Maybe you didn’t find the genre that clicks with you.

1984 is an objectively depressing story and not really interesting for the love story or other things. It’s political.

Reading is great when you have hours to kill and want just more dense information or description. You also sort of need to enjoy using your imagination I guess.

Maybe you’re interested in a biography of a musician or movie director, maybe you’re into history, maybe you like crime and horror stuff.

But also, there are SO MANY bad books out there. Don’t worry about it. I haven’t read a book in years, because I am not really interesting in topics at that level at the moment and I don’t think many authors really capture things well. You need a real good book recommendation.

And also, maybe you just don’t like reading books.

Also, translated books can be a lot worse, read in native language if possible. Authors can put a lot of… style and taste into their language and that’s lost in translation sometimes.

Not really.

For practical purposes, all files “binary”, ones and zeros. And with those ones and zeros, you can encode stuff for example text and for example with ascii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII But you can also encode programs that can be executed, or what you named, visual, audio, or whatever you want. The differences are the “encodings”.

Sometimes, things work a bit like one of those Russian Matryoshka dolls, for example a PDF can contain a JPG or a PNG but also TXT.

It’s really not that simple as there being “4” types.

I’m not sure that answers your question though.

Psychological tricks with external help.

Specifically reserve time for them, plan them out in advance, do something every day if you can and set reminders. There are even apps that try to support you with habit forming.

So if for example 6pm to 7:30pm is hobby time, every day, and you treat it like an appointment you have to go to (with yourself).

Plan your projects in advance. This can be done during that hobby time, but be sure to write down which tools and material you need, so you can just pick it up. Also, it helps if things are organized, if you just need to grab a box and it has everything in it, that’s easier to pick up and put down than searching and collecting all your tools every time you need them.

Imagine there’s a huge fuel station that’s so big they essentially set rules towards suppliers that they can’t offer their gas to other stations at a cheaper price otherwise they can’t sell it in their station with 95% market share.

That is specifically not what is happening.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

“Steam Key Rules and Guidelines”

“You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.”

Valve does not “dictate” prices in any way.

Ubi and WB are free to sell their games for as cheap as they want. But if and ONLY IF they offer a steam key with the purchase, they can’t undercut steam.

Edit: the original comment left it unclear if the price rule only applies to copies sold that include a steam key, or if copies that work completely without steam can be arbitrarily priced. If the latter is the case, it’s obviously fine. If it includes any game version, it isn’t OK.

Ok. The rule is, actually let me link it…

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

“Steam Key Rules and Guidelines”

“You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam.** It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.”**

Just read that paragraph. It should be pretty clear what the whole thing is about.

True, but this deal is that companies stick to the terms and in turn they get access to steams shop, implicitly the community.

They don’t have some unalienable right to access another company’s customers.

You don’t have a “right” to go into a BurgerKing and advertise and sell your burgers there.

That is true, definitely a “lesser evil” situation.

Bloomberg cites two high-profile cases referenced in the ongoing lawsuit, one involving Ubisoft, and another Warner Bros.

First of all, I trust Ubi and WB way less than valve.

Valve allegedly threatened to delist all editions of Rainbow Six Siege after Ubisoft offered a cheaper option on its Uplay store.

Yeah.

Because it violates their policy. That’s not a “threat”, those are the terms of the contract Ubi and WB agreed to. Terms that everyone has to follow.

Heck, Ubi and WB should be hit with a counter suit for trying to leverage their market position to exert control over valve and getting unusually favorable terms.

Clown suit. Ubi and WB are mad they can’t break their contract with valve in a one sided way.

edit: I forgot some context:

The deal between valve and a publisher or dev is: they can sell on steam and elsewhere if steam is at least tied in price, or cheaper, but when they sell somewhere else, that includes the steam key and access to steam and steam’s distribution at no cost.

What the devs and publishers wanted to do was leverage other features of steam and the steam ecosystem, while undercutting steam’s price.

They are always free to just not sell on steam for a cheaper price. That’s not what this is about.

edit2:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

“Steam Key Rules and Guidelines”

Duh. I wouldn’t have called it “addiction”, but dependency was clearly the goal, otherwise they wouldn’t take away classical search.

I thought that was obvious from the start.

The one thing that’s unclear is if they are going to change the spaceship scheduling, sending, dropping, etc. interface. That could be QoL. Otherwise I’m not sure what else would justify a big patch and a big version bump. We’ll see…

It is also dead due to how repulsive the place was. Literally.

Contrary to the memes and the “elite pvp” reputation of eve online, the people in the communities are very welcoming and you can make some long term friends there.

You still need to sort of enjoy the game itself I suppose. That is relatively easy with friends though.

Depends.

If they are the “Ratatouille” kind of critic, knowing what they like, or what is good and serving as a “bar”, that can be a good reference if you are informed about their tastes.

But there is also a bunch of “high art film” that’s just boring, so if they insist that that is art or film or cinema and something more mundane but fun isn’t, because it doesn’t fulfill some arbitrary condition, that’s bad.

A horror movie critic after watching thousands of horror movies saying “The overall movie was meh, but that one thing about the monster or the way they did their camera work was cool and that’s why the movie was worth watching and if you are just watching for entertainment, not so much”. And the same person can judge a different horror movie to be “completely unoriginal and derivative”.

But if it’s a movie about someone watching paint dry and it’s “super interesting because it reveals something deep about our human nature and our relationship with the passage of time” then that’s… that’s not my thing.

Also I pay zero attention to movie critics. I don’t care about movies. That’s just what I think about them.

Arguing against violence and war when that is possible is fine.

Arguing fanatically to lay down weapons when one side is very clearly not going to do that, is very stupid.

In the sense that there will always be people who are going to be tricked into a fascist, violent, superiority cult, because there are just that many people, and in the sense that sometimes and regularly moderate or intense violence will be necessary to stop them, because some people are closed off to arguments and peaceful discussion, opposing that violence is taking their side, yes.

And it’s fine if you disagree, I simply think you have really finished thinking about it. The reply is always going to be a “… but what if they just stopped being fanatic fascists” and I think that is not how that works.

So ultimately I agree with Orwell.

If you haven’t played it, try hollow knight. It also doesn’t do those things. It’s relatively clear about the story that you need to know and why you’re doing things.

Basically, the good parts of free speech arguments.

I do think there are things that can just be banned from existence, and be made illegal, but it’s significantly more tolerant than the current vibe.

Reality doesn’t give a shit about our systems of morals. There is a certain “mainstream, harmony and political correctness” creep that sometimes happens. And what’s bad about that, is that bubbles brain wash themselves into believing that the way they think the world works is really how the world works. And what they hold isn’t just a perspective and an opinion, but a fundamental truth about the world and deviation needs to be purged. And that eventually collides with reality. This is both true for racists and for people who think racism can be “cured” or “educated away” or “people can just consider the facts and change their mind”.

The fediverse allows a more gradual interaction than centralized social media sites. Because centralized social media must decide how to deal with… depiction of politics, religious subjects, NSFW topics, which btw, covers everything from violence over nudity to medical conditions.

If there was a medical community sharing discussions about medical topics, I can block that and be unburdened by it, but there is no central fediverse authority that needs to decide if that medical picture is not allowed because there is a boob in it.

In short, banning a social group on social media, like racists, doesn’t convince anyone or remove that group of people from factually existing and factually organizing.

Open Source Software works the same way, you can’t be sure that math library isn’t being used to control a remove controlled ballistic missile, but pretending that you can “ban math” depending on the purpose is stupid, so there is no point in worrying about it.

butterflies

I also don’t have a good solution and I’m extremely slowly writing my own stuff starting from svg and drawings and some programming to do geometry. But I mostly haven’t touched 3d yet.

I would use blender which you have already excluded so no idea.

That is true, didn’t even think to check that, thank you!

Sounds pretty neat. I would love if this was available as a built thing and I didn’t have to build myself though.

I see that requires some more explaining my thinking:

There is only demand and supply.

Previously, we had “high demand” and “limited supply” which is what lead to software dev roles being a very well paid job in silicon valley and some other places.

Now, the promise of AI, making software by itself or increasing productivity, if true, mean that supply increases. That makes software cheaper. Theoretically.

But that’s the supply side.

What you’re talking about is also a “I have so much supply, I can now afford to do projects and software I could not do before, because my time, budget, etc. was limited.” But you already had the idea and the “demand” however low priority, already existed.

What isn’t happening, is that some company sits down and suddenly decides that they need more software than they thought they needed. Even the bit that is “replacing real humans” is replacing humans. It’s meeting a demand that was already there in a new way.

Using a metaphor / example, we currently, as humanity, manage to feed ourselves. Or let’s pretend that we do and nobody is starving. Someone claiming that “the demand for food is going to go up” is talking nonsense. They can say that demand for “cheese” or “meat” or “potatoes” will go up. But not food, because that market is already saturated. Because we’re not starving.

Yes, the fact that the demand is there and that the supply gets cheaper will mean that more software will be produced.

But not because of increased demand. AI doesn’t create it’s own demand.

…at least that’s my thought process and why I wrote what I wrote in the original comment.