Zos_Kia

It might come from non native speakers too. For example in french using aesthetic as an adjective to mean “beautiful” is correct, and it may be true in other romance languages.

I think it’s a concept that’s hard to grasp for people with semi functioning families. Obviously they tend to believe that the model that worked for them is desirable.

Then there’s games like the original “pirates!”. It has an anti cheat that would present itself as a simple question like “do you recognize whose pirate flag that is”. The answer is in the booklet, and if you answer wrong nothing visible happens but the difficulty is cranked so high that the game becomes effectively unbeatable.

Ok that one is hilarious

Le ai Bad amirite guize

Arch Linux is a good alternative to Linux and is a good choice for most use cases where you can use it for a variety of tasks and and it is a good fit to Linux and Linux.

What is complicated about alchemy is that it’s a tradition that is thousands of years old and it has so many layers it’s hard to make sense of.

Originally you have metallic alchemy, a precursor to chemistry and metallurgy. An insanely valuable corpus of knowledge if you think about ancient times - good metallurgy made good armies which made empires. It was technology so advanced it might as well have been magic. The literature that has survived is very opaque by design, and hard to read because of cultural jetlag, but they are technical texts - tutorials and explainers for the various chemical and alloying operations that were known at the time.

utility outside of use as a metaphor : 10/10 if you’re kind of done with Bronze and want to boost your kingdom into the Iron Age

Then around the Renaissance, when antique stuff started becoming hot again, those texts started buzzing and they were re-interpreted with a generous flavouring of Renaissance spirituality. That’s pretty easy with antique technical texts because they are always written with a lot of religious and astrological terminology. It could be about plumbing and you’d still have Apollo fighting Hades as an allegory of you unclogging a pipe or whatever. So, to a modern mind it made sense to see them as spiritual guidebooks through the transformation and purification of the self. That’s also when they started pumping the gas on the “philosophical stone” ideas of turning mercury into gold, becoming immortal etc… The technical aspects of the texts started fading in the background.

utility outside of use as a metaphor : 0/10 although you’ll get some beautiful, evocative literature out of it. Some seriously trippy stuff if you’re into that sort of things.

Then you have the 19th century onwards where it’s a literal explosion of books and treatises and translations, and it gets even more divorced from the source material, as the academic work gets shoddier and shoddier. At this point the technical aspects are mostly lost on the readers because they make no sense in the context of early-industrial metallurgy and chemistry.

utility outside of use as a metaphor : 0/10, kind of new-agey to my taste. It has a lot of cultural relevance, though. Being well-read in early modern hermeticism is kind of the Rosetta stone of popular culture lol.

Seveneves would be the bomb (eta : they could even do the last part as a separate animated short)

Just blocked politics & news and my quality of life instantly jumped 200%. I highly recommend it. If something significant happens, you’ll read about it in another community.

LGTM ⛴️

If you like to write, I find that story boarding with stable diffusion is definitely an improvement. The quality of the images is what it is, but they can help you map out scenes and locations, and spot visual details and cues to include in your writing.

While this is undeniably good advice, it doesn’t address the core issue IMO.

Yes, Lemmy users are unusually hard to deal with. It’s roughly equivalent to Discord in terms of angry userbase, maybe a bit worse - even Reddit seems pretty level headed in comparison.

Jesus Christ man 😂 you’re looking for a moral angle but there is no moral angle here. A business has the right to design their transactions however they want, even if that design explicitly excludes people like you.

Some people are easy-going, they are more prone to trust, they want to test a product they don’t write an essay about it about it they just put their CC info in, try the thing, and cancel the sub if it’s not for them. If they forget to cancel i refund their money cause i need a happy customer more than i need 20 bucks. You don’t need to call them rubes just because they’re invited to the party and you’re not.

Hey man I’m not saying you’re wrong, but you’re touching on another important thing which is trust. On average, high trust people are just easier to manage, especially when you’re a small outfit. It’s better for everyone if low trust users bounce away because of the cc wall. They’ll come back once the product has some brand recognition or social proof.

Again, it’s a filter. You give me card details, that means you seriously want the product and also that you trust me. If i treat you right and give you a great experience you’ll be subscribed for years, purchasing add-ons, and recommending me to your friends. That’s much more valuable for me than skimming 20 bucks a month because you forgot to unsub.

When it’s a big corpo sure they’ll do it cause they don’t give a shit about their customers or even their reputation. I’m honestly not saying it doesn’t happen. But when it’s a no-name with a small online product they can’t afford that shit. If they put a credit card wall it’s most likely because they were getting too many people on the free trial, and were having a hard time telling actual future customers from drive-bys. This solves that.

lmao what a nuanced point of view, you seem to have vast personal experience of this kind of things

Or maybe they should keep their free trial and just filter out randos with a credit card wall. It’s a simple and cheap way to keep your user base high value. And as attested by the OP’s meme, it just works!

Yes, it’s a classic.

Pre-market fit it makes sense to be 100% free, as you want to gauge whether your product is attractive to people.

Post-market fit you already know the product has traction, so now you want to gauge whether it is attractive enough for people to pay for it.

Having worked at a bunch of SaaS products, it’s actually not that shady (at least in those cases i’ve seen). Free users are low value but they can cost a ton in support and commercial effort. Asking for a credit card upfront is just a simple way to filter for people who actually intend to maybe buy the product.

OP’s reaction is not a bug, it’s the feature.

Oh, it is functionally useless in the context of the game, more of a “because they can” kind of deal… That is why you’ll almost exclusively see that kind of things in Creative mode - it eats up tons of resources for no discernible end.