Carighan Maconar

The strength of life to face oneself has been made manifest. The persona Carighan has appeared.

  • 154 Posts
  • 2.89K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Do you? Then how come examples like OP’s don’t really specify much.

    Is that any keyword? All keywords? Where? Tags? Title? Name? Description? If all, do they all have to appear int he same field(s)? Anywhere? On the whole page including crosssellers?

    This is what to mean: it’s easy to say “just search for exactly this!”, but what you intuitively think of as “exactly this” is not intuitive from the perspective of a search index. At all. So it gets preprocessed and changes before being used for a search, and in many cases, widened. Because we humans are very bad at putting in an accurate search such as: name:"60w" and description:"standby". We rarely do that.


  • There’s nothing in it for them, the simple fact is that the virtual all of people does not look for specific terms.

    Hence the search is optimised to give you loads of things that relate to some parts of your search at least.

    Source: did backend code for shopping frontends for years.

    The search is incredibly fuzzy, plus the tag words of products themselves are fuzzy. And usually they don’t allow forcing a hard match search, though you can try + or and between each word. We had one site that allowed it, just use lucene search syntax.




  • How do you mean? It’s majorly US centric, and that was part of why Mastodon worked better as a Twitter-replacement here in the EU at first.

    But as always, something like Reddit or Twitter benefits from centralization, as far as user interactions go. So slowly, people drift to whatever the single largest alternative is when they leave the current status quo, and in alternative-Twitter-land, this seems to be either Threads or Bluesky, and their cases are fairly incomparable.

    Doesn’t make it the perfect solution, but like always in Engineering, the perfect solution is rarely the best one.












  • If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.

    Depending on how you read it, that explains why FP1 did not have the staying power nor depth nor draw of Anno. 😛 Still enjoyed playing through it once, but as far as best-paced goes, I don’t think the granted-much-newer Against The Storm can be beat in that regard, successfully managing to remove the rote nature of most long-tail city building from the genre - even FP1 sadly has that, more on account of how shallow its underlying systems are though, not that the campaign is done too long.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.

    This is kinda what I mean, actually. FP1 sells its narrative and atmosphere and story super well, even if once you try the waters, it becomes painfully obvious stuff like that is just a story-cover draped over a very rudementary core. These decisions are trivial in their nature and effect even as they sell themselves as being sweeping. The core directional decision sounds gruesome, but never truly amounts to much mechanically, so it peels off pretty quickly, too.
    Either way it’s just about maxing your tree depth so you essentially “beat” the game as people no longer become unhappy, and then optimize grid layout a bit (not even much) to survive the ending.

    Don’t get me wrong though, FP1 was fun to play. In hindsight it’s a mediocre city builder polished to an absolute gleam, which makes it “good”. I would not say it’s more than that, tbh, but then again it kinda doesn’t have to be, either.






  • Well yeah, but Spotify also does more than Youtube in some ways. Like, have a minimum amount of podcasts on it (I know I know, why not use a separate podcasting app, but for the little podcasts I listen to it’s easier having it all in one app that is known to shit like Sonos and stuff), or have bands that aren’t well known in the US.

    Don’t get me wrong, I loathe Spotify, but compared to Youtube’s audio side they’re a much much better experience. Hence I would usually rate them on-par in what they should cost: With Spotify you get a better experience, with Youtube you also get ad-free videos.