I write bugs and sometimes features! I’m also @CoderKat@kbin.social.

  • 10 Posts
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Joined 3 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月21日

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  • I badly wish that I could get (competent) home assistants with at least somewhat customizable activation keywords. I understand why it’s not customizable. They build it into the hardware so that it doesn’t have to be truly listening all the time. But I’d love at least some options to buy versions that have different phrases.

    For me, I just want something that references some pop culture AI (eg, HAL, Glados, etc). I especially don’t like Google’s approach of saying the freaking company name.


  • I like the idea of having a regulated, living, backwards compatible standard. Which seems to be what USB-C is now, for phones. The EU has soon to be active regulation that will make it a requirement for many things. Yet, it’s not a single, set in stone standard, but one that’s constantly being expanded (eg, version 3.2 and PD).

    Of course, the regulation has to also be living. Eg, at some point, maybe there’ll be a strong enough reason to allow another standard (by no means do I think USB-C will always make sense). And the regulation has to very carefully choose the standard.

    That way we get the benefits of standardization (from actually everyone using the same format), but we aren’t unreasonably crippling ourselves to do it.





  • Those prices feel so expensive, too. Like, does the news cost more to produce than full length movies and TV shows? Cause all the streaming video apps are far cheaper than 9€ a week. The only thing 9€ is cheap for is if you would have been buying a newspaper daily. Incidentally, newspapers have ads despite being bought, so that might explain why they kept ads in the web version too?

    A price like that may have made sense in the pre internet days, when a newspaper was a big chunk of my daily reading due to general lack of alternatives. But these days? I probably only read a single digit number of articles per day about the biggest headlines. And since I get lots of news from social media like Lemmy, it crosses many websites, which is unconductive with subscribing. Plus it feels like a sizable chunk of news articles are just quoting AP or Reuters these days, anyway.

    Mind you, I’m also Canadian. We have a fully publically funded news service (the CBC) that isn’t paywalled and generally high quality.



  • Heck, I’d say even give money to those big corps so long as they are being reasonable with the price and availability. Reasonable varies by person, of course. But for me, I’ll pay for any $70-90 game (the normal price for new games now in Canada), but stuff like Sims DLC or how the original Mass Effect only let you get DLC through some dumb BioWare credits are cases where I’d pirate no regrets even with my current income.

    After all, there won’t be AAA games if people don’t pay for them. I have (mostly) no qualms with big publishers pocketing a significant profit on those games if they get made well. Bigger problem I have is with games that get rushed to the point of impacting quality, but that’s something I see more for changing how you approach that individual title. Stuff like mistreating staff (crunch time) is a bit iffier. I still lean towards giving them my money, since nobody enters the game dev business without knowing it’ll involve crunch and I do want the devs to be rewarded for their hard work with a commercial success (cause that’s unfortunately just how success is measured in our capitalist society).








  • No Man’s Sky. Game was a disaster when it came out. For most games, a bad launch would have ended the game. But with NMS, the devs kept at it and constantly added new content over many years. I believe it’s still actively developed.

    That’s what got me to play it. I only played it maybe half a year ago. I wouldn’t have bothered if not for the fact that people were mentioning how much the game had improved. I wrote the game off after the bad press when it launched, but fortunately I was wrong and they did make something good out of it.




  • Same. Pick one. I don’t care which. They both have their pros and cons. Plus, it’s an arbitrary number and nothing actually forces people to believe things like “the work day should be 9-5” (though admittedly, changing social norms is difficult).

    Saskatchewan has the right idea. Its timezone is a bit weird, but nobody there cares and is just glad to not have to deal with DST. For non Canadians: it’s the part of Canada in this map where something that looks like it should be -6 (central time) juts into -7 (mountain time). They don’t have DST and it’s one of the few things Saskatchewan gets right anymore.