Most people with that little money aren’t going to go out of their way and assume the risk of investing in new ventures. They’re going to put it in some managed or unmanaged fund recommended by someone else, and that money is going to be invested in something safe and presumably profitable on an infinite time scale, like a megacorp (or 500).

It would amazing if the everyday worker’s savings went towards aiding the local community in starting new businesses, but I wouldn’t count on that being the default.

The typical conservative response to that is “but then they’ll take their businesses elsewhere and now you get nothing.”

The typical conservative response also fails to even consider just how difficult, expensive, and risky it is to move a large business to an entirely new region. Real estate has to be purchased and sold, employees have to be relocated or replaced, logistics have to be established in the new region, valuable business connections and contracts will have to be severed, and for brick and mortar businesses, the competitive landscape will be different.

There’s a few of them. Notably, the guy who didn’t care that AI art is built on the back of copyright violations getting pissy about his AI-generated art not being eligible for copyright.

But more importantly here, I don’t think most artists in the gaming industry are in much of a position where they can stand by their artistic integrity. If every publisher pushes studios into using AI to be more “productive”, the choice becomes between slopping or starving—and most people don’t like starving.

We as consumers are the only ones that can afford to push back against this shit. Our survival doesn’t rely on buying DLSS 5 games so we have the ability to boycott them to send a message.

Which is uncannily large for the wrist it’s attached to.

They’re not awesome when your workflow revolves around the command line and you’re stuck choosing between wasting days trying to layer your configuration on top of the project devcontainer or giving up and using the unconfigured bash shell included.

The Darwin kernel is based on BSD… sort of. It’s a monstrosity hybridization of an ancient version of BSD and the Mach kernel.

You should do dev work in devcontainers anyway.

Devcontainers work for Visual Studio Code when developers are more than happy to click their way through running builds and debugging problems. But, as someone whose workflow is optimized for the command-line, they can fuck off.

It’s the same for me.

I don’t care if somebody uses Claude or Copilot if they take ownership and responsibility over the code it generates. If they ask AI to add a feature and it creates code that doesn’t fit within the project guidelines, that’s fine as long as they actually clean it up.

I’m more concerned with the admitted OpenClaw usage. That’s a hydrogen bomb heading straight for a fireworks factory.

This is the problem I have with it too. Using something that vulnerable to prompt injection to not only write code but commit it as well shows a complete lack of care for bare minimum security practices.

They put out an engine that offers unoptimized shortcuts for traditional development techniques, replacing LODs with Nanite and introducing Lumen as a low-effort way to produce “realistic” lighting.

Both of those fall short of acceptable performance and visual stability quality during real-time rendering, but who cares about that when they make development faster and do a good enough job for prerendered trailers? /s

I can’t remember if I was wearing it before, but I’m not wearing it now. It’s probably fine. I think. Maybe.

Why days worth of farming? To help give the player a sense of “pride and accomplishment” of course.

Well, that explains a lot about the product quality. Their entire development workflow is a complete fucking mess.

• Long-lived feature branches.
• Creating merge commits to main just for the sole purpose of tagging them as releases while also maintaining separate release branches.
• Force-pushing tags to incorporate post-release hotfixes instead of releasing minor patch updates.
• Taking bugfixes from releases and merging them back into the development branch (have they not heard of cherry-pick?)
• Always using merges even when a rebase would be easier to follow and keep the history more straightforward.

"Art isn’t about artistic expression. Billions of people make paintings and most of them go unseen. Museums, on the other hand… They don’t make paintings, they make experiences. For a nominal entry fee, consumers have access to an evolving and ever-changing catalog of content.

This is the future we envision here at Remedy. High quality games that build upon themselves, creating an experience that grows with the player. For that reason, we’re announcing that the Alan Wake series will no longer be individual games, but instead a live-service experience with episodic content."

• also that guy probably

Literally create all the service problems by normalizing launcher DRM

I hate DRM as much as the next person, but if Steam didn’t exist and digital downloads still became a thing, there would still be launcher DRM. Thanks to corporate greed, DRM is an inevitability in the industry.

Games distributed on DVD were packed with DRM fuckery, needing to be inside the computer to launch and using kernel-level drivers to enforce it. Before DVDs, you had games on floppy disks. Those came with physical codewheels that the player had to use to decode a password before it would start the game.

even their precious HL’s engine was IIRC a rewrite or fork of the one for Quake

IIRC, even the HL2 engine was just an improvement on the HL1 engine with a commercial physics engine bolted on top.

Much like Google used to, Valve doesn’t really do anything new. They take existing ideas and remove the rough edges to provide a more polished experience than what is already available.

To their credit, that’s exactly why they succeeded with most of their ventures. Gabe Newell understands consumers well enough to know that most people don’t care about anything other than user experience. Or, as he put it, “piracy is a service problem”.

Also they’ve been separated out of CDPR recently

Someone corrected me on this recently so I’m paying it forward.

CD Projekt owned GOG, not CDPR. CDPR is a separate company under CD Projekt and isn’t related to GOG other than both previously having the same owner.

For localization, would -kun work? It wouldn’t be a correct translation, but the idea of the average citizen being conditioned into having that closeness and familiarity with Big Brother might make for an interesting take.

Is it? Or is it just a way to record which employees need mandatory cybersecurity “training” that tells them to use a 28 character password with at least one number, one upper case letter, one special character, no strings of 3 or more repeated characters, no strings of 3 or more incremental letters or numbers, and no strings of more than 5 of the same character class?

Windows’ UX is shit.

Windows 11 still has its settings splattered across multiple applications. The Settings application has all the shiny new gimmicks they added, yet still lacks any way to change some basic settings. If you need to reset a local user’s password, you’re stuck going back into the now-gutted Control Panel to do it. And if you want to change something that Microsoft feels the average user shouldn’t be allowed to know exists, you’re using the group policy editor to do it.

Or, how about the way that there’s at least two applications installed by default that do the same or very similar things? Windows Media Player or Videos? Paint or Paint 3D? Cmd.exe or Windows Terminal?

How about the design language inconsistency? The Run dialog was left looking like a Windows 7 dialog and didn’t get a dark mode until the mid 2020s. The Event Viewer and Windows Firewall UIs are still something right out of Windows XP, but with Vista-smeared paint applied on top.

Or, if that’s not bad UX, then how about the ads in the start menu? Or how OneDrive tries to trick you into uploading your desktop to the cloud? Or, maybe all the telemetry services running in the background and slowing shit down?

If you’re using a distro with a worse UX than that, then that’s on you. There’s plenty of options that provide a more cohesive UX than Windows

Yoshi’s Wooly World Cook’s Fuzzy Fone