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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: November 16th, 2023

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  • I like CDs, but I guess I can’t really call myself a kid anynore though, being in my mid twenties. I typically use Spotify for discovery/casual listening but but an album on CD or digitally through Bandcamp when the option is presented to me. I went out of my way to buy a 25 disc CD changer.

    Vinyl have definitely become way more popular for physical music purchases, but I like the smaller footprint of a CD.

    I do think the vast majority of people use Youtube Music, Spotify or a similar service though. It’s inexpensive, has family plans and optical media players just aren’t common anymore.





  • I see this comment every now and then, and it always forgets the cost of the transaction, confirmation time, and of course, the need for miners to exist to process these confirmations/transactions. The energy cost is extraordinary, and the end user is taxed for the use of their own dollars.

    It’s not really feasible on a broad scale. Bitcoin is a holding stock, not a valid currency. Its value only increases because it manufactures its own scarcity. And as its scarcity increases, it naturally moves toward centralization since mining becomes too large an activity for the individual to reap any benefit. You can argue for proof of stake to eliminate the need for mining, but then you open the doors to centralization more immediately.




  • Imo, plugins should have separate config files, with uniform, consistent formatting. Separating them ensures that plugins never modify primary configuration details, they can be updated independently, or deprecated without affecting future functionality. It also means you can take regular and reliable backups of each config.


  • Depending on the developer, and the scale of their game, these things can also be incredible cheap to produce too. If your gameplay/monetary loop is something designed to arbitrarily force a player to wait to accomplish something or otherwise spend money, then you can drastically reduce the amount of content that needs to be added as long as you have an adequate base.

    Even if you spend money, loot box mechanics and randomized stats can push players to continue to spend because while they got an item, they didn’t get the perfect item. Base builders, team combat titles and character based games are very, very effective at this.

    For developers like the one behind Evony, they can be a lot cheaper because that game, and a hundreds like it have existed all the way back as far as farmville and earlier. They just got better at the monetization loop over time.


  • Similarly, if you’re born at the tail end of Millenial/start of Gen Z, then you still grew up with a collage of 90s and 00s culture and inconography, offsetting the definitions the groups typically gain over time. Some Gen Z grew up into adolescence without really feeling the advent of the modern internet or social media. The end of that range never knew a world without it.

    Generations are useful statistical groupings, but don’t represent individual experiences or influences, leading to disparity or outliers that feel excluded from their “peers” so to speak. I’d say I probably share more experiences with Gen Z, but a lot of the cultural aspects of my childhood are closely linked to later Millenial ones. There’s a gradient, not a cutoff.



  • Hey there, I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “first activated”. In general, you activate a SIM card, not a phone. This would be associated with your current phone plan, not the device itself. Your carrier would be able to provide that info. If you’re referring to when your phone was first purchased/turned on, then most folks tend to add their Google account during setup, which might be why there’s a suggestion to check your Google account to see when the device was added.

    The IMEI is potentially useful as it’s a device identifier, but generally doesn’t matter to anyone except your carrier.





  • Flatfire@lemmy.catoF-Droid@lemmy.mlHow does one create an app?
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    2 months ago

    When people refer to a particular piece of development aoftware as closed or open source, they are referring to the license/availability of that software’s code. You can use proprietary software to produce open source code, which is the case with Android Studio. The code that makes up Android Studio is not open source, but your own work made within it can be.

    In general, “open source” is a broad term that just means “can I see the code that made this?”. There are differing degrees of open source software as well. The MIT license, for example, opens up code to some modification/re-use but protects some libraries. Something like a BSD or GPL license is far less restrictive, usually allowing free modification and use of the code. Android Studio falls under the Apache license, one of the more restrictive licenses that still applies copyright, and may employ proprietary libraries that cannot be modified or copied for use. Again, this ultimately isn’t likely to affect your own work or projects, but it does mean there’s less transparency about the tools you are using to make it.

    I apologise if this is overwhelming, but the distinction is important, and I think that as a beginner it makes sense to start with where there is the most documentation and ease of entry. Once done, it’s definitely easier to move towards projects that more closely align with FOSS philosophies.



  • Flatfire@lemmy.catoF-Droid@lemmy.mlHow does one create an app?
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    2 months ago

    Imo that’s fine. It’s also still the best tool for learning since it’s the most widely supported one, and contains the greatest amount of documentation for working with android development. It costs nothing to use, and doesn’t lock you into any kind of ecosystem you can’t later migrate from.


  • Flatfire@lemmy.catoF-Droid@lemmy.mlHow does one create an app?
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    2 months ago

    Android Studio is the primary toolkit for developing native android apps. If you have no background in programming, there are some more visual tools like Budibase (open source) or Softr (closed source), but you are likely to run into difficulty getting them to apply logic the way you’d like.

    If you’re a tinkerer, then honestly I’d look into learning more about Android Studio and Kotlin, the language most used these days for app development on Android.