Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: Cyba.CowboyThis is the most obvious downside to going all-digital, and a big part of the reason console manufactures are pushing this for the future... All-digital means you don't "own" anything and can have your purchase taken away at any time.

Wrong. It's the most obvious downside of using DRM. All digital DRM-free allows you to make your own backups, and no one can take it away at any time then any more than physical media you store it on. So if anything, GOG is the example of why DRM-free is important to prevent that.

Quoting: whizse

Quoting: tfkI'm a cheetah! I'm a cheetah!

Cheetah? When that's clearly a penguin avatar? I think he's lion to us!

Quoting: chickenb00I watched a YouTube tutorial recently on how to swap steam deck buttons, and it's an arduous process. Looks like it would take 30-60 minutes just to get to where you would have access to the button caps. Then you have to put it all back together !

Quoting: DrakkerIf at least they fixed the buttons order and made it like the Nintendo layout. There's no way I can unlearn that layout after having used it for so long.

Quoting: voxOh wow. I thought I would never see this cracked gem reimplemented. What a time to be alive! Despite it being somewhat experimental and janky, I have some of the fondest memories about it. The last game by Peter Molyneaux that I've played. I never even heard about a Fable for a million years and then I don't see his handwriting there. An RPG? What? Was it any good? Then he went completely off the rails seemingly, what a shame.

Somehow Bullfrog Productions were in the business of making groundbreaking games from the start and Peter was very lucky with the people that went to work for him. Did you know that Demis Hassabis started as a level designer in Syndicate, then went to be a lead programmer in Theme Park, then he designed the AI in Black & White, made Evil Genius and then went to create a DeepMind? - an AI startup that started to beat starcrafters and fold proteins, making a serious advance in the scientific avant-garde (and online ass-whooping)

Quoting: scaineI wanted to love this game, but it was pretty frustrating trying to train your avatar to do what you wanted.

Haha - it reminded me of the actual angry frustration I'd feel in later games like RimWorld where I want a certain job done right away, prioritise it as high as possible, deprioritise or remove EVERYTHING ELSE, and my workers either ignore me completely, continuing what they were already doing, or just to rub it in, sit around doing nothing! I'm practically shouting at the screen - DO THE THING!

Man, these colony-builders are clearly not for me.

Quoting: TheodisOh this is neat. I really hope someone adds in VR support. It really feels like it was designed to be a VR game before VR was a thing.

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: slaapliedjeI grew up somewhat poor, inherited clothes from my older brother, father and brother are mentally ill. I still managed to turn my interest in computers into a well paid career. The USA is one of the few places where that is perfectly possible.

Would you believe this is actually even more likely in countries where education is free or at least very affordable? Saying this as a fellow professional nerd who grew up relatively poor.

Statistics on complex issues like this are tricky, but you might consider the social mobility index to be relevant.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: TheBard

QuoteSo then, how about Fortnite on Linux / Steam Deck? Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said when it hits "tens of millions of users" that it "would actually make sense to support it". We must be pretty close by now right? Why ignore a platform that's sold multiple millions, and is clearly just continuing to fly off the shelves?

I've seen more consistency in /dev/random's output than Tim Sweeney's statements.

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: Cato-the-youngerIt also has further downstream knockon social effects that dont end up benefitting you.

Which ones?

The current ones that seem to be popping up is where certain people can't get promotions or hired because of their ethnicity isn't 'diverse' enough. There are lawsuits, for example, against IBM for not promoting someone who has been at the company for decades, but was told more or less that he would not be promoted because he wasn't diverse enough... then you have Gina Carano suing Disney for wrongful termination, etc. If you go looking through various codes of conduct (Gnome for example) and they're clearly racist against people who are white.

'Woke' is basically an ideology that says the minorities should be the majority and that the majority should bend the knee for being awful.

When you can show me a place where white males make less money on average than minorities, or have less wealth on average than minorities, I'll start to care. If you look at the stats, you will notice that there are NO signs of this coming close to happening. And despite all the anecdotal whining, they've done experiments in the US: They do sets of loan applications and job applications in pairs that are identical except one has a typically "white-sounding" name attached to it and the other has a typically "black-sounding" name attached to it. The ones assumed to be white get hired more often, get the loans more often, and if both get the loans the "black-sounding" name on average gets charged a higher interest rate. So for now all the bitching and moaning from white males about how terribly they're treated because of wokeness and reverse discrimination is going to get from me a sad song on the world's smallest violin.

God, I just get so ashamed of what fucking wimps many of my fellow white males are.

Ah, so what you're saying is the cure for racism is more racism? I believe that the answer to it is fairness across the board. There's a culture issue going on, it has less to do about what color your skin is and what culture you're from. There are a lot of individuals who escape that culture, and others do not.

If people are getting screwed over based on what color their skin is, than it is wrong, period. That's the whole purpose of discrimination laws.

Discrimination laws might get the job done in much of Europe, where the class system is relatively compressed, social programs exist and pretty much work, education is cheap or free and fairly equally delivered, unions are widespread and sectoral bargaining means most people not in a union still pretty much have a union contract. And where, far as I can make out, people take such laws fairly seriously. I have doubts, but sure, maybe.

In the US, such laws do little.
(hidden is explanation of why)

Spoiler, click me

Hierarchy is much steeper there and natural opportunities for class mobility much more constrained. So for instance, in the US, most people can be fired from their job for no reason. So it's illegal to fire someone because they are from some race or religion, or because they're trying to start a union, but it's not illegal to just fire them without saying why. Similarly, as long as you don't say why you didn't hire someone, or didn't give them a loan, or whatever . . . and indeed lots of people charging a black family higher interest for a loan or not hiring a black for a management job aren't being consciously racist; they're just white people who have a "sense" for who's higher risk or who's not a "fit", which sense somewhere at the back of their mind involves blackness as a risk factor. And of course, nearly all the people making these decisions are white. They're not going to notice this stuff--it has no impact on anyone they know. Incidentally, when there's talk about AI doing racist stuff, it's because they fed the AIs on data from this kind of decision maker and it took in the tacit bias from the data it got fed.

Or if you look at education--in the United States, primary and high school education are locally funded by property taxes, and property values vary wildly, so poor neighborhoods have very crappy schools. But wait, there's more! Federal funding tends to go preferentially to schools which are already performing well (not by accident, by design; it's supposed to be an incentive to compete), which is to say not the poor ones. And of course for the rich there are lots of private schools. And just having gone to schools known to be bad makes you less hireable. Since neighborhoods are also very segregated, and blacks are much poorer than whites on average, functionally "black schools" suck and make people less able to get hired.

There's a whole constellation of this kind of stuff all kind of working together.

To make antiracism laws perform effectively, you'd have to do massive witch hunts. You think people bitch about affirmative action, discrimination laws strong enough and strongly enforced enough to work in the US would be just insane police state shit. It's probably less intrusive just to have a quota. And the idea is that once the numbers are about in tune with population sizes, it also won't be just whites (or males) making the hiring decisions and so forth . . . there will be people in the decision-making part of the system to whom the whole setup isn't invisible. I would agree that there are drawbacks, but if you're going to have a steeply hierarchical and unequal system in the first place, nothing is going to work really well when it comes to trying to make people equal.