darthelmet

@darthelmet@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers'⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Clearly this just means that Silksong IS Half-life 3.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But yes.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not spicy. Everyone knows nuclear power is lemon-lime flavored.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube has found a new way to load ads | AdGuard Blog⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,

  I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.

  As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.

  The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube has found a new way to load ads | AdGuard Blog⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.

  People are great. We’ve done great things. We’re a species who’s defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.

  People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We’ve created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It’s bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don’t need to add to it by making it seem like everyone’s at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube has found a new way to load ads | AdGuard Blog⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.

  But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.

  So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small protection payment subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)

  There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube has found a new way to load ads | AdGuard Blog⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dead Dead Demon's Dededededestruction • DEAD DEAD DEMONS DEDEDEDE DESTRUCTION - Episode 18 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah it’s a pretty depressing ending. The shift technology isn’t letting them go back to fix anything. The world and the people they knew are dead. He and Ontan just noped out of the world to live in basically a fantasy rather than live with the world or try to change it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨God of War Ragnarök - PC Launch Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even for the single player games?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is Kamala Harris being held at such a higher standard than Trump this election?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  2 things:

  • Remember 2016 when the media gave Trump an absurd amount of free publicity by covering every stupid thing he said and did then he won? It wasn’t the only reason, but it clearly didn’t help.

  • People know who Trump is at this point. He’s awful in a way that’s really easy to see and either you’re someone that’s a problem for or you’re someone who loves the awful.

  Whoever is the current corporate lackey being put forward by the DNC is the one that needs to claim to be the good one, co-opting the language of progressives while taking corporate money and maintaining the brutal status quo.

  So for people who come looking for someone who’s gonna do good, the bad stuff represents inconsistencies with that narrative and despair at a lack of representation in a supposedly democratic system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DuckDuckGoose⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe they’re raising an army of nature’s angriest animal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably JoJos? Or maybe Monogatari? How many episodes does that have? There are a lot of seasons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yoru no Kurage wa Oyogenai • Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night - Episode 12 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This was a surprisingly good show. I guess the only things I can really say that disappointed me about the ending though are:

  • It felt kind of rushed. This could have used like one or two more episodes. Like there were 3 parts shoved into one episode: Whatever happened between Mahiro’s meeting and the concert, the concert, then the epilogue. So we kind of had to skip a lot of stuff to fit it all in one episode. Did they not talk between the meeting and the concert? Was their relationship just in suspended animation until they met after the concert?

  • I’m surprised they never addressed the kiss. I don’t know where I’d expect that to go, but it’s weird that they just never talked about it again and just left it as a tease for the audience. Idk, it’s not the biggest deal. They still had an interpersonal emotional arc independent of any yuri bait. But why include that at all if it wasn’t even going to affect their relationship in the slightest?

  But setting all that aside, great show even within a pretty packed season. Fun characters with relatable problems and a story that kept a good pace at least until the last episode.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Star Trek Adventures first edition Core Rulebook pdf free for Saturday, June 22⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. I got this a while ago too, but my friends from college now have jobs and live in 4 different time zones. It’s pretty hard organizing more than two of them being around for more than like an hour or so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Helldivers 2 has received 100,000 negative reviews since announcing players must link Steam to a PSN account⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I tried a 2nd time and no dice on a manual review. Same automated message.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Helldivers 2 Players Express Frustration On Steam As It Will Soon Require A PSN Account⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Trying to refund it, although pretty low chance since it’s well past the window. But that’s part of what makes it so bullshit to bring this in long after that window closed. I’d have refunded the game on the spot if it actually required the account creation from the get go. I refunded Red Dead 2 after it turned out to require a Rock Star account. Fortunately that was apparent on start up so I just quit and refunded.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NSA ’just days from taking over the internet’ warns Edward Snowden⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One of these countries is the largest military superpower the world has ever seen, has invaded or meddled in countless countries around the world for their resources, and has one of if not the most expansive domestic surveillance system… and the other country is Russia.

  Russia has it’s own problems, but they’re not the threat that the US is to the world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the best indie games you've ever played?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:
  • Slay the Spire: I don’t just think it’s the best deck building roguelike, I think it’s the quintessential deck building roguelike. It’s such a complete exploration of the design space of the genre in terms of the options it gives the player to build their deck and the challenges it puts those decks up against. Not that there aren’t any other fun games in this genre, but they all still feel like STS, but worse and with a gimmick that doesn’t add much.

  -Will edit with more in a bit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nobody is saying it isn’t. But if you genuinely care about the harm it causes and don’t just want an excuse to throw political enemies in jail, then the solution is obviously not to criminalize its use. The correct thing to do is to provide social and health services to addicted people to get them off of it.

  All criminalization does is ruin the lives of the people it targets and enrich the prison industry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨These violent delights have violent ends⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Voyager certainly has some great bits in it, but for me I think it’s just that TNG is quintessential Star Trek and DS9 does something very different pretty well. Voyager doesn’t feel like it has enough of a distinct voice to differentiate it from comparisons to TNG.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨These violent delights have violent ends⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s still baffling to me why there is even an unsafe mode in the first place. What could that possibly be used for?

  On a related note: why is the holodeck door so hard to open when the computer is on the fritz/taken over? Surely this isn’t such a high security room that they couldn’t just leave the door with a manual latch?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Companies Take Hit as Judge Says Artists Have “Public Interest” In Pursuing Lawsuits⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For me, I just recognize that AI, or any technology isn’t the problem. It’s context it exists in, who gets to use it, and how.

  We shouldn’t have to choose between automating boring or dangerous jobs and letting people live dignified lives free from the fear of poverty. We shouldn’t have to choose between having AIs that can generate all sorts of interesting media quickly (even if a lot of it isn’t that good yet, it can still serve its purposes, like say, quickly mocking up an idea to see if it’s worth going forward with it.) and ruining the livelihoods of the real artists that made it possible. We also shouldn’t have to deal wit the mountain of garbage that will be created and shoved in our faces by corporations that don’t understand what the limitations of the technology are.

  These are all capitalism problems. We should probably do something about that instead of asking dumb questions like if AI can really make “art” or if it’s copyright infringement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple Vision Pro Owners Are Struggling to Figure Out What They Just Bought⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It strikes me as a mostly non-technical problem. As a method of interfacing with computers/games it just doesn’t offer anything that useful and runs into a lot of practical problems that won’t magically get better with faster processors or smarter software.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean sure. Anything someone is using like currency can be called currency. But we’re talking practical terms here. Things we “collectively agree to value.” My WoW gold might be useful for buying potions, but it’s not generally accepted anywhere outside that narrow context. The fewer people who are willing to accept the currency, the less useful, and arguably less “real” it becomes, in so far as currency is defined by its value to others. I could print “me bucks” that I value at $1B USD, but that doesn’t mean much if nobody will give me a sandwich for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But this is actually why crypto isn’t a real currency: we haven’t collectively agreed to value it, or at least not in any way that makes it useful as a medium for exchange. Ironically it can’t possibly become a proper currency while speculators are making its price so volatile. The very act of investing in it is making it worthless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple Vision Pro Owners Are Struggling to Figure Out What They Just Bought⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  VR has been a thing for years now and has been getting cheaper over time. I’ve had no interest in using it whatsoever. Clearly the thing that needed to change was for it to get MORE expensive. Thanks Apple! Always giving the customer what they didn’t know they wanted!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's up with Epic Games?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They don’t even try to be competitive on technology or service though. If they were making a comparable or even superior product and people were sticking with Steam anyway for the network effect I’d agree they’d be justified in doing more to attract customers. But they just want to use their pile of money to buy their way into a market without putting in the work to design and develop a superior product.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pick your poison. Dystopian style⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s why police exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's up with Epic Games?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They do the same thing that the horde of shitty streaming services do: Hold content hostage through exclusivity deals so they can gain market share without actually providing a comparable technology or service as their competitor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There's no money for education and health care but they'll always find some for war.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. It drives me nuts when the media talks about misinformation as if they didn’t help lie us into a war that’s lasted most of my life. Clearly none of the bad things that we all see happening daily are the reason we’re all sad and angry right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is it apparently cool and fine for insurance companies to spend countless billions, trillions of our money constantly buying ad time?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Where do they get the money from?