@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

I’m saying that they are dying because they are being run the way a small hand full of whiny forever-victims who instigate the problems they then complain about want.

The more generic and baby proofed the games became the more the player base dwindled away. What is happening now isn’t working. What people did then was working. Back in the day there were hundreds of active players on at a time. Now you’re lucky to see five.

Maybe, just maybe, you might want to think about why it worked back then instead of just dismissing the only time the medium was actually successful at retaining a large player base because it hurt the feelings of a few bad actors who just want to stir up shit and make drama.

Text-based games are dying because gaming mediums are changing. People who want their dopamine fix have tens of thousands of choices, very few of which need telnet to access. This is no longer the Wild Wild Web 1.0 of unbridled creativity spawned by techological limitations.

Young people getting started go to Discord because that’s where all the RP is now. Thousands upon thousands of servers joinable at a click. Infinite accessibility. MUSHing is kept alive because of a dedicated and committed group and the average age of people in that group is rapidly ticking upwards.

It’s pretty clear now you’re arguing in bad faith. Everyone has their personal preferences, but I don’t see anyone else in this thread so virulently lambasting others for having preferences different from their own.

@Clarion said in AI Megathread:

Maybe in a few years it’ll be a 100% technically viable option and turn back into an ethical question

The reliability of AI when it comes to cutting code (and to a lesser extent, just having accurate information) is coming more and more into question because the data the AI is training itself on is getting shittier and shittier.

Note this loop:

1. Vibe coded app hits Github with issues
2. AI learns from vibe coded app
3. Issues are seen as standard practice and implemented
4. More issues arise because AI code isn’t perfect
5. Go to Step 1

I’ve been watching this continual enshittification take place as my company is forced to use AI (someone very successfully marketed to my intelligence-challenged CEO) and I’m getting more and more PRs across my desk that are full of slop. The decrease in the human element and the consistent marketing of “AI is gonna do it for you don’t even worry about it” is causing entropic damage to the AI’s ability to actually create something worth a damn.

Six months ago, it could spit out a CloudFormation template that was mostly passable, with a couple of fixes, and now it doesn’t even understand a WAF rule statement. It used to be possible to use ChatGPT for boilerplate BASH code but now it can’t even do that.

Can’t even use Google anymore, because the first five pages of results are AI articles that tell me less than nothing. Like, search engines give me results that are actively detrimental to what I’m trying to do.

For someone who keeps getting told AI is going to make my job easier, boy is it making it a lot harder.

I genuinely hope this bubble bursts with the force of a nuke because at some point in the near future an AI will introduce a genuinely serious problem that requires human resolution and there’s no humans around who have the knowledge to fix it for them.

tl;dr if you let dumb AI learn from dumb AI, AI gets dumber.

@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:

I miss RPing. I’ve filled my hours with other things, but I miss logging on and writing stories with people. I also miss the daily chatting with people I use to chat with about random stuff.

However, the idea of making a new character makes me feel like I don’t have the mental energy. Then I’m not sure how well my RP will be after the ‘break’ I’ve been on.

Anyways, in conclusion – if we’ve RPed at all, you’ve been on my mind and you rock - so thank you for writing stories with me.

I don’t post here very often, if ever, I’m mainly content to just lurk and read and keep up to date.

But this hit me like a brick.

I’ve got no game to play on right now and haven’t for over a year. Part of it is because I’m picky, another part is trust issues, and a third is a general lack of time. But every so often, at least twice a week, I think back and I miss logging on to a grid, seeing the familiar faces, and getting stuck into a bit of chaos.

I’m despondent that the last game that I invested a lot of time in went up in a sea of toxic flames, and I’m saddened by the lack of anything equivalent out there that’s similar in systems and size. I miss the people I don’t talk to anymore, and I miss playing in a codebase I understand.

I would love to find a game out there that fits my specific niche, but at this point I’d have to loosen my stifling standards and try something new.

I think I’ve been sitting on this for a long while, and I needed to let it out.

@RedRocket

No.

What is irritating me here, now, and far more than it should be, is the endless repetition of the burden of work upon other people. You are seeing something you do not like, and you are insisting that others must try it your way.

Do not do this.

Your preferences are unique just like everyone else. It is not your place to say that they are wrong (unless it’s illegal or really gross, we have other threads for that). If others like PvE games, they do not deserve to be lumped into a category of play-it-safe whingers. They are doing what they like, same as you.

If you are seeing the same mistakes made time and time again, the onus is on you to fix them to your satisfaction if it is within your power. Correcting the catastrophic freefall of the world’s economy is a bit out of our reach but learning how to code Penn or spinning up an Ares game is very much not insurmountable. So stop listening to us, and yourself, getting upset on the internet. Be bold, try new things. Innovate!

If you don’t see it, make it. That is the essence of creativity.

Finally, half of those analogies fell flat on me because I’m not American. I know nothing about yank politics or weird handegg besides that they exist and people are very noisy about them. I will not see things your way, and that is not something you can always change.

We recently went away on a trip for an extended long weekend with some close family friends of ours.

For four days, myself, my wife, and my kids (!) were used and abused for free daycare and hospitality by these “friends” that were more interested in TikTok and yelling at each other than the basic responsibilities of parenting. They contributed nothing to the holiday whilst actively-if-ignorantly sabotaging any activity we tried to do as a group, even something as simple as making dinner.

They didn’t exchange a word with their eldest son (who’s four) beyond telling him off for misbehaving when he’s clearly acting out for any sort of attention, and happily ignored their youngest (who’s not even one) as he pulled small coffee tables on himself, fell half-way out of his high chair, or climbed half-way up the stairs with no supervision. I was told later by my wife that I’d saved each of their kids from some form of serious injury at least once, something which didn’t occur to me at all during the trip.

One of those four days, and the one that showcased their worst behaviour, was my birthday.

This is… I mean, this is simple shit. Keep an eye on your kids, don’t shut them out or ignore them, maybe think beyond your immediate gratification. I get it! I get that it’s hard! I get that parenting takes everything out of you! I’ve been there, I still am there! But at one point late on my birthday when I was carting their baby down from the stairs for the fourth time that hour I’d had enough and I was one hair away from just saying get off your fucking phone.

There is at least one positive from all this though. It’s completely dismissed all the worries I have of being an inadequate dad. For now. It’ll be back lol.

Suffice it to say there’s agreement between my wife and I that we’re terminating this near-decade of friendship immediately. My heart goes out to their kids, but I’m ashamed to see this from people I once called friends.

@mietze First off, thank you for responding like this. I appreciate a differing opinion because I have a hard time assessing a situation from beyond my own viewpoint.

These are the friends where we’ve gone against our gut, given it another five goes, and been optimistic about the future. This, however, is the first time we’ve spent an extended period with them and their kids and it has been very telling.

There were a lot of things I didn’t get into in the last post, it would have been too much and it would have been a wall of text that’s just whinging. There will be some more details below.

@mietze said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

But yeah, there are a handful of folks where I have been, “You know, I enjoy doing X Y, or Z with you but I think we should do it without the kids,” too.

This is perhaps the core of the whole thing. Sometimes it is better to do things without the kids, but when the kids are there, it is unfair/dangerous to act like they are not. Approximately 90% of the holiday, the mother of those children was interrogating my wife about something or other while the father was on TikTok watching memes. This happened at the holiday house, at kid-friendly events, when we were out to eat, etc etc. It was happening while their baby was hanging out of a high chair held in only by their neck. It was happening in a car park while their oldest kid was walking into traffic. These are the aforementioned “saved from serious harm” incidents that I remember.

Part of my issue is that I consider parenting a 24/7 task, so I cannot turn off my instincts. It doesn’t help my own wellbeing much, but it does mean I’m aware of what the kids are up to even if I’m not actively watching them. To have children around who are visibly not having their emotional, physical, or safety needs met triggers extreme caution in me.

The number of times I turned and found myself next to their infant with them nowhere nearby was approaching double digits. One of those times, they were fifteen metres away arguing over a frozen drink they were going to buy for themselves.

Finally, I will never forgive a parent that scoffs and walks away when their child asks for a kiss and cuddle good-night.

I would never consider them aunty or uncle to my children. After this trip I wouldn’t allow them within fifty metres of my children without me being there.

@Pavel

@RedRocket why is it on others to make the game you want? There’s enough tools and know-how around for you to develop one to your requirements.

@Testament said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

Coming back to post that Ozzy died today.

https://x.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1947720771889205473

>plays the biggest farewell gig of all time
>dies

What a way to go.

@dvoraen This is one of my favourite reads lately: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

@Ashkuri @Trashcan sometimes I really like being proven wrong, but this is not one of those days. Why ya gotta take me out of my imaginary fantasy world where AI is a fad that will disappear by itself?

JFC I thought it was still writing absolute slop but now it takes only ten minutes to train the damn thing to write passable poses? I’m sitting here very annoyed lol.

I don’t think using an AI to generate creative writing is worth the trade-off of contributing to AI’s eradication of jobs, the environment, creativity, reliable and accurate information etc.

@Rathenhope said in AI Megathread:

two potential clients (the biggest we’d have) both went “we consider any use of AI to be high risk and we don’t want client information anywhere near it”

Just casually send me the names of these clients so I can get our CEO to try and sell to them, I really want to see that metaphorical ice bucket tipped all over him when he hears that.

With the amount of time investment needed to get AIs these days to do absolutely anything right (see the other thread where I said AI is getting dumber), by the time you carefully cultivate an LLM to write a pose that actually makes sense within the context of the scene, before even making it fit your writing style, you might as well have just written it out yourself.

It’s one of those traps where it’s doing more work for a worse result because it’s been advertised as the opposite.

I work in fintech. We are involved with some big cranky banks. The current AI push driven by our CEO is several GDPR breaches waiting to happen and my security guy is sitting there pulling his… actually he has no hair so I suppose he’s pulling his beard out! I’m right there with him, both on the frustration and lack of hair.

Devs, infra, solution design et al, we don’t get paid to write lines of code, we get paid to write the right lines of code. That’s why we have PRs and reviewing them is where all the productivity maybe-gained is being absolutely-lost.

I’m not even on the dev teams, I’m in infra, and even I’m copping it from product people trying to push code to my repos now. UGH.

@Clarion said in AI Megathread:

Maybe in a few years it’ll be a 100% technically viable option and turn back into an ethical question

The reliability of AI when it comes to cutting code (and to a lesser extent, just having accurate information) is coming more and more into question because the data the AI is training itself on is getting shittier and shittier.

Note this loop:

1. Vibe coded app hits Github with issues
2. AI learns from vibe coded app
3. Issues are seen as standard practice and implemented
4. More issues arise because AI code isn’t perfect
5. Go to Step 1

I’ve been watching this continual enshittification take place as my company is forced to use AI (someone very successfully marketed to my intelligence-challenged CEO) and I’m getting more and more PRs across my desk that are full of slop. The decrease in the human element and the consistent marketing of “AI is gonna do it for you don’t even worry about it” is causing entropic damage to the AI’s ability to actually create something worth a damn.

Six months ago, it could spit out a CloudFormation template that was mostly passable, with a couple of fixes, and now it doesn’t even understand a WAF rule statement. It used to be possible to use ChatGPT for boilerplate BASH code but now it can’t even do that.

Can’t even use Google anymore, because the first five pages of results are AI articles that tell me less than nothing. Like, search engines give me results that are actively detrimental to what I’m trying to do.

For someone who keeps getting told AI is going to make my job easier, boy is it making it a lot harder.

I genuinely hope this bubble bursts with the force of a nuke because at some point in the near future an AI will introduce a genuinely serious problem that requires human resolution and there’s no humans around who have the knowledge to fix it for them.

tl;dr if you let dumb AI learn from dumb AI, AI gets dumber.

@Lemon-Fox said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@dvoraen You could app a character in? 2000 bonus xp right now.

Oh look, I was waiting for his patented stfu bribe Grid Appeasement Tactic #23 to show up.

We’re running through the Cujo Conflict Resolution Handbook again, which looks something like this.

1. Let a bad actor run roughshod.
2. Deny all involvement/responsibility.
3. Tell people what they want to hear (zero regard to the truth) so they shut up.
4. Hey look free XP!

@Jumpscare This person definitely has time for a civil conversation about sea lions.

@Jennkryst you cannot bait me with the idea of a BattleTech MUSH then suddenly waylay me with Exalted! All I want is to take a contract in my MAD-5M against some Capellans and drain two cases of Timbiqui Dark when I get back to the mechbay!

Aw yis a topic near and dear to my heart.

Ever since I found Copilot in Notepad, that was it. 2025 was the year of Windows going from “passable” to “steaming manure”. All the adware and telemetry and forced AI and bunged-up local search reminded me too much of using Internet Explorer 5 instead of an actual operating system.

In July I got a new SSD for my boot drive and was able to set up Linux Mint (Ubuntu for cowards like me, if you believe the internet!) for dual-boot. I say “dual-boot”, but I haven’t booted into Windows ever since I got the Linux distro up and running. I genuinely haven’t needed to.

The worst issue I’ve had on Linux is one that actually ate up a few hours last night, where my wifi card decided after a kernel update (which didn’t resolve on rollback, itself a super-easy process) that it would make one connection total, and if you tried to swap SSIDs it’d just kark it and NetworkManager would crash. That led into a deep dive that taught me a lot more about how NetworkManager works, the joys of wpa_supplicant, and why my excellent crash-hot infinitely-tweaked tri-band router configuration was more of a hindrance than a help. Fixing that, and accidentally making the household wifi a lot better, I feel like I learned something.

Had that been Windows, I never would have known it was a problem, and it would have been “wait for a patch”.

When it comes to gaming, praise be to Gaben our lord and saviour for Proton. The only game I’ve found that was more than plug-and-play was Bannerlord once you start installing mods, because those need a few Windows dependencies which are easy enough to install with Protontricks once you do some research. When it comes to Anticheat, I’ve found most of the stuff I’ve played worked great out of the box. The only exception is, to no surprise, EA, which is actively preventing Linux machines from playing their games because “omg piracy lol”.

A lot of this pontificating on my part is because Linux works for me. My day job is DevOps so I’m always writing BASH and spinning up containers and virtual machines etc. I will absolutely dig into an OS to get it running to my specifications and I will constantly prune things that I don’t need. For the average user who may well use the AI more than my blistering hatred permits, who doesn’t care about the telemetry, who isn’t fussed about localhost suddenly being inaccessible, yeah Windows is fine. I wouldn’t tell my wife to stop using it. But for myself, I really like how this stuff isn’t being (re)installed now with every update.

If you’re looking for a change, willing to get into the weeds, and bothered by what Microsoft is doing, I recommend at least investigating swapping the OS. If you’re a daily user, then to be honest you don’t lose much if anything by staying on Windows.

@labsunlimited The second someone spins up a World of Mild Discomfort set in Minot I am there.