greenskye
@greenskye@lemm.ee
- Comment on Valve is fixin' to start some arguments over the holidays because 'All adult members in a Steam Family' can see your Steam Replay page 3 days ago:
Also in several games my ability to join friends in-game broke if I turned my profile completely private. As soon as I set it to friends only I could join them again.
- Comment on I just need to keep it steady 1 month ago:
These were so much better than the radio transmitters. That brief period where cars only had CD players, no AUX or Bluetooth was the worst.
- Comment on Life imitates art? 2 months ago:
Humans outsourcing human checks to bots because it’s too annoying to prove they are human. We’ve fallen so far.
- Comment on Why do phone apps update all the time but nothing seems to change? 2 months ago:
Also the app is probably built on a mountain of dependencies all of which have updates and security patches and bullshit. Delaying those updates for too long makes finally making a real update a nightmare, so you occasionally release updates just to keep up.
- Comment on Hey, a nickel... 2 months ago:
Explains the ‘mannequins’ that liked to come to life when I wasn’t looking. They’re just people that have been hit with this bow.
- Comment on Ubisofts stock tanked this morning ahead of the markets opening 2 months ago:
90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I’ve bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they’ve failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can’t remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a ‘favorite’.
Also I’m growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they’ve shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It’s off putting to me and I feel like having a ‘get off my lawn’ moment.
- Comment on God of War Ragnarok PC port suffers review bombing on Steam due to PlayStation Network account requirement 2 months ago:
Not going to lie, needing a PlayStation account feels pretty unrelated to the actual game to me. Akin to complaining about how something shipped on Amazon instead of, you know the actual product.
Your difficulties with needing a PlayStation account, like shipping, is going to wildly vary depending on location.
- Comment on The struggle 2 months ago:
Maybe pay people who’s only job it is is to talk to the researchers and write the proposal for them? Someone smart enough to get stuff explained to them, but with the communication skills to boil that down into something the money people can understand?
It’s a pretty common position in software engineering because programmers and business people are pretty bad at communicating with each other.
- Comment on Gacha games are out of control. Gambling shouldn't be so widespread 2 months ago:
Fair, but given the degradation of gaming these days I think a lot of people who aren’t paying attention have an outdated and understated view of just how bad things are. A parent might be thinking: wow had a subscription, so this game with micro transactions isn’t all that bad, not recognizing just how tuned modern predatory gaming has become at extracting money and addicting its users.
WoW mostly addicted people to playing (consuming their time), you can go hours and hours of gameplay without inputting more money. But mobile games maximize extracting maximal profit for minimal gameplay. There’s no functional difference between a gacha pull and a slot machine pull. It’s an endless, mindless set of pretty lights where you just hit the buy button over and over and over. If you sat people down and made them watch (with a running cost total) most people would immediately see the resemblance to a casino.
I think it’s helpful to break things down into more granular levels of predation, just to help clarify how bad it’s getting, even if all of it is problematic.
- Comment on Gacha games are out of control. Gambling shouldn't be so widespread 2 months ago:
I don’t allow myself to play any mobile games anymore. Spent like $300 on one of those idle games. Not worth it. I refuse to play any free to play titles at all, no matter the platform these days.
- Comment on Gacha games are out of control. Gambling shouldn't be so widespread 2 months ago:
Haven’t played WoW in awhile, but do they now have ‘you can spend unlimited money’ mechanics? Previously it was just stuff like mounts and character transfers and stuff. I know you can also sell tokens for gold, but I thought gold kind of becomes irrelevant at some point. The best gear is bind on drop right? Theoretically I guess you can pay gold for boost runs, which probably counts as an endless money sink.
I kind of have a mental separation in my head between games with unlimited money sinks (like games with energy mechanics) where you can spend and spend and spend and it never stops, vs games that have a finite of things to buy.
It can still be way over priced, but there’s a maximum amount of money you can throw at the game. Even Diablo 4, with a relatively huge and highly priced number of cosmetic items has effectively a maximum price (though every new cosmetic increases that price). Vs Diablo Immortal allowing you to spend 10s of thousands of dollars and still need to keep spending. I think unlimited money mechanics should be outlawed or at least fully classified as gambling and regulated accordingly.
- Comment on Calling in healthy 3 months ago:
Combined PTO (along with a salary job not needing coverage) does have its downsides, but it’s nice just being able to use PTO whenever without needing any sort of proof. I can just wake up in the morning and decide I’m not working that day. No fuss, no doctors notes, no nothing. As long as I’m not blowing off important meetings or deadlines, no one cares
- Comment on Dynamic pricing 3 months ago:
Not familiar with the implementation, so maybe this is incorrect, but does Wendy’s tell you when you’re paying more or less? If so, my primary issue would be transparency. I know to show up for happy hour or lunch and I know what the prices will be.
I don’t want to have to memorize the prices because they quietly bump up everything on the menu by $0.50 at peak meal times everyday for an hour and don’t indicate that anywhere.
- Comment on What the fuck happened to YouTube!? 4 months ago:
Same. I originally got it for YT music. I don’t listen to as much music as I used to without a commute anymore, but my wife and I watch a ton of YouTube. And it’s mildly more difficult to block ads on the Roku too. I know pi holes exist, but my wife plays those freemium games that give you currency for watching ads and blocking all ads will break shit for her and then I have to fix it. Someone will tell me there’s an easy solve I’m sure, but honestly the subscription is just way easier and I really don’t mind paying. $16/mo for a family plan is 100% worth it to just not deal with all of that.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
The conspiracy theorist in me sometimes wonders if this type of thing is deliberately done by bad actors to sabotage these movements with poor messaging.
- Comment on Anon finds a plot hole 4 months ago:
Arguably I think all the flaws combined with its popularity is why there are so many HP fanfics out there and they are at least part of the popularity of the work.
It’s like confidently posting a wrong answer on the Internet, people can’t help but want to correct you. Same with her story, which fuels a good chunk of the dialogue and discussions about it.
If it was bad or unpopular no one would care. If it was extremely well written, with little to no plot holes, people would like it, but that’s kind of it. Harry Potter just seems to have the right mix of good ideas and poor execution while remaining popular enough to be relevant to generate seemingly endless efforts to fix or improve it.
- Comment on Anon finds a plot hole 4 months ago:
Time turners can’t change the past that you observed and even then it could’ve been an illusion or a trick. Dumbledore could’ve gone back in time to save Sirius and then cast an illusion making everyone believe he passed through the veil. The past didn’t change, only people weren’t aware of what was really happening.
- Comment on Anon finds a plot hole 4 months ago:
Yep. Based on similar history it probably wasn’t even that the other founders disagreed, they just maybe thought he was taking it a little far.
- Comment on Before times. 4 months ago:
Lemmy seems to have inherited all the snark of Reddit, with very little of the ‘random expert reads post and chimes in with cool anecdote’ that Reddit used to have. I miss that.
- Comment on These AI generated pics are becoming impossible to spot 5 months ago:
I think it’d be pretty tricky to get a fire going at that size and get the photo taken before the thin plastic of the tent melted or burst into flames. The tent in the picture is fine, which I honestly think would be impossible with that setup, even if you tried to be quick
- Comment on Jon Stewart's Debate Analysis: Trump's Blatant Lies and Biden's Senior Moments | The Daily Show 5 months ago:
Oh, I absolutely agree with you on the probable outcomes of America did implement structural changes these days. That has like a 1% chance of actually being something positive. I think perhaps the most recent, best possible time for significant reforms was somewhere between 1930-1990. It depends mostly on the specific kind of reform (basically whether or not women or minorities were relevant to the change, farther in the past would be worse outcomes for them).
But some things like campaign finance reform, how many seats there are in the House, Supreme Court Reform, etc could’ve been accomplished with a relatively high likelihood of positive outcomes.
Basically before the complete collapse of proper journalism, when broadcast media was still king and most politicians still tended to compromise and were at least mostly interested in actually governing. It feels like post 90s, our governing body has passed some sort of tipping point where the majority of members are simply gaming the system, obstructing others from actually doing anything and shooting down any and all reasonable compromises. The actual productivity of Congress seems to be in total free fall. Bad actors pretty much always existed, but they only became a crippling number somewhat recently. (Or at least this seems true for the last 100 years, I have no idea if Congress was this dysfunctional in the early 1800s or something)
- Comment on Jon Stewart's Debate Analysis: Trump's Blatant Lies and Biden's Senior Moments | The Daily Show 5 months ago:
I’m not sure if anyone could conclusively declare a certain country’s democracy is totally better than ours, but several more recently created democracies have avoided many of the pitfalls that have been discovered with American implementation. Things like mandatory voting, ranked choice voting, better and stronger rules around money and political campaigns, more comprehensive list of citizen rights, etc. Most of those countries have their own missteps as well, but a lot of our issues have been solved, we just haven’t adopted the methods and improvements already shown to work. Typically because they’d require pretty extensive reform, which is incredibly hard to achieve with our government especially in the current political climate.
- Comment on Jon Stewart's Debate Analysis: Trump's Blatant Lies and Biden's Senior Moments | The Daily Show 5 months ago:
I’ve often thought that America suffers from being the first successful iteration of our style of government. It was great and a huge improvement over all the other examples at the time. So much so that much of the world eventually followed in its footsteps.
But where other countries looked at our first successful attempt and further improved and refined the idea, we’re still stuck on that very first version. What was once a radically new idea that worked so much better than everyone else, is now an old, outdated and barely functional relic. We’re the early prototype iPhone 3g, while several other countries have iPhone 6/10/etc
- Comment on Economics 5 months ago:
But there aren’t ‘new’ graphing calculators being required and they don’t get worn out that easily. There’s a relatively stable amount of people who need one at any given time, so honestly I’d have expected the second hand market to have crashed the market more than it has. There should honestly be multiple times over more graphing calculators in circulation than there is a need for them.
- Comment on PSI 5 months ago:
This is scary new information for me that puts a childhood incident in a much more horrifying context. I was at pet store when I was like 10 and one of the parrots seemed friendly so I let it climb up to my shoulder, only for it to painfully bite my ear. It hurt a lot, but no blood was drawn. I managed to get free easily enough. I thought that was pretty bad, but now I’m learning that apparently it could’ve easily ripped off my ear?!? Apparently I’m a lot luckier and that parent was actually a lot nicer than I thought.
- Comment on ChatGPT has caused a massive drop in demand for online digital freelancers — here is what you can do to protect yourself 5 months ago:
I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I’m not even that old and it’s super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It’s not that we’re doing more with less, it’s a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.
- Comment on Today, it has been 6 years since The Elder Scrolls 6 teaser 6 months ago:
Yep. And the good mods take a while to make too. If your game is dead 3 months after launch, who’s going to still be motivated to keep working on a big overhaul type mod?
- Comment on Today, it has been 6 years since The Elder Scrolls 6 teaser 6 months ago:
I think too many people forget that Skyrim was actually popular enough without mods to bring enough modders to the table to fix the rest of it. Bethesda seems to have forgotten that they actually have to deliver a mostly fun and mostly playable game for a proper modding scene to take root.
- Comment on I still don't get why people spend money... there's tons of it for free 8 months ago:
This. Also in real life, people with specific talents know they’re rare and charge accordingly. Pornhub is full of average stuff and if that does it for you great (though I’d argue anyone considering themselves a ‘porn addict’ is unlikely to be satisfied with basic porn)
- Comment on Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her 11 months ago:
The professional workaround is ‘are they eligible for rehire’. If you’re laid off it’s a yes, if not it’s a no.