Actually not a bad idea. Flood the department with bullshit resumes.

I like this idea

Ew, I’d rather not fuck Elon. He’s not my type.

Fuck. I can’t out-stupid this guy. I won’t win.

Indeed. I have absolutely no way of knowing anything for certain.

I’m just screaming into the void from this hellscape we call Earth.

I’d bet that channel “members” don’t get ads for that channel regardless of premium status.

IMO, Google made premium, almost nobody bought it. So they went after adblockers, hoping that people would get premium to get rid of the ads. People most just Adblock harder.

While this is happening, one exec is peering over the fence at twitch. Where they only way to get away from ads without a pretty good Adblock, is to subscribe to the individual creator.

So they make “memberships” to channels a thing.

Almost nobody buys that either. So they go… What if, even if someone is premium, we give them ads, unless they’re a channel member.

Genius.

Paying to block ads per creator/channel/whatever, is a special level of bullshit that twitch has always had.

The system is working as expected. The companies are trying to find the best way to extract the most value from you using their platform.

I chalk most of the shit that makes teams horrible, is closely related to electron and their whole web app as a desktop app bullshit.

Buckle up, because they’re doing that same enshittification to outlook next. It’s already begun. There’s a “new” Outlook. FML.

If I can quote the late George Carlin: “They call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

I would argue that George was right and the American dream doesn’t exist, and never existed. You cannot destroy that which does not exist…

Trump has a … Nope, nevermind, I don’t care. I don’t want to see that, and I’m not even going to ask.

How dare you encourage my wife to be an independent person and have her own thoughts!

• conservative men

Agreed.

The people that voted for this shit have the biggest blinders on right now. I’m sure they’re trying to ignore that anything has gone wrong.

I hope someone with enough money to make this a problem for the policy makers gets after this in court soon. The USA needs to either pass a federal law stating that abortion is legal, or they need a new roe v. Wade judgement on the books. Until one of those things happens, this continual and unnecessary loss of life will continue; it is inevitable.

For people who call themselves “pro-life” they sure don’t give any shits about people continuing to live.

Anyone who is anti abortion, this is for you: 🖕

Sincerely,

• your horrified neighbor to the north.

I’m not going to defend Ubisoft here.

I will make a comment about NFCs. Basically, if you’re trying to validate a set number of items in a digital market, NFTs are not the worst way to do it. In the context of a video game, it would be that you have the NFT for, let’s say, a limited character skin, associated to your game profile/account/whatever. As long as that token is attached to your account, you get access to that skin. If you trade it out, you lose access to that skin in the game… As an example.

NFTs would accomplish that goal, while being (at least in theory) decentralized, and in theory it’s immune to errors and exploitation.

All of that being said: there are much better ways to accomplish the same with less. Any blockchain, by its very nature, will eventually become a slow, unmanageable mess because anything written to the ledger is immutable. So the ledger will continue to grow and grow and grow until it’s so large that it’s unmanageable, slow as shit, and just garbage to try to use/work with.

For shit like digital art or whatever, NFTs make even less sense. All you’re actually buying is essentially a receipt that you paid money to someone for the receipt. It’s a lot like going to a store to buy air. You pay for it, get your receipt and now you “own” some air. The only thing that proves you “own” air, is the receipt. If you lose the receipt, oh well, you can’t prove you “own” the air anymore, but you’re still 100% able to use the air, to fill your lungs, and breathe for another day, whether you “own” it or not.

The only difference with a “web3” game is that owning the NFT may give you access to stuff inside the game that you otherwise wouldn’t have.

Great in concept, horrible in practice.

I think when the hype dies down in a few years, we’ll settle into a couple of useful applications for ML/AI, and a lot will be just thrown out.

I have no idea what will be kept and what will be tossed but I’m betting there will be more tossed than kept.

I don’t mean to, I wasn’t exactly looking at a comprehensive list of steam features when I wrote that. I’m sure I missed several of steam’s very good features from what I listed.

My main point was, and still is, that the core thing that made steam stand out, has more or less stayed the same throughout its existence. You log in, buy, download, and launch games right from one really easy to use program, it manages all the particulars about product keys and saves, etc. So you can focus on playing the game rather than trying to get the game running.

There’s a ton of other really good features that steam and valve in general have introduced, and I’m not trying to diminish the impact of those things.

While other games stores are pulling crap like exclusives to their platform, and requiring dumb shit like invasive spyware “anti-cheating” rootkits, steam has kept the basic formula the same, and doesn’t restrict any major publisher from deploying something on their platform. Other developers will still delay making their games available on steam for one reason or another, but steam has been fairly neutral in what’s published.

I am aware of some exceptions, so I’m not going to say it’s entirely universal that anyone can publish anything to steam, but it’s fairly rare that steam is preventing a game from being available on the platform.

That core purpose of steam has always been good. All the other stuff is almost always also good, but the core purpose of having steam installed is the same, or better then, when steam was first released.

The biggest thing that valve did that kept them in everyone’s good graces is that steam’s core functionality hasn’t had any major changes in years. Dare I say, more than a decade.

It’s a platform where you buy games, download them, and play them.

In the early days you still had to deal with all the bullshit, including third party launcher installs and crap to get things going, and over time, valve simplified all of that, making it easier than ever to take advantage of the core function of steam: buying, downloading, and playing games.

Literally the only improvement I can absolutely, positively credit them for, is making that entire process, easier, simpler, and quicker, than ever.

Sure, you can chat to people, track achievements, comment on your profile, comment on your friends profiles, buy and sell cosmetics on the market thing, even voice chat and I think they have a way you can stream your game to friends… Not sure on that last one.

It’s like Facebook, FB marketplace, FB messenger, discord, Twitter… And a bunch of other services, all huddled together to make a bastard child with the entire PC video game industry… That’s steam.

But the core mechanic that was always the main reason why steam was great, remains the same.

I made the foolish mistake of thinking things had finally started to make sense when Netflix happened, and I got my hopes up that going legit would be viable.

Oh well

I’ve been back to the high seas for a while.

Before I get into it, I’ll give an honourable mention to the RIAA/music industry, which is largely just putting all of the music on every platform and letting users choose which one they want to use. This is the way, and I’m happy to pay one service to get access to the stuff I actually want to hear.

Back to video/MPAA. Are you all on crack? I saw this coming back when Netflix was the only licensed media game on the internet… I was subscribed and enjoying some shows, the shows then… Went away, they disappeared. After looking into it, the show I was enjoying was pulled when a copyright was revoked by the publisher, so Netflix no longer had the right to distribute the show.

I saw the writing on the wall. That publisher was going to make their own Netflix competitor with their stuff on it, to try to extort more profit from the streaming stuff. Clearly their c-suite thought that people would be willing to pay for just their content separately from Netflix. I saw that writing and noped right the fuck out. Grabbed my tri-point hat and flag from storage and set sail, and I’ve never looked back.

The copyright holding asshats, ruined internet streaming, because everyone wanted to be their own thing. They splintered the entire online streaming thing into a bunch of disparate platforms all with some subset of the media available via streaming. It’s worse than cable, honestly.

IMO, the only good move that’s happened for streaming (but horrible for so many other reasons) was Disney gobbling up all the other media studios and production companies, then putting all their stuff on one service. There’s a few holdouts, but by and large the two biggest players right now are Netflix (the OG) and Disney (+)… So a bunch of good media ended up on D+, and so it’s kind of “the” streaming service… For better or worse (mostly worse, as OP points out).

I’m still firmly on my ship, sailing the high seas. Unless they go the way of music, and allow all shows on every platform and you pick your platform based on your preferences, I’ll stay on this ship. Thanks.

Hey, don’t point it out! People are blissfully ignorant of how much they are owned. Don’t try to educate them.

• corporations, probably.

Mine are.

This runs in parallel to tribalism and being part of an “in” crowd. Some people are so bound by their tribalism that they’ll stare at facts and cry that it’s not true because their tribe told them differently; they will reject the facts to continue to be a part of the tribe.

To them, being “in” is more important than being right, or even being logical.

Tribalism can take all sorts of different forms, from politics, to your local sports ball team. Even religion is a form of tribalism.

When everyone you know is a part of the conservative/republican/christian/whatever tribe, even if you don’t agree with any of it, it’s difficult to face the consequences of being ostracized or excluded from the only tribe you’ve ever really been a part of, by following what your mind and heart actually believe. In time, you might actually convince yourself of the bullshit you have to say you believe, in order to maintain your status in the tribe.

Tribalism is a survival trait. It’s what has divided us into nations, countries, states, provinces, cities, towns, etc. Looking back, if we need to do something that will screw over the survivability of the neighboring village, so that we can ensure the continued prosperity of our village, then the answer is yes, do it. It’s rewarded to be greedy and selfish in those circumstances.

Tribalism in the form of villages and towns like that is basically non-existent today, so instead we divide ourselves along other boundaries for what tribes we partake in. Whether that’s religion, sports teams, political ideologies, conspiracy bullshit… It doesn’t really matter, the tribes are all still present, they’ve just taken a very different, more abstract form.

All of the MAGA hats, Trump flags, big trucks rolling coal on “hapless” EV drivers… It’s all just parading around your tribes colors, announcing your affiliations so others will know (the same way that marine vessels sail under a countries flag, or an army marches carrying the flag/colors of a country or whatever). All this showboating is the same as a peacock trying to attract a mate. All these fancy colors, and not a hell of a lot more going on.

They’re baboons waving their big red buttocks around so everyone knows their butt is more red than yours.