MudMan

Yes.

I mean, for one thing, that’s a misrepresentation. You don’t need a behavioral scientist to figure out that “come back tomorrow for another reward” is a good engagement tool. For another, it’s a misnomer, because that’s not a dark pattern, it’s a deliberate, out-in-the-open design that is transparent about how it works.

But do I think that people freaking out about engagement tools they don’t like while giving functionally similar ones they do like a pass is a moral panic?

100%, absolutely yes.

There’s a reason why the PEGI rep talking to Eurogamer clarifies that this specific wording would absolutely have unintended consequences and they’re limiting the age ratings impact and leaning on content descriptors instead:

“There was some discussion here,” he added. “Some people pointed out that these are features that make the game engaging and fun - this is enriching the game experience similar to a cliffhanger in a Netflix series. So we mostly want to inform parents about this, because there’s no reason why we should give Animal Crossing a very high rating. So this is going to stick to a PEGI 7 but it will have a descriptor that explains this. The exact language of the descriptors still needs to be figured out.”

So yes. Slippery slope, moral panic, will somebody think of the children stuff.

Hah. You do you. I get how it’d be obnoxious to be called out, but man, it’s not my fault that you chose the worst possible example for this. Like, literally the worst iteration of Windows for the specific metric you called out, in a clearly demonstrable way that a ton of people measured because it was such a meme.

You can block me, but “they are what they are” indeed.

Incidentally, this is a classic opportunity to remind people that blocking on AP applications sucks ass and the only effect it has is for the blocker to stop being able to see what the blockee is saying about them while everybody else still gets access to both. Speaking of software degradation, somebody should look into that.

Myyyyyeeeeh. A lightweight distro or a conemporaneous distro sure.

If I’m running GPU accelerated Steam, tons of tabs on Firefox and the same highly customized KDE desktop full of translucent components and extra animations I am willing to bet they’d both chug.

Which is what the conversation is about: new software doesn’t suck, it’s doing more stuff.

For sure, all things being equal Linux does run ligher on RAM and VRAM, so if you’re using something that is speficially memory-limited so Windows and Linux fall on opposite sides of overflowing the available memory you’ll definitely see better performance on Linux, but that’s not an inherent issue with poorly made software having a huge performance overhead.

Myeh. I think they mostly do fine, but they’re certainly not perfect. These are reasonable, but some of the stuff they’re saying about it is factually incorrect, too (like I said, there ARE age-based commerce lockouts in games already despite their statements).

All they need to do to be functional is have a modicum of consistency and at least be reactive to feedback. The Balatro thing sucked, but they did correct it. Some of these changes seem to be specifically a reaction to the Balatro thing, in fact.

See, I have a real issue with the “12 year olds (or anyone, really)” bit there in juxtaposition to all the pushback on OS age verification.

The gaming community has spent the past decade and change doing the exact same moral panic routine that anti-game violence crusaders did in the 90s and are in the process of finding out why it’s a bad idea.

Age ratings and content warnings? Awesome. Gating content and design concepts on moral grounds? Not that.

It doesn’t need to be too specific, in that PEGI actually reviews the products it rates. You get to send them a preview and then talk to them about the rating.

I also think some of the stuff Eurogamer is reporting is weird, or maybe PEGI is just not aware of some tools? For instance, null

A game will be able to reduce this PEGI rating to 7 if it contains in-game controls that allow you to turn spending off by default. As Bosmans noted, these systems don’t really exist yet, but the hope is this change will incentivise them to be developed.

Is not actually true. Many games do include turning spending off based on the user’s reported age or whether they’re on a child account (Nintendo and Sony both support this as a feature, I believe).

So there is some confusing stuff going on here, but it all seems mostly reasonable to me.

Then you’re either lying about it or haven’t booted a newer PC. Fast Boot was a back of the box feature for Windows 8 for a reason. It was becoming a huge meme at the time how slow Win7 was to boot.

If your 2020s PC with Windows 11 is taking 45 seconds to boot on the Windows logo like Win 7 does (as seen in the benchmarks above) then you need some tech support because something is clearly not working as expected. I don’t think even my weaker Win11 machines take longer than 10 secs from boot starting to the password screen.

That may be true anyway, because the tiny hybrid laptop I’m using to write this is reporting 2-5% CPU utilization even with a literal hundred tabs open in this browser. So… yeah, either you have a knack for hyperbole or something broken.

Except the Linux userbase has been saying that exact thing for the past ten years, so again, has Linux also degraded in sync or, hear me out here, is this mostly a nostalgia thing that makes you forget the cludgy performance issues of the software you used when you were younger and things have mostly gotten snappier over time across the board?

As a current dual booter I’ll say that Windows and Linux don’t feel fundamentally different these days, for good and ill. Windows has a remarkably crappy and entirely self-inflicted issue with their online-search-in-Start-menu feature, which sucks but is toggleable at least. Otherwise I have KDE and Win11 set up the same way and they both work pretty much the same. And both measurably better than their respective iterations 10, let alone 15 or 20 years ago.

That’s… not really true, and not what that link shows. Those latency tests still show then-modern devices topping the list. They’re arguing that some then-modern low end devices have more button-to-screen latency than older hardware (which they would, given he’s comparing to single-threaded, single-tasking bare metal stuff from the 80s spitting signals out to a CRT to laptops with integrated graphics). And they’re saying that at the time (I presume the post dates from 2017, when the testing ends), this wasn’t well understood because people were benching the hardware and not the end to end latency factoring the I/O… which was kinda true at the time but absolutely not anymore.

I’d get in the weeds about how much or little sense it makes to compare an apple 2 drawing text on a CRT to typing on a powershell/Linux terminal window inside a desktop environment, but that’d be kind of unfair. Ten years ago this wasn’t a terrible observation to make with the limited tools the guy had available, and this sort of post made it popular to think about latency and made manufacturers on controllers, monitors and GPUs focus on it more.

What it does not show, though, is that an apple 2 was faster than a modern gaming PC by any metric. Not in 2017, and sure as hell not in 2026, when 240Hz monitors are popular, 120Hz TVs are industry-standard, VRR is widely supported and keyboards, controllers, monitors and GPU manufacturers are obsessed with latency measurements. It’s not just fallacious, it’s wrong.

When was the last time you booted a 2011 machine? Because man, is that not true.

And that’s a 2016-2017 era PC.

Windows 7 didn’t even have fast boot support at all. I actively remember recommending people to let their PCs sit for a couple of minutes after booting so that Windows could finish whatever the hell it was trying to do in the background faster instead of clogging up whatever else you were trying to do.

Keeping my old hardware around compulsively really impacts my perception of this whole “things were better when I was a teenager” stuff.

That’s some nonsense, though.

For one thing, it’s one of those tropes that people have been saying for 30 years, so it kinda stops making sense after a while. For another, the reason it doesn’t make sense is it doesn’t account for modern computers doing more now than they did then.

In 2016 I had a 970 that’s still in an old computer I use as a retro rocket, and I can promise you that wonderful as that thing was, I couldn’t have been playing Resident Evil this week on that thing. So yeah, I notice.

And I had a Galaxy S7 then, which is still in use as a bit of a display and I assure you my current phone is VERY noticeably faster, even discounting the fact that its displaying 120fps rather than 60.

Old people have been going “things were better when I was a kid” for millennia. I’m not assuming we’re gonna stop now, but… maybe we should.

But… 2016 was a decade ago. If it feels quick and snappy that way that means the post is right.

Which it kinda isn’t but hey.

I can’t believe I walked into this comment one hour after it was made in a 9 month old zombie thread. I haven’t even opened this app in days.

Anyway, I do think it’s funny that you said Morrowind when I was comparing it to Oblivion, because it just goes to make my point: this is about age and where specifically you set the focus of your nostalgia goggles.

You give the jank and smaller scope and jank of Morrowind a pass because it’s weird and was advanced at the time, but probably think Oblivion traded visuals for a more boring setting and truncated world, which was the criticism at the time. I think Daggerfall was doing some crazy sci-fi stuff in 1996 and just making a console RPG was a step back for Morrowind, which was the criticism at the time, and I bet plenty of people are more than happy to be nostalgic about Oblivion. People tend to think stuff holds up depending on how into it they were when it came out.

I absolutely don’t understand Calibre at all. That’s been my point all along.

I can tell you that I’ve actively tried to avoid Calibre when setting up a self-hosted ebook library and I’m currently chugging along with my Calibre-web install.

Turns out, somebody is forcing me to use Calibre, because I promise if I could have stuck with the half a dozen attempts at having a ebook library handle my pre-existing directory structure I wouldn’t have wasted a day having Calibre ingesting and duplicating it all, then manually checking that everything came over before feeling safe enough to delete the original repository.

Because that’s how it still works as of today, as it turns out.

And again, Calibre gets no more respect from me than… I don’t know, Canva. I owe neither of them anything and if I happen to have a bad time using any part of it I feel super happy and safe sharing that on whatever venue seems applicable with as much sarcasm as I see fit. Software is software and end user criticism is end user criticism. I’m being exceedingly articulate and respectful about it, by those standards, speaking with full understanding of what the bad version of this looks and feels like.

Hah. You get the “FOSS gets to be crap because you can’t do it yourself” cop out often, but rarely when you haven’t actually complained about it.

I mean, there are a ton of Calibre alternatives, the point everybody is making here is that a bunch of them don’t get enough support or stick to Calibre conventions anyway because Calibre is at the ground floor of the entire thing and has sort of metastasized into a de facto standard architecture. I don’t even know that you could make a commercial Kindle alternative and not at least support Calibre conventions at this point. It’s like trying to not use HDMI anymore, and for similar reasons.

Unless you’re Kovid Goyal (made me look that up and man, what a rough name to have in the 2020s), I don’t see how that connects to your response at all. And even if you were, honestly. I’ve seen some of the other stuff the guy has done and said. I’m not sure he’d take it as an insult and I don’t mean it as one. The man made the piece of software he needed the way he wanted, which is very much not universal. It just happens to now be the core of entire chunk of the ebook industry that isn’t made by Amazon.com Inc., much to my annoyance.

But since I’m at it, if your software is annoying people have no need to hide their anger or contempt for the ways in which it is annoying, even if it’s FOSS. If you put it out there don’t be mad when end users act like end users. People who stumble upon a piece of software and try to use don’t need to do an audit on your accounts and licenses to know if they are allowed to be mad at the stuff that’s annoying them. FOSS competes with commercial software in equal terms, as far as end users are concerned. Some of the ways it competes have to do with privacy, security, code access and lack of fees, but all the other ways, including UX, polish and feature set, still apply.

Nah, hard disagree. Calibre has quirks because it’s old, but it also has quirks because it has quirks.

It’s not particularly disputed that a lot of how its original pre-web UX was designed and the weirdly rigid, stunted structure of how it wants its libraries organized are a side effect of it originally being a one person project that seemed mostly designed to the preferences of its maintainer. And then there’s all that baseline functionality from it being originally meant as a standalone app rather than a self-hosting thing layered on top of all the weird decisions.

I’ve been at this for a long time. I tried to use Calibre back when it was new, digital comic books were rars with jpegs in them and ebooks just sat in random directories as .txt files. It was weird then and it’s weird now. If anything, the crazy ecosystem built around it has made it less weird now that a bunch of stuff is hiding the rough edges behind more modern/reasonable design.

There’s a reason Calibre-web is called Calibre-web. Calibre-web itself is a mitigation for how dumb Calibre is.

A lot of a very cool ecosystem is built on top of this one core piece of weirdness this one nerd made in his own alien mindspace and nobody likes any of the choices in there, but it’s inescapable now, precisely because all these other cool, important tools are built around it.

See also: Gnome.

Have I? I tried so many so quickly I can’t even remember.

In any case I’m part of the problem now, because my dealbreaker was having to organize my library in the obtuse alien way Calibre wants instead of the nice, human-readable way I already had. I bit that bullet, so now I’m married to a Calibre format library and thus perpetuating the terrible standard.

Hah. Good to know. I haven’t refreshed that container in a while and the data keeps populating just fine, so I hadn’t considered it. Makes a lot of sense to consolidate all the media server options into one package, though. I’ll take a peek at the new one.

I strongly recommend Overseerr if you are going to run a video server.

Forget piracy. I only host dumps of my physical media (which at least where I am is perfectly legal), but that thing has an database of international streaming sources. I use it just as a watchlist and to check whether I have access to a thing on a commercial streaming service already. It is effectively Justwatch for your streaming media.

Immich is a pretty obvious thing, too, if you want to get out of commercial image hosting services.

I’d say, though, that’s a fairly ambitious plan, and if your self-hosted apps, your home webhosting and your NAS are all going to live on the same home server I’d certainly figure out security and backups before overcommitting. That plan is a lot of hard drives and failure points you’re gonna be wrangling.