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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • There is definitely a market pressure not being fulfilled that I think does accommodate much more effective tech workers.

    At least in the spaces I frequent the cap isn’t as much the volume of work you have to do, it’s how much of it you can’t get to because the people you do have run out of time.

    The real question is whether at the corporate level there will be a competitive pressure to keep the budget where it is and increase output versus cut down on available capacity and keep shipping what you’re shipping. I genuinely don’t know where that lands in the long term.

    If smaller startups are able to meet the output of shrunk-down massive corpos and start chipping away at them maybe it’s fine and what we get is more output from the same people. If that’s not the case and we keep the current per-segment monopoly/oligarchy… then maybe it’s just a fast forward button on enshittification. I don’t think anybody knows.

    But also, either way the improvements are probably way more incremental and less earth-shattering than either the shills/AIbros or the haters/doomers are implying, so…


  • Yeah, the modern experience of retro games is super different in all sorts of ways.

    All of that is 100% true. Conversely, a lot of stuff I was fine with in games at the time now seems unbearable. Old games that were great in context now aren’t and games that nobody knew existed now hold up great and have become cult classics.

    Which is why preservation isn’t just about making the games playable, you also need some sort of record of how they were perceived at the time and why.

    I’m overthinking some random meme about old game nostalgia, as usual, but none of this is wrong.




  • MudMan@fedia.iotoGaming@lemmy.worldThose were the days...
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    2 days ago

    Yeah, man, I still have games with gamebreaking bugs. Those were the days, when every other Spectrum game you got was not actually completable but they just cranked up the difficulty so nobody could beat level one and wouldn’t notice.

    Nah, just kidding, I loved buying Street Fighter 2 three times at full price to get all the characters and rebalances. We all loved it. I mean, you barely ever needed to buy more than three expansions to get the full game, not everything was like The Sims. My full physical copy of Diablo 2 fits perfectly inside its board game-sized box.

    But seriously, though, do buy DRM-free copies of games whenever you can. GOG could use a pick-me-up to prove that it’s a viable model, patches or no patches.



  • You made me go check, and the signed-out site on an incognito tab does autoselect my browser-default dark theme. It looks much better than the light, incidentally, and the highlight to the Fedi tutorial link makes more sense in this context and is clearly restricted to signed-out users as a call to action/promo thing.

    I don’t necessarily think the light theme is as awful as you’re claiming, and at a glance it definitely seems to be derived from Dark and not the othe way around. The more I look into it the less this seems like a universal problem with the UX in Mbin derivatives and more “the light theme has made some debatable color choices”.


  • Honestly, choosing whether to default to dark or light is pretty arbitrary, and pointless once the user sets a preference on login anyway. I’m not sure if there’s a reason you can’t default to OS/browser preference on a logged out user, but also don’t think it’s a big deal. Plus highlighting a “what is this app” tile makes more sense on the logged-out default, so there’s that as well.

    Which is not to say that you’re wrong on the larger point. FOSS devs having the attitude that the UI is a secondary concern or wildly misrepresenting the ability of users to deal with friction or bad looks is an ongoing frustration. I guess engineers are more likely to attempt FOSS projects than UX designers.



  • I suppose that’s the point of interoperability. I would much rather support an ecosystem of apps doing the exact same thing to satisfy different UX preferences than the excruciating endless talk of “which of these identical instances all plugging to the same service should I arbitrarily joing as an identity-defining statement” you get in Masto.


  • Hold on, that doesn’t seem like an apples to apples comparison. You’re doing light theme in one and dark in another. The light theme has a different balance (also, ow, my retinas).

    The default Fedia dark theme I am using does not look like that at all. Sure, both the main column and the tool column on the right have the same emphasis, but you still get hierarchy from both the relative sizes and the positioning (if you’re a left-to-right reader, at least).


  • Disagree hard with ugly and awkward. It being less of that han Lemmy is the reason I use it in the first place.

    If anything, I’d swap the pros and cons around, because every time I accidentally respond to a Masto post over here and half the functionality is missing I have a few seconds of confused panic before I realize what’s going on and drop that conversation altogether.


  • I use Mbin (well, Fedia, but same thing), and honestly I do that because of the interface. Lemmy’s UX seems so much worse.

    The microblogging thing is… there, but it mostly just serves some random post here and there. It’s fine to be able to have a microblog follow in there if you want, but I think the assumption that you’d centralize multiple AP services in a single app now feels entirely obsolete. That doesn’t get in the way and it’s still a much better client for Lemmy than Lemmy, though.




  • Is this about the US? Is the US alright?

    I was in a bookstore yesterday. I did have a chuckle at this self-help book called something along the lines of “How to Politely Tell People to Fuck Off”, which proudly stated to be written by a social therapist or some other Pokemon evolution of a psychologist.

    Otherwise it was novels from mainstay authors, young adult stuff whose quality was undecypherable from their “my cousin knows Photoshop” covers and a bunch of pseudo-academic highly specific texts from local self-published authors.

    I was disheartened to see that the native minority language section keeps shrinking, especially among children’s stuff. And while I was looking at that I also noticed the manga section is bigger than the graphic novel section and that is bigger than US comics, which were now nonexistent. More neutral about that one.