Yeah, I’ve been really impressed with Gloomwood but I am already tired of the fishery (level 1) and wish the EA would come with a jump-ahead feature. It’s looking to be a very good game on release, I’m quite excited for it.

What if I told you that there are roughly 4 million steamdecks in existence. Ref

And that this is about 1\3 of the Steam Linux market. Ref and about half of the entire handheld PC market. Ref

Of course, we dont know how many MAU GOG has so maybe 4 million new customers is baby numbers, but Steam seems enamored enough of that market segment to commit huge new UI and store features (deck verification, “Runs on Deck” filters, other deck specific stuff) including the game controller mappings which do help with non-deck also but were clearly a necessary element for handhelds. Maybe deck users, it being a committed gaming platform, spend more on games?

Anyway, trying to get subscribers (always a teeny fraction of your free users) ahead of converting new non-customers into customers, seems like bad econ to me.

If GOG is so hot for game preservation why not see if they can score an emulation deal to bring lost handheld titles to PC\deck? Sega might be down, NeoGeo is owned by the Saudi’s, I’m sure they’d love some free money for their back catalog. That’s in line with Lutris’ mission of being the one game launcher for your entire library. A few strategic investments and partnerships could open up GOG as the gateway to classic gaming across devices, but that would require some vision to carry through.

One of my favorite books! Great world building and quite thought provoking!

Oh so like the music industry where every artist retains full rights to their work and the only 3 big publishers definitely don’t force them to sell all their rights leaving musicians with basically nothing but touring revenue? Protecting the little guy like that you mean?

Or maybe protecting the little guy like how 5 tech companies own all the key patents required for networking, 3d graphics, and digital audio? And how those same companies control social media so if you are any kind of artist you are forced to hustle nonstop on their platforms for any hope if reaching an audience with your work? I’m sure all those YouTube creators feel very protected.

I assumed the alternative was “melee combat only” not pacifism.

Also classic Doom has an entire pacifist speed running category. And a melee only category, usually called “Tyson mode”

As I’ve heard it expressed, Chinese thinking is that capitalism can be kept in service to the (communist) state but then you see their capitalists investing in international Nazis (just like all capitalists) and I wonder how long they think they can ride that leopard before it throws them and starts eating faces.

https://youtu.be/bEXefdbQDjw

I figured rule of threes meant it was funnier to leave it out. 2017 would have been sad gooning to pornhub during the first trump nightmare.

Then 2027 could be sad gooning to ai hyperporn during the second trump nightmare.

Maybe I should have used 20 year jumps, but "2037, I am jerking off because there’s no food, and the internet is nothing but ai porn.’ didn’t seem as funny a point for the “time shattering” bit.

I thought this was going to go Watchmen for a moment. Like…

It is 1997, I am a young boy, I am jerking off to a grainy porno playing over stolen cinemax.

It is 2007, i am in my dorm, i am jerking off to a forum thread full of hi-res porno.

It is 2027, i am jerking off to an ai porno stream that mutates to my desires in real time. I am about to nut so hard that it shatters my perception of time.

Like all good sci-fi, they just took what was already happening to oppressed people and made it about white/American people, while adding a little misdirection by extrapolation from existing tech research. Only took about 20 years for Foucault’s boomerang to fully swing back around, and keep in mind that all the basic ideas behind LLMs had been worked out by the 80s, we just needed 40 more years of Moore’s law to make computation fast enough and data sets large enough.

This is just willful misunderstanding of history. Several of the founders were against political parties, but since game theory hadn’t been invented yet they put in place a system that would force a two or one party system. Which it quickly did. There have been two parties from the very beginning, just not the same two parties. But arguably, the same two broad positions: the Federalists favored elites, while the DRs favored liberalism.

Thanks for the fun summary! (Oh hey, its Atomic Poet, I follow you on Mastodon too, love your work!)

I played the newer trilogy on PC years ago and really enjoyed them, great little action games. I’m too young and American to have enjoyed the Amiga in its day, though a Commodore 128 was literally this baby’s first computer. Big Team17 fan currently too, I adored Yoku’s (sent me down a digital pinball spiral that was finally slaked by Xenotilt) and love them as a publisher too, being behind great indies like Blasphemous and Dredge!

Words also just rotate around in popularity like any other fad. Remember synergy? Paradigm shifts? Thinking outside the box?

Academia isn’t immune to memes, far from it. In the semi-contained world of higher education, trends in words and phrases are even more pronounced and likely to spread.

If this is evidence of LLM usage, it could easily be the machines reflecting back trends. These things pick up on subtle cues in your prompts to match tone with you as well so I wouldn’t rule out human influence either in prompts or the RLHF process.

🙏Lord, I seen all that money Fortnight is making, and I want that for me!

Why? So they can betray you at a critical junction to claim power for themselves, or so you can betray them without feeling too guilty about it?

Because you sure as hell can’t work with them on any leftist projects. They have zero desire to unconcentrate the accumulated power in Washington, only to claim it for themselves.

It’s an untenable situation because its so much bigger than the tech world and open source. FOSS fundamentally works on a communal model: everyone needs lots of software, no one can hope to write it all themselves, so what if we distributed the labor out among the community so that everyone can work on some things important to them and the whole community benefits.

Then, capitalist businesses entered the picture and began using more and more open software as backbone for their enterprises. Government entanglements further complicate the picture, but fundamentally the capitalist mindset is incapable of building or maintaining our current technological base. It isn’t capable of maintaining or building our infrastructure either: almost all of that was built on government subsidies, socialism.

And now that vulture capitalism is the law of the land, everything is falling apart because there’s no more “slack” in the system where people can engage in personal socialism on projects like FLOSS, every bit of our time is being stolen to pad the numbers of capitalists.

This bleeds over into attitude as well. Every entitled user who thinks their personal issue is more important than any other concern is a trump or musk in miniature, believing that the the blowhard bravado of our current government is a model for forcing work to get done rather than a death spiral there’s no pulling out of.

You want FLOSS software that’s good? You want less burden on maintainers? You want a safer, saner, more human-centric technology base? You want a better tech world?

Eat. The. Rich.

The United States will happily supply all the weapons our oldest ally, Canada, needs for this battle of survival against the tyrannical forces of the United States. Will you be paying with cash, credit, layaway, or mineral rights to all your natural resources?

Imagine being a director at this company. One of your employees brings you a report showing that your most active users, who are the backbone of your business, have a huge overlap with rape reports. This will destroy the company, and you know they’ll fire you for bringing it up and suppress it anyway. So you just… forget… to bring it up at the next quarterly. You used to work at Uber, and before that covering up how gambling and gaming companies float on a raft made of addicts, so this is well practiced blindness.

There are aspects that could be better, sure. I think communities should be like sets of posts, subject to unions, conjuctions, and other set operations. Then you wouldnt have the issue of 5 versions of c/memes, they could be virtually joined into one memes community at the user level (and the user can filter out instances, communities, and users they don’t like of course). Moderation could be decoupled from communities and made a broader service that users choose to interact with, agreeing to a level of moderation comfortable for their experience.

But also, put me in the group that thinks lemmy should stay small. Corpo social has convinced us that a single big room with every idiot and literally their mother screaming into it is how the internet should be and it isn’t. We can go back to smaller, focused online communities that don’t openly invite everyone to come in and fight.

Centralization tendencies are all rooted in power and control. We need to fragment more.

Ah sorry bud but You were Time’s person of the year in 2006 so now we’re all complicit!