logic error on line 2: Beer == Germans

Beer does not equate to Germans, rather Germans equate to Beer. If we fix that error, then it doesn’t fit the original pattern:

• Germans == Beer
• Germans == Fascists

That would only work if Beer == Fascists, which of course is not true.

Also, wrong does not equal stupid, rather stupid equals wrong. Which is to say, you comment is wrong, but not necessarily stupid.

Sure, but

• Lemmy == Lots of tankies
• Tankies == Anticapitalist

So I operate on the assumption that anticapitalist people on Lemmy are tankies. It’s not true in all cases ofc, but without more info, I think that’s a safe default.

That dude calling my post “bullshit romanticism of capitalism” gives a bit more confidence that they’re a tankie with a strong case of grassphobia.

I meant that they’re fighting Valve, which is “the good fight”. They’re not the only ones doing it, and they’re definitely not the best ones doing it, but they’re doing it. If they do manage to take a big chunk out of Valve’s marketshare somehow, that will be good for everyone, even people who decide to stay on Steam.

Found the tankie lol

Unregulated capitalism doesn’t work. I don’t think anyone has ever seriously claimed that it does. The FTC isn’t the only thing keeping the market fair, the free market does that on its own. When a company does a shitty thing, they lose customers and die. That’s true in pretty much every market in the real world, except for a few problematic ones where there are bad actors trying to cheat the system.

I think he graduated from the Parker Brothers school of economics.

This is not a good way to look at it. Competition is good regardless. It doesn’t matter how good Valve is today, if a viable competitor comes out, Valve will be forced to get better in order to compete.

All we need is some way to guarantee valve doesn’t become public.

This is wrong. Valve can enshittify without going public. If you think that public corporations are the only ones that are greedy/evil/anti-consumer, then you’ve never heard of the “private equity” industry. Look up the recent fight between the FTC and U.S. Anesthesia Partners in Texas for a clear example.

In capitalism, free market forces are what keep tug of war between produces and consumers fair, and competition is the fuel that keeps those free market forces moving. The fact that the Valve of today is both good and a monopoly is just a temporary rounding error/outlier. Over time, Valve will go to shit and consumers will suffer simply because Valve has almost no competition. This isn’t a question, it’s a fact of the mechanism of the economic system they exist in. It’s like gravity; just because you haven’t hit the floor yet doesn’t mean jumping off that building was a good idea.

Epic games, whether you hate them or not, is fighting the good fight. They are doing shitty things (exclusivity, etc), so maybe they aren’t the chosen one who will take challenge Valve, but they are on the right side of that fight. Hoping that Valve will stay great forever is foolish.

…but I will add that I don’t think Epic alone should be trying to take down Valve. Valve is way too entrenched in this market to be taken down with any realistic competition (probably why Epic is resorting to exclusivity deals). The FTC needs to step in and regulate the market. Idk what that would look like, but it’s possible to do it in a way that makes everyone happy. For example (off the top of my head, so probably flawed but whatever) the FTC could enforce interoperability between digital marketplaces so that consumers don’t need to install 30 different launchers to access their purchased libraries. That relatively small change could lower the bar to entry for competitors by a lot, and not be a burden to consumers at the same time. EDIT: and it would not be anything drastic like forcing a break up of Valve.

DDG isn’t the only alternative to Google. I use Kagi and love it. The results IME are definitely better than Google’s.

I think if you were to ask “most people” about which search engine they prefer, they wouldn’t really understand the question. I remember in highschool a teacher asked someone what operating system they have at home, and she replied “I think it’s Microsoft Office”.

Tech people tend to severely overestimate non-tech peoples’ understanding of tech.

Despite the issues, and knowing that a different phone would get me a much better value at a lower price, I was going to buy one of these.

…but then I saw it wasn’t available in the US. So I went with a (used) Pixel 7 on ebay instead. Considering this is the 5th iteration and they still don’t have a US variant, I’m not going to get my hopes up. I know Murena sells a US variant of the Fairphone 4, but apparently it uses the same exact modem, so using it in the US will result in connectivity issues.

at least I’m recycling!

I’ve seen people say that the Murena version uses the exact same modem as the original Fairphone one. This means you’ll get connectivity issues if you use it in the US, which is likely why Fairphone themselves don’t sell in the US.

Stop spamming this shit. Lemmy isn’t that big, and all your posts are showing up multiple times on people’s feeds since everyone is subscribed to multiple communities.

I’ll believe it when I see it. Nintendo are cheap bastards, and if they fix the drift issue then they’ll likely cause it to fail prematurely somewhere else. Maybe the rubber will be cheaper so that it wears down and has to be replaced anyways? Or the plastic will be thinner so it cracks sooner, etc.

I have an iPhone as my only phone, and a Pixel sitting in a closet. Not sure why I’d want to use both. Emulation on mobile isn’t something I do anymore, but if I did, it is possible to sideload on iOS with some extra effort. It’s not as easy as Android, but I’d say it’s worth considering before deciding to go with two phones.

You can use either the official Apple sanctioned way, where you manually install via Xcode every few weeks or pay $100/year for a dev certificate, OR use something like SideStore. No jailbreaking required.

If you train on AI generated art, you get bad results.

Oh wow that looks a lot like the From Software game Dark Souls. That game sold really well and was a lot of fun, so it was smart of this company to make a similar game! They also added a funny to it because that makes it unique and creative.

Great work gentlemen! 👏

You’re right, just checked my emails and saw that the code is for “Overwatch 2 Invasion Ultimate Bundle”, which I guess is DLC or something. It was bundled with a Zotac 4090 on Amazon.

I’d disown you if you were family and I found out you were hosting my email on a VM in a 5 years-out-of-date windows PC. Some things are simply unforgivable.

I got the premium edition when I bought a new CPU and it came bundled, so I still have my Hardcore Gamer Badge.

…I also got Overwatch 2, but I’m not even going to bother redeeming that one.

I was having the same problem until I switched to the preview branch and installed the latest system update, and I also switched it proton experimental. My current Steam OS version is 3.4.9, although I see there’s another update available.

Just because the studio shut down doesn’t necessarily mean they lost their jobs. Often (especially for a giant publisher like Embracer), talent gets moved to other studios since it’s easier and cheaper than hiring new people.

But when you’re part of a smaller studio, you have creative control and freedom you don’t get when you’re a cog in someone else’s machine. People who go into this industry typically are looking for that more than just a salary, especially since other non-game jobs usually pay better. Although, idk what Volition was like internally, so maybe it sucked to work there.

I played a few more hours today in handheld (yesterday was on power and connected to an HDMI display).

I did notice worse performance, but that could also be because the content was different. The game is still fully playable, and I had fun murdering a bunch of pirates in an abandoned fracking station. New Atlantis (the first big hub city) ran like dogshit though. It struggled to maintain 30 and was blurry as hell, but yesterday it ran better. Idk, this isn’t scientific at all.

Just adding this extra info in case someone sees my first comment and thinks the game will run perfectly. Playable? Very much so. Recommended? Only if you can’t play on something more powerful.

I only played a few hours on my Steam Deck (because it would freeze on my PC), but what I saw was slightly disappointing. The game looks great, even on the Steam Deck with FSR blurring everything, the gun mechanics are fun, the character animations are the best I’ve ever seen from this studio. The performance is also very good on the Deck, with stable 60FPS 30FPS (edit: when I wrote this initially I was just eyeballing it, but didn’t bother to check that Steam capped the frame rate to 30 by default lol, so it was actually 30 and not 60…my bad) in indoor scenes and playable sub-30 in large outdoor areas.

…but the exploration. Man, Bethesda is known for their exploration, yet the spaceship is a gimmick at best. To be fair, I haven’t played enough to get familiar with everything yet, but I don’t expect that part to get much better. The game feels like Fallout, except instead of having a giant seamless open world to explore, you have a giant open world with tedious transitions between different areas. Maybe it’ll grow on me, but it’s not at all what I was expecting.

EDIT: update after playing some more.

The game definitely grew on me! The exploration is still shitty, but everything else makes up for it. I’m at ~9 hours on my Steam Deck, and even with all the FSR blurring I’m enjoying it a lot. I started doing a side quest collecting on bad debts for a bank, and during one of them I found a mission terminal on Mars offering a reward to anyone who surveys a distant planet, and on my way to the planet I picked up a distress call from a settler asking for help to fight off a bunch of pirates, and stumbled upon a drama between 3 settler families, then hijacked a pirate ship and found some “sentient AI” contraband inside and then… I went to sleep because it was late.

So in short, it definitely feels like a typical Bethesda game, but in a good way. Just side quests on top of side quests, but with less bugs.

The ship combat is still bland. I found it very easy. Idk if it’s because it’s early in the game, but no enemy has even gotten close to killing me, even when it’s 3 on 1 and we’re using the exact same unmodified ship. On the one hand, that’s boring, but on the other hand I appreciate not having to spend a lot of time in ship combat. However, now that I discovered how to board and hijack a ship, the combat is slightly more interesting.

And again, I did all of this on Steam Deck, with the only performance issue being on Mars and New Atlantis, which are both big cities/hub areas. It was still playable, but a blurry FSR mess. I disabled FSR because I hate the blurring, and it dropped the FPS pretty hard. Luckily, I didn’t have to spend a lot of time in those locations.

The decision to move away from real time with pause and small party size changes the identity of a bg game

You could’ve just led with that so we know which vocal minority you’re coming from. I’m sure if it was RTWP with the exact same interface and tooltips, you’d be praising the game.

If I want to play a Tetris game, they both suck.

The recently released Baldur’s Gate 3 can be played with one hand perfectly fine. Your arm will likely heal before you finish it.

Edit: just noticed that you said you want keyboard only, in which case BG3 might not be ideal since it’s mostly mouse based. I think you can customize it to play with keyboard only since it has gamepad support, but don’t know what that’d be like.

There’s no fast paced clicking required though, so you could try to adapt to left handed mousery if you really want to play that one.

With the ending of Alyx, I don’t think HL3 is that unlikely anymore.

…but I also doubt that’s what this is. The multiplayer game they were working on was (afaik) a VR thing, and I think they’ve abandoned VR too in favor of the steam deck.

If that’s the case, then he is severely overestimating two populations:

• people who know how to input unicode characters

• people who want to talk about twitter

A part of me wants to start spreading a #PirateUbisoftGames hashtag.

…but another part of me doesn’t want to bother because it’s just Ubisoft games lol

Piracy can’t be stealing when the supreme court of the united states says it isn’t stealing.

I like that quote a little better

The only situation I can think of where it makes sense is where you have the money now, and don’t think you’ll have the will power to not waste it before release day.

…which, if you’re a teen/young person, I could totally see that being a legitimate concern.

I know reading is hard bro, but give it another go.

Read the linked article for some good potential reasons it’s an issue (e.g. Microsoft has been doing a lot of layoffs recently, why is her son still employed?)

But that was written before the ruling. Now that we have it, her ties to Microsoft offer at least one potential explanation to the nonsense of the decision (IMO, obviously).

For an excellent write up on what happened, check out Matt Stoler’s recent article.

Just a friendly reminder that the judge’s son works for Microsoft.

That’s genius! I’ve been trying to figure out how to incorporate ChatGPT-like bots into my work, but haven’t found it to be that useful. I don’t write a lot of regex, but hate it every time I do, so I’ll definitely be trying this next time I need it.