Don’t think I saw these mentioned so here ya go:

• Little Kitty, Big City
• Any of the Atelier games if you don’t mind anime, though the upcoming one may not be as relaxing in terms of its story.
• Timberborn, though some might feel stressed about handling droughts. You can turn the difficulty down and it’ll just be a cute diorama where you build a city (or cities) with beavers.

And this is extra but grab your friends and family and play some couch co-op. It can help get your mind off things and just enjoy being in company of loved ones.

Aand if you want to eventually find something that will keep you hopeful in the face of despair, in a healthy way, I recommend the first part of Honkai Impact 3rd. It’s long, has lots of depressing moments, enough to make fans call it Depression Impact. The story touches on themes of existential horror, suicide, duty, death of loved ones, humans who have no morals and believe that all rights and wrongs as transient, cosmological threats, etc. Despite all that, I’d actually say that it’s a story about hope, and what can lay the foundations for hope. It’s definitely fan-service-y, and it’s a gacha game, but very much ignorable and playable without investing any money in it. It’s also made by a Chinese company, but maybe that can help with recalibrating perceptions on Chinese people, instead of what we’ve come to know through their government. Of course, if you’re susceptible to gambling addictions, please feel free to ignore this recommendation.

Like I mentioned, just because you dislike something, doesn’t mean it’s actually unfavourable, or that other people shouldn’t see it, and that holds true a lot of the times, unless you’ve sort of geared yourself such that what you dislike is also something unfavourable. But even so, you can’t assume that other people would be or do the same.

And yeah, they’re functionally the same, but the intent is different. The point here is that votes have intentions behind it, and what we’re telling you is that it shouldn’t be a self-centric intent.

For your last question, I actually don’t really have a good answer for you. I’ve seen many people react in similarly clueless ways in order to rile others up. I’ve also seen too many who can’t look at things pass their own lenses, can’t properly put themselves in someone else’s shoes (despite claiming they do, but what actually happens is that they’ve set up a convenient strawman of the person and put themselves in that instead), and can’t think for the sake of others, and how this shows through how they use social platforms. So I guess I’m being wary.

There’s likely no such thing. How you interpret upvotes and downvotes is up to you. But don’t you think that’s a more much more useful measure than “I like this” and “I don’t like this”?

1. Nobody knows who upvoted or downvoted, at least if you don’t get to see the database or server logs. This means nobody would really know if you in particular liked some post or comment or not. IIRC Lemmy doesn’t even show you what your upvotes and downvotes are. This means you wouldn’t remember what you upvoted or downvoted.
2. What we like or dislike has nothing to do with what is good for more people. We can dislike something, but it doesn’t mean that that something isn’t good for ourselves, or everyone else.
3. Votes can sway where a post/comment appears depending on the sorting option.

Given all that info, you should know that votes matter not for yourself, but for others. Want something to be more visible up top in the Top sorted comments? Upvote. Up in Hot? Upvote. Want them down the list? Downvote.

So then the final question is, well how should I decide what do I want to be more visible and what do I want less? That’s really up to you and what you think your relationship with other people and your world is. You want chaos and like watching the world burn and have yourself caught in that too? Upvote crazy takes and downvote the sane voices of reason and care. Want to promote a healthier world where people have useful conversations that help each other in their lives? Upvote those good comments that do so.

Get your mind off the kind of Facebook voting treadmill where it’s your own visible voice and that everything is just about “me, me, and me” and focus on others for once.

Ofc, if you want to be a troll, have at it and do whatever you want. I’ve wasted my words on you, but I’ve at least left some words for other people.

Uneducated 2 cents. afaik the publishers have some kind of “part ownership”, where they can pull it out from the store whenever. The “anti-piracy” feature you get with DRMs is why many publishers actually like them tho. The part ownership thing is just icing on the cake. So no, a good chunk of publishers won’t be furious at all. DRM gives what publishers want and more, at the expense of the consumers in a way that most wouldn’t realize.

And if anything, I think it makes more sense to think that these publishers are also just granting Amazon some kind of “license” to sell their e-books.

Amazon would absolutely be destroying their relationship with a publisher though, if they decide to block the selling or access of a book to large group of people who are would-be buyers. But, at the end of the day, publishers want to know how much they’re making from putting their e-books on Amazon, and as long as that revenue is enough to satisfy their needs, they don’t need to care too much about the odd customer who had their book revoked, and they would generally be pretty shielded from any sort of disputes as long as Amazon is making those revoking calls.

$60 can buy you a lifetime license for the Affinity Designer 2, which is a fantastic alternative to Adobe’s Illustrator, which some people can’t live without. AFAIK, Serif isn’t backed by a venture capitalist as well. So, are you still happy paying $20 more for a social media app?

Like, look, I get that we should support devs for what they do, especially if they don’t take venture capitalist money to sell their products for cheap to gain market share. But this seems really overpriced. What are you getting with an $80 app for social media?

I don’t think I’ve known of a “designated tourist area” in Japan. I lived there for a month in some town that I doubt there’d be any foreign tourist and nobody harassed me and my friends. We were even helped by the locals and police when one of my friends lost their wallet, and they were super patient about it too.

I’ve read (in Japanese, written by Japanese people) that those places will actually welcome you in if speak Japanese and is respectful of the place and other patrons, the latter 2 conditions just like any respectable human should. It could be that they’ve put those up due to xenophobia, but there are also those that just don’t want to deal with people who don’t respect their culture.

For some, human pride and dignity have literally no value, or is something they will hold simply to trade it off whenever convenient, especially in a world that can value it, so it’s just like a commodity.

Says the company that literally crawled the Internet without anyone’s permission to train their damn model.

Rules for thee, not for me.

This. Any time someone’s tries to tell me that AGI will come in the next 5 years given what we’ve seen, I roll my eyes. I don’t see a pathway where LLMs become what’s needed for AGI. It may be a part of it, but it would be non-critical at best. If you can’t reduce hallucinations down to being virtually indistinguishable from misunderstanding a sentence due to vagueness, it’s useless for AGI.

Our distance from true AGI (not some goalpost moved by corporate interests) has not significantly moved from before LLMs became a thing, in my very harsh opinion, bar the knowledge and research being done by those who are actually working towards AGI. Just like how we’ve always thought AI would come one day, maybe soon, before 2020, it’s no different now. LLMs alone barely closes that gap. It gives us that illusion at best.

Somewhat unfair judgement against emails IMO, especially cause it’s the “trust list” that’s in the control of a few, with no open manner to add more people to the trust list. The protocol isn’t at fault for failing to prevent problems; it’s the ability for corporations to gain significant market share without control, before they are then allowed to put barriers down to disallow or discourage interaction between those in and out, forcing those within to stay in, while those outside to give up on others in order to gain usability.

That’s fair.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing and I’m sorry to hear that it’s been what seems like a lot of trouble for you. I don’t use Mint, but it’s what I hear a lot of people recommending to new people, so I’m just curious how things have been.

Have you tried getting support from their forums?

It’s pretty rare hearing that Mint is worse than Ubuntu. Genuine question to just know what people may think about it: what made you think it’s worse than Ubuntu?

As a poke at Emacs’ creeping featurism, vi advocates have been known to describe Emacs as “a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war

:P

Haha, y’all are welcome to try that ;)

Because unlike emacs gang, we don’t need to build an OS to browse Lemmy.

How bout you go back and let your friends know that if they’re in need of a good editor, try Vim ;)

Sounds like a classic case of early onset yak-shaving. But given that I too get bitten by this bug from time to time, I approve.

One case where I find it useful, tho it operates in a more limited way, is code in block blocks within code comments in Rust, which are also printed out in the generated documentation. They essentially get ran as part of your unit tests. This is great for making sure that, eg, your examples left in code comments actually work, especially if they’re written in a way that functions like a unit test.