theneverfox

The funny thing is, my friend is LGBTQ - it's not at all a dog whistle for them. It's very real frustration at beloved games and IP being ruined

But they hear "go woke go broke" so often that they've been trained to look for inclusivity to blame. We like talking about topics like this, and each time I have to walk them through it again - "yes, the game is inclusive, yes, the game sucks. Let's be precise and critique it, why does the game suck? What systems and processes keep causing this?"

I think my friend is doing this on purpose to help process the emotions, because it always ends with the same conclusion

"You think it's a bad game because it is, you feel like it's an attack because they went online and said you're a bigot for thinking it's bad, and we're all biased but you're self aware and this is coming from propaganda and very valid frustration, not hatred.

"Now let's talk about the mechanisms through which consulting companies ruin everything we hold dear, and brainstorm ways to mitigate or fix these systematic problems. And would you look at that, you're sounding just a little more like a leftist each time"

Identify the problem, trace it through the system, find the root cause, and brainstorm solutions/work arounds

There's just not true. The orange guy isn't a billionaire

Right on. The proof is in the pudding even their games I don't finish, like the gwent one, aren't bad or not fun, I just lost interest

I used this argument with my friend the other day - cyberpunk lets you play as a trans character, . People got upset when they found that out prelaunch... And then no one cared, the main complaint was bugs

It's not "go woke and go broke", it's "no one wants shit media, and inclusivity is not a substitute for quality"

Inclusivity isn't the problem, only bigots care if you make something great that happens to be inclusive. It's observer bias, not correlation - inclusivity is generally good. Gamers don't mind inclusivity, they'll get the experience they want and ignore the options they don't want

The problem is shit writing and gameplay

1. installers for games are usually just a script that unzips the game and makes some shortcuts. Steam installs all your games in a standard way in a folder of your choice. You can straight up copy that folder to another computer. You can use another launcher and just play your games, there are already many that can read steam's standardized format. I've done it multiple times to avoid redownloading my library

2. It depends how steam sunsets their DRM, but yes - obviously if a game has 3rd party DRM, that third party is in control. Steam could choose a user hostile way to sunset their own DRM, but they could release ways to deactivate it

DRM is bad, steam provides an easy way for developers to use steam DRM, and it's generally less user hostile than most DRM. To me, this seems like harm reduction

Ultimately, it's not up to steam what, if any, DRM a game uses. They manage their in house offering, but the developer doesn't have to use it if they don't want to

I think I read in the steam agreement itself - I could be wrong, but I generally have a source tagged to my knowledge, and the knowledge is tagged as a direct quote from the document

And yes, if a VC buys out steam I'd be horrified, but it's structurally resistant to that. It's largely employee owned and heavily employee managed, their handbook helped me understand the concept of how employee owned businesses could be the answer to many of society's problems

Doesn't steam have a clause to the effect of "if we go out of business, you'll get X period to download your games so you can manage them yourself"?

The best tool is the best tool for the job. My php code was immaculate - import header, write your content, import footer. I wrote it all in a few hours, and I think my university is still using it today. One of my proudest moments was when a team member whose abilities I respected gushed over how easy my code was to work with

I haven't used it since.

I'm led to believe modern PHP has become pretty good. It's also never been the right tool for the job since then

Mojo sounds incredible - python is a beautifully consistent language, and I've written a shit load of it. I like it a lot. It's often not the right tool for the job, but mojo promises to turn it into something extraordinary that shores up its weaknesses... It's just promises so far though, I really hope they pan out

But always ask yourself - what's the right tool for the job?

So what could be better than getting started?

Yeah, if search hadn't become dog shit I'd be happy with it

Instead, everything is a video for some reason, and the results are purposely worse than a year ago...I don't want to watch a video, I can read 20x faster than I can listen, I don't want to read an ad in article form - I'm generally looking for one little nugget of information

I took this into my own hands - I'll use free services if they work, but increasingly they're just demos for a product that may or may not be better. So I spun up a searx container, I point a local LLM at it, and I let it filter read through results. My next stage is to crawl documentation, use LLMs to feed it into a vector db, and use AI to retrieve exactly what I want without sifting through garbage myself

I think Android is big enough to be immediately forked. There's many existing forks already, if they tried to take it private many companies would be invested in a new "Android core" being developed upstream - it's one of the few situations where open source can work, because businesses would throw money at an org that keeps them competitive

But I'll be hopeful but pessimistic about a Google breakup. It would be huge, it would be real change

... What? There are fully integrated Palestinians living in Israel right now, they could just integrate them or let them establish their own self rule in one form or another

All it takes is to improve conditions and slowly increase rights for Palestinians until they're full citizens. Probably start by making it illegal to mow them down in the streets. If you cut off the flow of new recruits, Hamas will wither. If conditions are rapidly improving, it's hard to convince people to martyr themselves

And Israel could do that... Just not with an unpopular administration that is using this conflict to stay in power

The m in stem stands for medicine. Maybe your new body doesn't trust experts, so when doc spoke in an overly educated tone it provoked aggression. Possibly because of overhearing this tone during incubation and while getting the original brain replaced

Or maybe I made a typo