Way back at the start of GoG (I want to say year one), CDP did the “joke” of suddenly taking down the entire site except for a text page saying they are shutting down. I forget if they said that people would have 24 hours to back up their games or if they said we were up shit creek, it doesn’t matter.

They then basically said “Ha ha, april fools! But you see, that is why you should buy all your games from us because we are DRM free and you own them”. Which… rightfully angered a LOT of people.

So GoG did a video where a “french monk” (which is really weird since they are Polish but…) apologized and gave away a discount code or something. And in The Witcher 2, an NPC was added who alluded to all this and I think gave away a free copy of The Witcher 1 if you beat him at dice poker or whatever?

Short term? It led to a lot of us actually trying to back up our games. And realizing that was not feasible because GoG would almost never post changelogs or let us know which installers had updated versions and ain’t nobody got time to manually scrape every download page. Long term? You can generally tell who was a “GoG OG” in that we look at ANY “And we are the best site ever because we have no DRM and preserve everything” bit of PR from GoG/CDP because it is painfully obvious this is just advertisement for them.

For “rare” games like some of my oldies from the 80s and 90s (one or two that weren’t even on the abandonware sites last I checked) I have ISOs I ripped and store on my NAS. Same with stuff bought form smaller/sketchier stores (I am sure it is backed up millions of times over, but think Romero’s Sigil).

For gog or steam or whatever games? I just don’t bother. The French Monk Incident more or less taught me there is zero chance of maintaining archives of GoG games. Their servers are “fine” at the best of times (let alone when the site is “dead”) and they don’t publicize when an installer is updated or not.

So if gog or steam or whatever goes offline and I still really want to play… Darklands? Piracy.

As others have said: This was likely more about making a statement and getting attention than causing damage.

That said, it is well worth looking into the training of even “tier 1 operator” special forces. Unless their job is bomb defusal they aren’t actually learning all that much. Here is some det cord and some plastic explosives. Here is a bunch of math to figure out how much you use of each and for liability purposes you’ll need to get a passing grade on the written test. But the reality is that here are the common doors and walls you’ll encounter and how much to use and in what shape. And if you are using this in a situation where you don’t intend to murder everything on the other side? Get a professional to do it.

So it is very much possible that someone who was “an expert” on blowing out locks and even knocking holes in walls would have absolutely no idea how to make a proper car IED without having access to artillery shells and the like.

One way to think of it is that somebody could be the best F1 driver on the planet and even be able to articulate that they need the camber on their left front wing changed or whatever. But if you gave them a beat up 98 Camry that was misaligned and veered to the left? They would be just as lost as a kid who barely passed driver’s ed.

Ha ha ha.

Maybe we could avoid racist bullshit?

I mean… this guy was possibly a suicide bomber.

I don’t think there would be concerns over what happened if he got into a fender bender on the way there.

Having an AMD or nVidia or even Intel GPU/APU at this point “suggests AI image upscaling tech”

Especially in the case of an underpowered mobile adjacent device.

Completely pointless? No. They reduce the ridiculous excess of guns in this country and reduce the odds of little timmy grabbing his dad’s assault rifle because the safe was too full. Or, because we pretend the real problem is black crimninals, Jamal robbing timmy’s dad and timmy’s dad never even noticing he is missing twelve glocks.

That said: it is indeed still something that only really impacts Responsible Gun Owners™ who generally only have two or three loaded firearms laying around the house rather than twenty.

That said: Buyback programs PLUS actual gun control would go a long way.

You’re doing it again.

As a publisher: Yes, Epic stopped the Rocket League devs from continuing to build Linux binaries. To my knowledge, they have not disabled “support” for Proton in any of the anti-cheat solutions.

Similarly, the development branch of CD Projekt (the parent company of GoG), apparently had Linux binaries for The Witcher 2. They do not for The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk.

Both companies decided it was not worth internally supporting Linux and instead rely on Proton/Wine to do it for them. Whether that is good for gaming is debatable, but both are “actively hostile towards Linux” in that regard.

If you do want to criticize the handling of Linux then I would suggest looking into the Unreal Engine marketplace (or whatever they call it now) being a complete shitshow for Linux developers. Which is ironic since the UE documentation is actually great for Linux devs. I cannot speak to the CDPR efforts with their modding SDKs since I haven’t opened one since The Witcher 1 (when it was either a hacked version of the NWN toolkit or an officially hacked version of the NWN toolkit).

But that is Epic and CDP not EGS and GoG.

For a very limited subset of games, they provide linux binaries. For the rest? You are up a creek and in the realm of “Figure it out”. Which… is generally the Heroic Launcher (or Lutris for a subset) which puts you in the same boat as Epic.

If you insist upon saying one store is more virtuous than the other… okay? I personally don’t like defending companies but you do you.

But for the vast majority of games? Epic and GoG are in the same category as basically everything but Steam. And both are in the exact same category regarding launchers and download services since they both heavily rely on the Heroic Launcher (which is awesome).

And, to be clear, neither should be applauded for Linux support.

Well, to be clearer. The folk behind the Heroic Launcher (and Lutris) SHOULD be applauded. And I think there is actually a very strong argument that store fronts should not be expected to build out entire social media ecosystems with attached updaters (what launchers basically are). But both Epic and GoG have decided to half ass that so they should be called out for not doing it “right”.

Yes yes, bitch eating crackers and all that.

But can we maybe focus on what they actually are shit at (which is a lot) rather than manufacturing virtue for other companies?

Epic exists on Linux to the same degree gog does: heroic launcher.

The reality is that legality doesn’t matter a lot unless you have enough lawyers on staff to fight various government agencies. That is WHY most creators and communities use established services like youtube or reddit because it offloads that hassle to a company that actually has the lawyers to figure out what is and isn’t a risk.

Whereas a lemmy instance is a few people who have no idea what they are doing.

The best metaphor I have heard to explain this is: A group of weirdos start singing prayers while you are boarding a plane. The flight attendant tells you that you need to sing along or you will be kicked off the plane. You say that is nonsense. They say they are going to have you escorted off the plane if you continue to be disruptive.

You KNOW you are within your legal rights to not do that bullshit. But you don’t have a lawyer with you. Best case scenario? You get off the plane, you get an apology handy from a CSR, and you get to get on a different plane in 12 hours. But now you have missed your connecting flight and 1-2 days of your trip. So you are wasting personal days or pissing off your boss and missing an important client meeting and blah blah blah. And… the browner you are, the less likely you are to see that CSR after the cops escort you off a plane.

So… you just sing along because it is easier. Even if you know it is bullshit, you know it is “close enough” that your life will become a living hell.

Which is why I have no issue with a site policy of “We don’t want that smoke. Please don’t make jokes about the guy who killed a piece of shit CEO until we know we won’t get investigated by law enforcement”. But I DO have issues with making up weird narratives to justify it.

The world admins have a long history of this kind of shit.

A great example was when they updated the TOS to remove specific call outs for (if memory serves) transphobic hate being against TOS and instead replacing it with very generic text. The response being that they didn’t need that text because the generic call outs covered it.

Nobody with two brain cells was fooled and everyone knew it was about getting ahead of angry chuds who might be mean to the admins. But enough people were mysteriously banned for horrible shit (with their whole post histories being wiped) and everyone else who cared left for different instances.

I’m not going to fault admins for not wanting to get calls from the FBI. I will fault them for abandoning our friends because they don’t want angry emails. But, either way, the constant need to build up weird narratives and assume everyone else is really THAT stupid is just tiresome.

What country is lemmy.world based in? Because having a law about talking about jury nullification in the context of a future crime sound so incredibly stupid and specific that I need to know the precedent that led to it.

Because people are thinking through specific niche use cases coupled with “Well it works for me and I never do anything ‘wrong’”.

I’ll definitely admit that I made the mistake of trying to have a bit of fun when talking about something that triggers the dunning kruger effect. But people SHOULD be aware of how different use patterns impacts performance, how that performance impacts users, and generally how different use patterns impact wear and tear of the drive.

Just a reminder: These massive drives are really more a “budget” version of a proper tape backup system. The fundamental physics of a spinning disc mean that these aren’t a good solution for rapid seeking of specific sectors to read and write and so forth.

So a decent choice for the big machine you backup all your VMs to in a corporate environment. Not a great solution for all the anime you totally legally obtained on Yahoo.

Not sure if the general advice has changed, but you are still looking for a sweet spot in the 8-12 TB range for a home NAS where you expect to regularly access and update a large number of small files rather than a few massive ones.

THAT actually probably was a translation error (unlike “oh, he is not a disgusting misogynistic piece of shit. You are just racist and so is google translate”).

Swen’s speech was (paraphrasing) about how an oracle told him that the future GOTYs will all be games made because they are games the studios wanted to make and were allowed to make without fear of layoffs (which is why it was ironic that a studio that came out of Sony gutting Team Japan won…).

But a lot of chuds and CCP mouthpieces keyed in on the “An oracle told me” narrative framing as an indication that it was all rigged. In large part because they are fucking morons who don’t realize they were voting on a different category when they rushed that vote harder than a gamefaqs poll with Aeris in it.

And Swen is head (?) of Larian who made Baldurs Gate 3.

Also: BG3 is, in scientific terms, gay as all fuck. So the chuds who were already focusing on BMWukong because “it understand that women should be sexy” and whatever other “anti-DEI” bullshit they are radicalizing people with, saw an opportunity to pick a fight now that the mass support of BG3 is somewhat waning.

… Is this a Poe’s Law scenario?

There’s that ass! Better be careful. You keep showing it and a certain dictator will think you are making Winnie the Poo references!

It is so fun giving people who try to pretend to be rationale and enlightened plenty of rope.

So… while you are showing your ass and defending someone who said shit like

I want to expand my circle and hire more people, get licked until I can’t get an erection.

(Hint: that is where you claim everyone is racist and just misinterpreted him without providing any other defense)

do you want to further show your ass and say why it would matter where I was physically born while explaining your “You just don’t understand our humor” defense?