off_brand_
@off_brand_@beehaw.org
- Comment on Disco Elysium Successor Dev Says He Is Being Sued By The Others 6 days ago:
I mean in this case it was their company at the start. Like they get (or got) money from it in a way that the usual developer doesn’t. And in this case it’s because of a shitty, greedy action we have a pretty easy solution to. That being piracy.
- Comment on The original Facebook was something we’ll never get back 4 weeks ago:
Cringe
- Comment on he got his bachelor's in gender studies circa 1492 1 month ago:
Fuck I thought men were featherless bipeds?
- Comment on Official poster for "The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim" 1 month ago:
first I’ve heard of this show, so forgive me if you’ve heard this before. But. Aren’t all LOTR stories generic, because “generic fantasy” was defined by LOTR in the first place?
- Comment on All five of you will get a free buggy when you next boot up Starfield 2 months ago:
It’s for me that car is for me
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 11th 3 months ago:
Shot in the dark, but would anyone be willing to share a deadlock invite?
- Comment on Valve attempts to deal with jokes, memes and ASCII art reviews on Steam 3 months ago:
I wish it was rarer is all. The joke got old after it was 4 out of 5 reviews with just something like “my girlfriend said she’d buy me this game if this review got 1 million likes” or a big ASCII Heavy giving thumbs up.
YouTube comments are like that too. Everyone wants to be funny. Say something real.
- Comment on Civil servants cannot wear ‘fetish gear’ to work, minister confirms 3 months ago:
Well, the article itself dedicates a section to how she’s been targeted for “gender ideology”, which is dog whistle for “trans”. Calling non-cis gender expression a “fetish” is another dog whistle. Those two points in combination make her trans-ness relevant, even if the author isn’t going so far as to explicitly call out that this anti-trans behavior.
- Comment on Title 3 months ago:
the internet is just… Such a shitty venue for these conversations. I have friends in the real world who disagree with me. If someone is being nasty online I feel no compunction to spend the brainpower on them. Especially as I continue to struggle with the deluge of bad news and it’s affect on my mental health.
Block away, for your own health and well-being.
- Comment on Astronomers discover technique to spot AI fakes using galaxy-measurement tools 3 months ago:
“This image was generated anywhere between 3 and 3 million years ago by an AI”
- Comment on Windows 11 is now automatically enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission 4 months ago:
Right, I recall news from years ago where a bunch of celebrities’ very private photos backed up to iCloud were leaked. They may or may not have known they uploaded those to iCloud, I dunno. But imagine what’s up there if you don’t realize you’re doing a backup. Not just photos, but like scanned documents with vulnerable information. And all that personal info in a centralized server is a big ol honeypot for a malicious actor.
It’s not hard to see why this is a vulnerability, is what I’m getting at.
- 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 would question the efficiency claim. Uber and the like claimed incredible market dominance, driving local food delivery and taxi services out of business. They’re only now really being forced to find profitability.
I wonder if AI is going to be similar. The powerful models right now, as I understand it, have ludicrous power requirements. I don’t know their balance sheets, but in the current race to market share, I’m skeptical that most of these services are in the green.
What that ultimately says about the future I don’t really know. Like it could be we reach some point where the models get better, or more specialized, or something and profit arrive. Or maybe theres a point of diminishing returns where the profit just can’t be made, and once the hype falls off (and investors stop clamoring for AI) these companies will ask what they’re getting for the money spent
- Comment on Raspberry Pi is now a public company 5 months ago:
It comes from the case against Henry Ford after he saw his company was making gobs of cash and decided to give some of that to his employees. Shareholders successfully sued him to stop this on the grounds that he has a fiduciary duty to shareholders.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
As with anything legal, there is nuance, but the basic assertion that there is fiduciary duty to shareholders is not wrong.
- Comment on Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract 6 months ago:
You really can. Right to work, + free speech is only applicable wrt the government.
The fact that it’s legal does not make it moral.
- Comment on Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions 7 months ago:
Not the person you responded to, but: left economically is not left socially.
- Comment on Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions 7 months ago:
Also, it’s cheap to speak total bullshit, but it takes time, effort, and energy, to dispel it. I can say the moon is made of cheese, you can’t disprove that. And you can go out and look up an article about the samples of moon rock we have and the composition, talk about the atmosphere required to give rise to dairy producing animals and thus cheese.
And I can just come up with some further bullshit that’ll take another 30 minutes to an hour to debunk.
If we gave equal weight to every argument, we’d spend our lives mired in fact-checking hell holes. Sometimes, you can just dismiss someone’s crap.
- Comment on Dragon's Dogma 2 MTX 7 months ago:
Ah! Well! I don’t like that!
As with DD1, DD2 is fun and I don’t mean to say it isn’t. The MTX just provides a barrier to entry for folks turned off by it, and I wish it wasn’t there.
- Comment on Dragon's Dogma 2 MTX 7 months ago:
Huh. Did it??
reddit.com/…/are_we_forgetting_that_dd1_had_micro…
Here’s someone corroborating you, but it’s impossible to Google at the moment for obvious reasons. I have 0 recollection of any MTX, though. FWIW, it wouldn’t be any less bad if they did it before too.
To be clear though, it didn’t ruin it. I said it “marred” the game. It is a mark that affects how the game is perceived and I hate that. The game itself is fun, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
- Comment on Dragon's Dogma 2 MTX 7 months ago:
Hate it hate it. This game is so good, and it’s like I’m playing my old favorite again. The fact that they marred my baby with MTX like this is just gross. DD1 should be more popular, and what they did to DD2 may keep it from being the powerhouse it could because people will see the “mixed” ratings and second guess. Or they’ll open the store page and see a wall of MTX and get the wrong idea.
But that’s just part of it of course. If this works for them, it’ll explode. And it will work for them. And everyone will get these fucking MTX in their full priced AAA games. And then once sales on MTX aren’t up to snuff – or if they are up to snuff, but in a few quarters when sales are merely consistent rather than continuing to grow – they’ll start pushing it. Just like they did with Shadow of Mordor where the gameplay gave you a nasty grind and a quick “buy your way past it” option.
I’ll never buy the “it doesn’t effect you in a single player game” argument. It will, because the market incentives a worse experience for those less willing to buy in.