sugar_in_your_tea

@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:
This makes a lot of sense.

It would be nice if multiple people reviewed each game, and then they discuss before publishing a review. That’s one thing I really like about Digital Foundry, though they focus way more on technical details than overall gaming experience, but it’s very fun to see what each reviewer has to say about a given title.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:
I’m not talking about my personal preference on rating, I’m talking about broad community reviews.

For example, Cyberpunk 2077 is a notorious example. It got generally favorable reviews from reviewers, and the public release was a completely broken pile of trash on console. Reviews didn’t even get the console release, yet still gave it a positive review because the experience on PC was decent. How can we trust reviewers if they don’t actually try the game? The terms of the review embargo alone should have pushed reviewers to give it net negative reviews since they’re not able to actually try the game.

For strict review differences, look at Starfield, which got 85% by Metacritic, and Steam reviews are more like 55-60%, and it got hit hard by independent reviewers shortly after launch. That’s a pretty big mismatch.

GTA V was pretty close to a perfect score, but actual reception was a bit lower (80% or so on Steam right now). That’s not a huge difference, and it could be due to frustration about not having a sequel for over a decade, but it does seem that some studios get more favorable reviews/more of a pass than others.

That said, a lot of the time reviews are pretty close to the eventual community response. It just seems that reviewers overhype certain games. I haven’t really seen much evidence where critics review a game much below where the community reception is, but I have seen cases where reviewer scores are quite a bit higher than the eventual community response.

Maybe there’s nothing suspicious going on, it just sometimes feels that way.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Are you talking from a regulatory standpoint or from an “I like indies so I’d give it a pass” standpoint?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Sodium-Ion Battery Revolution Has Started⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
At a certain point, profit can turn to status, like with the super wealthy. Elon Musk seems to be pushing for $1T, not because the extra money matters, but because he wants the status of being the first to get there.

But if you look at the quiet majority, many people will take more stressful roles because of the higher earning potential. So they’re increasing their output specifically to get a better standard of living. Those types tend to be contractors, small business owners, and early stage startup employees.

If you look at the alternative, such as China or the USSR, those who rise to the top aren’t those with the highest productivity, but those most able to play the political game. If you look at a small engineering company, it’s generally those with the most technical capability who rise through the ranks, but once you get to larger companies, higher roles generally get taken over by business types, i.e. those best able to play the business side of the political game. It’s the same process, just with different mechanisms for gaining power.

Any proper solution here needs to fix the problem of the wrong people getting to positions of power. The economic system isn’t particularly relevant, other than setting the rules of the game. The best solution, IMO, is to make the rules of the game such that you get punished hard if you don’t know what you’re doing (i.e. you’re a business type running an engineering firm firing top talent to cut quarterly costs), and you get rewarded if you do. If we actually put execs in jail for problems their businesses create, I think we’d quickly see companies like Boeing change their leadership to one that will prevent problems, such as someone w/ an engineering or safety background.

That’s why I think government and the economy should be as separate as possible, and in fact in an adversarial relationship. Bureaucrats should be rewarded for catching crime in the private sector, and private companies should have real incentives to keep everything above board. That can’t happen when politicians are literally funded by the companies they’re supposed to be regulating.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Sodium-Ion Battery Revolution Has Started⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Right, used cars are feasible, I’m talking about new cars. A sub-$20k new commuter should be possible w/ sodium ion batteries.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Is that actually enforced? If so, what’s the explanation for reviewers giving suspiciously high reviews to AAA games?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
But weren’t game reviews essentially ads paid by the publisher? Because that’s what it looks like from the outside, since the reviews are increasingly poor quality that largely focus on positives and ignore negatives. Some games that completely flopped due to technical issues got glowing reviews by journalists, probably because they were paid handsomely for that review.

I think game journalists should avoid advertisements as much as possible because once they rely on it, the temptation to allow their content to be colored by whatever attracts advertisers is too much. They should be solely focused on attracting readers, which means they need to be reader supported.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Sodium-Ion Battery Revolution Has Started⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
It makes a lot of sense, but I doubt we can have a rational debate about that. In short, people tend to be motivated by profit, so theoretically productivity goes up when the economic system rewards that.

The root of the problem has little to do with the economic system, and it’s like blaming bombs for war. The real problem is government structures that reward and encourage consolidation of power, both in the government itself and in the private sector. If you strip away capitalism, you just consolidate that power into the public sector, and for examples of that look at China and the USSR.

I would think that people on Lemmy who likely left other social media due to centralization wouldn’t be so enamored w/ more centralization in the government space. We need solutions that look like Lemmy in the public space to decentralize power so we don’t run into this type of problem. I don’t think there’s a magical structure that fixes everything, and I don’t even necessarily think that capitalism has to be the dominant economic system in play, I just think we need to come up with ideas on how to reduce the power of those at the top.

Specific example of the US military
We should dramatically reduce the federal standing military, increase the National Guard to match, and put stricter limits on when the President can use the National Guard. IMO, the only way the President should access the National Guard is if one of the following happen: - governor explicitly yields control, or the state’s legislature forces the governor to yield control - states vote with a super majority to declare war - legislative branch votes to declare war with a super majority That’s it. The President would otherwise be left with a small standing military that’s enough to deter or perhaps assist in peacekeeping, but nowhere near large enough to invade another country.

I personally think we should embrace capitalism as it’s decentralized by nature, unless forces centralize it, and then create rules that discourage/punish over-centralization. For example, I think small companies should have liability protections, and larger companies should lose it, such that lawsuits could target specific individuals in the organization instead of allowing the organization to be used as a shield. For example, if a company files bankruptcy and it’s over a certain size (maybe $1B market cap? $100M?), then shareholders and top executives become responsible to cover whatever the debts are still unresolved after liquidation. If a crime is committed, it shouldn’t simply result in a fine that’s factored in as the cost of doing business, it should result in arrests. The problem isn’t capitalism, it’s corruption and protectionism.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Sodium-Ion Battery Revolution Has Started⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Partially. It’s more that people don’t click unless the headline is sensational.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Sodium-Ion Battery Revolution Has Started⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah, I want to buy a car w/ reduced range at substantially lower prices, but I can’t do that right now. Give me a sub-$20k option to get to work and back and then I’ll get excited about the tech.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Um, that’s how it always should have been. That’s how journalism in general works, going back since pretty much the dawn of newspapers: readers pay for copy, and advertisements subsidize it.

Like the games industry, publications that cover video games have been rocked by a turbulent market since the highs of the COVID-19 pandemic. Media owners like IGN, Fandom, Gamer Network, and Valent have all cut jobs in the past year.

Is it turbulent though? This article goes over video game spending by year, and it has largely plateaued since 2019. There was a pretty big jump in 2020 due to the pandemic, but the market seems to have returned to a normalish trajectory and mobile revenue seems to be plateauing (I guess it’s saturated?).

I think what happened is that people are shifting where they get their information from. Instead of relying on game journalists, who seem to be paid by game devs (hence why any big game rarely gets below 7/10), they rely on social media, who theoretically aren’t paid by game devs (there’s plenty of astroturfing though). The business model where they’re not paid by game devs should always have been the case, since when people are deciding what games to buy, they clearly would prefer a less biased source.

IMO, games journalism should have multiple revenue streams, such as:
- fan revenue - either donations or subscriptions should always be primary
- curated game bundles, like Jingle Jam - run a charity event where a large portion is donated (be up-front, and have a slider so donators can decide how much goes where, even 0% to one or the other)
- merch
- game tournaments w/ prizes - would be especially cool to focus on indies
- maybe have paid questions from fans that gets answered in a podcast or a paid video to discuss topics of fans’ choosing
They can get very far before needing to run ads. Produce quality journalism and have some additional revenue streams and it’ll work out.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

When AWS went down, users lost access to the app that manages its water-cooled coils, leaving them stuck with whatever setting was last active.

That’s ridiculous. The app should merely talk to the device over wifi, if available. The cloud should only be used to connect from outside the wifi network.

Why is everything so crappy?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
I, too, like Dutch people.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Simplex is ready today, assuming you just want 1:1 messaging.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
How sure are you? Assign a percentage chance to it and the cost of exposing old messages, and compare that to the cost of this dev effort.

We know governments are using it, and there’s likely a lot of sensitive data transmitted through Signal, so the cost of it happening in the next 20 years would still be substantial, so even if the chance of that timeline happening is small, there’s still value in investing in forward secrecy.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨similar to the word of mouth post, what game did you not expect much from but loved it?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Yup, I remember reading the manual on the toilet while my sibling was playing so when it was my turn, I’d have a leg up. We would take turns, cheering each other on as we got past a difficult part, and sharing secrets that we found.

With the internet, I can just look up a walkthrough pretty soon after the game launches, so I have no reason to look at the manual (if there is one) or talk to anyone else.

I think that’s why competitive MP has taken off. People want that social experience, and that’s filling in for what used to exist. I remember PvP being a thing, but I also remember helping each other out on a SP game being a thing, so both were social activities.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Unit tests aren’t intended to find bugs, they’re intended to prove correctness. There should be a separate QA process for finding bugs, which involves integration testing. When QA inevitably finds a bug, the unit tests get updated with that case (and any similar cases).

only cover cases that you know will work

And that’s what code reviews are for. If your tests don’t sufficiently cover the logic, the change should be rejected until they do.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Huge internet outage live blog: Amazon, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max and more experiencing issues⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I did it in a few weeks. I basically swapped discs while playing games, before going to work, before bed, etc. It was tedious, but I got them all.

Now when I buy one, I’ll rip it first before watching.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
It shouldn’t, but it does. The person who writes the code cares more about its correctness, so I trust them to write better tests.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨similar to the word of mouth post, what game did you not expect much from but loved it?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

who reads manuals?

In the 90s, everyone who wanted a shot at understanding what was going on. Games didn’t have a ton of text, so the manual was the way to learn the controls, get backstory, and even some hints for obtuse puzzles.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tragic Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
But I don’t wanna.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨similar to the word of mouth post, what game did you not expect much from but loved it?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Headlander

I don’t usually like Metroidvanias, having played a bunch of mediocre ones, but Headlander really sucked me in for some reason. Basically, you’re a head without a body and steal other bodies to use their abilities. In a sense it took everything I knew DMT about the genre and flipped it on its head (pun begrudgingly intended).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Eh, GOG isn’t a nonprofit or anything, so there’s no guarantee they’ll use your money for the cause you want.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Why not just buy a game instead? That doesn’t provide as much money to GOG, but it also rewards game devs for providing DRM-free games.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
No, if there’s nothing, it’s not using one of the big DRM systems.

The only way to know for sure is to install it and try to run it without Steam (rename Steam dir and Steam exe just in case). Some games use Steam DRM or otherwise rely on Steam, so this is to rule those out too.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah, I didn’t have a Steam account until they came to Linux back in 2013 or so. Back then, I bought most of my games through Humble Bundle since most had Linux support, and the rest direct from the dev’s website (e.g. I bought Minecraft and Factorio around their public alpha/beta release). I played a few games through WINE, but not many since it was a pain.

Steam was a game changer, and they didn’t even have Proton yet, so I only bought Linux-native games through them. Being able to finally find games that supported Linux easily and keep them all on an account was amazing! And then they added Proton for the Steam Machine launch, and I could finally play many Windows games as well!

In that time, what has GOG done for me? Offline installers suddenly doesn’t sound as impressive, especially since they don’t come with a compatibility layer, so I’ll have to go mess with WINE directly again to use them for Windows games. With Steam, I can copy the installed files for most games and it’ll work without Steam running, so I can get 90% of the value GOG provides (my “installer” can be a tarball) with a small amount of effort, and also get all of the extra value Steam provides, so any pick GOG?

Here’s what would change my mind, in rough order of preference:
1. GOG brings Galaxy to Linux with a WINE compatibility layer that works with local installer backups
2. 1, but without support for local installer backups
3. 2, but offloads the WINE support to another project, say by adding Steam entries or handing off to Lutris or Heroic or something
4. Officially recognize and support Heroic (or another launcher) on the download page for Galaxy (e.g. “until Galaxy comes to Linux, use Heroic, which is officially supported by GOG support”); the closest they have now is a Heroic affiliate link
I mostly want some indication that GOG cares about Linux gamers. Valve has gone out of their way to support Linux, EGS has done the same to not support Linux, and GOG is somewhere in the middle. I like GOG’s principles here, I just need some level of actual support from them.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Oh sure. I’m just saying the computer interface presented as “futuristic” doesn’t look enjoyable to work with.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The AI that we'll have after AI (Doctorow)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Boiling time isn’t related to original potato size, it’s related to the size of pieces you cut. So the first half is irrelevant and the second half is overly verbose.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The AI that we'll have after AI (Doctorow)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
It’s just this person from what I can tell.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Rules Could Force Tesla to Redesign Its Door Handles. That’s Harder Than It Sounds⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
That’s fine, and I’d probably say the same about yours.

My point in all of this is to say that changes should be gradual, and policy makers should adjust based on the results. The main issue w/ people like Brownbeck and Trump is they don’t do that, but instead go full steam ahead on whatever agenda they have planned. Rapid changes in any direction are generally bad in the short to medium term. I think we should steer the ship toward personal liberty, you may disagree, but hopefully we can agree that policy should be an iterative process where we take two steps forward and one step back based on the data.