Try That in a Small Town features lyrics threatening violence against protesters and has been removed from Country Music Television, but Aldean says it is a celebration of community
This is sturgeon’s law. 90% of everything is crap. There’s tons of garbage pop, rock, industrial, etc etc. This is true in books, movies, and other forms of entertainment too
Aging gamers were reportedly delighted to see that a new video game called Eldric Quest has accessibility features catered specifically to people their age who do not have enough time to actually play a video game....
I feel like a time wizard because I’m like 40, date several people, have a full time job, and still play games and read books. Where is everyone else’s time going??
Semantic versioning. If I have 1.0.0 and you release 1.1.0 I can be pretty confident it’s safe to update. If you release 2.0.0 I need to read the release notes and see what broke.
If I have version July2023 and you release August2023 I have no information about if it’s safe to update. That’s terrible. That’s really bad.
This is for dependency management and maybe apis more than OSs, but in general semantic versioning is a very good system. It should be used often.
And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility....
I’m pretty sure google is more like many small fiefdoms fighting for money and prestige than a unified pack of moustache twirlers. Though there do seem to be a lot of “head up their own ass” engineers there, too, which leads to things like them having 15 different messaging apps and an inability to maintain projects long term.
The current system of job seeking often requires to lie on resume. It is even being highly recommended by people that coach people for job seeking, although with some moderation of course.
I’ll go without youtube before i watch their shitty ads. Unobtrusive ads, fine. Contextual ads instead of invasive behavioral ads, maybe. But the current system is trash and they can fuck off.
Some stuff that’s colloquially seen as capitalism is okay. Me paying someone to clean my house because I hate that chore is fine with me.
It quickly becomes Not Fine when you add in all the “if they don’t clean up my shit, they risk starving”, “they work for a boss who takes most of the money I pay”, and “none of us pay for externalized costs like using toxic chemicals for cleaning” parts. Other things too I can’t think of right now n
Left alone, nothing stops capitalism from selling you bread made with sawdust. People might say “well the market would reject an inferior product” but that’s not necessarily true. Monopolies and cartels form. People might not know a product is harmful until it’s too late.
Blah blah blah. Fittingly, I have to go back to work now.
When I was recruiting for a game this summer, one of the questions I asked applicants was ‘How do you feel about “politics” in games?’. I wanted to fish out who was going to throw a fit when they met a gay couple in-game. Or when other parts of the game weren’t extremely traditional or reactionary.
I’m up to 92 so far. A mix of non English, furry and hentai porn, and a few I just don’t see the point of. I’ve got 6 or 7 users to, mostly bots that repost reddit content, and the piped link bot.
It has a lot of gotchas and an unstable ecosystem.
A lot of basic stuff is confusing of weird. How do you loop over an object? There’s like five ways. How do you declare a function? There are two very different ways that behave differently, and the new one has like five variations in its syntax that can throw you.
Here’s an example of something that continues to bother me:
What do you think bar looks like? If you thought it had a key of “hello” and a value of “world”, that’s sensible but wrong. It has a key of “foo”. Object keys don’t need to be quoted in JavaScript. If you want the key to be a variable you have to write it like { [foo] : “world” }. Which looks like a list.
There’s a lot of this kind of stuff in the language. Small things that once you know you can work around, but are still weird, annoying, and prone to causing errors.
The standard library historically hasn’t been very good. This has lead to many libraries being maintained by the community. But the community is fickle, and the quality of libraries is not guaranteed.
The standard library was bad at some basic operations, so underscore was created. But then someone made lodash, and most people (but not everyone!) moved to it. But then the standard library caught up some more, so maybe you don’t need either? When you start working on a new-to-you project you don’t know what you’re going to get.
Dates were a mess so momentjs got big, but now that’s deprecated. Move to datefns, which has a completely different interface.
Node releases a new major version every six months. Every six months! Python has been on major version 3 for years and has no plans for a version 4, for comparison. The constant version releases is a potential source for headaches.
In my experience many libraries are kind of fast and loose with major releases, too. It can be a pain to keep up, especially if you have peer deps.
The debugger is kind of bad. Sometimes it will pause but you typically can’t like treat it like a repl. Python’s, for comparison, blows it out of the water.
Many things are async in JavaScript. Sometimes you don’t expect a particular call to be async or you forget, and you have a bad time. The async/await keywords were a godsend. The giant stack of “then…then…then…” was not fun. Combine with the weak debugger and you have an extra bad time. I bet there are a lot of console.log(“code is here”) debug calls out in the wild because of this.
For your actual front end view layer, react is the current hotness. But older projects are still out there with angular, backbone, probably some with just jQuery. React isn’t terrible but how long is it going to be king? What breaking changes are they going to put out in the next version? The ecosystem is unstable.
Also redux kind of sucks. Not a fan of global variables. I think the community has moved on from redux though? Again, the ecosystem is unstable.
In my experience there are many developers who only know JavaScript, and they want to use it for everything. It is the dungeons and dragons of languages. Much like how it is frustrating when your friends want to run a cyberpunk murder mystery in Dungeons and Dragons, it can be frustrating when your team wants to write everything, even your backend, in JavaScript.
We had browser tests at one job. They’re a very synchronous thing. Open the browser, load the page, enter name and password, wait for login. We had all of this written in python working fine, but people wanted to switch to a JavaScript toolset. Sorry, I mean they wanted to switch to JavaScript but there were three different browser testing tools the different teams wanted to use. Because the javascript ecosystem is like that. After a more candid talk with one of the guys I knew personally, he admitted it wasn’t because JavaScript was the best tool but rather he didn’t want to use python.
I can’t authoritatively say this is typical, but in my experience I’ve had a lot of resistance from JavaScript devs using other languages. Again, I think it’s like DND. DND is a unnecessarily complicated game full of exceptions and gotchas. If that’s what you learn first, you probably think everything is like that, and why would you want to go through that again? But of the popular languages/games, javascript/DND are exceptional for their weirdness.
In fact, thinking about it for more than a minute, my current team lead is a JavaScript main and he’s great. Super willing to learn other languages and has never been pushy. So it’s definitely not everyone.
The stack traces tend to be kind of bad. In production shit is probably minified so you might get “error on line 1, column 4737373”. In other contexts you may get a few hundred lines of node_modules to sift through before finding your actual code.
At least jest and (react) testing library aren’t bad. Mocha + chai were annoying. Enzyme is not great. Again, things change rapidly. You might join a company and find they’re still using mocha and enzyme, and switching never gets prioritized. If JavaScript made things better without breaking changes or swapping to an entirely new toolset it wouldn’t be a serious problem, but the standard mode seems to be “fuck it let’s make an entirely new tool”.
The lack of type hints isn’t great. You can use typescript but that’s a whole new set of stuff you have to set up. Python also doesn’t have types but they managed to add them as an option without making us switch to like TypeThon. But that’s not the JavaScript way. If you’re not making a breaking change are you really doing JavaScript?
I could go on, but my cat is getting up to some bullshit and I need to see what he’s screaming about. Probably not JavaScript.
tldr:
standard library kind of bad
ecosystem unstable and of variable quality
unpleasant personal experiences with JavaScript developers wanting to use it for everything
If it makes you feel better, many of the things you learn in JavaScript will be helpful in other languages. You already know what functions are, for example, so you don’t need to relearn that. Even though JavaScript has some weirdness about functions.
I used to check the front page at least once every day, and occassionally check specific subreddits. Now I don’t look at reddit unless theres some drama, like mods getting purged, then I’d go there and enjoy the drama. Occasionally there will be questions that only reddit has the answer to so I have to reluctantly use it. I...
My parents fucked up a lot of things but I’m lucky they gave me pretty good food habits. There was no idle eating from boredom. You don’t have a snack if it’s almost dinner time. Chips are rare. Candy is basically holidays.
In the (very good) video game pillars of eternity 2, an imp comes to tell you his wizard wants you to see him. If you respond with “I’ll go if I have time” the imp replies “pfth. Who has time? You have to make time”. Now I think about this a lot.
I’ve also learned that sometimes when people say they don’t have time they actually mean they don’t want to, but they think a small lie is more polite. Personally if I invite you to something I’d rather you tell me you’re not interested so I know not to invite you in the future. But some people are cripplingly conflict avoidant.
Identifying when to throw those last few hit points in the trash and call the fight a “win” for the adventurers is part of what separates a great GM from a good GM....
I guess, but in many systems this is on like a razor edge of GM fiat / “are you sure you don’t want to just write a book?” problems. I don’t really want the fight to go on until the GM unilaterally decides it’s been cool enough. There are games with more explicit rules and guidelines about it, though.
Hey, I am a little bit annoyed by moving stuff around on between different characters. The easy solution is to put stuff in shared inventory slots. The big question is: How many should you get?...
Other than your carrier give it for free or cheap, I don’t really see the reason why should you buy new phone. I’ve been using Redmi Note 9 for past 3 years and recently got my had on Poco F5. I don’t see the point of my ‘upgrade’. I sold it and come back to my Note 9. Gaming? Most of them are p2w or microtransaction...
I buy a new phone when my current one breaks. So like every five years.
Lots of people are bad with money or don’t prioritize the same things I do. I try not to worry about this. I worry about other unimportant shit like why do people roll for stats in DND 5e.
I can imagine people having fun getting lost in the flow of playing a competitive sport. I’ve also heard some people experience a post-workout high. But does anyone actually feel pleasure in the moment while lifting weights, jogging, cycling, etc?...
Almost every language has versions. Python’s is fairly stable. Python2 has been end of life for a few years now, and I don’t think there’s a python 4 even on the horizon.
Almost every language has dependency management. Use an IDE.
Use an IDE with refactor->rename. I’ve never had a problem with renaming. Right now when I went to see what it would do, it suggested correctly “did you mean [correct variable name]?”. But even without that it just says my class has no attribute with the incorrect name, which is about what I would expect. If you think these are bad error messages you should stay away from JavaScript.
Most languages running as admin can delete files. I don’t see how that’s a relevant critique of python.
Really? You hate python but recommend typescript? All the problems you cited about python are there, too!
Garbage stack traces that go through a hundred lines of node modules.
Dependency hell. Peer deps. Npm or yarn? An ecosystem where packages have a half life of weeks. A new major version of node comes out literally every six months. SIX MONTHS. MAJOR VERSION CHANGE. And you complained about python2 vs 3!
Typescript also has a garbage debugger compared to python.
There’s also just too many ways of doing things because the standard lib is thin. How many ways to loop over an object are there? For in, for each, object keys, lodash, underscore, object.entries, what am I forgetting?
Newer versions have stuff in the standard lib like Array.at, but if you’re targeting an older browser that won’t work unless you enter the wonderful world of transpiling and polyfills. And you thought virtualenv was bad??
And let’s not forget the language’s obsession with being async, even when you don’t expect or want it. How many hours have been lost because someone forgot to await response.json()?
Oh right and remember how there’s like six ways of declaring a function. The function keyword, when it’s in a class, and like four variations on arrow function syntax. And arrow functions are different than ones with the function keyword.
Go on. What do you think that object key is? The syntax is insane . You need to do { [foo]: “world”} to reference a variable as a key. Which looks like a list. Because typescript/javascript is kind of bad.
Typescript is used in the browser because that’s the only thing really supported there for front ends. It’s a horrible tool for anything else.
Why is having multiple different ways of declaring a function a good thing??
The standard in JavaScript for object declaration "is stupid*. It is a bad standard that is unintuitive and error prone. This has nothing to do with libraries. And JavaScript is notorious for "oh get a library for that*. Why do you think momentjs became mega popular? And momentjs is dead now! Move to datefns! The JavaScript ecosystem is full of that nonsense! Underscore got big because the standard library was kind of bad, but then people moved to lodash.
I don’t know what you’re responding to with point four. Honestly I don’t think you’re actually that familiar with python, and you ignored a lot of my points, so this probably isn’t a very fruitful conversation.
One person is the “dungeon master”. They are sort of like a referee. They typically make the initial pitch of the game to the other players. That’s something like “I want to do a game about defending a town from zombies” or “wouldn’t it be cool to be like bank robbers in a fantasy world?”
The group then comes up with characters they want to play. DND has rules for what sort of powers and abilities characters have. This is mostly captured by “character class” (fighter, wizard, paladin, etc). You might say "I want to hit things with a sword so I’ll be a fighter " or “I want to learn magic so I’ll play a wizard.”
Unlike playing a board game, you also come up with some story bits for your character. So you might play a wizard who’s fresh from wizard school and turned to bank robbing to pay off student debt. Or an old wizard that needs money to pay for expensive magical healing. It is pretty wide open, though not totally open. Some new players will try to do like “my dad is the king and my mom is an angel and I can fly and…”, and forget to sync their story with the rules parts. And ideally whatever story idea you have hooks into the pitch.
Once you’ve done all that, you get together as a group (virtually or in person). The DM (dungeon master) will describe the initial scene. “You’re just kicked open the door to the bank office. Your tip said it was going to be empty, but two elves are sitting behind a large desk. They jump up, startled and surprised. The room is ostentatious. Marble floors. Stained glass floor to ceiling windows. Magical lights hanging from the fifteen foot ceiling.” The dm will probably ask what you do.
Note that the dm generally describes the scene and characters that aren’t being played by one of the players. The players in DND generally only control their specific characters. In dnd a player could not be like “the elf runs away in a panic!” or “suddenly all the lights go out!”. Only the dm can declare what the world and its non-player inhabitants do. The players control their characters only. (non DND RPGs may differ on this point)
A player may ask questions. “are the elves armed?”
The dm may answer. “you don’t see any obvious weapons”.
The dm may ask you to roll dice to determine if you succeed at something, notice something, or know something. “Roll perception for me to see if you notice anything else.”
When you check if you succeed at something like that in DND you roll a 20 sided die, and often add something to the result based on your character. A smart character has a bonus for knowing stuff, and a strong one to physical challenges, as examples.
“That’s a 17 on perception? You notice a magical wand on the desk, half covered by papers, and the elf glanced at it.”
Players may declare they’re doing something. “I want to lunge for it before the elf picks it up!”
The dm may call for a roll to see how that goes, and narrate the outcome.
This process of the dm describing the scene and the players asking questions / taking actions continues. If a fight breaks out, combat in DND has a lot of specific rules for determining if attacks hit or miss, if someone is taken out of the fight, and so on.
Usually people play for a few hours at a time, and pick up the story the next time they play. So the first session might be trying to rob the bank vault and getting in a fight with the staff, the second might be cracking the vault and escaping, the third might be a showdown with the head of security with a horseback chase. Much of this will be made up by the DM. They may not have expected the players to steal horses and ride into the desert, but if that’s what the players do they will make something up. This is the big appeal of RPGs over videogames. You can do anything the group thinks is cool. It doesn’t need to be scripted ahead of time.
Much of this as I’ve described it applies to non-dnd RPGs, too. DND has a lot of very specific things about it I’ve kind of glossed over. It has very idiosyncratic combat and magic systems, for example. You’ll hear people talk about “roll for initiative”, “saving throw”, “critical hit” and more. Those are details for dnd’s rules.
Honestly DND is kind of a bad first rpg. It’s very popular but it’s also extremely janky, and only does adventuring day fantasy at all well. Games about political intrigue or social conflict don’t do well in DND specifically because it doesn’t really have detailed rules for them. It’s also pretty harsh on allowing players to be creative compared to other games.
I used to use whatever was at hand for tokens. Coins. Bottle caps. Chips. Sometimes we’d eat the stuff we killed.
But my favorite was one time I grabbed a small piggy bank and described it was the big demon thing that had emerged from the back of the truck. Players were fighting it, and after a particularly nasty hit I said like “Your rifle shot punctures its grisly belly, and you see…”. I picked up the piggy bank and pulled out the stopper. Coins spilled out onto the table.
“…countless smaller demons bursting out of the wounds, screaming and skittering at you.”
Players lost their minds. A+ would traumatize players again.
I have always liked open world games as a concept, but I have a very bad sense of direction. So whenever I play open world games I keep getting lost and frustrated. Eventually getting bored and dropping the game. I am curious how other people with bad sense of direction cope with this problem.
‘There’s nothing American about promoting violence’: country star Jason Aldean criticised for anti-protest song (www.theguardian.com)
Try That in a Small Town features lyrics threatening violence against protesters and has been removed from Country Music Television, but Aldean says it is a celebration of community
Game Introduces Easy Mode Called “I’m 35 and Have One Hour to Play This” (hard-drive.net)
Aging gamers were reportedly delighted to see that a new video game called Eldric Quest has accessibility features catered specifically to people their age who do not have enough time to actually play a video game....
How LA Failed to Stop Landlords From Turning Low-Cost Housing Into Tourist Hotels (www.propublica.org)
why is it like this? (lemmy.world)
Google engineers want to introduce DRMs for web pages, making ad-blocking near-impossible in the browser (github.com)
And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility....
Elder Scrolls Online is free on Epic right now
Been playing this for the last few years. Helped me get through lockdown!...
Do employers actually know or care about lying on resume?
The current system of job seeking often requires to lie on resume. It is even being highly recommended by people that coach people for job seeking, although with some moderation of course.
/r/place going full-on French Revolution now (media.kbin.social)
Why are folks so anti-capitalist?
Hi all,...
Does someone speak LISP? - Yeth, I do. It'th betht to look at lithp-lang.org (feddit.de)
I swear, someday I was casually brainstorming a character and my brain went "why are they not NB" and I had no reply other than "fair point." (ttrpg.network)
Panel 1: Bilbo Baggins holding a character sheet....
How many communities are you blocking?
I’m up to 92 so far. A mix of non English, furry and hentai porn, and a few I just don’t see the point of. I’ve got 6 or 7 users to, mostly bots that repost reddit content, and the piped link bot.
What's up with memes suffixed with "rule"?
Like I saw one that was titled “I wonder why rule” and had a picture about overpaid CEOs or something....
Florida ocean temperatures peak to almost 100 degrees amid heatwave: "You really can't cool off" (www.cbsnews.com)
Programming Languages (lemmy.ml)
No offence
Be honest, do you still use reddit?
I used to check the front page at least once every day, and occassionally check specific subreddits. Now I don’t look at reddit unless theres some drama, like mods getting purged, then I’d go there and enjoy the drama. Occasionally there will be questions that only reddit has the answer to so I have to reluctantly use it. I...
Water? WTF is that? (i.imgur.com)
What's a quote that has stuck with you for your whole life?
I always loved browsing such posts on reddit, so thought I should make one on lemmy too...
Horse Grenades, Hand Shoes, and Hit Points -- Close Enough is Good Enough (archfossil.wordpress.com)
Identifying when to throw those last few hit points in the trash and call the fight a “win” for the adventurers is part of what separates a great GM from a good GM....
Kids (i.imgur.com)
What do you keep in your shared inventory slots?
Hey, I am a little bit annoyed by moving stuff around on between different characters. The easy solution is to put stuff in shared inventory slots. The big question is: How many should you get?...
What's the point of buying new phones every years?
Other than your carrier give it for free or cheap, I don’t really see the reason why should you buy new phone. I’ve been using Redmi Note 9 for past 3 years and recently got my had on Poco F5. I don’t see the point of my ‘upgrade’. I sold it and come back to my Note 9. Gaming? Most of them are p2w or microtransaction...
Does anyone actually enjoy working out?
I can imagine people having fun getting lost in the flow of playing a competitive sport. I’ve also heard some people experience a post-workout high. But does anyone actually feel pleasure in the moment while lifting weights, jogging, cycling, etc?...
Using Python, How can I create a bot/script that let's me re-post a subreddit's post to Lemmy?
Using Python, How can I create a bot/script that let’s me re-post a subreddit’s post to Lemmy?...
ELI5: How do you play Dungeons & Dragons?
I’ve heard a lot about this game, but I just don’t know how to play it. Can someone fill me in?
I wonder if they were a party of Lizard Folk (aussie.zone)
Transcription:...
People with bad sense of direction, can you enjoy open world games?
I have always liked open world games as a concept, but I have a very bad sense of direction. So whenever I play open world games I keep getting lost and frustrated. Eventually getting bored and dropping the game. I am curious how other people with bad sense of direction cope with this problem.
What's your favorite piece of GM advice?
What’s your favorite tip or trick for running games?