It is real, you just have to have sufficient funds already to be able to pay someone else to do the active part of the income and make sure they are earning less than their worth so that you can pick up the excess. Most effective if there are many layers in between, so that the income becomes increasingly passive as you move up the chain, so that those under you have something to strive for, because you don’t want to be in charge of hiring all of those people, so you hire people to hire those people, each taking a cut of the value along the way.

But don’t worry, the American Dream™ is that, as long as you keep working about 10 layers deep in value cuts, eventually you might be able to get into layer 3 or 4 and get your kid into the job early so that they can get to layer 5 or 6, and maybe they’ll have enough money to get their kid to 6 or 7.

Lots of immediate hate for AI, but I’m all for local AI if they keep that direction. Small models are getting really impressive, and if they have smaller, fine-tuned, specific-purpose AI over the “general purpose” LLMs, they’d be much more efficient at their jobs. I’ve been rocking local LLMs for a while and they’ve been great as a small compliment to language processing tasks in my coding.

Good text-to-speech, page summarization, contextual content blocking, translation, bias/sentiment detection, click bait detection, article re-titling, I’m sure there’s many great use cases. And purely speculation,but many traditional non-llm techniques might be able to included here that were overlooked because nobody cared about AI features, that could be super lightweight and still helpful.

If it goes fully remote AI, it loses a lot of privacy cred, and positions itself really similarly to where everyone else is. From a financial perspective, bandwagoning on AI in the browser but “we won’t send your data anywhere” seems like a trendy, but potentially helpful and effective way to bring in a demographic interested in it without sacrificing principles.

But there’s a lot of speculation in this comment. Mozilla’s done a lot for FOSS, and I get they need monetization outside of Google, but hopefully it doesn’t lead things astray too hard.

Yeah, I knew freelance folks who provided long term support with such complicated setups. The base daily rate plus hourly with a monthly retainer and weekly on call fees. Wild.

Or, hourly = extremely high paid contract work.

Soap. 100%.

I know this post and comment might sound shilly but switching to more expensive microfibre underwear actually made a big impact on my life and motivated me to start buying better fitting and better material clothes.

I’d always bought cheap and thought anything else was silly. I was wrong. So much more comfortable, I haven’t had a single pair even begin to wear down a little bit, less sweating and feel cleaner, fit better, and haven’t been scrunchy or uncomfortable once compared to the daily issues of that cheap FotL life. This led to more expensive and longer lasting socks with textures I like better, better fitting shoes that survive more than one season.

It was spawned by some severe weight loss and a need to restock my wardrobe. My old underwear stuck around as backups to tell me I needed to do laundry, but going back to the old ones was bad enough that I stopped postponing laundry.

Basically, I really didn’t appreciate how much I absolutely hated so many textures I was constantly in contact with until I tried alternative underwear and realized you don’t have to just deal with that all the time.

It depends what “From Scratch” means to you, as I don’t know your level of programming or interests, because you could be talking about making a game from beginning to end, and you could be talking about…

• Using a general purpose game engine (Unity, Godot, Unreal) and pre-made assets (e.g., Unity Asset Store, Epic Marketplace)?
• Using a general purpose game engine almost purely as a rendering+input engine with a nice user interface and building your own engine overtop of that
• Using frameworks for user input and rendering images, but not necessarily ones built for games, so they’re more general purpose and you’ll need to write a lot of game code to put it all together into your own engine before you even starting “Making the game”, but offer extreme control over every piece so that you can make something very strange and experimental, but lots of technical overhead before you get started
• Writing your own frameworks for handling user input and rendering images… that same as previous, but you’ll spend 99% of your time trying to rewrite the wheel and get it to go as fast as any off the shelf replacement

If you’re new to programming and just want to make a game, consider Godot with GDScript - here’s a guide created in Godot to learn GDScript interactively with no programming experience. GDScript is like Python, a very widely used language outside of games, but it is exclusive to Godot so you’ll need to transfer it. You can also use C# in Godot, but it’s a bigger learning curve, though it is very general and used in a lot of games.

I’m a big Godot fan, but Unity and Unreal Engine are solid. Unreal might have a steeper learning curve, Godot is a free and open-source project with a nice community but it doesn’t have the extensive userbase and forum repository of Unity and Unreal, Unity is so widely used there’s lots of info out there.

If you did want to go really from scratch, you can try using something like Pygame in Python or Processing in Java, which are entirely code-created (no user interface) but offer lots of helpful functionality for making games purely from code. Very flexible. That said, they’ll often run slow, they’ll take more time to get started on a project, and you’ll very quickly hit a ceiling for how much you can realistically do in them before anything practical.

If you want to go a bit lower, C++ with SDL2, learning OpenGL, and learning about how games are rendered and all that is great - it will be fast, and you’ll learn the skills to modify Godot, Unreal, etc. to do anything you’d like, but similar caveats to previous; there’s likely a low ceiling for the quality you’ll be able to put out and high overhead to get started on a project.

Yeah, I really think it’s important to not see Lemmy as one singular community, or a lot of important use cases will go ignored.

I certainly used to, and used to think it was essentially gender neutral, but again - in certain contexts like a male dominated classroom, the women/nb students could easily feel excluded by it. Outside of that, I also recognized my trans friends had a lot of thoughtless people intentionally misgendering them on the regular just to be mean, and finding small ways to reduce that reinforcement felt better than not. It was also surprisingly not that tough for me to adopt the more neutral language, so if it’s a subtle help with no skin off my back it just seems very win-win.

I know it’s controversial, but moving away from “guys” when I address a group and more or less defaulting to “they” when referring to people I don’t know.

They was practical, because I deal with so many students exclusively via email, and the majority of them have foreign names where I’d never be able to place a gender anyways if they didn’t state pronouns.

Switching away from guys was natural, but I’m in a very male dominated field and I’d heard from women students in my undergrad that they did feel just a bit excluded in a class setting (not as much social settings) when the professor addresses a room of 120 men and 5 women with “Guys”, so it just more or less fell to the side in favour of folks/everyone.

Getting really speculative, but maybe Infinite Scrolling and similar UX design patterns. I think we learned it was dangerous pretty early in, but I have a feeling there isn’t currently a widespread understanding of just how badly things like infinite scrolling shortcircuit parts of the brain and cause issues with attention and time regulation in large populations.

If I was more researched on it, I might include infinite short-form content feeds of almost any type to be honest, which may just be another way of saying social media.

Conversely, if smart watches with accurate health monitoring become cheap and commonplace it might drastically improve health outcomes by motivating people to see doctor’s when needed for subtle heart issues that would otherwise go unchecked.

I’m at least happy to see some decent, really cheap (<$100 CAD) smart phones popping up that are competent enough to work with, but it’s still such a single point of failure for so many aspects of life right now. Not even not having a phone, but a dead battery (and inability to swap it out with a backup like you used to), spontaneously breaking, losing cell service at an inopportune time to access your virtual tickets and things.

I don’t mind smart phones, but the single point of failure for so much is really not good.

Interesting - I’ve been thinking about trying to decentralize lately, and been having fun collecting my data from sites to analyze my own behaviours in data and build unique recommendation engines for myself and was recently thinking about trying to build a crawler and DIY search engine for myself. Any tips/pitfalls on getting started with that?

Yeah, I think framing it similar to the old days might help, but I could be wrong. Like, you aren’t signing up for (just to web-equivalent) PHP Fusion or something, you’re signing up for your gaming clan’s forum, or your roleplay group, or your Canadian phreak BB. The difference with Lemmy is just that you also indirectly sign up to receive content from a lot of other places using the same protocol.

IMO, I think the framing/abstraction will make or break the future of the paradigm for mainstream consumption. Not to get into another repeat of the EEE discussion, but assuming nothing nefarious from something like Threads, that would mean people start an account there and then find a niche group with their friends to go hang out on instead.

I also have to push back against the pushback against the paradigm going mainstream, because again IMO a move back toward decentralized platforms is really important for the future of the internet and quite frankly the global economy.

Just editing to expand, but I think maybe there’s a problem in framing Lemmy or Mastodon as communities in themselves, because it really conflicts with the model of instancing and email that is being used to describe them.