Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program’s features and how to use it. It wasn’t impossible, but it took effort

I went through the same effort and all I got for my troubles was a few dead chatrooms where what little discussion exists is purely about distros.

The barrier to entry filtered out everyone else.

If an OSS project is designed to connect people with each other, and it doesn’t do that well, it’s kind of a failure.

Looking at you, Matrix.

Discord is moderating private chats PC Gamer

This annoys me, not because discord is doing anything wrong, there needs to be a way to report spam and abuse, but because users can potentially abuse the feature. My hope is that reported DMs past a certain age are automatically ignored.

Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch

This one is just inevitable due to all the kids on it. Discord doesn’t want media and govts breathing down its neck after kids are bullied into killing themselves via the platform.

Where it gets annoying is one of the bigger public servers in Oz is straight-up a neo-nazi recruitment vector, and no amount of reporting seems to get anything done about it.

Had a look at it, seems to lack dedicated modifier and cursor keys. Looking specifically for a PC-style keyboard.

Does anyone know of an alternative to Hacker’s Keyboard? It hasn’t been updated for about 5 years and I’m worried it will stop working on newer versions of Android.

I mean I agree that this is a new user nightmare, but we’ve been conditioning people for 30 years to download and run random .EXE files as admin too.

Well they’ve since deleted their comments, so hopefully a twinge of shame was felt.

The fact is that you’ll be filter fed morons who impulsively spend money AND have the money to spare.

This is the same rationalisation the gambling industry used.

And then the gaming industry.

And we know from those instances they’re often not morons, they have mental health issues, or are exceedingly lonely. And they often don’t have the money to spare either, those dollars are food being taken out of their or their family’s mouths.

But feel free to tell yourself whatever robin hood bullshit you need to if it helps you sleep at night.

Thin toilet paper is one thing, just use more layers.

Narrow toilet paper is another. Fuck places that use non-standard width toilet paper.

Ars’ quality dropped badly about 10 years ago, around the same time New Scientist went to shit. A lot of their articles are now uncritical regurgitations of press releases. Even the one guy they had doing really detailed investigative pieces on the videogame industry up and left probably 5 years ago.

Also they never followed through on their promise to give us an everything-but-apple RSS feed.

They cited their sources and included direct quotations from the bill.

And the direct quotations from the bill were less-than-damning without several paragraphs of editorial leading the reader down the garden path. This is on the same level as the ‘death panel’ hysteria from about 10 years ago.

At some point in the future cars will have to incl. some form of assistance technology as a standard feature, big whoop. It doesn’t say it has to be enabled by default, or always turned on, and with all the assists and autonomous driving features already being added to cars, it’s very likely most manufacturers will end up meeting the requirements of the bill without even trying.

…

If

driver behaving erratic and interfering with safe function of car

Then

pull safely to the side of the road and temporarily disable ignition

…

BuT mUh FrEeDoMs. Something something ‘right to travel’ = right to operate a car whilst intoxicated (sounds like some SovCit bullshit), as opposed to right to a functional public transport system or something…

Is it that hard to read the post? OP is right, almost every TV on the market has the same cheap, shitty plastic feet, and they’re spaced as far apart as possible so you’re unnecessarily size-limited when trying to buy something like a bedroom TV to sit on top of bookshelves or a tallboy.

I’d like something more than 32" for my bedroom too, but I can find one new 40-42" TV on the market with a central stand now, and it is some obscenely expensive 4K OLED thing from Sony. I am keeping an eye out for older, pre-owned TVs as a result, but am yet to find any good deals.

I think the far-more realistic scenario is we create a colony of robots, first for experiments, then (if possible) to build out a colony that can eventually be inhabited by humans.

That’s almost precisely their business model.

Get users, retain users, turn users into recurring paying customers.

Dating apps don’t exist to find you connections, they exist to keep you hooked. They’ll give you the bare minimum of opportunities necessary to make you think they’re viable, drag it out as long as possible, pressure you to pay for premium, and if they ever developed a matching system that worked well, they’d bury it to stop half their userbase from marrying each other and uninstalling the apps.

I’ve got pretty low standards when it comes to graphics. The first game had AA issues too, but generally looked much cleaner and more polished.

Anti-aliasing? Pop-in on textures and geometry? Shadows? Looked like some z-fighting there too.

There was a nice-looking model train, though.

So many dead franchises. The videogame industry really went in an unexpected direction…

Maybe I’m just weird but I think the tech focus is better.

Like that’s where all this started. Kevin Rose wanted a better version of Slashdot, a tech news aggregator, so he created Digg.

And Digg was about tech news for several years before going to a general format, at which point it became trash.

And then Digg’s redesign killed the site and everyone flocked to a Digg clone called reddit, even though reddit was a clone of post-shittification Digg, not pre-shittification Digg.

Being tech-focussed really does help. I’d sooner deal with Well Actually neckbeards than the average Facebook user, even if I’m not just interested in tech news.

Forums worked really elegantly when you had an active userbase of maybe a couple of dozen people a day.

Megaforums… not so much.

I think you’re just supposed to avoid heavy acids with them. And it’s one of those ‘lifetime risk’ dealies.