Itty53

It’s actually a really old practice, “the first DRM”. You’d place things in your game that could only be solved by having the manual on hand, meaning you purchased it. Many games took a jovial approach to it, letting you play the game, but in a broken state if you answered incorrectly and indicated you’d pirated it. Castles II comes to mind, also Kings Quest 5. Others did the “die if you didn’t have the manual”, but those let you go on … just knowing you’d lose every single time.

It’s this. It’s a business decision. You don’t spin servers up in a second and take them down hours later, there’s contracts involved. You spin up enough servers to handle the load you expect normally, not at launch.

Honestly I played Payday 1 A LOT, enough to be in the top 1% of 1% of players. Got invited to the studios after being among the first to complete the ARG.
Then played Payday 2 A LOT.

But I quit halfway through the lifetime of 2 because it was clearly not getting any better, but worse. They stopped innovating and just started looking at player builds and releasing more and more powerful bulldozers. Got boring really fast.

So when 3 was announced? I haven’t even looked at it.

Microsoft doesn’t want to rely on licensed software every time they install their programs either. Again, Valve taking a queue from MS. And that’s fine BTW, the whole industry follows MS.

Moreover the real issue, the difference in computing cost between running Win10 with all the unnecessary boost vs Linux is massive. Had they used Windows it would’ve costed more to be able to run less.

As to being reliant on Windows, that’s been their standard most of their history. Steam was Windows based. If Windows were to go ahead with making a stripped down Windows OS that was specific to gaming, such as the one demoed in a code jam earlier this year, you can bet steam would be selling that version of Windows direct from their store, and likely have a easy tool ready to use to install it to your deck. They would probably offer it as an installation option too. Why not? There’s no good reason they shouldn’t. The whole verified question goes out the window. That’s huge. But again, MS controls that situation, not Valve. They’re still reliant on MS in major ways.

Does he want to distance himself? Gabe said he learned more in his short months-long tenure at MS than he did in the rest of his academic career. He dropped out of Harvard, mind you.

He modeled his entire company off of MS. He even adopted their primary strategy, buy, polish and package. It’s literally just embrace, extend, extinguish all over. Balmer taught him very well.

I really don’t get why people think he’s all that different from any other billionaire. He got there by buying out competition, and if they wouldn’t sell, theft and litigation.

Put simply, they could not retroactively apply new changes to you.

Sounds like they could though?

Jokes aside, this is another in a recent string of “let’s pretend our ToS are legally binding documents as fool-proof as the law” actions by major companies because … well, who’s stopping them?

Counter point, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I’m not gonna argue your brother (“my sister in law is the wife of a cop” is a strange way to say that) is evil simply for being a cop, no, but your brother does defend bad cops all the time. Every cop does. They call it a brotherhood for a reason, and the expectation is that their brotherhood runs deeper than yours. Be aware of that and keep him aware too. Because if he’s “one of the good ones” he’s in real danger if ever he spoke out against the bad ones. Real, life threatening danger. That I can say that of police and back it up with a dozen examples of cops killing other cops should at the very least give you pause.

By the way if you do the “don’t assume their gender” thing from my assumption that it’s your brother, oh boy they’re in a lot more danger than I originally thought.

“gamers are doing with a new Bethesda game what they’ve done with every previous Bethesda game! You won’t believe what comes next!”

“you guys screw me out of thirteen or fourteen more Kickstarter funding rounds and I’ll take my business elsewhere!”

- SC funders

Nintendo just waiting for the thing to go on sale to drop their lawsuits.

Tony Hawks Pro Skater wants you to remember it. The game that launched an entire music genre into the mainstream.

This is far, far from a first.

I’ll go one more, this format itself breeds contempt and arguments. There’s never going to be a “good old Reddit” because it was always a cesspool. I was there for ten years, believe me. It’s a cesspool. It’s because it’s shaped like one. The format is the problem.

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The steam deck is already right there at the limit with it’s weight. This thing looks significantly heavier.

Also can’t wait for Nintendo to sue. This article even called them “joy-cons” as if desperately calling out to Nintendo, “yep, pull that trigger”.

That’s very cool. I personally hate watching vlog videos and would always prefer to read.

But this tool also desperately needs punctuation. I feel like that’s an actual great use case for an LLM: feed it the transcript and tell it to punctuate it. Just a thought.

Grain of salt, rather than skepticism.

No normal person can waste their time being truly skeptical of everything they see. The reality is we don’t have to (nor often do we) believe everything we see in normal situations. So take everything you see online, on TV, from afar with a grain of salt. Don’t put too much faith in it. Shit this is important even with actual real video footage, context can change everything. You get twenty seconds of a twenty minute video and you can make it say anything you want. Just cut the context to suit.

In situations where evidence counts, such as a court room, custody of that evidence is considered. Any old mp4 can’t be provided to the court as evidence without it being thrown out by the other team. So there really, truly is hardly any concern whatsoever about generative AI in the courts.

And the other side of that coin is confirmation bias. I don’t care how shitty the fake is, if you show a MAGA a video of Biden eating a baby that person will insist it’s real. Against any evidence to the contrary, they’ll argue its real and reality won’t matter.

That’s what’s been meant by the “post truth world”. It isn’t a problem of establishing what is and isn’t truth. The problem is that the truth doesn’t matter anymore.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moon-photos-ai-galaxy-s21-s23-ultra

The irony of people posting on web applications they utilize for their own enjoyment, “applications don’t belong on web browsers” is killing me here.

There is a portion of the tech industry with their head stuck firmly up their ass and it seems a lot of em hang out in the fediverse. These people would demand we go back to party lines and manual switchboards. Techno-hipsters who are just angry at the next generation who took their BBS internet and actually made the world use it.

Downvote me, that’s fine. Use that interactivity application on your browser. Go be the very definition of irony. Please.

Imagine having the time to actually look at all that nonsense just to find out who clicked an arrow icon halfway around the world.

I don’t think people really understand just how privileged it is to be here dawdling at all, given time, technology, access, etc … nevermind dawdling maliciously over something so petty.

Then again you could easily make bots to check all that shit, do the cross referencing, and pump out a black list of folks you don’t want to interact with. I can see there’s a lot of use in that for moderation and administration, but as a user? Begging for problems. It won’t ever create positivity to have people able to see that. I understand the protocol won’t hide it, but apps can.

Edit, Wait, I’m not even sure the protocol allows for downvotes anyway, that’s specific to the apps isn’t it? So there’s a conscious decision going on to show them? That’s a miss.

This is a wildly over generalized take.

Twitter was also an important tool for journalists and researchers worldwide. Military targets have come from Twitter posts. It is a reflection of a huge chunk of society. You may as well call all of internet technology “just a porn box” for how wildly over generalized that statement is. The reality is your generalization comes from arrogance. “I never engaged in such frivolous behavior”. You’re here now. Yes you have and yes you do.

Even your comment is the first cousin of outrage, it’s pure disdain. Nothing more or less, and exactly as valuable as outrage.

No joke, start digging into the guys who made ancient aliens and not too long after you start seeing Nazi shit in their past. Like explicitly so, not tangentially related, not “neo” but actual Nazis. Historical revisionism is literally the basis of the show, so you shouldn’t be surprised that the main players are Holocaust deniers.

Wanna know who wrote the book the show is based on? It wasn’t Von Daniken. He only wrote the first, unsuccessful draft. Utz Utermann rewrote the second draft that actually became very popular. Guess where he was from? Guess what he was doing during WW2? Writing propaganda for the Hitler Youth and working as the editor for Nazi newspapers. I’m dead serious.

Ancient Aliens is just soft selling literal, actual mystic Nazism and it always, always, always has been.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Utermann