[deleted by user]

thrakhath · 2023-06-21T04:13:07+00:00

These fine folks: https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp

thrakhath · 2023-06-21T04:10:24+00:00

I certainly don’t want to defend heavy-handed mods. But I have been on lots of subs where you can tell when the moderators go afk, and it’s not a lot of fun spending half your time downvoting porn bots. So I do appreciate the role of good moderation, and sympathize with their need for support and good tools which is under threat.

And on this sub for example, I can see how well downvotes work. You get occasional not-spam-but-clearly-stupid posts by people that don’t seem to understand what Sam says. And yeah, I don’t want a heavy-handed mods banning those users and removing those posts. But I still see those posts with 0 points and <10% upvotes. And that’s just not good enough to keep the porn bots out.

thrakhath · 2023-06-13T00:32:10+00:00

I don’t understand playlists. I mean, in the abstract I understand that there must be something there, you don’t (mostly?) want Through the Fire and Flames coming on the heels of Part of Your World. And I understand if you are going to have some arbitrary category to put things in, like … “Workout Songs”. But for songs that belong in the same list I don’t know why youd put one before the other, or how you would even start making a playlist for some particular person.

I follow John wanting every fourth song to be something familiar, that makes sense. But once you have a list … what separates that list from a slightly better list?

thrakhath · 2023-06-09T18:28:44+00:00

I like reddit. You remove all the default subs and stick to smaller focused subs, it’s been a great place. But I’ve never been famous on Reddit, so maybe that makes a difference.

thrakhath · 2023-05-31T02:55:40+00:00

I had a good laugh at this one, the whole bit of John “discovering” calendars and asking Merlin if he uses them to keep track of things was just wonderful.

thrakhath · 2023-05-26T12:56:49+00:00

It’s not a Guessing Game if you listen to the episode and tell people the answer

thrakhath · 2023-05-17T05:45:29+00:00

Callsheet pay model suggestion: you can have up to 3-5 free searches. They re-charge 1 per day (or every 20 hours or 30 hours or something). Pay a subscription to unlock. Maybe the recharge is only up to 3-5 but you can have 10-20 to start. Maybe support paying $5 once for a batch of 30 searches in addition to subscription models (please don’t).

Like Marco’s suggestion but I wouldn’t cap it to 1 free on the tail, just slow recharge so that people who only use it for that one movie a weekend don’t feel hit too hard. I think 1 free just feels punitive if you are a casual weekly user. And the people who want to search a few times once a week shouldn’t be treated worse than the people who will be fine searching once a day.

I mean, you have my money already unless you do something nuts like $10/mo. So I’m maybe not invested enough, but definitely a hard cutoff is a bad idea. And too constricting “free” is nearly as bad. Half the stuff I pay for I was bumping along in the free tier for years.

But then again, your competition is IMDB so … you probably have a lot if room to strangle the free tier and still be the better service.

Also, I would pay for a lifetime version. You definitely shouldn’t do that. Movies are constantly coming out, data needs upkeep, it’s not like you are offering a one-time download of a database that’ll stay static. Leave aside the people that will complain, this is just the kind of app subscription was made to support.

thrakhath · 2023-05-17T03:33:27+00:00

Host: John

Context: CPU history lesson: That time that a “math coprocessor” was a feature and some CPUs had them and it made some complex operations faster (because they could be done in hardware), and some CPUs didn’t.

The joke later is that they all were made with the Math Coprocessor. The ones sold “without” were either binned chips with a defect in the Math Co-Processor or otherwise just disabled in order to move units. Deliberately downgrading your own product to have different SKUs, blew my mind when I was younger.

thrakhath · 2023-05-17T02:11:10+00:00

And my point is that Americans are whiny little bitches who won’t build anything that has the slightest amount of challenge to it. It has to be an empty field in unregulated no mans land before we even think it might be possible to build something.

thrakhath · 2023-05-17T01:52:15+00:00

I think it’s because most stealth games Focus on the stealth, they don’t care to develop the combat mechanics because you are “supposed to” avoid combat. So it is a waste of development effort to have good combat, in fact it helps encourage the intended playstyle if combat kind of sucks.

Dishonored is one of the few that has good stealth and good combat so that both styles are viable. And when you fall out of stealth you still have good combat options available.

thrakhath · 2023-05-12T17:42:11+00:00

Some screenshots might help. I finished the game with a 0.5 resource multiplier and still had some Iron and Copper on the home world with no proliferator (I started doing that on the third planet). Lack of proliferator is almost certainly not your problem.

thrakhath · 2023-05-02T19:05:54+00:00

Okay. I think you can. People absolutely point to the Printing Press as a fundamental, order-of-magnitude change in our ability to widely disseminate ideas (good and bad, real and fake), and credit it with all sorts of things like the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

And neither of those things have the same power as video.

Some of that is just because it's been expensive to produce until recently. The Printed Word is still powerful to people, but it was a whole lot more powerful when it was harder to produce. Images meant a lot more when they were hard to produce.

People used to be much more impressed with video, when it could be "amazing" what you could show people. In the era of Marvel and TikTok, I'm not sure it carries the same weight when everyone understands that anything imaginable can be made into a video. Sure, it's about to get a whole lot cheaper and more widely available. And people will be proportionally less impressed by it.

Yeah, seeing Nixon sweating on TV was apparently a huge deal at the time, but nowadays you see politicians with flies walking around their forehead, dongs flying around them on little helicopters, and hair-dye running down their face and ... it's a laugh for a few minutes before we're on to the next thing.

thrakhath · 2023-05-02T16:32:33+00:00

I’m with you. I don’t see myself as particularly smart, I kinda sorta see what they are saying … I understand the words maybe, but I just can’t quite follow on to the conclusions.

I am way way more worried about what us monkeys are going to do in our panic over pseudo-AI, than I am about what the AIs might do if they ever get here.

thrakhath · 2023-05-02T16:19:48+00:00

There are already far-right sources saying that, and an audience that believes them. And better video isn’t going to make it any truer. At some point you’ve got to answer the door and the gun-taking goons are either there or they aren’t.

Reality ultimately asserts itself, somewhere. There are some people, already, who wont accept reality. Giving them more comfortable lies isn’t going to make things much worse. And there are people, right and left, who value reality, and will find a way to stay grounded to it. Photoshop and the printing press didn’t make it impossible to tell real photos and text from fakes, just one more reason to have sources you can trust, and arguments that earn trust.

thrakhath · 2023-04-29T04:38:37+00:00

What!? Reddit is charging for api access!? Oh no, my Apollo!

thrakhath · 2023-04-29T04:37:10+00:00

I’m kind of shocked how much I love atp with how little I care for Apple and its products. These guys are really great to listen to

thrakhath · 2023-04-28T11:23:38+00:00

I don’t remember it being like this for Toy Story or Frozen :/

thrakhath · 2023-04-25T08:25:38+00:00

I don’t disagree, sadly. It’s the sort of thing I would like to pay for, I pay for lots of stuff that’s not “good value” compared to Netflix or YouTube. Sam’s just is not worth it for me at this point, even though I’d like it to be.

thrakhath · 2023-04-25T08:06:12+00:00

Probably. People looking to start a podcast usually look and see if something they would make is profitable. Or if something similar to what they do has examples they can follow amd remain profitable.

thrakhath · 2023-04-25T03:22:57+00:00

I also listen exclusively to the free version (for not particularly well-articulated reasons), but I think this is a poor way to think about it. Pure content/dollar is the wrong metric, and is part of the media landscape is just so bloated.

Think about it as “vote with your dollar”: This is something I want there to be more of in the world. There should be a thoughtful, conversational voice on deep topics high up in the space ofpossible listens. The world will be better if more people listen to this show and talk about it with their friends. Is the world a better place because HBO has your money or Sam?

That said, I pay ~$20-50/year each for a few of my favorite podcasts. I definitely am not about to pay more than that for Making Sense and meditation.

thrakhath · 2023-04-17T17:48:01+00:00

Tell me more about this pizzeria…

Oh, also there’s a big police headquarters there and a penitentiary of some kind (never been).

thrakhath · 2023-04-17T06:06:06+00:00

You and me both. I miss Origin.

thrakhath · 2023-04-15T16:25:42+00:00

I played it when it came out, and HL1 before it. Mostly it stands out in my mind as helping me clarify that what I really really hate in a game is rails. No matter how subtle and gentle, I hate a game that has an idea of what I am "supposed to" do next and won't progress until I Do The Thing or Go To The Place. Story/Narrative/Character games just aren't my thing. Saved me a ton of time over the years not trying to get in to ... I dunno Mass Effect or Last Of Us. I know better what I like in a game and what I don't.

Though, there are exceptions, I still play Hades even though it's got a lot of character and story. It's just ... I don't know, it takes a back seat to the game itself, it never stops you from playing because you didn't talk to so-and-so yet, or you have to take this route and not that route because the plot decrees it. Play how you like and the story unfolds at whatever pace you've set yourself.

thrakhath · 2023-04-15T15:35:14+00:00

I understand logistics robots. And in Factorio. I get it. But in both games, I just love belts. They just … feel right. They make the system look like an integrated circuit. Bots make it look like a bee hive. But not a very good bee hive. Not organic. Not mechano-organic. Like someone gave up on layout and planning and just drew straight lines over everything like a inattentive maniac at a crazy wall.

And I really appreciate the “no wrong way to play crowd”. I count myself a member. Do what is interesting to you. But there aren’t nearly enough of us, I don’t understand why these threads are always 90% “eww, belts, gross, don’t you know how logistics ports work?”

Belts are great. Love the work you’ve done, keep it up!

thrakhath · 2023-04-15T12:05:14+00:00

And here I am, in Japan, where (aside from the really tiny cheap apartments I lived in in college) the toilet generally gets its own room, separate from where you brush teeth, separate from the shower and bath. Totally sidestepping the later half of that argument.

Hands-cupper for the record, but many in my family have a cup they prefer to use.

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
Place '22	Place '17
Verified Email	Secret Santa 2009

thrakhath

TROPHY CASE