lime!

i thought you had to use garlic bread? man, i’ve been overpaying

this reads like a teenager wrote it

it’s more than that Kola, it’s large.

me and three friends have been spending on average 80 hours each on a space age game together since the expansion released, and we’re currently in the process of getting the third planet (out of five) to produce evenly without getting stuck.

each planet has basically it’s own tech tree, and you need to re-learn how to build a factory every time because the conditions are so different.

where we are now, the only resource is “scrap”. building a factory here involves basically running the entire process to build something in reverse, disassembling broken machine parts to extract the components, sorting them, and reusing them in new things. we’re completely swamped in blue circuits, batteries and low density structures, which isn’t much help when you need pipes.

don’t know why nobody stated this but space age is basically five times larger than the base game. they’ve announced that even though the game is coming to switch, space age is not since it has much higher requirements.

it’s not a dlc, it’s a proper expansion.

i don’t know of a single town here that has overhead power lines in populated areas. those are for long-distance transmission only.

or, okay, i know of one. but that’s because there’s a steel mill and a hydropower plant there, and you don’t wan to bury lines that carry that around of energy.

hypothesis: the last reply is usually left there to stop hundreds of people replying that exact same thing below.

of course not. the american “system of checks and balances” only works if everyone plays by the rules.

…again

because political dissidents who are in jail for trying to overthrow a dictatorship should also be able to run. it’s one of those unfortunate situations where this would be a good thing to have under an authoritarian government…

there haven’t been card fees for end users in Sweden for many years. handling cash is a lot more expensive since you need somewhere secure to keep change, you loose time at the till handling the money, and you need to pay for someone to come pick it up. the time gained from just having the customers pay with card means businesses gladly swallow the fees.

and yes, i’m always surprised when going abroad how much more analog everything is. the nordics and Baltic’s are generally at about the same level (with Estonia way ahead), but the rest of the continent feels like it’s 10 years behind. I was once asked if I really wanted to pay with card in a corner shop in Leipzig, since the card fee was €10.

not that i’m a fan of the digitalisation, it makes marginalised groups even more marginalised. i see my elderly relatives struggling with it often.

okay, this is going to require some introduction.

back in the olden days of youtube, there was a channel named silvagunner. it uploaded video game music in high quality ripped straight from the game files. this channel is long since gone due to dmca, although it lives on as the lower-profile followup gilvasunner.

during the first channel’s reign though, a parody account was created called siIvagunner (that’s two i’s) which exactly copied the style and text formatting of the original channel, but replaced the tracks with “subtle” changes. this one is one of the more famous examples. if you haven’t heard the track in a while you may be lured into a sort of Mandela effect of “maybe it did always sound like this” and then they hit you with the full switch at the midpoint. hilarity ensues. this is, truly, a high-quality video game rip.

siIvagunner is a really popular channel, and is run by committee. they have a vetting team, and scores of people have contributed tracks. like with everything, there have been trends in what content is included in the rips. from absolute dogshit to frankly insane effort, you at least know you’re in for a laugh when they upload (which they do a lot; for a while they averaged one track an hour). these trends usually take the form of one track being parts of many rips at once, with different spins.

some people, who i think must have thought that their taste was objective or something, took it upon themselves to police the meme quality of the videos. for a while, it was customary to downvote any rip containing a specific track from the Love Live series, regardless of quality, to simply “warn others”. this brigading was so common they even made memes about it.

ok, intro over. fact is, brigading occurred. my point is, this has a snowball effect. we know for a fact that only a small percentage of viewers actually like or dislike, which means that when it’s applied as consistently as it was here, great videos are skipped due to some people downvoting out of some sense of “community service”. siIva, of course by it’s very nature can’t make money, but this is in my opinion indicative of a common issue with the platform.

originally? a paid product. now? crypto!

well that’s good then. personally my experience with the dislike bar is mostly from siIvagunner, where videos with well-used tracks got shitloads of dislikes, more than the views of videos without them. this despite the quality of work put into them. i’m glad to be rid of that.

but like… the like/dislike buttons are there for the algorithm. they’re there to tweak your recommendations. always were. the problem with having the ratio visible is that people will brigade, and that “mainstreams” your recommendations, making them less useful. that’s why youtube removed the visible ratios. putting them back, and just for people with the plugin, means your recommendations will start to align only with the people who have the plugin. it literally becomes an echo chamber.

i just think dearrow seems like the better choice for that purpose.

Is it? personally, when i think of “people who want to see the dislike bar” my mind equates that to “people who want to dislike”, and that’s not a group of people i want to interact with.

how can we even know that though? there’s no stats anymore.

also, if peertube et al got bigger, surely sponsorblock would be useful there as well? if creators would use those services because people were on them, sponsors would contact those creators because they got the views.

one thing i know it does from GitHub issues is it changes the names of files you download to make them “clearer”, which breaks some tools for flashing firmware and lead to a spike of reports.

the return dislike plugin is just stupid. it’s a community database now, so rather than being based on the actual number of dislikes on youtube it’s based on the dislikes of the people who have the plugin.

it used to be that it actually got the real numbers but youtube removed that endpoint so now it’s just a misanthropic echo chamber.

Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan died.