Spyke

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Is anyone else beginning to mourn reddit?

I’m mostly just upset about the fact that healthy niche communities that existed on Reddit are likely to die rather than migrate in earnest. Reddit itself has been feeling downhill pretty much from the moment I joined, but it was the only service that managed to have not only very specific niche communities, but a wealth of active ones with quality contributors.

I just joined here and haven’t lurked too much, but the format here looks nice to foster that type of growth over time. I just hope it can be rebuilt to even a portion of what I’m leaving behind.

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What is the least SEO-fucked search engine?

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Have you tried using the Chat feature (GPT-4) to do searching? I just tried it, and it surprisingly works really well for some inquiries.

Like, use their chat AI, but as a natural language search engine. It’s integrated to Bing’s index so it can peruse it itself, so you don’t have to wade through all the Microsoft click-baits crap they put everywhere.

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Could we get official word on what Kbin's stance is towards federating with Meta?

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You’ve summed up pretty much exactly how I feel.

The Fediverse solutions are better because of interoperability. While I feel Meta needs to be watched closely as far as their moves and intentions in the space, I’m worried by shutting out any large company projects utilizing the Fediverse, the concept will never “take off”.

And I’ve seen some argue that they don’t want it to take off. That they’d prefer the Fediverse stay niche, and I wholly disagree. The way this is all designed allows each user to choose the experience they’re going for, and shoehorning the entire Fediverse into some vision of a fringe and niche network that no influencers or corporate interests are on at all, is just begging for it to stay irrelevant forever.

Ideally, we wind up in a situation where Meta content can easily be filtered away by any individual user, should they feel that is necessary. But if Threads takes off, I’d rather be able to interact with that content from right here than have to actually become a user of their entire platform.

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iOS 17 Anticipation

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Android fan here, currently using an iPhone.

You’re not entirely wrong, but you’re missing half the equation. You see, the implementations here actually work fairly decently and feel nice to use. Still took them way too long, and they’re still getting too much credit. But the entire experience is more polished.

That either matters to you or it doesn’t. It didn’t used to for me, so I used Android for years since it’s significantly more customizable and capable.

Now I have multiple computing devices and need my phone to fulfill a more general role, and I’d like that to be an enjoyable experience. So I’m on iPhone again.

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Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA

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Admittedly the system is a bit confusing as far as UX goes. I’m a fairly nerdy gal and am familiar with servers and software packages and “instances”, and I’m still having issues wrapping my head around the UX.

For example. I’m on Kbin, federated with Lemmy instances. Which is working obviously. But how do I go about discovery of networks and instances and communities within those instances from Kbin? That seems possible but to an uninitiated user, not exactly the simplest thing. None of this is a dealbreaker for me, but what about others? Am I the only one not quite understanding how it all slots together interface wise?

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Why did people used to hate Fortnite so much?

For me, a lot of it came down to the fact that Epic Games more or less dropped Unreal Tournament 4 to focus on what appeared to be a low effort adaptation of PUBG slapped over another game, and in doing so basically ripped the heart out of deathmatch arena shooters, and all we got out of it was a game that didn’t excel at any specific thing beyond appeal to children.

At this point I’m still sour about UT, but Fortnite has gotten enough updating to its technology and graphics that I’m less angry about it pretty much becoming Unreal Engine’s flagship game and more angry about what it represents. The game has always been fine.

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While you're waiting on a kbin app, you should know the mobile site is entirely functional as a mobile app. Just make a shortcut for your home screen

If you are using iOS and Safari, adding the icon to Home Screen prevents Safari extensions from running in my experience. So if you’re using any of the Userscripts or user styles like the collapsible comment script, they won’t work. Took me a while to figure out why they weren’t working. Visiting from the browser works with the scripts and styles, obviously.

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A simple script to install vkBasalt on the Steam Deck without modifying the immutable file system!

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It’s a tool that hooks into Vulkan applications and allows for postprocessing effects (shaders) to be implemented on top. For me; I use it to enable FXAA, smaa, and FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening on games which don’t support those features for whatever reason. (As an example, I’m using DXVK with GTA IV, then vkBasalt on top of that to add antialiasing and sharpening)

It’s a bit annoying to use as you have to add a vkBasalt.conf file to the directory of the game you want to use it with, or edit the system vkBasalt.conf file to reflect what you want to apply system wide.

It is comparable to what Reshade does for DirectX applications.

games

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Prediction: Starfield is going to a massive blunder and people are going to be unhappy

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It’s funny, I’ve never thought about the render-ahead queue manipulation being a way to make lower FPS more tolerable.

I don’t mind that the game is targeting 30fps on consoles but man I cannot for the life of me get used to it. I got a Steam Deck and targeting 30fps would let me run more games at native resolution but I haven’t been able to handle the lag and choppiness so I’ve been settling for 40-45.