tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Mini-marts linked to convicted people smuggler closed after BBC investigation 6 hours ago:
One of the shops that has been closed is next to the constituency office of the local Conservative MP for South Leicestershire, Alberto Costa.
“Let’s be clear this man should not be in Blaby, should not be in this country,” said Costa. The fact Jamal had been running a business next door to a member of parliament’s constituency office “speaks volumes about the character of this individual”.
Indeed. Most unsavory.
- Submitted 6 hours ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 2 comments
- Comment on Boomers scolding us about how they were able to buy a house working at a gas station... 9 hours ago:
I just recently sold one of my houses for 900k. Which I bought for 300k 25yrs ago. And it even was due for major renovations. Well, could have. Actually sold to them for 500. Didn’t wanna be an idiot but also didn’t want to rip them off. I did nothing of value to justify that gain. And they were very happy. Still unfair…
300,000 euros in 2001 is, inflation-adjusted, 512,000 euros in 2026. If you sold at 500k euros, you sold for slightly less than you bought it for in real terms.
- Comment on Good offer! Which one should I pick? 10 hours ago:
I mean, they’re all WireGuard. ProtonVPN is WireGuard. Mulvad VPN – what I assume you’re referencing — is WireGuard.
If you don’t like a given WireGuard VPN provider, then just switch to some other VPN provider that supports WireGuard and use that service instead.
- Comment on [deleted] 15 hours ago:
The city in question is in Canada, if you’re thinking that it’s the US (as you appear to be in the US).
- Comment on [deleted] 15 hours ago:
people are just shitty
Well, some people. Not like the whole of humanity lined up there.
- Comment on US Energy Secretary Chris Wright: “I'm thrilled to report that after 35 years, on July 4th, we will end the subsidies for wind and solar projects” 1 day ago:
I mean, there are a bunch of people who are involved in the oil and gas (and coal, but those guys are are a corpse) industry who are terrified of things going away. If coal goes, so does, say, Gillette, Wyoming. That’s part of where Trump got support from.
But it’s not gonna change the general trajectory much on carbon. They might kick the can down the road a little more, but it’s gonna die sooner or later.
- Comment on YouTube Premium Lite 2 days ago:
How many different tiers of YouTube are there now so Alphabet can skim off slightly higher margins from each user possible?
I’d rather have more tiers.
I’d pay for a tier where they had a no-log, no-datamining policy, which they don’t currently offer. I’m not demanding that they change their existing tiers. I’m sure that there are plenty of people who are not interested in that. But that’s what I’d like, so I’d like to have a different tier.
- Comment on Why are AAA games a rip off in US, UK & EU? 2 days ago:
Why does the same cost less in Kazakhstan for example but it’s overpriced in the US for American players
There is an optimal price for a market to produce the biggest return for the publisher.
If I make a widget and then sell it for one cent above what it costs me to make, then I will probably sell a lot of units. But I won’t make much profit on each.
If I make a widget and then sell it for ten thousand dollars a pop above what it costs me to make, then I will probably sell few units. But I will make more profit on each.
There is a point where a seller maximizes their return. They’ll try to price their product at that point.
An input to that price at which one maximizes their return, as @Hapankaali@lemmy.world points out, is the price elasticity of demand in each market.
People in Kazakhstan are not as well-off as people in the US. They’re more price sensitive, will just not be willing or able to buy something at a given price than people in the US. That means that that optimal price for the seller to set is going to be higher in the US than in Kazahkstan.
What you’ll probably also see — because a digital download of a video game has a marginal cost of production that’s basically zero — is prices slowly decreasing over time, approaching zero. Once a publisher has sold it to everyone willing to buy it at a given price, they’ll probably lower the price to try to sell it to more people who wouldn’t have bought it at the higher price. It’s why you can often get old games sold at lower prices. So down the line, that game may be selling for less, in both the US and Kazakhstan.
- Comment on Time to bring back physical media on PC? 2 days ago:
I mean, you can definitely get drives. I bought a LibreDrive-flashed USB 4k/UHD Blu-Ray last month, because I wanted to (legally) play UHD Blu-Ray movies on Linux — I don’t know how much longer they’ll be around, and the quality is generally higher than streamed video. But just saying…the infrastructure to use the optical media directly is not generally there any more, I think, on most out-of-box PCs. That’s an additional barrier if you want to sell the stuff in that media format.
goes to skim Dell desktops
Yeah, it doesn’t look like they have optical drives these days.
- Comment on Time to bring back physical media on PC? 2 days ago:
Most laptops don’t have an optical drive any more. I haven’t looked at desktops.
You can obviously buy an external USB one, or sell things on USB thumb drives, but…
- Comment on Prop65 label on my beans! 3 days ago:
This is bullshit. Have they not heard of “the boy who cried wolf”? If they throw a meaningless label on everything warning about potential lead exposure, it loses meaning.
I don’t disagree. I’m not justifying the policy, just telling you not to panic when you see one.
- Comment on Prop65 label on my beans! 3 days ago:
A wide range of products and businesses in California have scary looking Prop 65 warnings. Most restaurants have them posted. Just disregard it. They’re internal California politicking, and don’t represent a meaningful danger.
At one point, a group opposed to meat consumption tried to get a Prop 65 carcinogen warning stuck on all meat in California (though thankfully, that fell through.
One day, we will get our shit together in California, and you won’t see stuff like this.
- Comment on Another UK heatwave could be on the way 3 days ago:
skims text
He’s specifically complaining about single-hose portables. I wouldn’t say that single-hose portables don’t work, but they are substantially less-efficient than dual-hose portables. If you’re getting a portable, there are very few scenarios where it’s a good idea to get a single-hose portable. Unfortunately, single-hose portables are slightly-cheaper and simpler than dual-hose portables, and the great majority of portables on Amazon are single-hose.
Single-hose portables suck air from inside your house, heat it up by transferring heat from air inside the house, and blow the hot exhaust air out the hose. The problem is that because they have no intake — they intake the air for exhaust from inside the house — and thus create negative pressure in your house. This means that hot air from outside is sucked into the house, to equalize the pressure.
Dual-hose portables pull air in from the outside, heat it up with air transferred from indoors air, and then blow it back out to the outside, so they don’t have this problem.
They do leak a little more heat and have more noise in the inside than window units, but they don’t have the glaring problem that single-hose portables suffer from.
Note that this isn’t a new problem. Many people in the past have used fireplaces for heating. They create the same problem, just for cold air from outside instead of hot air — they send exhaust hot air up the chimney. That causes cold air to be drawn into the house. Doesn’t mean that fireplaces are non-functional as heating systems. Just that they’re less-efficient than they would be if they didn’t exhaust interior air.
- Comment on Another UK heatwave could be on the way 4 days ago:
They do make cooling vests that take ice packs that can be frozen in one’s freezer.
I think that a lot of people in the UK would benefit from picking up an air conditioner this winter so that next summer won’t be an issue, but since I’m sure that that’s not going to happen for more than a fraction of people…
- Comment on Ministers urged to curb energy costs as Great British homes face 13% bill surge 6 days ago:
James Mabey, a policy analyst at National Energy Action, a fuel poverty charity, said: “The consequences of energy debt include cold homes,
Right now, cold homes would be fantastic.
- Comment on I'm loving zelda-like souls-likes right now 1 week ago:
Anyway, if you know of any other top-down/isometric action games with an eldritch horror aesthetic, please let me know. I can’t get enough of them right now.
I don’t, but insofar as “eldrich horror” means “Lovecraftian”, there’s a Steam tag for that, so you could use that in your searches.
There’s a “sort by user reviews, Lovecraftian, Souls-like” search:
store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DES…
You might also try “sort by user reviews, Dark Fantasy, Souls-like” search:
- Comment on 1 week ago:
- Comment on Microsoft Announces Significant Price Rises for Xbox Series X and S, 2TB Model Discontinued 1 week ago:
For computer hardware, it’s uncommon to see major increases — computer hardware has consistently seen dramatic long-term declines — but it does happen. The other major incident I can think of was 15 years back:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Thailand_floods
Severe flooding occurred during the 2011 monsoon season in Thailand. The flooding began at the end of July triggered by the landfall of Tropical Storm Nock-ten.
Thailand is the world’s second-largest producer of hard disk drives, supplying approximately 25 percent of the world’s production.[76] Many of the factories that made hard disk drives were flooded, including Western Digital’s, leading some industry analysts to predict future worldwide shortages of hard disk drives.[77][78] Western Digital was able to get one of their plants, flooded on 15 October 2011, restored and operating on 30 November 2011…As a result, most hard disk drive prices almost doubled globally, which took approximately two years to recover.[77][80]
- Comment on Microsoft Announces Significant Price Rises for Xbox Series X and S, 2TB Model Discontinued 1 week ago:
Alongside the price rise announcement, Microsoft pointed to Buy Now, Pay Later options that break up your payments, as well as interest free financing. It’s also working with retailers to make second-hand consoles available at lower prices, it said.
In all seriousness, if you can’t come up with the cost of a console, do not buy it (a) using an unsecured loan (b) in the middle of a short period of time where you know that the price is elevated.
- Comment on Farmers criticise government plan to counter threats to UK food security 1 week ago:
Farmers tend to cry “food security” pretty readily.
A threat to British food security would need to come from:
-
Blockade. There are few countries that are able to blockade the UK, and in most of the cases, I suspect that there would be more-immediate problems for the UK.
-
A scarcity of food on global markets. Given that the UK can afford to outbid most countries in the world for food, if the UK gets in trouble, most of the world is already screwed.
But, hell, let’s ignore all that and for the sake of discussion, assume that there’s a real food security issue. If so, then:
A. The UK should stop producing foods other than staple foods, stuff like wheat, since this is the most calorie-productive. No meat production should occur, as this is quite calorie-inefficient. I strongly suspect that the National Farmers Union will suddenly decide do an about-face on food security being an issue if this point is raised.
B. The UK should be worried about its supply chain for food production, not simply food production. For example, “The UK is estimated to produce approximately 40% of its nitrogen fertiliser requirement, while the remaining 60% is relied upon from imports (AIC).” That’s a higher percentage external dependency than is present food production.
-
- Comment on Valve’s Steam Controller stock shortage will last until next year after fans massively exceeded expectations 1 week ago:
In general, one can swap in custom outer shells for controllers if one has a particular look in mind; there are stores that sell these.
In the case of the Steam Controller 2, Valve published the CAD files for the outer shell to actively try to encourage this, so I imagine that there will be replacement outer shells.
- Comment on Valve’s Steam Controller stock shortage will last until next year after fans massively exceeded expectations 1 week ago:
I have been assuming they had stock set aside for some kind of Machine + Controller bundle.
Could be — I haven’t seen news along those lines and the Steam Machine description on their website doesn’t presently say anything about coming with a Steam Controller — but I suppose that it’s not unreasonable. But it’s also worth remembering that they’re probably aiming for the console market with the Steam Machine, and a lot of people use consoles for local multiplayer games and are probably going to want more than one controller for that.
Now, local multiplayer is less common among PC games than console games. But, especially with console ports, it’s definitely out there.
store.steampowered.com/search?tags=7368&supported…
That says that there are 7,933 games currently on the Steam store that support local multiplayer.
- Comment on Epic Games unveils Launcher V2 in re-attempt to topple Steam, says redesigned storefront is up to 6.5x faster — promises player profiles, user reviews, universal controller support, and much more 1 week ago:
Matrix Games. They’re a publisher that specialize in wargames that I frequent to get some of my more-serious milsims from (though availability has improved on Steam). They also run an online store. The above three stores are the only places that I’ve bought video games for a long time. Well…tries to remember actually, I did get a few things on itch.io, and IIRC I bought Starsector directly from the company that makes that.
- Comment on Valve’s Steam Controller stock shortage will last until next year after fans massively exceeded expectations 1 week ago:
Well…
www.pcgamesn.com/pc-retro-tech/ega-graphics
Pity the poor PC of 1983-1984, before EGA graphics changed everything. It wasn’t the graphics powerhouse we know today. IBM’s machines, such as the IBM PC 5150, and their clones might have been the talk of the business world, but they were stuck with text-only displays or low-definition bitmap graphics.
The maximum color graphics resolution was 320 x 200 on a CGA graphics card, with colors limited to four from a hard-wired palette of 16. Even at the time, you’d have a hard time convincing someone that this was really the best graphics card you could buy. Worse, three of those colors were cyan, brown, and magenta, and half of them were just lighter variations of the other half.
You can see in the screenshot from The Secret of Monkey Island below that 16 colors make all the difference, with EGA on the left and four-color CGA on the right.
However, EGA had one big problem; it was prohibitively expensive, even in an era when PCs were already astronomically expensive. The basic EGA card price was over $500 (around $1,400 today), and the Memory Expansion Card cost a further $199.
Go for the full 192KB of RAM and you were looking at a total of nearly $1,000 (approximately $2,900 in today’s money), making a top-end EGA card way more expensive than the GeForce RTX 4090 today. What’s more, the monitor you needed to make the most of it cost a further $850 (approximately $2,500 today). EGA was a rich enthusiast’s toy.
- Comment on Valve’s Steam Controller stock shortage will last until next year after fans massively exceeded expectations 1 week ago:
When they initially went on sale, apparently scalpers flooded the thing. They put a reservation system in place for the Steam Controller to aim to defeat scalping. This new shortage is with that reservation system in place, limit on two Steam Controllers per account and the Steam account needs to be in good standing. Now, I guess it could be possible that scalpers went out and figured out how to defeat that, like having a number of people collude to purchase two each, so one can’t say that there’s no scalping…
- Comment on Valve’s Steam Controller stock shortage will last until next year after fans massively exceeded expectations 1 week ago:
I mean, they aren’t going to stop making them if there are people buying them. I’m sure that, at some point, there will be enough manufactured to catch up with demand.
2026 has been a pretty exasperating year to try to get ahold of a lot of pieces of hardware, I have to say.
I’m wondering if — assuming Valve still is trying to release the Steam Machine this year, which according to the last news I’ve seen, they’re still saying that they’re going to do — this is gonna dick up their Steam Machine sales. I mean, the Steam Controller is a nice-to-have on a regular PC, but for people with a Steam Machine in the living room, they probably are going to want it even more — like, there it’s a lot more important to have the touchpads to replace a mouse, remote power-on capability, etc.
- Valve’s Steam Controller stock shortage will last until next year after fans massively exceeded expectationsfrvr.com ↗Submitted 1 week ago to games@lemmy.world | 86 comments
- Comment on Pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto VI will officially begin on June 25 2 weeks ago:
Get a small SSD and just put that game on it?
screenrant.com/gta-6-file-size-200gb-rumors-gamer…
According to GTA 6 Intel in a post that has since been taken down, Grand Theft Auto VI will “be just under 200GB”, with other “sources” also corroborating this claim. Of course, this rumor has not been officially confirmed by Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive, and it was already clear to fans that GTA VI will be quite demanding when it comes to storage.
- Comment on Epic Games unveils Launcher V2 in re-attempt to topple Steam, says redesigned storefront is up to 6.5x faster — promises player profiles, user reviews, universal controller support, and much more 2 weeks ago:
Steam: Good featureset, good Linux support, large library, probably going to be around in 10 years.
GOG: Offline installers, some explicitly DRM-free stuff.
What does Epic bring to the table?
