Piers

Sad, disappointed, and worried.

What games?

It's showing me two AMD GPUs currently but one of them is listed as a new product so it might not have been there when you last checked.

https://www.scanmalta.com/shop/12gb-xfx-amd-radeon-rx7700-xt-qick19-black-graphics-card.html

Something about the Blitzball players all being characters you could find in the world, some of whom would otherwise be unremarkable NPCs really burrowed into my brain with FFX. Something about the fact that you'd have relationships with characters in two different contexts where they would often play a wildly different role in each really made the world feel a little bit more alive than normal.

I like it but found the fear of using items you might later need too be exacerbated to an uncomfortable degree by the magic system. I suspect I'd enjoy it more today than when it came out.

Both She-Hulk and Ms Marvel had flaws as TV shows. On account of being TV shows. The over focus on those flaws was driven by people who wanted to hate them for not being about white American men.

It's because they go hand in hand. I've had experience with customer service roles where staff are empowered to solve issues and it requires very very very slightly higher investment in your employees to pull off.

AFAIK it's a system to let Linux software bundle all of it's dependencies up with it so it just works in a self contained way that doesn't care about what else is and isn't installed.

Advantages is that they are more reliable and user friendly than traditional approaches to Linux software installation.

Disadvantages are that they have bigger footprints where you might have the same dependencies I dependently installed for each app rather than as a single installation that they all utilise and that they need to be updated individually (as part of the flatpak.) IE if basically every app uses the same dependency and it turns out to have a huge security hole, under normal Linux software the developer would patch it, you'd update it and the hole would be filled. With Flatpaks you need each individual Flatpak developer to update the version used by their Flatpak and for you to update all those Flatpaks before the hole is plugged. I think I remember they run in some kind of sandbox to mitigate this though.

All you can hope is that some day they are forced to support 3rd party apps because of some anti monopoly lawsuit telling them they have too.

I'm not sure if you are aware already but the reason Epic are announcing a million changes to their business is that the previous business plan was based around them successfully throwing a fortune at suing Apple to force them to support 3rd party apps and they tried and failed.

I think if it were ever going to happen that way, Epic would have succeeded.

That's not to say it won't still happen one day through political means. Seems plausible the EU might force it at some stage.

if this company goes out of business the source code dies with it.

Despite the fact that probably none of us had heard of them until today, it appears that FUTO has tremendously deep pockets so are very unlikely to go out of business any time soon (which Rossman mentioned in the comments of his video with a link to this one (that I haven't yet watched) of his interview with the owner a year ago https://www.youtube.com/live/OJPmbcU-Vzo?si=DovtYTWTC3S1QIY-)

Futo (the organisation developing this app) appears to be a tech billionaire (Eron Wolf) firing his money at the tech industry until it stops being so shit.

This is from the about page on their website:

Our Three Pledges

We will never sell out. All FUTO companies and FUTO-funded projects are expected to remain fiercely independent. They will never exacerbate the monopoly problem by selling out to a monopolist.

We will never abuse our customers. All FUTO companies and FUTO-funded projects are expected to maintain an honest relationship with their customers. Revenue, if it exists, comes from customers paying directly for software and services. “The users are our product” revenue models are strictly prohibited.

We will always be transparently devoted to making delightful software. All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so. No effort will ever be taken to hide from the people what their computers are doing, to limit how they use them, or to modify their behavior through their software.

(From: https://futo.org/what-is-futo/)

What they say and what they will do could of course differ but they do go to great pains to paint themselves as fundamentally opposed to be sort of action you are worried about.

It looks like Kotick will be leaving after the transition so that's a great start. My dream is that this all somehow leads to the full Overwatch PvE campaign coming back onto the table again (given that their attempts to provide long-term replay ability without doing the work seem to be floundering now, there's a chance right?)