Yesterday, for the first time, I got google search results that were entirely useless. I don’t remember what I searched, but it was a relatively simple question and I was kind of in a hurry. The only results I got were video thumbnails and sponsored products… Also presented as thumbnails. Barely any text anywhere to tell me what the thumbnails were supposed to be. They even removed the choices across the top so I couldn’t select “all”.

It’s been getting worse for years, but that was the last straw for me. I don’t want to search the web on “large thumbnails”, I want “detail view”. Sometimes I’m searching for a product, but mostly I need information in the form of text written by a real human. If a search engine can’t give me that, then it’s not useful anymore.

Really frustrating. I guess I better get around to using duckduckgo everywhere.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried spacerpg4 but it hasn’t held my attention as much as I hoped.

I did find an android port of star control 2, and that is some good stuff. Really scratched the 90 gaming itch too.

I think certain places (reddit?) Have been using algorithms to find and stamp out bots/vote manipulation for quite a while. I remember at least one major wave of bans for smurfed accounts participating in manipulation.

Yesssss

Do you know of anything like this for the switch? I’m a late comer to handhelds since I developed some shoulder problems and can’t really PC game anymore.

I used to love a game called transcendence back when it was a free alpha. Top down, open world, semi-roguelike, big focus on combat with satisfying 2d physics and lots of ship customization. Less focus on trading and world interaction stuff.

I’ve looked at a couple you guys mentioned, but I’m really trying to find something that’ll scratch that 2d space combat itch on a handheld.

Dark souls 1 or the remaster is still worth playing. The map design is once-in-a-lifetime good. There is a pretty hefty penalty like in other souls games, but it’s just getting hollowed and losing some souls. DS3 is also good, maybe a more refined version of 1, but I personally don’t think the world is as cohesive with the loading screens.

The trick is to just get used to being hollowed all the time and spending souls asap when you get them. You don’t lose gear when you die, and gear is pretty important. The real progress comes from learning how to deal with each enemy though, and that comes from dying. I guess it sort of boils down to “git gud”, even though that wasn’t what I was trying to say here lol.

You’re damn right it’s too soon. My beloved dead steam controller is barely cold, and to make it worse, they’re discontinued.

I used to use Relay for reddit, and jerboa feels really familiar. It’s development really picked up last release too. Still having an issue getting back to a comment context from a reply in my inbox, but I think that’s a bug from last release and there’s a pull request already.

Waow 😮 <3

Wow, thanks for such a detailed reply. I was sitting here thinking something like “just take what the server does and uh… distribute it”, but it’s clearly not trivial.

I’m not really up on the intricacies of the federation philosophy, but why isn’t it just distributed p2p style?

So there would be 1 forward facing thing that you interact with, but all of the backend functions would be spread across all the volunteer servers/instances. Like torrent seeding.

Maybe that’s not even feasible, but I’ve been wondering since I joined.

Exactly. Make it infrastructure that’s hidden away from the front end. Find some way to wrap up duplicate groups into larger categories or something, and figure out a way to migrate accounts if your home instance tanks. That would cover all my concerns.