I’ve seen this reported in other countries as well, and it makes perfect sense. If you’re already at risk of being deported just for existing, why would you do anything to put yourself at higher risk.

Just installed an update to 10 2 days ago to find that it had installed Copilot and put an icon for it on my taskbar. Stuff like this is why 10 will be my last version of Windows.

Are they, though? Starfield was so lifeless that I felt scammed even getting it for under $50 on release.

I mean, Lemmy definitely runs more techy than most other places, but I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say the average user here knows any better than any Reddit idiot or something lol

And my point wasn’t to peer review your example or anything, just to say that people keep complaining about it because these snake oil salesmen keep getting richer while using the same tired lines about how AI will do everything and anything, and do a handstand while it’s at it.

It’s like all the complaints historians keep finding about that one guy selling shitty copper bars or whatever. Nobody is gonna shut up about it until the bubble finally bursts and these AI companies can’t unload their shitty copper on anyone anymore.

In your example, the thing missing is that the belt sander companies are selling their belt sanders as screw fastening, band saw multitools.

I always say about AI that it’s not the tool but who’s making it and why, and this is especially true for the average person. Your average person isn’t seeing the LLMs that are trained to identify anomalies in MRIs or iterate on chemical formulas to improve drugs in a simulation that takes milliseconds compared to the months of research it would take technicians to replicate the same experiments. So all they can talk about is the AI that is in their face all day, every day, as every company in the world tries to shoehorn it into their product somehow. And so they complain about the belt sanders that the company told them would fasten their screws and cut their 2x4’s.

The only way the complaining is going to stop is when the bubble bursts and these companies have to find a new way to chase the infinite profit pipedream.

I didn’t mean that Ubisoft’s was better than Steam - just better than Epic’s store when comparing both against Steam. I hated the uPlay store as much as everyone else.

As for your question, once you have feature parity, it becomes about finding a niche. GoG has its list of old games and lack DRM going for it, for example. Nobody is going to pull large groups of people from Steam immediately without some major draw, obviously, but if you offer a similar service that doesn’t exclude people on other platforms like Steam from playing games with people on your own platform, then people will be drawn to whichever they like better.

The big reason I think we don’t see any real competition for Steam is that the companies with the funding to do so all wanted to force a piece of the pie rather than actually compete with Steam on quality of service. If EA, Ubisoft, and Epic had tried that, we would probably have a much more diverse ecosystem of storefronts - especially with crossplay becoming common. As it stands, Steam’s biggest competitors are the consoles, and that’s largely down to hardware preference rather than storefront/launcher preference.

Steam has so much impetus now that competing with them is very difficult, but as I saw somebody else in here say, if Epic had done something like offer their lower take from devs on sales at the agreement of a 5% lower price on their platform instead of spending all that money on forced exclusivity, people would have a real reason to go there instead of Steam (if the quality of service were comparable).

A. The technological landscape is very different today than it was 21 years ago. Many other companies have launched a better copy of Steam - including Ubisoft themselves. People didn’t like when Ubisoft and EA did it because they tried forced exclusivity, like Epic, and couldn’t offer anything beyond their own games. And you couldn’t even sync friends between the 3, needlessly splitting your friends between different platforms. GoG has been doing fine for years now.

B. Maybe if Epic had provided basic stuff like a shopping cart - you know, a basic feature that you can find on any webhost service’s website maker - instead of paying companies for forced exclusivity, maybe people would’ve been more willing to give it a chance.

Forced exclusivity put them on a bad start. The lack of basic features that were standardized for online storefronts 25 years ago killed any chance they had to gain any kind of traction. And the series of bad decisions following guaranteed that they never would have a good reputation. Remember when they had a sale on unreleased games without asking the devs of those games?

I’m getting flashbacks to Tumblr’s “female-presenting nipples” censorship rules during the porn ban.

I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you’re going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can’t go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that’s before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.

There’s definitely studies on it. I don’t know how they measure them, but it’s all about the number and type of cones in your eyes because there are a few different types that see different colors. This is why tigers are orange - because their prey lack the cones that see red, so the tigers look like the rest of the background foliage.

The worst part of this for me is that I remember when you could build a PC with better specs than a console for the same price. Now we’re coming back full circle to where that might be possible again, but graphics cards never truly came down from their inflated crypto mining prices. So that means consoles are just getting more expensive and everybody is losing.

I’ve heard that women have more cones in their eyes as well, which leads to a more nuanced sense of differentiation between colors.

The context that we’re talking about here isn’t somebody that you know personally and have permission from/are talking to mutual friends of. We’re talking about publicly announcing a stranger’s dead name to everybody who reads this post and the justification that it’s okay because they once had 15 minutes of internet fame from a video going viral before they transitioned. At best, it’s a paparazzi-esque invasion of privacy, and at worst, it’s straight up doxxing.

A. Hyperbole, look it up.

B. Why do you think it’s okay to dox people?

TIL the internet doesn’t understand hyperbole so long as it’s a trans person using it.

Did you miss the part about how my safety is dependent on going stealth? I moved somewhere where nobody knew me after transitioning for a reason. A stranger going around and telling random people my dead name would be like a stranger going around telling random people that a person is in witness protection and what their real name is. Again, your threat index isn’t universal.

The first rule of self-defense is that a battle not fought is a battle won. The second rule is if you have to hurt a man, you hurt him so bad that you need never fear his vengeance. If he can stand up, he can come right back at you.

Except that’s not at all what’s happening here. We’re not talking about somebody we know personally with their permission or anything, we’re talking about an actress who got into pornography after having an emotional video go viral many years ago. Her dead name has nothing to do with that, and if you had even left out the fact that she’s trans, most people probably could’ve figured it out if they even bothered to go check out the original video. Abd if they didn’t? It wouldn’t make a difference in their knowledge of the subject. They’d still know that a woman who had an emotional video go viral years ago later became a porn actress. All her dead name adds to this is a possibly paparazzi style invasion of her privacy.

Does it add any useful context, though? I don’t know either name but I do remember the “Leave Britney alone” video being a thing (and the fact that the person in the video turned out to be right all along when the truth about Britney’s situation came out years later), so the added context that she’s trans and what her dead name was is meaningless to me other than to say, “She used to be a man. She’s a woman now, but she was a man before. Did you know that? That she was once a man? Because she was. Here’s what her name was.”

As a trans woman, whose safety is so dependent on being able to go stealth in society, if I found out people were going around talking about me like this, I’d take a rusty icepick and make sure that they never think in words ever again. Lack of malicious intent doesn’t mean that no harm was caused. Your threat index is not universal.

This could have very easily been left at “Trans woman X got into porn after her viral video Y” and there would be all the context needed to figure out who they were and what video they were in without using their dead name. Hell, you probably wouldn’t even have to point out that she’s trans for people to figure it out. Cis people treat the privacy of trans people the same way that the paparazzi treats the privacy of celebrities.

So the way Tumblr works is that your account is basically a blog, with your home page on the site being populated with posts from the accounts that you follow. You can reblog posts onto your own account and comment on them to create individual conversation threads like this one. At one point, there was a bug in the edit post system that let you edit the entirety of a post when you reblogged it, including what other people had said previously, and even the original post. This would only affect your specific reblog of it, of course, but you could edit a post to say something completely different from the original and create a completely unrelated comment chain.

The question is whether or not Tumblr users would want such a thing.

I feel like the same thing will happen like when WordPress introduced a (bad) TikTok/streaming clone called Tumblr Live. I think less than 10% of the userbase ever interacted with it, most of the community openly hated it, and the people who did use it largely didn’t use Tumblr themselves.

I could see Tumblr users actively finding a way to defederate their blogs from everything Fediverse related.