Craig is the real hero of the internet age.
People came to him and offered him tons of money to give them craigslist so they could ruin it. He said, no, what the fuck? Why would I do that? I like it the way it is.
They said, but you can make MONEY.
He said yes but I have already have some money. Why would I want to fuck up something neat that I created? That sounds bad.
But, they said, MONEY.
He repeated himself. It went around several times. Eventually, they went away, angry and confused, still not understanding.
I can’t stop laughing.
No single person suggests making a logo that resembles an anus, but when everyone’s feedback gets incorporated, that’s what often emerges.
- 1990s-2000s: 3D and Glossy - Remember when every logo needed a drop shadow and a glassy shine? Apple’s aqua interface set the standard.
- 2010-2013: Skeuomorphism - Digital designs mimicking physical objects, with stitched leather textures and realistic dials.
- 2013-2018: Flat Design - Reaction to skeuomorphism brought minimal, clean interfaces with bright colors and no shadows.
- 2018-2022: Neomorphism - Soft shadows and semi-flat design creating subtle, “touchable” interfaces.
- 2022-Present: The Butthole Era
Yeah. The whole experience might fail and would probably turn out to be punishing for her and her family in a variety of ways. I’m just saying how I would hope it to happen. I pictured one of the school administrators on the stand under oath, having to explain themselves to people with more authority than them, and it was too compelling to let go of.
School administrators not caring about the well-being of their students, because they’re just kids and so who gives a shit what happens to them?
Color me shocked. I think the underlying reason is that the kids don’t have the societal standing to fight back. She should move on to suing the school for conspiracy to distribute child pornography, violating their role as mandatory reporters, IDK about the legalisms but she should pick whatever the best option is and try her best to fuck them up. Maybe they’d handle it differently in the future if it involves some consequences for them.
HL2 was the first major game that based its core gameplay to its physics engine, the first to have HDR rendering and the game that Source engine was developed for. Without HL2, a lot of video games in the decade that followed it, would have looked a lot different.
Yeah, maybe so. Source is just Valve’s internal engine, it was continuously developed and used during pretty much all of their FPS-type game development which includes HL2 along with everything else. It was forked from the not-“Source” source tree at the time of release of the original Half-Life and moved forward continuously from there. But yeah HL2 did do a bunch of ground-breaking stuff, I do see your point and I think it belongs on the list.
The article claims that Shenmue was the first to have a “living world” where characters follow their daily routines and so on.
It’s not. Ultima 6 was doing that.
Actually, The Last Express had already done whatever Shenmue was attempting to do with its “living world” absolutely ten times better. But the same tragic story that led The Last Express to be a commercial flop also means that all the wonderful stuff it did didn’t really make any impact. 😢 TL;DR it was an actual successful implementation of powerful narrative inside of a world that the player could meaningfully impact, in a perfectly meshed and groundbreaking form. But for some reason the studio either refused to or couldn’t do basically any promotion for it, and so after being completed it sold barely any copies and simply fell into the abyss, unknown. It was a masterpiece. Shenmue probably had more lasting impact on gaming.
Zero Punctuation as usual gets to the heart of the matter very effectively: https://youtu.be/g4Dw0Z2Dsts
That’s for Shenmue 3. He actually made a separate video reviewing the original, but that one covers more of the history and context. TL;DR It has a devoted cult following of people who basically want a very specific type of gaming experience, but the specific game that was the first to give it to them just objectively is not very good at all as an interactive video game, which is why it has never been all that popular outside that little following. Some people trace to Shenmue the lineage of huge cinematic games that emphasize narrative, which I guess could be valid, but even a super-charitable reading shouldn’t put it anywhere near the coveted number 1 spot.
Oh, you know what happened? I just realized, I hadn’t even read the introductory material and realized it was from a public survey. It’s a “first past the post” problem. Plenty of people had various lists of games they felt passionate about (and you can tell where the boundary is where “I played this game recently and I love it now so it is my favorite” started to distort the placement of some recent games), but anyone who had Shenmue anywhere on their list put it as the number 1 spot. And so, it won by bad voting algorithm. I can almost guarantee that each respondent was only allowed a single choice for most influential game.
I actually think the list, with some exceptions, is remarkably accurate. It definitely isn’t perfect. There are also some big omissions, notably in old PC games that had a big influence or fleshed out new genres that have mutated since then, or gone extinct or something. I think they’re just outside of too many people’s memory at this point.
Off the top of my head:
- Ultima or Dungeon Master
- King’s Quest or Monkey Island
- Civilization
- Battlefield 1942
- Halo or Goldeneye
- Counterstrike
- Warcraft 2
- Zelda 1
- GRAND THEFT AUTO
- THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM
- GRAND THEFT AUTO III
Wow… okay, this is good. It is really rare to see one of these lists that is actually populated with extremely influential games. That’s a good choice of metric, too. Not which ones are “great” but which ones had a lasting impact on the landscape.
- WORLD OF WARCRAFT
- PONG
I wonder if it might be good to separate by decades or generations or something. These are both obviously ground-breakingly influential and belong on the list but it seems kind of senseless to try to “compare” them.
- HALF-LIFE 2
Okay that’s a little weird. We’re getting up into the real high-water heights here and I mean HL2 is good but…
- KINGDOM COME: DELIVERANCE 2
Guys? You okay? I haven’t played it but it seems unlikely that it needs to be above WoW and Dark Souls.
- MINECRAFT
- THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME
- HALF-LIFE
Okay, here we go. You guys found your stride again. These are legit choices yes.
- SHENMUE
THE FUCK WHY WHAT
I was careful with my phrasing for exactly that reason. I think that, either, before the end of his current term things will blow up in such cataclysmic fashion that all bets are off for what comes next, or else Trump will be starting his third term in 2029.
As much as I am scared for it, I am hoping it is the first.
Not even Elon Musk gets to ignore Wikimedia policies. That will never change.
I hope this is true. By the end of Trump’s term, ICE may be able to simply storm the Wikimedia offices and shut everything down if they don’t adhere to Trump’s official truth.
I assume they have enough international presence that things will be able to continue, but their core office being in the US is no longer the pretty-good protection against authoritarian regimes trying to force them to alter what they’re presenting. I’m sure they will fight, but a lot of the tools they used to use to fight with are being attacked, with quite a bit of success, right now.
Wikipedia is extremely resistant to this kind of thing. They’ve been dealing with it for decades now. All kinds of people have had that idea, sometimes professionally being paid by some company/country/individual to the tune of quite a bit of money. Sometimes they do succeed in bending the narrative slightly in particular ways, but the simple “overwhelm everyone’s resources” approach that works a treat on Lemmy or Facebook can get simply brushed aside on Wikipedia because of its strong culture and good design features.
Nginx and Lemmy both absolutely logs IPs by default. sudo journalctl -u lemmy -f.
I assume that most admins of server big enough that they have to worry about abuse should check IPs to detect ban evasion, although you can get around it reliably by switching instances, and whether they actually do that or not would be a crapshoot, I think.
Hey, can you summarize the core argument of this for me? Specifically with an eye to its broader implications about the AI sector and the technology industry as it currently stands in its current form today.
I’ll analyze the core argument of this piece and its broader implications.
The article’s central argument is that DeepSeek’s recent breakthrough has exposed fundamental flaws in how Western tech companies, particularly OpenAI and Anthropic, have approached AI development. The author contends that these companies weren’t actually innovating but rather perpetuating what they call a “Rot Economy” - a system where companies burn through massive amounts of capital while creating an illusion of inevitable progress and necessary scale.
The key revelation isn’t just that DeepSeek created more efficient models, but that Western AI companies apparently never seriously tried to do so. The author argues this wasn’t because they couldn’t, but because they had no incentive to - they were operating in a system that rewarded spending and scale rather than efficiency and innovation. They had convinced investors and the market that the only path forward was through ever-larger models requiring ever-more expensive infrastructure.
The broader implications about the current state of the technology industry are particularly damning:
- The modern tech industry, particularly in AI, has become fundamentally anti-innovative. Rather than solving real problems efficiently, it’s oriented around maintaining narratives that justify continued capital accumulation.
- Silicon Valley has lost its “scrappy builder” spirit. Instead of finding clever solutions to constraints (as DeepSeek did), major companies simply throw money and resources at problems.
- The venture capital and tech media ecosystem has become complicit in this dynamic, uncritically accepting narratives about necessary scale and inevitable progress while failing to ask basic questions about efficiency and practical value.
The author suggests this represents a deeper crisis in American tech innovation - the industry has become dominated by what they call “management consultants that lead teams of engineers to do things based on vibes” rather than genuine technological problem-solving. This has created an environment where companies compete not on actual innovation or efficiency, but on their ability to raise and spend capital while maintaining compelling narratives about future potential.
The piece concludes that much of the current AI boom has been essentially a confidence game - not because the technology doesn’t work, but because the companies developing it have been more focused on maintaining narratives that justify their continued fundraising than on creating genuinely valuable and sustainable products. DeepSeek’s achievement matters not just because it created more efficient models, but because it demonstrated that the emperor had no clothes - that the massive infrastructure and spending of Western AI companies wasn’t actually necessary for technological progress.
This suggests a potential inflection point for the tech industry, where the narrative-driven, capital-intensive model of innovation may be reaching its limits, potentially forcing a return to more genuine technological problem-solving and efficiency-driven development.
My AI summarizer is superior to your AI summarizer. 😃
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