Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.

I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’

People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you

The problem is that’s kinda true of pretty much everywhere so your choices are to isolate and only get lied to by your own politicians and corporate overlords or to accept the complexity of the world and try to work on moving forward where possible.

I do agree that this entirely greed based approach from the company is wrong but honestly I prefer it to your extreme xenophobia towards them. Yes there are issues with China just like all our countries have issues, they’re not the devil though not by a long shot.

Free cad is brilliant especially if you come from a more technical understanding rather than an artistic one.

I hate kier but not voting for Labour would be stupid, protest votes or non votes don’t count any the only people pushing that idiocy are the rich right wing because they don’t want you to vote against them

Everyone just thinks ‘oh look these people are too dumb, busy, or disconnected to vote oh well’

You can still resist and work against a system you voted for,

You’re literally arguing ‘this has no uses and anyone who says otherwise is a meany’ what is anyone supposed to do but laugh at you?

We know, you want to make a ridiculous statement and for everyone pointing out you’re objectively wrong to be ignored.

It’s the level of thinking of a six year old.

Well I use it most days and it’s sped up my coding and documentation writing considerably.

You’re either too dumb to be able to use it or you’ve not used it because of some weird fear of new things, either way you’re not coming from a place where your opinion has any value on this topic.

Why do people praising a thing you’re saying is useless sound like someone listing it’s good points in an advert? Gee tough question, could it be that they’re essentially the same thing and the latter is explicitly designed to look like the former?

Of course if you’re going to dismiss something entirely then people who benefit from using it are going to give their opinion, that’s what this is - a place to give opinions and talk about stuff.

How else would anyone answer your question? You suggest that it has no use, people who use it regularly are of course going to point out the uses it has. And yes many aren’t going to bother they’re going to use the button that essentially says ‘this is balderdash I don’t agree’

I have found many things ai is brilliant at, as a coding assistant it really is a game changer and within five years you’ll be used to talking to your PC like they do in Star Trek and having it do all sorts of reality useful things that there are no options for in software made like we do now.

I feel like a significant amount of my friends would be caught by that too

Oh there is but it’s sorted through rich people filters, if a hundred show ideas contain important and useful thoughts about our current society and one show Idea boils down to ‘capitalism is good actually’ then we already know which one will get made without any other information

I don’t mind watching a ‘capitalism is good’ show occasionally if it’s risen to the top because it makes important and informative statements but i can’t abide a landscape where other opinions don’t have that same ability.

Yeah but it’s still corporate pandering and drowning your brain in bullshit. ‘did you see the latest show that rich people decided we should be brainwashed with, it contains all the talking points they think will help society to continue to benefit them’

I much prefer stuff that’s free because it’s made by people who want to make it, I’ll even put a few coins in their patreon if I really like it.

Ok but nothing I’ve ever experienced or witnessed has ever made sense, literally nothing ever fits any form of reason or logic - a thousand years from now if they write off all the things from our lives that make no sense or are absurd then the vision they come up with won’t resemble reality at all, not one little bit.

So when someone says ‘its unlikely they’d waste resources’ or ‘this would be totally unfeasible and require insane amounts of totally needless extra measures while providing no benefit what so ever’ that just makes it feel even more likely to me, like yes of course that’s what they did that’s what we always do!

Sounds like an interesting video though, I’m going to watch it but I’ll be thinking about aliens and trying to find cracks in the narrative where I can poke them in!

I like the theories about them being ancient power stations or radio devices, using the water channels and gold cap stone to create enough pd to be useful in occult practices. It doesn’t have to be aliens that helped make them but I think there’s something the really resonates with the idea of aliens coming down and teaching ancient people how to make super complex and beautiful machines to synthesize small amounts of potent narcotics. Like none of the other reasons aliens would come make much sense but a tiktokable prank like that really does.

Imagine how fascinating it would be if we find loads of old alien stuff on Mars with like little model pyramids and pictures of them with the pharaoh. Or if when we meet aliens and have first contact they got us up with galactic tiktok and people are reposting all the old videos of pranks aliens have pulled on earth over the years.

Yeah they were probably just the biggest coolest looking thing that knew how to make so everyone wanted one, yeah they were probably just dragging rocks up sandy inclones and using water filled counter weights… but we don’t know aliens weren’t there so I’m going to enjoy being open to that possibility.

I think you’re selling freedom short, yeah convenience and momentum are hard to beat but Lemmy is where the open source Devs are and the first adopters, I think we’re gonna go see a lot of interesting things emerge here which will draw a lot of users into trying it out - especially if all the other social media sites are closing their doors to people without accounts from viewing information.

What Lemmy needs is it’s own version of place, not the same thing but things that are fun and novel and community building. The basic stuff is still getting finalized but as things get established we’ll see plenty of tools made to help moderation, to enable new features and useful ways of interacting with information. Hopefully some fun games and toys too.

I’ve got a lot of work to do on my main project at the moment but I’ve also got a lot of ideas for Lemmy stuff I want to play with when I’ve got the time, I’m sure theres a lot of other people cooking up ideas and watching things develop and stabilize waiting for the right time.

They won’t have hospital bills, this happened in Ireland not capitalist hell

Someone I watch was sponsored by a PCB fabrication company and the way he described their service I realized I could save a lot of time and money doing it that way.

I don’t think advertising always has to be manipulation, it could just be making you aware of the advantages of a product. Though most adverts are nothing but lies and bullshit.

Yeah, personally I enjoy seeing adverts for things I think are dumb because it’s like a shitty game company is paying my favourite creators to amuse me and they’re doing it by collecting money from rubes that’d only be wasting their cash on something worse anyway.

It feels like the sort of thing a chaotic hero would do in a cyberpunk romance.

Yes we should let the worst people in power because the other option isn’t perfect, the axis had a lot of issues during ww2 so we should have just let the Nazis win.

What’s a good space combat game?

X-Wing was one of my all-time favourite games, it was late niceties and got followed to by tie fighter then X-Wing Vs tie fighter but the original was best. It was really simple combat, lasers or rockets and you had to balance power between shields and lasers. I don’t know what made it so great, there was a pace to it the just felt so good - lining up and blowing a tie fighter then another and coming down on the third, doing a hard breaking turn and driving your speed to get behind it and land a shot in its rear before it can outpace your maximum acceleration.

X com interceptor was a great game too, I remember it being deeply flawed but incredibly easy to get hooked into playing for hours. Combat was a bit more like wing commander which was a touch more strategic and less frantic.

Any good, ideally cheap, space combat games anyone can suggest?

I went through a phase where I played every game on there, most were gloriously unfinished or ported from the zx spectrum. There were some real gems too.

That was years ago, what’s it like now? Is there android wesnoth? Did any of the RPGs ever get to a fished state?