I was personally involved in getting established, and even led a faction of my own. Many other people have similar stories of getting to influence the overall canvas from participating in the event, and I think that's neat, even if in this case the only lasting effect is as part of a PNG file.