Not the answers you are looking for but I feel like the vibes you want are best met by games like…

webfishing

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3146520/WEBFISHING/

no man’s sky

the nerd.nu pve minecraft server (for shared public spaces made by players that feel real and actually social). Very long running with no lame autoteleport so player made rail, roads and nether roads create emergent highways and gathering spots in a meaningful way that is exceedingly rare for open world multiplayer

https://nerd.nu/

or doing logi jobs in Foxhole

https://store.steampowered.com/app/505460/Foxhole/

I also get the feeling the VR market started out a lot like the mobile gaming market in that mba business majors who have zero ability or to desire to make genuinely artistic and compelling experiences choked out any other kind of person being in leadership positions in the industry.

Similar to mobile gaming the rush of business majors who “think” they know how to transform vr gaming when they don’t know the first thing about game development and have never bothered to pursue a creative venture in their life that wasn’t just a thinly veiled scheme to scam other people out of their money has severly stunted the growth of the vr industry indefinitely as it did the mobile gaming market.

The very structure of the largest companies in VR (besides perhaps valve) precludes the possibility of any actual artists and developers with a vision getting into positions of power in these companies and even if they do, they are never actually listened to or you wouldn’t get embarassingly empty visions of VR like “the metaverse”.

VR, like mobile gaming cannot be understood as an out growth of the traditional gaming world, rather VR in particular must be understood as a market constructed by non-experts who didn’t give a shit about learning gaming development or how to create compelling fantasy worlds because the objective was always to be a digital landlord speculating and monetizing on an ownership of large swathes of digital communities that artists showed up and made into actual spaces people desired to be (artists are an unpaid detail though, that kind of fluff is easy, an AI could do it and besides it is fun for them!).

Unfortunately for VR fans I don’t think the industry will take any significant strides until those kinds of people are kicked out of the boadrooms of these companies and I don’t see that happening anytime soon given how long mobile gaming has been a squandered wasteland of casinos that nothing with any vitality or soul can grow in.

Let AAA die.

I don’t give a shit generally about AAA games but the value of having large stable game development studios goes beyond the direct games they create, this is a crucial stepping stone for would be indie game development studio founders detonated and destroyed and mark my words the collapse of stable, consistent employment in the game development industry will play right into a brutal deleveraging of worker’s negotiating power and lead to further consolidation in the industry around AAA studios that have to try less and less hard (and pay their developers less and less) because very few indie studios will be able to weather these manufactured and designed shocks to the system.

This is the same old strategy cut throat robber barons/capitalist oligarchs always use to steal from workers.

Let me repeat myself because this keeps coming up,

It’s a superior replacement to about any other plane

Sure, if you pretend money doesn’t exist? Baseline for getting your money’s worth from spending 1.5 TRILLION more than anybody else on development of a type of airplane is that your airplane should be the best airplane of that type.

That doesn’t prove that money was well spent, it just proves you have way more money than anybody else to throw at things though I guess the confusion makes sense, we 'muricans have such a very hard time telling the difference between those two concepts.

These massive cost overruns aren’t just a single one time strategic failure, like a good modern western tech product the f35 is built to burn money over its entire lifetime by having WAY higher operating costs. Thus the failure is compounded and compounded and as Sun Tzu would point out, the battle has been lost before it even began.

“Maybe you’re actually being anti racist bc you want the US to have worse planes to kill brown children with cx”

hmm 4d chess I like it lol

I guess you have never heard of the concept of “too big to fail”? because you basically just made an argument that pretends that massive, corrupt and ethically dubious corporations don’t routinely employ this strategy as a defensive bulwark against society getting upset about the extreme degree of systematic theft they are doing.

There’s actually not much info on how often other jets break down.

…what?

This is…one of the single biggest metrics people talk about in evaluation of military aircraft development projects?

Why has everyone temporarily lost their critical thinking skills in this thread?

Wait I thought it was patriotic to be casually racist about Iran? Did I do that wrong? Damn I didn’t slip in enough jingoism did I?

I am not insulting Iranians and their capacity to develop weapons, I am in fact ashamed my country overthrew democracy there and yet pretends Iran is just irrationally evil like a stupid disney villain or something. Most of my country (the right, center and center “”“left”“”) isn’t interested in understanding anything beyond a superficial association of Iran with evil.

I am insulting all of you who unreflectively accept these ridiculous framings of war and national security that feed right into the cancerous growth of the military industrial complex.

I also wasn’t making fun of Iranians or being racist, I was pointing out the absurdly unfair matchup in military budgets between the US and Iran makes the comparison between the two and evaluations of the effectiveness of US weapons programs in terms of resources consumed an absolute joke.

…and the third option was a nextgen fighter development aircraft program that didn’t have horrific ballooning costs?

The F-35 would be good if they hadn’t wasted so much time and energy and weight on having a pilot in it. On board pilots are a complete waste.

no, as a manned fighter the f35 is an embarassment of an arms development program independent of any discussion about the effectiveness of future manned vs. unmanned fighters. The program is a historic cost overrun and makes the litoral class of us navy ships look downright functional and frugal in comparison.

Because anything you make with 1.7 trillion is going to look impressive unless you just throw all the money into barrels and just burn it?

Excluding the context of astronomical amounts of money like that is fundamentally disgenous to any accurate description of reality.

edit go on people, keep downvoting me to feel better because you don’t have an actual response, the jet looks cool and Musk is a pathetic loser with a billion dollars, but to admit the f35 is the same species of rot that the rise of oligarchs like Musk are an indicator of is too high a dose of reality for you :)

I mean everybody is right by accident some of the time…

I love libs defending the f35 like the good warhawks they pretend to not to be.

Yes the f35 is a good fighter jet, if you ignore THAT IT COST 1.7 TRILLION and completely forget about the concept of lost opportunity cost.

Lol downvote me you fools the f35 was set in stone as strategic catastrophe before it ever entered combat by virtue of destroying an incomprehensible amount of our shared wealth. The f35 is a tool of the military industrial complex designed to suck up as much cash as possible, the functionality of the plane is a distant concern in practice which explains why it barely works even given the obscene amount of money spent on it.

wow the terrible, frightening might of Iran’s air defense network! Good thing we have essentially (like…literally) infinite money to spend on negating and penetrating it or else those Iranians would sweep all of western Europe under their iron fist!

I want to see someone take an actual slot machine rip out all the evil bits and replace it with a computer running Luck Be A Landlord with custom flashing lights for when you win, the slot machine lever and all that stuff.

It would be pretty awesome

The pathetic thing is games of the ilk of balatro and luck be a landlord (also OG peggle) are actually the kind of game that plays with your gambling impulses but in a healthy and fun way, these games should be celebrated for subverting the language of gambling to make something beautiful, how pathetic to have so little actual understanding of video games and yet have this kind of power to impact the industry.

You don’t call it semi-boat if there is a gaping hole in the hull and no convincing indication the hole will be fixed or indeed any really solid evidence the hole wasn’t put their on purpose to negate all the other floaty bits.

You either call it a scam or a $15 million boondoggle of a yacht that was designed so poorly that it can’t even go in the water without sinking.

Everybody has been led by the hype into speaking about this boat as if it was a foregone conclusion it will float when nobody can even conclusively demonstrate the motives of the builders and financers is to create a boat that actually floats rather than just the vibe of one.

We have a perfectly seaworthy boat here and while it is ugly, obtuse and patched together it is still actually a working boat that was designed by people who would be absolutely mortified and ashamed to find out they somehow missed patching a gaping hole in the hull that allowed the cold brutal ocean of corporate money to rush in and effectively sink the ship before it could even set sail.

Monetization of the commons to the exhaustive extent modern capitalism demands is fundamentally at odds with any meaningful sense of decentralization and worse the health of the commons and the community members who compose it, it is surprisingly easy to understand if you just think about the basic incentive structure here.

Why do bluesky advocates always concede the “appview” part is effectively centralized, mandatory to interact with as part of the community inside the silo of bluesky and is indefinitely considered a proprietary entity to bluesky themselves, to the point that the CEO of bluesky (a crypto person which should already be a red flag) has gone on record saying they haven’t ruled out using “appview” to interject ads into the network as an avenue for monetization … and then act like that doesn’t undermine the basic sales pitch of bluesky in the first place?

I feel like I am being sold a boat by a salesman that just explained to me with a straight face that yes the boat technically has a huge hole in the bottom of it but that the rest of the boat is far more seaworthy than any boat ever and the builder is absolutely going to deliver by fixing the critical design flaw soon even though in this case doing so would existentially threaten the “boat” builder’s business and besides the salesman knows one of the low ranking workman at the “boat” builders yard and he is very trustable.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/05/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-is-reshaping-social-media-but-advertising-isnt-off-the-table/

“The way Bluesky is built largely prevents a business model solely relying on ads, because users could create alternative feeds without ads on its open protocol.” - Jay Graber CEO of bluesky

This is incredibly disgenous to say, sure you could run your own entire seperate network using bluesky… why would you? You have to either choose to be in the big silo or you are banished to outside of it, a state of affairs the fediverse was specifically designed to stop from happening and yet it still struggles with overcentralization.

I am sorry, I have been on the fediverse for years and seen it struggle with the natural tendency for winners to win more and centralization to occur from bandwagoning (exhibit A: mastodon.social) and I think it is hilarious anyone who is actually paying attention thinks bluesky has a real chance of becoming and staying decentralized in any meaningful sense (especially when the investors knock on the door to pay a visit and say it is time to start delivering).

Thinking that a handful of libre-minded people can change that is wishful thinking bordering on delusion.

My point is that it is unreasonable to compare the popularity of a scam being hyped by some of the biggest names in the techbro world with direct access and influence over the mainstream tech press and millions in cash to spend on advertisements, luring in big social media accounts and making a slick UI and onboarding process and most crucially lots of time to hold off on enshittification/monetization…with a community developed fundamentally decentralized constellation of people who are maintaining and developing the fediverse on a budget that is peanuts compared to the literally astronomically larger budget Bluesky has.

The danger with leaving this context out is it leads you into thinking rich people are smarter and have better ideas than you when they are really just richer than you and every single interaction in society is structured to benefit them and defer to their preferred narratives.

Bluesky was always going to grow more explosively than the fediverse, the whole fundamental issue with corporate social media is the immutable need for endless growth that supercedes any moral concern and indeed any concern for the longterm at all.

There is no use lamenting the fact that the fediverse isn’t growing at the clip bluesky is, and there is the very real danger of getting caught up in the hype and losing sight of why it is unreasonable to hold the fediverse to the same expectations of nearterm growthrate.

The Saudis footed the bill for most of that $44bn - most is only out of pocket about $10bn of it iirc.

I mean they definitely got their money’s worth in terms of torpedoing one of the most threatening social media tools for politically destabilizing authoritarian regimes.

Bluesky is at least semi-decentralized

No it isn’t, this is marketing and until the developers actually put their money where their mouth is and provide the genuine capacity for decentralization (not just along some narrow technical definition but actually decentralized in practice) this is pure marketing hype that you absolutely shouldn’t trust until you are given indisputable proof and then you should still be skeptical because they can always pull the rug out from under you.

Bluesky is open source yes, but what they are talking about is the CLIENT side of Bluesky, the actual system is dependent upon proprietary code that is most definitely not open source.