Carighan

Carighan , 2 hours ago

It’s free software as in, it’s free. You can continue mumbling your nonsense in the corner of course, the rest of us have bigger issues than whether someone we don’t actually know can use word “free” like everybody else.

Carighan , 1 hour ago

Or maybe because it’s good? Have you tried the Occam’s Razor thing? You need to realize that by and large, users could not possibly care any less about source code available if you gave them money for it.

And the software has upsides. Compared to NewPipe (what I had before):

• Updates in finite time after Youtube breaks something.
• Can actually log in with your youtube account, directly accessing your subscriptions and so on, instead of having go through the complicated export/unzip/import process every time you change your subscriptions and want to resync them.
• Includes more sources, and pretty heterogenuous ones at that. Nice all-in-one app.

And keep in mind, nobody who is not a gnu cares whether for some hyper-specific context that this post is not in, “free” can mean the sourcecode is freely available. The english language already uses the word “free” in everyday parlour, and if you use english, you know those uses. One of which being “costs you nothing”. Trying to argue around that just makes people less likely to care about source code availability because frankly, you’re being a dick to people for no bloody reason.

Carighan , 23 hours ago

This makes sense to a degree, tbh. You cannot guarantee full removal anyways, at least over here a filetted fish still says that there might be the odd leftover bone in there.

It’s like, “yeah it’s 99% and any reasonable person would not assume 100% anyways”.

Carighan , 19 hours ago

Yeah, hence the ‘to a degree’. Although I should have expanded upon that to include that while you should always be careful (same with pitted cherries or so), a bone that big is weird to still be in there.

Carighan , 22 hours ago (edited 22 hours ago)

At least here in Germany this is apparently still not true as smokers in particular add a huge cost to the healthcare system due to the long-term and repeated damage. For example, once they get parts of their feet amputated from clogged arteries, most actually continue to smoke (“Ah well now it’s too late anyways”), and hence will get half a dozen such amputations over time.

Carighan , 22 hours ago

Keep in mind that the person you reply to isn’t wrong: Big corpos would still be lobbying, as they got the resources to hide it effectively and keep everyone trying to sue them over suspicions of lobbying stuck in litigation hell.

Anybody less affluent would however find it impossible to do any lobby work. Environmental agencies etc.

This is one of those situations where just outlawing something does the least affect the very party you would want to hit most.

Carighan , 22 hours ago

Most people in countries where guns are regulated would not get access to a gun for hunting, mind you. Unless your job is to be a forester, which over here includes selectively shooting animations to balance populations if something goes out of balance.

“I want to get my own deer meat from the forest” is not a valid reason to get a gun. Or even a bow!

Carighan OP , 20 hours ago

Same. For me the final straw was when it started desynchronising from actual progress when playing podcasts, which means every time I pause and resume I’m somewhere else I the episode.

Carighan OP , 19 hours ago

That’s the worst part, back when they were new, at least Sonos had a cool USP. Nowadays others do remote access and smart speakers too, and Sonos is still overpriced, still mediocre hardware, and now doesn’t even have a nicely integrated all-in-one-app any more.

Carighan OP , 1 hour ago

Yep. It’s impressive, tbh.

It’s a company that was one of the first to get into “smart xyz” at all, scored big, and since then has shown that they have absolutely not a single clue how to do smart home appliances.

Carighan , 1 day ago

Yeah I thought so, too. But this does come with the pretty big benefit that the demo will have it’s own reviews. Which is cool. I like that. And to be fair, they already showed up as their own entry in search results as if they had a page, they just then also went to the same page.

Carighan , 1 day ago

Oh yeah, definitely.

Carighan , 1 day ago

This is interesting. I mean of course, I am aware of the reasons they did this massive change, and on paper they all made sense ahead of time.

They also massively degraded the game feel, and IMO were ultimately the wrong solution for the problem(s) they were facing. I understand why they did it, much like I understand why they chased the eSports-hype, but I disagree with all actions taken and their outcomes regardless.

The game had already mostly lost me by the time OW2 rolled around, and between the very intense-feeling 5v5 that was nothing like the chill chat-with-friends-while-playing-some-OW we had before and the rampant monetization, I just dropped off. I don’t think this will at all make me come back to the game, but on a conceptual level I really enjoy them at least experimenting with undoing a lot of the shit they did to the game over the years, this isn’t the only thing they’re reverting after all.

Carighan , 1 day ago

The biggest issue is that IMO, even nowadays balance isn’t remotely as good as it was before the change, owing to the massive imbalance on all ends the 5v5-switch introduced, and them only working through that at a glacial pace. But even more so, this is annoying because of how it essentially undermines the reason they did this.

Sure, the queue time argument still stands. Yeah. But on a balance level, “Double tanks were problematic for game balance” is a bit of a moot point in hindsight. Yeah, they were, sure. Less so than 5v5 is, it turns out.

Carighan , 1 day ago

Overwatch 1.2, which would be more accurate?

Carighan , 1 day ago

It’s worth it to read the director’s take that goes with this announcement, it’s quite long but goes into great detail about the motivation and effects.

I hate the change, but I can totally understand why they did it. Much as I personally dislike it.

Carighan , 1 day ago

It also essentially undermines the whole idea of the game. “More FPS focus” and “more focus on individual gameplay” are not why I enjoyed OW1 in the first place, after all. It was the game to play with real life friends while hanging out on voice chat and relaxing after work. The mix of high-precision, low-precision, no-precision, tanking, healing, everything meant that there was something for everybody and we could all easily play together and just spend an evening talking shit and doing shit.

Carighan , 1 day ago

Microtransactions don’t have to affect gameplay any more. The video games industry has successfully sold this narrative (“Please ignore cosmetic microtransactions mkay?!”) while also raising a whole new generation of gamers that value ingame cosmetics to a social-interactions-affecting degree.

There’s a reason kids laugh at one another over default skins in Fortnite or lack of cash in Roblox and so on.

Plus just as importantly, they normalize mtx on an industry level, making selling of other types of monetization easier in the future.

Carighan , 1 day ago

I mean, cars aren’t essential to existence either, just don’t buy them <-- technically correct, but not at all a helpful statement when discussing car-price-related issues.

Carighan , 1 day ago

No you should not, you should add her as a red flag on your dating profile.

Carighan , 1 day ago

Personally I get why 5v5 was done, but I utterly hate it. It removes all the things that made Overwatch 1 so cool compared to other FPS to me:

• Slow TTK as a result of two tanks in front of the team.
• High focus on healing, as someone who enjoys playing healers in all games this was heaven to me.
• Lower focus on personal damage contribution and aim, as syncing ults, creating trap spots and selectively bursting targets was how you got kills, not just aiming.

In total, this resulted in me and my friends easily having a game we could all enjoy on a few characters each (me on Moira, Mercy, Torbjörn, Symmetra and Bastion, for example) and talk shit while just playing the entire evening.

This whole “social” spirit was lost as they slowly pitched the balance towards faster and faster TTK, and ultimately with 5v5. It’s a “competitive FPS” now, but honestly, I don’t need a competitive FPS. Never did. I did however need a social fun low-stakes FPS, back when OW1 came out. And that spot is no longer filled, sadly.

Carighan , 1 day ago

I mean, they can undo the buffs to the other tanks, and do the equivalent nerfs to the new tanks.

Carighan , 19 hours ago

Oh the grenade part was so silly. “Hey we are removing the stun, too much CC and let’s be honest, it makes it far too easy to blow up stunned flankers”.

…

“Here, as a replacement that’s a homing grenade that just straight up kills the flanker, no stunning necessary.”

Okay, I guess. 🤷

Carighan , 21 hours ago

Yep, exactly that. Thanks, I was confused until I saw your comment.

Carighan , 21 hours ago

Did the fax go down from CrowdStrike? No. The superior communication medium!

Carighan OP , 1 day ago

How so? As in, who is being excluded and how so?

Carighan OP , 1 day ago

Never in my life have I heard anybody say “Are you going to get new game …? I’ve heard you can play as a black woman in this one. So cool.”

Hrm, anecdotally I have quite a lot of formerly non-gamer friends who were really hyped for say, Life is Strange: True Colors, specifically because they were excited about how Alex breaks some beauty norms and gets to flirt with Steph on top of that.

Of course, anecdotally.

But it’s important to keep in mind that we’re no longer an industry of 5 teams creating 20 games a year. There’s so many games that there is more than enough space for every game. From absolutely purist near-identityless gameplay-only designs (Which exist in droves) to huge mass-market hyper-produced open worlds all the way to purist story/feels only visual novels and experimental art pieces.

And each of these categories has more games each year than the entire market around the Gameboy time had. Gaming is insanely big now.

Carighan OP , 1 day ago

I think you missed the point of the person you replied to.

Carighan OP , 1 day ago

No you did, keep thinking.

Carighan OP , 1 day ago

The most refined form of play is unstructured, spontaneous, and uses imagination.

[citation needed]

Carighan OP , 1 day ago

I mean on the plusside, you always know that whenever anybody uses the word “woke” as if it were a real word, you can immediately add them to the blocklist or ban them. Nothing they can add has any value any more.

Carighan OP , 1 day ago

Can you make that bigger? 😛

Carighan , 1 day ago

Okay? Used the wrong community for your ad spam?

Carighan , 1 day ago

I mean, come on, this has to be someone taking the piss internally. There’s no way anyone working in public relations or marketing could be this stupid. Not even the boss of marketing would be this utterly idiotic.

Unless this was something the COO sent out on their own without consulting anyone doing actual work in the company, this has to be someone sticking it to the bosses by also pulling this stunt.

Carighan , 2 days ago

Yeah, and it’s fine if people need such a pet around to stay calm, but then plan your travels accordingly. It’s not like you couldn’t have trivially known about this beforehand and the fact that this person decided it’s beneath them to inform themselves beforehand about whether this airline is compatible with their specific needs just shows what an asshole they are.

Carighan , 3 days ago

She’s the first candidate in a while where I feel she might genuinely be good as a president, not just “not bad”.

Carighan , 3 days ago

But it was takes serious? It wasn’t ignored?

Carighan , 5 days ago

Yeah that’s my take on it, too.

Plus they’re far too big for “Google” to be a useful entity in discussions. The Google C-suites? The CEO? The Maps team? The Mail team? The support for end-user customers? Need to be more specific, because I bet the Mail team is bigger than some competing companies in their entirety.

Carighan , 5 days ago

There’s this study that attempts to quantify this effect, at least.

Carighan , 5 days ago

WDYM? It seems to update every 1-2 days on the beta channel for me, always fine-tuning some language or another. Do they not push updates to non-beta any more?

Carighan , 5 days ago

I dunno. Don’t enough communes have a fair fee computer devices around?

Carighan , 6 days ago

Me, coming into this thread: “Great idea, but I bet this is over comparatively minor shit. Are we renaming the cat race Maine Coon now?!”

…

Hitler Beetle. The fuck.

Carighan , 6 days ago

That’s not how bitlocker works, it was quite obviously not set up correctly.

Carighan , 7 days ago

And keep in mind, the falcon sensor exists for Linux. All those big companies largely use it.

Essentially we just got lucky that their buggy patch only affected the windows version of the sensor in a showstopping way. Could have been all major OS.

Carighan , 7 days ago

It’s not your machine, your choice of distro, or your choice of specific packages to use or not use. It’s a work tool you get handed as part of a job. So whether CrowdStrike runs on it or not is not your decision and you aren’t allowed (and usually not capable) to change that.

That’s an entirely different situation from one where you get a PC to do with as you please and set up yourself, or a private machine.

Plus we’re mostly talking endpoint devices for non-technical users with many of these difficult-to-fix devices as techs have to drive out to them. The users expect a tool, and they get a tool. A Linux would be customized and utterly locked down, and part of that would be the endpoint protection software.

Carighan OP , 7 days ago

The thing is that by and large, only #2 out of your list is included in the big profits of these companies.

The other thing is somewhere between 1 and 3, namely grown-ups with cash from work but who find it absolutely normal to pay a certain amount per week for their favorite game. Because they’ve never known different.

And then of course, there’s the really fucked up group: problem spenders. Who are explicitly targetted and exploited by these shit companies.