I like to do things cost per hour. A $60 dollar video game that gives me 120 hours of content is $0.50 an hour. Pretty good if you ask me.

Going to the movies is $20 for 2 hours. $10 an hour. Pretty high, sometimes worth it. That’s about my gauge.

This is $21 an hour. For that I better be having just an amazing time, I better be at Disneyland or something.

I know it’s weird here on the fediverse, but I’ve been through it. If you want, DM me anytime, or DM me and I can give my mastodon. Should probably start a community sometime. It’s been good talking to you too!

I wish you luck, but be prepared for anger in response. Just be ready for it. Make it not about the politics but instead the hate, the anger. Hell try to make it about politics but instead make it about the hate. It’s not about Biden or trump, it’s the anger.

By then the startup ceos will have made their money and ran though. Just like Blockchain

I was just thinking yesterday how the rest of the country’s conservatives look at Seattle as a burning liberal hellscape, but we actually have a lot of conservatives here. What do the conservatives here think when fox news says that capital hill is still under riots?

Costs is the key thing. People know it’s nice, so people move here, and costs go up. Expect 2000/month rents, and that’s the low side in some areas

Edgy McEdgerson is checking in!

Which is why as an engineer I can either riddle with a prompt for half an hour… Or just write the damn method myself. For juniors it’s an easy button, but for seniors who know how to write these algorithms it’s usually just easier to write it up. Some nice starter code though, gets the boilerplate out of the way

All crime TV is just godawful. Was just law and order and saw the tech person say “come on, you know there isn’t a hard drive I can’t lick”

This was exactly my experience. Freaked myself out last year and decided best thing was to dive headfirst into it to figure out how it worked and what it’s capabilities are.

Which - it has a lot. It can do a lot, and it’s impressive tech. Coded several projects and built my own models. But, it’s far from perfect. There are so so so many pitfalls that startups and tech evangelists just happily ignore. Most of these problems can’t be solved easily - if at all. It’s not intelligent, it’s a very advanced and unique prediction machine. The funny thing to me is that it’s still basically machine learning, the same tech that we’ve had since the mid 2000s, it’s just we have fancier hardware now. Big tech wants everyone to believe it’s brand new… and it is… kind of. But not really either.

Learning about Gerrymandering was one of the first times I noticed cracks in our democracy.

I grew up in the Midwest, and I truly thought America had done it. We solved corruption and bad governments, why wouldn’t the rest of the world want to know how to do it right?

Gerrymandering proves the absolute worst of our system. Corrupted officials carving the worst possible areas to make sure the person they want to get elected is elected - and the only time we get to change them is once a decade - when the same committee decides again.

I appreciate it, and I hope your interactions with your father go better too. I know many many people who take your approach, just avoiding it. There’s no real right or wrong way, because we shouldn’t be in that position in the first place. I hope they stop bringing it up around you and respect your wishes about it.

Re: circles, maybe keeping it personal will help too. Turning off Fox news and sources will help, but my dad sure did shut up when I brought up the people he knew (and I know he liked) that he was talking about. They always go “They’re one of the good ones”, but then the reverse is “These policies effect the good ones too, dad”

not sure about CoD myself, but Halo was my franchise of choice. Over the last couple of games they’ve changed social playlists to still alter your skill, I’m not 100% on the details of how, but essentially it means ranked is where you go to compete, social is where you go to practice for ranked. It’s become extremely frustrating because you have everyone trying way, way too hard in social games, getting angry when things don’t go perfectly, and dropping out of games that aren’t competitive enough leaving us with lopsided teams.

I just wish games had a “Hey, no skills here, just in and have fun, there’s no points or levels, that’s over there” style gaming. And if there is skill based matchmaking in that style, then we shouldn’t know about our level in those games.

Social playlists were unranked, vs ranked playlists. They generally had no stakes to play, and there were no benefits for players in there except to have fun. You couldn’t boost your skills or anything in socials, the only way to do that was to play the ranked playlists. So for me, it was just a blast playing those. Just a bunch of people who wanted to have fun

Then they wonder why I have 2000 hours in the $30 game Satisfactory and haven’t logged anything in my favorite multiplayer games. Apples and oranges I know, but why do I want to be sold to constantly?

Xbox rediscovers social matchmaking. Oh shit, you mean noobs don’t like getting 360 no scoped by some kid when they’re just learning? Bravo Xbox, you figured it out after 15 years of matchmaking.

All I’ve seen them do is continuously push ranked, MLG, clans that practice, and expect people to play every free hour of the day. Now they’re surprised that the only people who want to play their multiplayer are the try-hards.

I work 40+ hours a week. When I’m done I don’t want to log into a game where I get yelled at for letting the team down, or be the obviously worst player in a lobby of pros. We used to have social, and for a few years it was great. There was no need to farm down there, it was just for fucking around. Now in Halo Infinite even the action sack stuff is rankable. Shit sucks for a casual gamer. My favorite franchise, I know everything up and down, have played since CE (and I mean CE and Custom Edition), and I can’t get any joy out of the competitiveness of Infinite.

For group things I don’t think it’s bonkers. Mostly because that gives everyone time to make sure that specific time to work. Honestly to me that says they really want you to come, I’d be flattered.

For just my SO and me it’s different though. Usually rough idea forms about a year out, with us formalizing and time off about 6 months out, and booking about 3 months out

I’m sorry to hear that. I “lost” my father in the same way. He was always conservative (listened to Rush when I was a kid), but he went from casually conservative to full MAGA radicalized thanks to facebook and modern social media. I went to his facebook a few years back and saw some of the most hateful vitriolic content. I asked him how he could do that to people who helped raise me, that I had both LGBTQ and mixed race teachers, leaders, friends, all of whom have been incredibly important to me. It did not go well. I had to tell him to allow his hate speech would be a disservice to everyone else who had such a profound impact on me, and told him if he loses the hate we can have a relationship again.

That was 6 years ago. Haven’t heard from him since.

I hope your dad is doing better than mine. I’ve seen others confirm what you said, that just cutting out the source will see a return to semi normalcy - the propaganda depends on a constant drip. Just disconnecting them from the feed can have a huge positive impact.

It must be really nice being able to suspend all reality like they can

Oh no, there are millions and millions of boomers who are thoroughly addicted to that site and will happily consume AI generated content.

I went on there and saw a post about log cabins. That was some generic caption like “bet you wish you could live there”. The image was very clearly AI generated with things like floating lanterns and walls that didn’t need any support. Didn’t stop the literally over 20K comments of “you bet!” And “beats the city!” And a thousand other generic cliche responses. Which probably about half are also bot related but just as many are brain dead humans

who would have guessed streaming services are expensive and non-trivial to run. “We’ll just build our own, we’ll make much more than licensing it to Netflix!”