@_NetNomad - eviltoast

FM Chiptuner and Retro Computer Nerd
https://netnomad.dxcomplex.com

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 21st, 2024

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  • forums face a lot of the same issues federated platforms do, chiefly- why the hell would the proverbial i join it when reddit and discord already exist? i already have an account there, there’s already a community there… i think for some people that’s just never gonna change. there’s no closing pandora’s box. i run an online community with a small but fairly active discord and we have a forum as well in anticipation of discord going full enshittification, but it’s just impossible to get younger people onto it. the fedi at least has the advantage of looking like the monolithic platforms people are leaving, but forums are such a foreign concept

    getting a community going is a bit of a catch 22. the best way to get users is to already have users and appear active. if i recall correctly, early on reddit had a ton of staff sock puppet accounts to do just that. i’m certainly not advocating for it but it goes to show how tricky the problem is. the only real answer on an individual level is to pick a platform and stick with it through the thin years and try to recruit a few friends- after that MAYBE hopefully it eventually gets some momentum











  • a lot of games these days have higher graphic “fidelity” but it’s at the point where they’re exaggerating them just to show off. light and reflection systems in particular have kind of an uncanny valley feel to them now at least to me, and it makes the games much less pleasant to look at


  • windows 8 is a strong candidate, because that was their huge push into trying to remodel the OS in the image of mobile OSes. you had to perform quite the exorcism to get it functional. i skipped Vista so I’m not the best source on this but my understanding is that the issue with Vista is less that it was loaded with dark patterns and trying to be a walled garden and more just an unfortunate time to be an OS with the technology and security landscapes changing.

    of course, while the base OS wasn’t necessarily always the problem, Microsoft has anti-competitive practices going back even further and you could argue Windows stopped being good when MS started bundling Internet Explorer with it, so it all depends where you draw the line. might be safest to say their last truly good OS was MSX-DOS just because they abandoned it before they could do anything scummy



  • as someone approaching my 30s in america this sounds consistent with both my experience and many of my peers. our education system is more or less a trauma machine, and couple that with the demise of “third places” (places that aren’t school or home for kids to hang out in without having to spend money) and the general state of the world being hard for even adult minds fo wrap around… our world is a difficult and unpleasant place to be a kid. it ain’t a cakewalk being an adult either but it is relatively better with a relative increase in agency and more experience dealing with everything







  • yeah, at least where i am the cowboy days are long over. we have a modern change control system on the box that ties into our company’s broader service management system, and methodologies like agile are used (and misused) just like in the newer departments. the software and hardware are also constantly being updated by IBM and keeping up with them and other vendors is a full time job all on it’s own- really the only things ancient about it are the oldest parts of our own codebase and the terminal interface. we actually have a product that lets us bypass the terminal now and do everything in eclipse but the old timers don’t use it because the terminal is easier for them and then the newbies don’t use it because any time the oldbies teach them how to do something, it’s on the terminal emulator lmao