Hello!

I work as a AAA game programmer. I previously worked on the Battlefield series, but now I’m working on a new AAA title I can’t really talk about.

Before that, I worked at Disneyland!

As a hobby, I also collect and run model trains.

  • 5 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 24th, 2020

help-circle
  • Posting this from my Lemmy.ml account so you can see the account age - it’s from 2020. When taking the survey, I noticed the phrasing/answers on some of the questions could maybe be improved if you want to find out what Lemmy was like before Reddit came over.

    I am a long-time user of Reddit. My Reddit account is well over a decade old at this point, and I’ve disliked the admin team since about 2013-2014 or so. I continued to use Reddit because of its scale and the ability to have niche discussions on it, but I have always taken any alternatives seriously. Over the last 10 years, my trust in the Reddit admins has continually shrunk; bear in mind that I am also a moderator of a medium-large subreddit (600k subscribers).

    I discovered Lemmy from this post on Reddit. At the time that post was made, Lemmy didn’t really have any federation yet. Lemmy.ml was the only real place with any activity (although Lemmygrad was founded and beginning to grow).

    I used Lemmy for a while, but left for a couple reasons:

    1. Conversations were slow, with 1-2 weeks between a post and a reply

    2. People on there had unsavory politics that I disagree with, including the creators of Lemmy itself (who ran Lemmy.ml, which was - again - the only instance with any notable activity)

    I also was frustrated with the lack of an Android app; I was recommended one at the time but it has since stopped development and is now abandoned.

    These factors drove me to Reddit again, although Lemmy stayed in the back of my mind. But I checked in every 6 months or so, just to keep an eye on things. Which brings me to my real point here:

    It’s really hard to talk about “Lemmy” as a whole. It’s not quite like Mastodon, where there is very much a culture that’s shared across instances. Pre-migration, there were politics between Lemmy instances and these politics have always been dividing lines.

    People federated with Lemmy.ml because there was no alternative. That’s the “stock” place people go to sign up. It was the only place with activity, and thus if you didn’t federate with it you didn’t have anything in your feeds. (Not that there was much going on anyway… there were maybe a couple dozen active accounts per month.)

    Despite this, you still had places like Beehaw which had a very strict moderation policy (basically a safe space for people who disliked Reddit and Lemmy.ml), but Beehaw still federated with Lemmy.ml. You had Hexbear, which technically turned off federation altogether and used Lemmy as a traditional forum after their subreddit got closed (like Truth Social is to Mastodon). Etc.

    The way the survey speaks about all these places as a monolith sort of ignores a lot about what Lemmy was like before the migration from Reddit. Each instance was very different from the others; now they’ve sort of run into one another but prior to that you had very specific “look and feel” for individual instances.

    Because of this, questions like “How do you feel was the response from the existing Lemmy community towards the migration?” will get very different answers based on what instance you joined. Asking how Beehaw reacted is very different from how Lemmy.ml reacted, and Lemmy.world didn’t exist at all before Reddit came over.


    Another confusing question: “Which platform’s user interface do you find more user-friendly?”

    This can give you very different answers based on whether people are coming from New Reddit or Old Reddit. I very much dislike New Reddit (and have since it was launched). Old Reddit is much more functional, but I have no way of indicating what I’m comparing Lemmy to.









  • Los Angeles has been turning their streetlights into EV charging stations. So if you need to charge - just park under a lamp and plug in.

    The goal is that everywhere in the city will have charging, so presuming you can park near a streetlight you’ll be able to charge your car. After all - the streetlight needs power anyway.

    That said - I bought my Model 3 when I was still living in an apartment. Charging wasn’t too bad. My job gave me free charging in the parking garage as a perk, and on top of that I had a Supercharger I could stop at on the way home if I needed it (which I rarely did). Usually I only used that charger if I was eating in that shopping center anyway, and typically my charging would get done before I finished waiting for my food (so I’d have to rush to move my car before getting idle fees).

    The challenging part came when the pandemic started. I didn’t commute to work anymore, but my car would slowly die in the parking spot (just like how your phone can die in your pocket).

    Every weekend, I had to take it down to charge it. This honestly wasn’t so bad. There was a charger by an In-N-Out, so I’d stop by and grab something to eat while I charged. There was a mall across the street with free charging as well, but during the early days of the pandemic they originally blocked a lot of the mall off.

    After a couple of months I moved to a place with a garage, and now I charge using a regular wall outlet without any problem. But it really wasn’t too bad having to charge while in an apartment, to be honest.


  • When water evaporates, it has a cooling effect - this is why your body produces sweat. As the sweat evaporates, it causes your body to cool down.

    The wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature that can be reached as a result of water evaporating.

    When this wet-bulb temperature approaches human body temperature, then the human body cannot reduce its temperature via sweating. This causes your body to overheat and will eventually lead to death. This is true even in the shade, even with unlimited water to drink.

    At some point in the near future, it will be so hot somewhere that the wet bulb temperature will reach 35C (95F). Once this is reached, anyone exposed to that temperature will die after a few hours. The only way to avoid it is air conditioning, and if the power fails due to the heat then that won’t work either.

    This is most likely to happen somewhere tropical first, but it will slowly happen in more and more places as the Earth warms.




  • One thing I think is interesting is how tildes.net is planning to handle moderation.

    Basically - they give you broad powers initially, and take them away from you if you show yourself you can’t be trusted. So if you report a user and it’s a bad-faith report, they can ding you. If you keep making bad-faith reports, then over time you lose the ability to create reports at all.

    By contrast - if you repeatedly prove to make good reports, and your reports are usually actioned upon, you become “trusted” over time and your reports may cause content to be removed as soon as you report it. (And of course - if a moderator restores a post that you got removed, that counts as a ding against you.)

    Over time, trusted users get hand-picked to become moderators. This has the ability to create “power users”, of course, but a moderator that acts in bad faith can become less trusted over time and potentially loses their privileges. The thought is that the risk of power users is less than the detriment of an unmoderated community.









  • Fair enough. It’d be nice to centralize all my social media in one place - Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, etc. It’s actually super-cool that this works the other way at all - I’ve followed a couple communities on Mastodon and it’s neat seeing posts pop up in my feeds.

    But I totally get why Lemmy works the way it does. I almost wonder if maybe it makes more sense to be able to follow Mastodon hashtags? I’m not familiar enough with the ActivityPub protocol to know how easy that is, though (and I get the feeling it’s not easy…).


  • Haha, I was here 3 years ago, before Federation even worked. It was very slow, to say the least. ;)

    It’s been my first time back since 2020, and it’s kind of wild to see it taking off. I’d imagine it’ll only grow as the enshittification of Reddit continues.

    I am very curious what’s going to happen to the larger instances like lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org. Lemmy.ml was struggling to load for me a bit earlier; come July 1st when everyone gets their access cut off I’m very curious how slammed this’ll be.