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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2023

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  • I have kids. I don’t see how that’s relevant here.

    Children shouldn’t have social media accounts in my opinion. Nothing to attack or break into if it doesn’t exist.

    A coworker shouldn’t know enough or otherwise have enough access to your child such that they can break into their accounts.

    Failing all that, parents need to have frank discussions about the potential dangers of internet fans turning into real life people, and some of the more severe potential consequences.

    Even without those three layers of failure, your kids need to know about basic online account security, like using unique strong passwords and two factor authentication.

    That all being said- I don’t know the people or the situation. But from your short account of things that’s what I see as wrong with the situation.

    In general, the social networks of today are optimized for extracting value and attention from adult brains; an incomplete adolescent brain stands no chance.

    Kids can still socialize electronically just fine in group chats with the advent of RCS implementation on both major phone platforms.

    Not sure what kids in cages have to do with anything or why they were mentioned.




  • Tiktok shows you more of what you engage in and throws some randomness in there so you don’t get stuck in a local minimum. It’s like when YouTube’s algorithm kinda worked and you could see how it’d possibly be better; bytedance actually pulled it off instead of enshittifying.

    And it takes time for the algorithm to learn your tastes. If you’re a mouth breather at heart you’re gonna get mouth breather content no matter how much you try and change it. If you’re a perv and linger on thirst traps… You’re going to see more thirst traps.

    With your described scenario, that’s not unique to tiktok- that can happen on any platform when the child is unsupervised. It could have been twitch, Roblox, Instagram, Snapchat, it myriad other platforms; the real problem there is inattentive parenting.

    I’ve learned about more shitty local government practices from tiktok than any other platform. I’ve been exposed to points of view I’d never otherwise see. Random videos have triggered just as much progress on my mental health as years of therapy. I’ve found people far more articulate than me explaining shit that combats my family’s far right talking points in a way where they actually listen and change their mind, and vice versa.

    I’ve also consumed an inordinate amount of white hot memes and mountains of brain rot lol

    But yeah. The TT algorithm is a mirror (given time). It reflects your persona back at you with the type of content you see.



  • Slay the spire, FTL, and Into the Breach probably have the most hours from me because the controls are entirely cursor driven and can be paused indefinitely.

    Balatro is quickly taking the space that the built-in Windows solitaire game used to.

    Those are the ones that I open when my brain can’t brain.

    At least one idle game. I just finished antimatter dimensions after a year or so. Starting on NGU idle next.

    And one “100% attention” game like outer wilds or hollow knight.




  • The game was done at launch. I played through the campaign the first month after it was released. I would have been happy with what was in the game a year ago

    People bought the game and that enabled larian to keep working on it. So they got to polish and add in the stuff that had been left on the cutting room floor we’d have never otherwise seen due to that pesky reality of not being able to ship a finished product if the scope kept growing.

    So now, a year after release, there’s a whole DLC’s worth of content in the game that we just get for free.











  • It’s not like the value added for that 30% tax isn’t there. Steam has made so many things so easy that it’s easy to forget what things were like decades ago.

    If you were an independent game publisher, you had to figure out how to set up a web storefront, a content delivery network hosted in perpetuity, take payments, do multiplayer, add in-game chat, map every weird joystick and gamepad in the universe to your control scheme, achievements, friend lists… And every game developer had to do that independently because there was no public solution, really. The friction to enter the indie dev space was so much higher.

    Also, steam does not force you to use their store- you can generate steam keys and sell your game away from the steam platform. The only thing that they enforce is if you sell it for a lower price elsewhere, they’ll de-list your game. Which I think is reasonable.