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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • For public ones, depending on what people started getting, it’d really strain the AIs. You could go in like 1 or two ways, probably different people getting both.

    Something very uniform but still unique, like a QR code kind of deal, AIs would hallucinate the crap out of that. Or abstractions, like people do to change the way the shape of their face to combat facial recognition.

    For private ones, just don’t ever get it photographed, any image showing that area without it would be probably fake.



  • For something I’m paying for, I want no ads, recommended or otherwise.

    For something I get for free, if it’s easily skippable/ignorable, I don’t really care, I’ll skip it or mute the tab or whatever. If I can’t, I’d rather have a like sniper level targeted ad (use all the data!), really try to show me something I’ll care about (there was some like 10 minutes ad about the science behing glass by one of the guys from MythBusters, I watched the whole ad, it was great). The demographic level targeted ads are my 2nd least favorite, mostly because it feels like I usually need to suffer through what is a targeted ad but if they bothered to exclude some of the audience based on some data points (looking at you luxury car ads, it’s just never going to happen), they’d know I’m a bad target, I’d rather some generic add over those. My least favorite ad though, when I get an ad in a language I don’t even understand, like at least match my primary language, wasting everyone’s time…






  • While that’s part of it, it’s definitely not “just” that.

    Sadly, part of it is that the game has released in a fairly stable/polished state, which is considered a positive in the world of broken releases. The multiplayer also just works with little issue as opposed to some problems of yesteryear.

    There’s also a perhaps surprising pent up demand for good co-op PvE focused games. They blow-up hard but tend to fade out depending on gameplay quality. Part of this is the streamer effect, streamers like to play group games with other streamers because it helps cross-pollinate their audiences. Sales are also improved due to group/peer-pressure, if someone can pull in their friend group, that’s a lot of sale multiplication.

    I also think that the developers tried to make a game that’s fun. A lot of decisions seem to have followed the rule of cool for this type of game e.g. pal mounts, firearms, catching people, automation of survival elements via slavery.

    It also manages to have both a clear and guided progression system while maintaining the freedom for the player to just fuck off and do whatever they want while still at least partially progressing.

    My only honest gripes with the game are how world saves are handled (they should use the Grounded system in addition to having dedicated servers) and that I for some reason can’t find the exit button on the title screen so to quit I need to alt-f4, for the rare times I need it.





  • The proprietary/cloud based threat bit me already. Installed smart vents in my home several years ago. They weren’t perfect, but they did really help even out my 3-bedroom, 2-story, 1-zone home. Now the app fails to login, the site doesn’t even attempt password recovery and I’m back to dumb vents… Customer support is a black hole and basically every product is and has been out of stock for years, so I’ve no hope of any happy resolution.

    They apparently used to be supported by SmartThings when it allowed custom stuff, but that’s dead now too because Samsung didn’t want to allow it. I even tried to use their proprietary hub which said it could connect to them, but that shit didn’t work either.