I've been having trouble putting my finger on what it is about it like that. I waited a little bit past the hype to play, and when I started I was completely hooked. Then I got busy for a few days and couldn't play it, but never really felt like picking it up again

I wonder if it's because it has a lot of different mechanics, but they aren't particularly deep? So it's addicting as you keep discovering new ones and how they interact, but then dies off?

I think a reason that Valve has been able to be consumer friendly for so long is that they aren't public and not beholden to shareholders.

I've seen so many "this new battery technology" articles over the past decade, I can't bring myself to care until it enters production.

Yeah, who's gonna say "Oh, I'm not blocking ads on YouTube, better take the time to make sure I see ads everywhere else as well."

https://xkcd.com/927/

Esperanto

Absolutely makes sense for most planets to be rather barren.

This idea is something I've heard a lot about Starfield and is why I don't think I'll pick it up, at least until a big sale. To me, it seems like they made a fair number of design decisions around what "makes sense" rather than what's fun.

The value isn't for existing PC gamers. It would be for people who are not tech literate, do not know how to build a PC, install an OS, or even tell if a given computer is powerful enough to run a particular game.

I think that's the real strength (and more importantly, intent) of the Steam deck: to get people who aren't PC gamers to become PC gamers by making it as simple as a traditional console. Steam machines could provide a similar thing if there were a Steam Machine 1 Verified flag next to games.

Weekly reminder that "trickle down economics" was always meant as a criticism. Coined by Will Rogers

This election was lost four and six years ago, not this year. They [Republicans] didn't start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didn't know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow's hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#:~:text=Trickle%2Ddown%20economics%20is%20a,critics%20of%20supply%2Dside%20economics.

Cyberpunk 2077. I was pretty skeptical of it before it came out (didn't really feel like it was doing anything unique), but it was such a big release I picked it up to have an opinion on it.

Don't think I'm gonna do the same for Starfield, though, that's just a pass

I get the sentiment, but don't really agree. Humans' inputs are also from what already exists, and music is generally inspired from other music which is why "genres" even exist. AI's not there yet, but the statement "real creativity comes solely from humans" Needs Citation. Humans are a bunch of chemical reactions and firing synapses, nothing out of the realm of the possible for a computer.

Interesting, interesting, so by that logic it's fundamentally impossible for a country to have inadequate rail service and all rails are of equal quality? I'll be sure to let everyone know they can cut all funding because none of it matters.

Time to add medium.com to the trash list

"How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?"

The industry should've already learned this lesson from the MMO crash, of everyone trying to replicate WoW's success and then later realizing that a business model of investing a ton of money to try and compete for both consumers' time and money is a bad idea.

A monopoly with checks notes 30% market share. It has a plurality, but not a majority.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/20/22892939/music-streaming-services-market-share-q2-2021-spotify-apple-amazon-tencent-youtube

I think it highlights how perverse the stock market itself is. It doesn't really seem like it functions much as a way for riskier ventures to raise capital outside of a bank, but a giant casino that gives the illusion of not being a zero sum game.

It's hypothetically possible for a company to make more money in the stock market by investing in themselves than by creating anything (see Tesla). And if all companies could behave this way and somehow knew what the stock market would do for 5 years, I'd wager a TON of companies wouldn't meet it, invest in the stock market, drive up the "value," more don't meet it, etc. etc. until no one is making anything, and everyone is happy with their paper fortunes and try to sell.

2004 would have my vote. For the lazy:

• Halflife 2
• Halo 2
• World of Warcraft
• GTA San Andreas
• Counter Strike: Source
• MGS3
• Fable
• Star Wars Battlefront

And a bunch of other bangers

misconfigured

Makes me skeptical this is a real "loophole"

The issue revolves around permissions, with GKE allowing users access to the system with any valid Google account. Orca Security said this creates a “significant security loophole when administrators decide to bind this group with overly permissive roles.”

Orca Security noted that Google considers this to be “intended behavior” because in the end, this is an assigned permission vulnerability that can be prevented by the user. Customers are responsible for the access controls they configure.

The researchers backed Google’s assessment that organizations should “take responsibility and not deploy their assets and permissions in a way that carries security risks and vulnerabilities.”

Yeah, PEBKAC

You say it like there's some hypocrisy going on. Yes, I donate money to charity, no, I don't leave all my money on my porch. Hot take: people should be allowed to sell their creations.

I'm just going to throw out that if your understanding of US prom is based off of movies and videos people make to try and get views, that doesn't match reality. For mine, it was fun to dress up and dance, but I knew plenty of people who didn't go, and plenty who went without dates. And there was no prom queen or king or anything.

I thought they jumped to it because ancient, poorly made software would check for Windows 9* to cover 95 and 98, and could now potentially catch windows 9 as well

Yeah... I hadn't heard of G2A before now, but after reading up a bit, it seems like a bit of a convenient scapegoat for developers.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/g2a-and-wube-software-settle-usd40-000-chargeback-dispute

Some quotes

The debate over the site was triggered by No More Robots founder Mike Rose, who claimed it was better for gamers to pirate titles than buy from G2A since "devs don't see a penny either way."

Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail agreed, adding: "These sites cost us so much potential dev time in customer service, investigating fake key requests, figuring out credit card chargebacks, and more."

As the discourse escalated into a petition to stop G2A from allowing the sale of indie games, the marketplace responded with its 10x chargeback offer in an attempt to address these concerns.

Lack of response has frequently been an issue for G2A. To date, Factorio remains the only studio to challenge the firm's offer of 10x chargebacks, and when G2A suggested a potential keyblocker tool for developers, only 19 companies registered interest.

Klonan acknowledges Wube's role in how G2A sellers were able to obtain codes for Factorio. These codes were purchased through the game's official website, which was previously less secure than the likes of Steam or Itch.io, although did give Wube detailed records of purchases and chargebacks it could compare with G2A's audit.

The company also offers a free Steam key with website purchases, many of which are "probably flipped on G2A", although as these are obtained legally it becomes harder to challenge these transactions.

Klonan notes that after Wube switched to using Humble's widget on its site and refraining from "giving out tons of keys for giveaways to dodgy, often fake, influencers," the fraudulent purchases "stopped completely."

"In the end, contacting G2A is treating a symptom of people stealing keys," he says. "The best way to combat that is to cut it at the source.

Heels are my pet peeve

And Andor

Nice try, agent

So... you in fact don't like the series. You like RoR2

You didn't read their question, did you? Because your quote does not answer it.

Weekly reminder that "trickle down economics" was always meant as a criticism. Coined by Will Rogers

This election was lost four and six years ago, not this year. They [Republicans] didn't start thinking of the old common fellow till just as they started out on the election tour. The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didn't know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow's hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#:~:text=Trickle%2Ddown%20economics%20is%20a,critics%20of%20supply%2Dside%20economics.

I still don't know it. I don't have a huge amount of confidence in "a prominent figure in the Counter-Strike community" as a source for Valve's internal finances.

Not really, and I'm guessing it's part of their decision here since it could open them to possibilities they don't like if they say that an account is an asset. It's also probably fairly complicated, legally; they need to understand how estates are settled in every country they do business, open themselves up more to scammers, etc.

I doubt they're going to enforce this if you were to give your credentials to someone else. They're just not going to voluntarily provide the credentials for you.

I've found Babble to be okay

Neither of those are necessarily true. For an Abrahamic god, sure, but one can certainly conceive of a god that doesn't define good and evil, and a god that defines good and evil and doesn't define itself as good.

Will better border security help stop the bad climate change from getting in, and only allow the good climate change?

One caveat I'd want to note is for the underlying methodology that uses:

As this study by Joseph Bonneau attests, people frequently choose common phrases in addition to common words. zxcvbn would be better if it recognized "Harry Potter" as a common phrase, rather than a semi-common name and surname. Google's n-gram corpus fits in a terabyte, and even a good bigram list is impractical to download browser-side, so this functionality would require server-side evaluation and infrastructure cost. Server-side evaluation would also allow a much larger single-word dictionary, such as Google's unigram set.

As another example, the passphrase "This password is good" is claimed to take centuries to crack, but if the search space were narrowed down from a sequence of words to grammatically correct sentences, certain passphrases would be much weaker than this would show.

The general gist is he thought it was boring, and the scope was so broad they forgot to make it fun

🎵Schools close, Tom Hanks, trouble in the big banks,

no vaccine, quarantine, no more toilet paper seen.

Travel ban, Weinstein, panic COVID-19,

NBA, gone away, what else do I have to sayyyyyy🎵

I was assuming this was a quote from an interview with a leading question like "what do you think about players who claim to know what went wrong in the development of Starfield?" And the quote was out of context to make him look bad.

But this was a Twitter thread. It's a completely unforced error, no one was making him do this.

I think it's generally agreed that pretty much all our genre naming conventions are bad and alternatives exist. https://youtu.be/uepAJ-rqJKA has a pretty good description of an alternative, where you describe games by their core reason for play as opposed to mechanics or camera perspective

The last person would still decide the outcome. They could keep choosing values for whatever function until it produces their desired result and then post that.

What you would want instead is for everyone to post a (salted) hash, and after the hashes are posted, reveal what the original numbers were and then publicly add them. Everyone could verify everyone else's numbers against those hashes.

Surprised to see New World in there, I'd thought it had imploded

I mean, it's hard to steer me away from regular old stupidity and incompetence. I'd like to understand the logic for why he would intentionally run his $44 billion investment into the ground.