EldritchFemininity

Seriously. I have some DDR3 RAM and a motherboard with processor laying around somewhere that I recently was considering digging out to make a second computer out of as a home storage/media server/pihole analogue, and I bet I could still get low quality settings on most recent games to play nicely with whatever parts I can scrabble together.

Yeah, consoles are normally (except when an idiot is in charge at Microslop) what they call a “loss leader” - an item that you sell at a loss because you’ll make up for it in other purchases now that the customer is in the store.

With a console, the idea up until recently had always been that you lose money on the console but make up for it several times over with game sales, generally making it more affordable than a PC of similar specs.

There was a period of time where you could build a PC with better specs for the same price as a console, but hardware prices going up in the past 10-15 years meant that that really hasn’t been the case for a while.

I think a lot of the conversation around exclusives comes from the standpoint of what keeps a console player from switching from one console to another (whether that’s a PC, a PS5, an Xbox, etc.), so PC exclusives don’t really factor into it because PC players are almost always a PC gamer plus a console player rather than somebody who is switching from a PC to a console.

That said, I think a lot of people in the industry (and console gamers) really underestimate the vastness of PC exclusives that exist thanks to the indie scene. Most people will think of PC exclusive genres like RTS games, but few people think of Bloodborne Nightmare Kart or all the tiny indie RPG/horror/etc. projects that come out all the time as a reason to switch from a console.

Yoshi P is the only man I know who has looked a board of directors in the eyes less than a month from release and said, “I’m pushing the release date back 2 weeks because the game isn’t polished to our standards” and gotten away with it.

I don’t think I’d give Square the time of day if it wasn’t something that he and the rest of the FFXIV team were proud of. I’m pretty sure that he’s said that he will never let them put any of that AI or crypto nonsense into his games.

You were thinking logically about a normal production chain. In that case, QA or whoever says “This is wrong, rework it and correct the issue” and that’s that. With AI, it does the whole thing over again and may or may not come back with the same issue or an entirely new one.

You did say that it wasn’t useless if you and your kid both use the same system, so my first thought for how it could be useful in any capacity outside of adhering to a law, which in the US at least (I’m not as well versed in the Brazilian, UK, or other variations) has in some versions very explicitly stated that the intent is for the OS to provide said age information to any app that requests it, was for group permissions on the different accounts on your system, which can just as easily be set up using other settings already available to you. I would consider that “protecting kids.” If you meant that it was useful in some other way where you and your kid are using the same system, by all means, tell me.

As I said, I brought up the rest because that is the explicitly stated or easily inferred (in the case of increased fingerprinting of users for increased revenue) intent of the US versions of the law and “protect the children” is the tired old excuse being used by Facebook and the politicians in their employ.

Obviously, the data field equivalent of clicking the “I am 18 years or older” button is as non-invasive as you can really get, but it’s blatantly obvious that this is merely the first step in what the corporations and governments actually want out of this, and adhering to it before the laws are even out merely sets the stage for them to refine their language and push further. Something this easy could be rolled out at any time. There’s no need to comply before they have a leg to stand on. They won’t be satisfied by this, and they certainly won’t stop here.

Don’t forget the personalized ads! 🫠

And how is it useful then? Parental controls have existed for decades and you never had to give your age to Facebook, who is the main proponent of these laws in the US and has poured millions of dollars into their creation.

This isn’t about protecting kids. It’s about adding an additional fingerprint companies and governments can use to track and identify you and what you do with your system.

It would be weird for the Marxist instance to have entire communities dedicated to saying how bad socialists are, that’s what Hexbear is for.

But, that’s also why memes.ml is here, right? When people aren’t making fun of liberals (rightly so) or calling all Americans Nazis or something, you gotta make fun of the wrong kinds of socialists for not seeing the truth. Otherwise, what kind of content would be left?

This is the sort of behavior that I’m talking about, but with the term “liberals” being thrown at any leftists whose flavor of socialism you personally disagree with. Like a bunch of Christian denominations all claiming that they speak the truth and all the others are heretics and liars.

It’s all too common in leftist spaces because we can’t get over the minor (and not so minor) differences in our theory/philosophy to stay focused on our shared opposition of fascism long enough to act on it, while fascists naturally cooperate because it’s easy to do when you don’t believe in anything other than hate and whatever you’re told to believe.

I didn’t mean that as a literal quote but as sarcastic air quotes to evoke the exact imagery that you came up with. Although, I have actually seen a Hexbear or (what’s the other one, Beehaw?) user use that phrase. Of course, they also said that only capitalist pigs die in China, so it’s hard to tell if they were serious or if it was full commitment to the bit. That part of Lemmy is fairly indistinguishable from a leftist version of 4chan.

Like I said in another comment, ML has an issue common to many leftist communities in that old saying of “nobody hates leftists more than other leftists.” And that can manifest as behaving like more moderate leftists (not liberals - actual leftists) may as well be centrists or conservatives, or treating Europe as being just as bad as Trump’s regime. Purity tests and trolling rather than the mutual cooperation that Cowbee posted.

I guess? I don’t think I’ve ever really stayed in a memes community where that’s the case, though on Reddit I was largely in places like egg_irl and traaa, where everything was focused around a shared experience of a minority group.

Besides, it’s not just the memes community, the memes is just where it appears the most blatantly and loudly. As the person above me said, it’s an instance wide thing. ML is nowhere near as bad as Hexbear (or I have yet to see any targeted harassment campaigns against an instance for failing a purity vibe check come from ML, at least) but, as they say, “nobody hates leftists more than other leftists.” Leftist spaces tend to have a bit of an undercurrent of only being welcoming to the “right kind of leftist.” I used “decadent West” up there very purposefully. There’s a bit of a vibe to ML that’s less “uniting various leftist groups” and more “preaching The Good Word to those poor ignorants” proselytizing.

Every time I see Cowbee in a thread like this, it’s like I walked into a restaurant to see someone trying to explain to somebody else why their friend who just spat in their food is actually a cool dude doing great solidarity because the owners of the restaurant treat their employees poorly.

ML in my experience has very little to do with engaging with leftists and more to do with bashing the “decadent West.” Anytime I see memes.ml pop up in my feed, it’s a 50/50 shot between me finding something funny or something that makes me debate blocking the instance as much as I can at an account level.

Considering it was only about 100 years ago that science decided that women could orgasm and weren’t just faking it to make their husbands happy…yes, the idea that a woman can be horny and is a normal human being is a shocking revelation to some (many?).

An estimated 20% of women will be sexually assaulted in their life. Half of those will happen by the time that they’re 16. 40% of trans women will be sexually assaulted.

This isn’t about your feelings being hurt.

But refusing to buy from one company specifically is. Just because you buy similar products somewhere else doesn’t mean that you aren’t boycotting the other company.

I refuse to buy from Blizzard, Activision, EA, and Ubisoft. I refuse to buy Sony games so long as they require a PSN account for PC games. Just because I buy indie games doesn’t mean that I’m not boycotting those AAA companies for their actions.

The one thing I will say is that there does seem to be a generalized dislike for AI that has all the investors and upper management types nervous. Even by their own studies do people generally either not care about AI in their products or actively dislike it/find it intrusive. There was a study by a phone company from this past summer or fall that concluded that 80% of their users had no interest in AI or found that it actively made their experience worse, and there have been plenty of pretty damning reports about how useful it’s been in various industries (just look at Microslop). That is not conducive to convincing investors to fund your product and does not show a viable path to making a profit in the future.

We’ve seen similar things happening recently with car manufacturers walking back on their big touchscreens (with some help from regulation in civilized places that care about things like “pedestrian fatalities” - like Europe) due to consumer sentiment. They tried for nearly a decade to push bigger and bigger screens into cars and remove physical buttons, and now they’re moving in the other direction. Completely anecdotal evidence, but the last time I went to buy a car I told the salesman at the dealership that I wasn’t interested in cars newer than a certain year because that was when they increased the size of the screen and put them in a more obnoxious spot on the dashboard, and he said that he heard similar sentiments from practically everybody who came in looking to buy a car - everybody hated the bigger screens.

If you think about it, it is very wasteful for you to have that chocolate bar in your food pantry. So many wasted calories as most bodies can only burn a fraction of them before converting the rest into fat. Same can be said for pasta and many other foods. We even spend a full third of our lives asleep, consuming even less calories! Incredibly inefficient!

Maybe the solution is aerosolized calories that can be sprayed via plane over vast regions of the country instead of food so that calories are owned by the people on a local, regional, or national level?

Don’t worry, you’re not pissing in my Cheerios or anything, I just always end up in one of those “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!” rants whenever they pull the “ghost gun” nonsense.

It’s like how it’s illegal in Mass to own a suppressor unless you’re a cop or military, then you can buy as many as you want. Like…it reduces recoil a little and reduces the noise from permanent hearing loss to temporary hearing damage, it’s not gonna make a gun silent. Movie magic quiet is only possible with very particular sub-sonic rounds of a specific caliber. You want silent? You put a suppressor on an air rifle. Dead silent and completely legal to put a suppressor on in all 50 states because it’s not a gun, despite being just as dangerous at close ranges.

Edit: Also, these laws are often supported by firearms manufacturers because it benefits them to prevent people from being able to go elsewhere, like making aftermarket car parts illegal or forcing people to get their service done at a car dealership.

They have metal internal components just like almost every 3d printed gun does. There are some things that you just need metal for, like springs. The vast majority of 3d printed guns are actually guns purchased from a gun store and then modified with the equivalent of handmade after-market parts.

In order to be undetectable by metal detectors, you would have to keep the amount of metal in them to about that of a pair of glasses. So basically a firing pin and that’s about it. I think a break action firing chamber would probably set it off like a big belt buckle would, and no recoil or magazine springs mean that it would have to be a single shot weapon with a manual reload - some kind of break action. And no barrel liner or a metal barrel at all, nor metal bullet casings. A shotgun shell might be able to make it through because of their mostly plastic shell with a copper back about the size of a quarter, but that’s gonna be about it.

It’s really not the issue that politicians and the media make it out to be. It’s just fear mongering.