The power grid problems islands have is a really interesting topic. Just the other day I read an interview discussing Taiwan's energy situation[0] and even though I am familiar with the various factions and the surface level debate, it prompted me to think a bit deeper on the unique challenges islands have as marginalized geographic entities. I didn't grow up on an island so I'm not sure if people who do are more conscious of the precarity, but you'd think if they did then they would place even more emphasis on getting energy independence. It's one of those things that would be cool to study if I could go back in time and choose a different specialization...
Some public schools in Puerto Rico started putting solar panels on their roofs after Maria which imho makes sense for all public schools all over the US / world. You have kids at school during the day, rarely during night. When schools not even open you could either put that extra power into the grid or store it for rainy seasons.
Alternatives include generating power from wind as well.
I live on an island and my first priority after getting a full time job again is to buy solar and storage good for a few days of my homes usage. The cost of energy is increasing here and I don’t see it ever going down since we’re still using oil for the most part. I plan to build a little wood workshop shed in my yard and cover it with solar panels and put some batteries in it. I should only need about 30 kWh of storage to cover three days use, and maybe 2 or 3 kW of panels for daily use and recharging the batteries; except for the EV, which I normally charge once a week but I can just start plugging in during the day instead. With that setup I can keep connected to the grid and eventually see if I can go off grid after a few years, or possibly add more solar and storage later if I find the first phase wasn’t enough.
However, that’s only possible because I have money and knowledge; most people don’t have that and so as a whole we’re kind of screwed here. Costs will continue to rise while not enough renewables are installed, usually on individual homes which only helps those individuals.
I have a friend in the Bahamas who had setup his entire home up for solar and even to reclaim water from the roof. The builders messed up the reclaim water system I forgot the reason but he mentioned he cannot drink the water whatsoever because of the screw up, so he has to eventually rework all of that, but in terms of power he is better off than most since he is setup for it with batteries and everything.
$1 is far too low to discourage abuse. Spammers and scammers will still make exponential returns. PR agencies are paid tens of thousands to craft narratives for their clients. With institutional actors the sky is the limit. Even just your average basement dwelling troll might consider it worth their while to pay a dollar for a sock puppet account.
Requiring a valid payment method before posting will take out 99.9% of spammers and trolls. Newspapers discovered this when they went behind paywalls. SomethingAwful discovered this 20 years ago when they required $10 to create an account.
This kind of thing already existed for a long time, but not as a scam. The people selling these products were selling their ability as "tastemakers". They knew about all the various distributors who could provide "artisanal" products from around the world, they took the time to leaf through all the catalogs and find the best knick-knack that they felt would fit with the theme of their stall and do good business in their local market. And then on the day of the market they would chit-chat with the customers about the process.
The funny thing is that what makes the scammer version a scam is that they go through exactly the same process but then try to pass the products off as their own artisinal work, presumably because they think that will net them more money. But in reality most people browsing for tat at a market aren't going to pay more or less for local artisinal versus imported artisinal versus mass produced, they just enjoy the experience of browsing the different stalls and chatting with vendors and feeling like they have connection with their local merchants. So the scam was wholly unnecessary, the vendor didn't need to make up a story, they just needed to be open to chatting with their customer. They're shooting themselves in the foot by lying about their products because if/when they're found out then they lost the trust, which is the actual product they are selling. People who choose local markets over chain stores or online shopping are doing it exactly because they are looking for a more trustworthy experience, so when you take that away you have nothing to sell.
This doesn't make sense to me. I mean, the term "remix" literally comes from the music scene.
Artists are constantly getting inspiration from one another, referencing one another, performing together or having their works exhibited together...
While there are some big name artists who are famously protective of the concept of IP, those artists have made headlines exactly because when they litigate they seem so unreasonable compared to the bedroom musicians and pub bands and church choirs and school teachers and wedding DJs and millions of other artists and performers whose way of participating in "the culture" is much less tied to ownership.
Eh, Aphex fans and IDM more broadly has always been pretentious AF. I think there's a kayfabe effect going on where both the artists and the fans lean so far into the earnestness of it all that it surely has to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I suspect that's part of the appeal for some folks, the delight in being obtuse.
It doesn't bother me too much. Many indie scenes have this sort of self-consciously avant garde sub-movement - theater, dance, fashion, games...
While I find 99% of braindance to be aggressively unlistenable and/or thoroughly tedious, the 1% that isn't tends to be truly great. Imo the best thing that ever happened to this genre was digital record stores, because casual fans can skip over all the limited edition vinyls and albums full of abstract noodling and just pick up the bangers.
From what I've heard from people who insist on using Substack even though it's American, VC-funded and full of dark patterns, they are trying to make money from their writing and are actively hoping to capitalize on its social network features. Basically they want Instagram or YouTube for text, they want "the algorithm", they want the recommendations, they want the analytics, they want the money or the fame more than they want to uphold their indie values. There is no non-US alternative that provides an equal-sized network effect, but if there was it would anyway be problematic because that whole model of monetization where the platform refuses to take any editorial responsibility incentivizes the production of clickbait, ragebait, misinformation/disinformation, scams, slop etc.
Of course for ordinary people there has always been an alternative to Substack, and it's the Bcc field in their email client. For folks looking to self-publish on the web, Wordpress has been around for decades now - there is no excuse for any serious writer or journalist not to know about it and the multitude of managed hosting options. Even for a newsletter-first option, there is Ghost. But if you discuss this with writers who move to Substack the answer is always the same - they want to try access the money or the fame that may come from being on the most popular social network for writing. I think the only fix for this broken ecosystem is for governments to dismantle these sorts of companies, but the US will never kill their golden geese - they are gladly taking a cut from every other country's content creators.
I can't speak for this one, but I've stayed in a bunch of these over the years and they're exactly as quoted in the article - better than a hostel, worse than a hotel. Because the rate is higher than a hostel, it prices out the bottom rung crowd, and because the architecture explicitly prioritizes privacy over socialization, the visitors tend to be more respectful of one another. As such, it's quiet and clean enough, although obviously if you are sleeping next to a bunch of other people you may hear some snoring, farts, sleeptalking etc.
Some of these are better sound-proofed than others. Some even have little TVs or radios inside, but I've never found that worse than traffic or construction noise if you're anyway in the city. There's always earplugs.
Shared bathrooms suck, especially if you need to be out during "rush hour" when everyone else also needs to be out, but for a saving of $100+ per night there's plenty of people who would gladly accept holding their pee for a few minutes and/or getting into an already-steamed-up and damp shower cubicle. Most people gotta work 4 hours to make that kind of money back.
What platform are you on? I use Ungoogled Chromium on desktop (uBlock Origin still works if you install it from GitHub) and Cromite on mobile (some AdBlock built-in), mainly because both of these just give you a clean and compatible browser without any frills. I noped out of Firefox back whenever it was that they started prompting me to make an account to sync every time I opened it, but I still use LibreWolf at work to test compatibility.
I'm kinda strictly against Chromium because I first installed Chrome to break up a browser monopoly that threatened the long term future of the web. I uninstalled it once it flipped from "the browser that's making the web better" to "the browser that's making the company Google better at the expense of the web"
It's not really a political stance, but a pragmatic one. I appreciate that makes it hard to find alternatives, but I can't logically justify using Chrome.
I agree that mainstream games tend to feel more predictable in their mechanics than what we got in the 8-bit era, but I'm not sure that that means they're more boring. There were a lot of crap games that came out in the old days that only seemed interesting at the time because our access was so limited. Nowadays anyone can play thousands of games for free, on pretty much any device, so they can choose to spend their time in the kinds of games that they actually prefer.
I'm not sure it's worth lamenting that the most popular games today tend to have addictive mechanics and otherwise little novelty. Clearly that's what people enjoy. If you are interested in experimental or avant garde games, then that stuff is still out there in the indie scene. Lots of them are bad games, but they still might be good ideas.
There's plenty of examples I am sure people can share on the thread, but here's one that comes to mind for me as interesting but not very fun: Bokida - Heartfelt Reunion. It's a gigantic monochromatic world with impenetrable puzzles and weird geometry that reminded me of those old freescape games like Driller. I don't think I enjoyed it very much but somehow I did play it all the way through and it still sticks in my mind today because no other game I played really did the same stuff. But, then, it's possible that that's just my subjective experience and for someone who plays Minecraft or something similar, Bokida was just derivative and forgettable? I dunno.
There's a lot out there, though. I think we're in a golden age of games! As a kid I could never have imagined having a literal "backlog" of dozens of games I've already bought but not even started yet because there's so much to play.
Isn't this what MUDs are? I tried a few in the early days of the internet and even back then they were like much bigger and more dynamic versions of text adventures of the 80s. For me I bounced off the idea that I had to role-play with other humans - I thought it was far more interesting to chat with other humans about real-world topics - but if you are looking for a large, text-based role-play experience then it's probably worth trying out a few. There might even be some that can be soloed these days, there are so many.
I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative. There are players who enjoy the mechanics of looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world, you still need the player to do things that fit into a storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off. But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that the player submits to, or the player is building their own narrative inside a sandbox.
AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully progresses the state of the world.
What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one. And then I wanted a way to join MUDs together—like if you leave a forest by a certain path you are, unbeknownst to you, rerouted to a different MUD that picks up where the forest left off.
In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than any that had come before it—where you could really just keep going, keep playing, never see all of it.
I never got deep into it, but I remember reading magazine articles back in the 90s that that's exactly what the new generation of MUDs were. Wiki has pages on MOO, TinyMUCK, MUSH etc - these are basically platforms where the players themselves can expand out new objects and locations, presumably in a similar way to Second Life or other MMO sandboxes do today.
So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they primarily appeal to a very specific type of gamer, one that doesn't have much overlap with the type of gamer who would like an "endless" open world or the type of gamer who would like a tightly-plotted narrative experience. I think it's more something that appeals to fans of table-top RPGs, people who are looking for a collaborative storytelling environment.
I think many gamers have the imagination of an epic infinite metaverse style game, but then when they actually get the opportunity to participate in one, it turns out that that's not really what they wanted after all, because it requires a level of creative labor that they weren't expecting. This is why I think the market has naturally segmented into sandbox builders, survival/roguelikes, traditional narrative adventures etc.
My experience was that in practice all that mapped-out world of most social mu*s was largely ignored by players; they'd all end up in a few gathering spots, or in private spaces disconnected from the main map, open only to their owners and people they teleported in.
MUDs are a low-tech version of what I'm describing. It relies on other people being available and generally leverages the usual tropes with repetitive killing-based gameplay.
LLMs are limited today, but one day they may be able to provide the well-paced narrative you're talking about. The LLM would be a skilled fiction writer that would introduce interesting events as I explore the world.
If I decide to go to a bar and talk to random strangers, it could give me interesting life stories to listen without any action. But, suddenly, a mysterious man walks in, gives me a sealed envelope and departs without saying a word... What is in the envelope?
You can do this with regard to a MUD too, but typically out of character
and not every MUD would allow OOC chatting within the game world, as that
is disruptive to those players who seek immersion.
It seems to me as if you may not have found a good roleplaying MUD back when
you played MUDs. You may be missing out on that experience. I retired from
playing MUDs about 11 years ago permanently, but the in-world roleplay was
the only thing that was interesting to me since it was the creation of a
unique storyline potentially involving many other playercharacters.
I think I just don't really vibe with roleplaying in realtime with other humans, to be honest. I grew up trying to play tabletop RPGs (my dad was a DM and used D&D mechanics as a way to make storytime more engaging), but while I really enjoyed making up characters, I never had much fun actually doing a campaign.
The thing I love about computer games is that I can go through them at my own pace, pause whenever I like, hang around looking at a cool visual, go back to an old save and try something different, whatever. Multiplayer takes all that freedom away because everything has to progress on somebody else's timetable, which isn't as fun for me. Nowadays being expected to perform on a time limit just reminds me of work, which is the last thing I want when I'm playing a game.
It is my understanding that muds (and all the flavors of Mush in particular) can sort-of do it, by letting players create their own story through roleplay, supported by an extremely open (and often player-modifiable) world, as well as good admins / GMs.
That is more like "computer tabletop", however, and doesn't scale beyond a small number of players.
[0] https://www.volts.wtf/p/taiwans-energy-dilemma
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