Live service games, MMOs, gatcha games, and many hardcore multiplayer games are the worst for this. They love to waste player’s time on some repetitive grind because they want players to keep playing their game. They usually have either microtransactions (often for cosmetics) or a subscription.

Personally, I love MMOs, but I try to avoid playing any grindy content (or at least as long as I don’t think I’ll genuinely enjoy it). So I’ll usually play a game for a few months (they’re really big games) and then quit for years, if not permanently (I have a bunch of MMOs I intend to someday return to, but have not yet).

Single player games are generally much better at being genuinely fun. Especially story driven games. I also love open world games because you largely get to make them your own. It’s perfectly valid to beeline the story missions if that’s all you care about. Or you could do just the side quests. Or you could additionally explore like crazy. e.g., with Tears of the Kingdom, you really can ignore most of the shrines and largely focus on the story quests. None of the side quests are necessary, either. You don’t have to explore the depths except for a tiny few places for the story. The vast majority of sky islands can be ignored. But I personally had a lot of fun exploring, so I explored nearly everything and loved it (except most of the depths – they were way too big, empty, and repetitive).

Some people don’t like long games, though. And that’s fine! There’s tons of short or more streamlined games out there that you can have fun with. e.g., The Last of Us is a fantastic one. The sequel is about 24 hours long for the story and it felt like it flew by in the blink of an eye for me cause I was having so much fun.

I also can’t stand the fact that smokers can take unlimited ‘breaks’ whenever they please just to come back stinking up an entire room with their smoke.

That feels like a workplace problem. Why would a workplace give them unlimited breaks? And why would nonsmokers not be allowed comparable breaks? This feels odd to me. My recent jobs have been ones where nobody is micromanaging my time, so anyone can take whatever breaks they want. As long as productivity doesn’t obviously suffer, nobody cares. My past jobs in retail didn’t allow smokers to take extra breaks. They’d get the same breaks as everyone else (for an 8 hour shift, that meant a 30 min lunch and 2 x 15 min coffee breaks).

Well… I’m not surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. We all knew this Supreme Court was not in favour of its citizens. The Supreme Court should have been stacked long ago. Leaving it be with its insane appointments just because stacking it might start a war with the GOP was a short sighted move, as the GOP is always going to play underhanded (that’s how they managed to get so many SCOTUS appointments in the first place). Biden’s insistence on trying to play nice with the GOP has always been his weakness.

This really sucks for those with student loans who were depending on this. We’re already in an economically rough place for the kinds of folks who would have student loans. Inflation has been sharp in recent years and wages have not kept up. In my field of tech, layoffs have been widespread and new grads would be the most severely impacted (they already struggle to get hired and now they’re competing against an increased number of experienced people).

As an aside, it’s also a shame that lawmakers have not managed to pass a law for this debt relief. My understanding is that the strike down is specifically because it’s not a congress passed loan forgiveness. But congress isn’t willing to do the right thing (not in enough numbers to pass a law, anyway).

Yeah, to be clear, MediaWiki is open source and also has alllll sorts of really cool extensions. You also already can download the entire contents of Wikipedia.

I think this desire to federate everything is going too far. Most things don’t benefit from this and in fact just become over complicated. If you can host a regular copy of a site easily… that’s frankly most of the benefits there.

That is the best part and honest one of the best parts of gaming in general.

Kinda reminds me of burning the weed fields in Far Cry 3.

That’s the part that keeps me from doing it. While portability is nice, I have a really great desktop with an ultra wide. That ultra wide in particular is what makes PC gaming really great for me. I think I’d only use it on longer trips, which isn’t that often.

No, Who’s on first.

I really hope that lawmakers and AI companies can clear this up soon, because I think AI art could be a massive thing for gaming. In particular by generating small variances so that the world doesn’t feel so copy paste.

For example, consider a map with a large office building (like in the game Control). There’s so many assets needed to avoid feeling copy paste. You’ll notice if the game reuses the contents of whiteboards, which isn’t realistic. In real offices, we can expect every single whiteboard will likely have different contents (with the exception of blank ones). They probably will have lots in common, but they wouldn’t be exactly the same. A human creating dozens of hundreds of unique whiteboards isn’t a very good use of time, especially if we’re talking about one of many minor assets that aren’t even meant to be paid close attention to. An AI, on the other hand, could generate the many variations we’d expect to see. We can even have a human design a couple and ask the AI to make similar ones.

This isn’t even all that new. We’ve had procedural generation (which is not AI) of stuff like height maps and trees for ages now. But we’re finally able to generate entire textures (and perhaps eventually entire 3D models) very easily and while fitting into a specific theme.

Finally, for indie games, developing art can be a major challenge. There’s countless programmers who want to make games and are good programmers, but they’re not good artists. AI generated art could help make being a one person dev more viable. And even when the dev is an artist, it could simply save them a lot of time on what’s a very time consuming part of game dev. eg, AI would be good at generating the profile pictures of characters that RPGs often show during dialogue.

Terrible. And while we don’t have enough details at this time to do anything but guess, I wonder if incel and anti-feminist rhetoric had an impact here. Gender studies as a subject is heavily loathed by those types, sometimes to the degree of wishing violence on them.

I’m sorry, are you saying you indent the braces? Cause if that’s not unintentional, those are both horrifying!

Because real people don’t enjoy sales?

This isn’t an advertisement and tons of PC gamers love gaming sales (which can usually get quite substantial for PC games). I mean, there’s a whole meme about constantly buying more games than you can play.

Would an external battery pack be able to keep it going? I have a battery pack that claims it can put out up to 18W. It’s really meant for phones, but wonder if it can keep a Steam Deck going, too?

If your employees (even if they work without payment) dont follow your instructions you search for someone who does follow them.

If they work without payment, they’re not your employees. And reddit isn’t a registered charity either.

It is their site so they can technically do what they want, but it makes them assholes and is not “ok” as you put it.

… UPHILL! BOTH WAYS!

Same. I actually love Linux and don’t like to do software dev on anything else. The only reason windows is my main personal computer is for gaming and streaming services. And some of that is inertia, cause I’m aware that Linux gaming has improved a ton in recent years.

Problem is that there’s a bunch of major communities on that instance. They have no affiliation with the server admins and mostly just chose the instance because it seemed like the default very early in the migration to the Fediverse.

Yeah, DeSantis is evil, not stupid. He has degrees from both Yale and Harvard. He knows full well what he’s doing and how things work. It’s all calculated evil.

The whole CSAM issue is why I’d never personally run an instance, nor any other kind of server that allows users to upload content. It’s an issue I have no desire to have to deal with moderating nor the legal risks of the content even existing on a server I control.

While I’d like to hope that law enforcement would be reasonable and understand “oh, you’re just some small time host, just delete that stuff and you’re good”, my opinion on law enforcement is in the gutter. I wouldn’t trust law enforcement not to throw the book at me if someone did upload illegal content (or if I didn’t handle it correctly). Safest to let someone else deal with that risk.

And even if you can win some case in court, just having to go to court can be ludicrously expensive and risk high impact negative press.

Ah, if only all dictators would be benevolent dictators for life like Guido.

Exact estimates vary, but are generally in the ballpark of about 1% of people being trans and non binary (though this is skewed towards younger people).

At any given time, the US federal government has 535 elected seats. The point of this comment is to highlight the disproportionately low rate of trans people getting into politics and being elected. Things are stacked against trans people, whether it’s the barrier from how poor social acceptance growing up can limit opportunities or heightened fear of getting into politics because of how toxic they are.

And we’re talking about a job where their coworkers are sometimes actively campaigning to outlaw trans treatment, acceptance, and protections. Something that in many work places would get you instantly fired, but is permitted in US politics.