This was, without any doubt, a prophetic dream. The apocalypse will soon be upon us! Be wary of the four horsemen: Ronald, King, Wendy, and… Chihuahua

It’s always a treat to see the wheels of open source & community funding meshing together to bring about a better internet. You and @nutomic@lemmy.ml have already done the honors of thanking the open source contributors, so I think it’s now my turn as an ordinary user to thank you both for your continued hard work and leadership – I have my quibbles, but these do not preclude the giving of a well-deserved and hearty thanks: Thank you! It continues to please me greatly to have the privilege (in both senses of the word) to contribute to the financial sustainability of the project as one of its many small recurring donators.

And, while I’m at it… since the opportunity doesn’t come up often: I also want to specifically express gratitude to dessalines for their (unrelated) work on the thumb-key project. As a long-time user of MessagEase (10+ years!), I’ve become a happy convert to your more well-maintained and open source replacement. So, thanks for that too! Please continue to suffer my past & future criticisms with the knowledge that it always originates from a place of equal parts respect & gratitude.

A fellow Xbox gamepass User IT seems.

Nope, I’m just someone who waits for sales and has a bit of an indie streak.

This was after my First playthrough. Now, with George putting out his video, im back in. My god, its marvellous.

I see we follow similar creators! I only just picked Pentiment up last week – Jacob Geller’s recent 2023 video is what originally put Pentiment on my radar and then George’s video gave me that final push into playing it for myself. I’m extremely glad for having done so because Pentiment has quickly become quite special to me. I already look forward to making subsequent playthroughs despite still working on the first.

Hifi Rush was great, but felt too formulaic for me, so i abandoned it after the first or second Boss. Too much running arpund, No real banger music between Bosses.

I can see where you’re coming from. From a macro perspective, the game’s essentially just a series of battle arenas stitched together by corridors and platforming challenges… nothing incredible there. What makes Hi-Fi Rush special for me is the novel fusion of rythm mechanics and spectacle fighter mechanics – they complement each other extremely well. (Forgive me for explaining at you like this. I just can’t help myself when it comes to talking about this game)

Normally, I can’t stand DMC-likes because of the requisite rote memorization. HFR flips this dynamic on its head by making the memorization incidental – it happens naturally as you practice playing the combo on-rythm. Perhaps even more importantly; just as mastery of a combo string comes within reach, the underlying musical qualities all suddenly spring into focus and turn the sequence into a musical phrase. It clicks together in a very intrinsically satisfying way IMO. Naturally, this all compounds in on itself and gets double-fun once you start improvising your own “melodies” during real combat. You like Jazz? Because it’s like Jazz if Jazz killed people.

Now, obviously this isn’t going to hit the same way for everyone (nor should it!)… but if you’ve not yet buckled down in training mode and truly mastered a string or two for yourself, then I would very emphatically encourage you to give the game a second try. I actually had to do the exact same thing myself before I really “got” the game and my mindset shifted. Hi-Fi Rush truly is the Dark Souls of 3rd-Person Action videogames

When it comes to Deep Rock/co-op I think my issues are more associated with the underlying gameloop design. I find it hard to perform well when the “tension” ramps up and these games are kind of tailor-made to create high-tension situations. When a round ends I’m left feeling tired/deflated rather than joyful. I had the same issue with Left 4 Dead, but oddly not so for Payday 2.

In any case, I’m right there with you when it comes to TF2 community servers. I sorely wish that more games emphasized these sorts of digital “3rd places”. I have TF2 servers where I can go anytime and just… belong for as long as I please. Games should have more permanent places like that, where play and community come before any imposed win/lose dichotomy. People would be happier.

Yup, that about sums it up: fun, but shallow. Nevertheless I think it’s worthy of a recommendation because it has a great honeymoon period before falling off.

I had a really solid year, all things considered:

• ⭐ Hi-Fi Rush – Love it, hands down. This game’s like if Jet Set Radio, Scott Pilgrim, and DMC got into a fist fight and then that fist fight had a baby with Jack Black
• ⭐ Pentiment – I’m still playing through this one but I can already tell it’s a new favorite. Major Return of the Obra Dinn vibes
• ⭕ Against the Storm – This game innovates on the citybuilder genre so hard and I can’t get enough of it. If you love a challenge and hate the late-game, this is THE ONE
• ⭕ Psychonauts 2 – Fun and bursting with creativity… but I had to set it down after a certain point because I stopped enjoying the gameplay loop. Can’t put my finger on why…
• ⭕ Peglin – Yes, Peglin. The Peggle Roguelite. I like it and you would too if you gave it a chance. It’s not a forever roguelite, but I guarantee you’ll have a blast with it for 5-10 hours
• ❌ Deep Rock Galactic – I bounced off of this one. The game has so much charm… but I just couldn’t click with it. I think co-op games just may not be for me

Honorable Mention: TF2 – Definitely not a “new” game to me, I own TF2, I bought it with money! Even so… this year marked my return after a looong hiatus. Coming back was a total revelation – I thought I’d grown to hate FPS games – as it turns out, what I’d actually grown to hate was the modern antisocial MMR grindset. Game developers: I beseech thee… abandon matchmaking and return to 2007. Return the slab or suffer my curse

Sacrifice a human heart to appease the comet!

Another reason is that "CP" got jokingly coopted by abusers in the form of various dogwhistles (e.g.: "cheese pizza"). It made more sense to adopt a new acronym rather than try to uphold any sense of decorum while sharing ownership of the term w/ edgelords & predators.

Communism with western characteristics?

Hmm… I think we’re dogging on the author a bit much here. Don’t get me wrong, they’re clearly swimming in philosophical water that’s a bit too deep for themselves, but sometimes you’ve gotta be clumsy in order to explore topics at the edge of theory.

Let’s dial things up a notch and bring Undertale (the Dark Souls of – nevermind) into the discussion. What does it have to say about branching pathways, tonal consistency, and savescum? It says: I was made for you, please enjoy me.

The game adapts to the audience – you, that is. You are weird and hard to please, so the game needs to be flexible without feeling compromised. If you want to leave hidden depths unexplored, the game abides. If you want to vivisect every last detail, the game changes to fit your desire.

It’s alchemy, of course; both magical and unobtainable, so the author isn’t strictly wrong to accuse Baldur’s Gate of falling short. It’s true: sometimes a gap in the curtains opens up and the illusion is spoilt. With that being said, I think what’s missing is the logical conclusion to the criticism: universality – despite being unobtainable – is still worth striving for. To be universal is to distill humanity itself, as great and terrible and impossible as that may be (and here you thought I was joking with that Dark Souls jab!).

You’re about 20 years late for that particular shitshow, but here’s a fun video retrospective on the war on Pokemon if that’s your thing.

Note that I’m specifically including “in an an instance-local post” because I am assuming admins don’t want to provide free cloud image hosting to random internet people for arbitrary non-lemmy use.

Note that I at no point allude to hotlinking from outside of the instance. Unless you want it to be possible to create an image post, delete the post, and then have an orphaned image forever (thereby creating an attack vector), you do need to solve that problem. If you solve that problem without considering crossposts and comment hotlinks within the scope of your own instance, you’re going to cause breakage. If you’re forced to consider these things before triggering the deletion regardless, then you’re not saving much on performance.

What’s the practical difference? In both cases you’re culling images based on whether they’re orphaned or not.

If you’re suggesting that the implementation be based on setting individual timers instead of simply validating the whole database at regular intervals, consider whether or not the complexity of such a system is actually worth the tradeoff.

“Complexity comshmexity”, you might say. “Surely it’s not a big deal!”. Well… what about an image that used to belong to a valid post that later got deleted? Guess you have to take that edge case into account and add a deletion trigger there as well! But what if there were other comments/posts on the same instance hotlinking the same image? Guess you have to scan the whole DB every time before running the deletion trigger to be safe! Wait… wasn’t the whole purpose of setting this up with individual jobs to avoid doing a scripted DB scan?

Should the NVD be deeply involved in all of them just to provide the most accurate security score? That’s an impossible ask.

This is a false dilemma. If the task is truly impossible, that’s not a valid excuse to try anyway and fail repeatedly, especially if doing so causes negative externalities. Numbered scores with decimal precision are not necessary to the core functionality of a CVE database and there are plenty of alternative solutions which would minimize harm and scale more economically.

We can do better.

I’m guessing “wrong-sider” would be a step in the wrong direction?

Ah, nevermind sorry about the trouble. He’s a cofounder of the company whose logo you’re using as an avatar (“Ronimo”, i.e.: “Robot Ninja Monkey”).

This is a long-shot question, feel free to disregard… but I have to ask: is that you, Joost?

Skill issue

You’ve assumed that I want to explain the root cause of the initial decline. This is not the case. Historically, SO has seen several periods of decline. What I’m actually addressing is the question of why the decline has not stopped, because the sustained nature of this decline is what makes it unusual. If you look at the various charts, you can see a brief rally which gets cut off in late Winter 2022 – this lines up rather nicely with the timing of ChatGPT’s release, I feel.

Let’s ignore that. Tell me more about your Google angle: what’s the basis of your hypothesis?

It’s too much to attribute to any one effect. 50% is a lot for a website of this size (don’t forget that Lemmy exploded from a migration of <5% Reddit usershare). Let’s KISS by attributing likely causes in order of magnitude:

1. ChatGPT became the world’s fastest growing website in a single month and it’s actually half-decent at being a code tutor
2. ChatGPT bots got unleashed on SO and diluted a lot of SO’s comparative advantages
3. Stack Overflow moderators went on strike, which further damaged content quality
4. Structurally speaking, SO is an environment which tends to become more elitist over time. As the userbase becomes progressively more self-selective, the population shrinks.
5. The SO format requires a stream of novel questions, but novel questions generally get rarer over time
6. Developer documentation has generally improved over time. On SO, asking about a well-documented thing is a short-circuit pathway to getting RTFM’d & discussion locked