Aceticon
@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI and layoff-happy CEOs: 'Everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis' 1 week ago:
“Somebody else will pay the salaries of our customers”.
As far as I can tell the individual actors extracting more from a system that its capable to support if everybody does the same (the kind of situation Game Theory calls a Tragedy Of The Commons) always think in one of 3 ways:
- They simply don’t think about systemic consequences at all, be it simply that they don’t have the kind of intelligence for it or the purposefully don’t dig down into it because they don’t want to think about consequences.
- They expect the “system” (i.e. somebody else, maybe everybody else) will make up for it so it’s fine if they take more from it than the put back in, as illustrated in my first paragraph.
- They’re aware of what the commulative impact of their actions can or even will have in the future, but they think they themselves and their families will be alright and screw everybody else - essentially that if they can get ahead enough they can ride the wave whilst it crashes.
The same kind of thinking also applies to Ponzi Schemes (like the current AI bubble) - Ignorance (willful or due to lack of knowledge/intelligence), The Many Will Make Up For The Over-Extraction Of The Few and/or I Myself Will Be Alright.
And you know what?
Those people have very good reasons to believe in the second one (that I illustrated at the start) - you look at Neoliberal Capitalism so far that’s what’s been happening as Money acummulates in fewer hands and sin ce with regulations neutralized and Corruption through the roof, those holding most of the wealth can do whatever the fuck they want so they are increasingly pillaging wealth from the rest, and the “system” - i.e. everybody else - just gets poorer and instead of Revolutions and Guillotines for the rich all we see is passive acceptance so the rest so have been making up for the depredations of the few for decades.
And if they’s CEOs they also have very good reasons to believe the third - just look at corporate governance in the last decades, with getting those jobs being far more abour Cronyism than Merit and incompetence being de facto rewards with golden parachutes a even failing upwards.
Given the experience of CEOs for at least the last 3 or 4 decades, it’s pretty rational for them to believe that their depredations wont destroy the Whole enough to come back to them and even if they do, they themselves personally will be alright.
- Comment on Interesting movie detail you've never noticed 1 week ago:
Whilst fear seems to be used to induce hate in many (just listen to the fables of “the need to protect ourselves” coming from the politicians there), I’m pretty sure others just directly hate without the need to be led there through fear.
- Comment on Interesting movie detail you've never noticed 1 week ago:
I think you misspelled the word “hate”.
- Comment on Subtitles 1 week ago:
So substance is the position that MAGAs adopt towards Trump.
- Comment on Is this true? 2 weeks ago:
Generally good open world games have a lot more emergent content - situations that emerge from the interaction of agents and simple mechanics (in the style of how simple rules create complex outcomes in the “Game of Life”) - the whilst good linear games have highly curated scenarios which were created by level designers directly.
For an example of the former, imagine you’re running around the Game World looking for a special kind of plant to create a potion that you need. You come across a battle between bears and a bandit group. When they die their drops are free for the taking and both groups are too high level for you to take on your own. None of this was setup to happen when you crossed some trigger line, it literally just happened because those the entities in those groups are part of enemy “factions” and the patrol route of one group (a route which might itself be procedural rather than fixed) passed near enough the position of the encampment of the other.
Think kind of thing randomly happen is just not something you get in linear games which are generally just set-pieces and even the ability to pull on group of high level enemies to another group has to be designed in (mainly by making the restricted game area big enough for it in that section and placing the groups in the right places).
Emergent content is also why Multiplayer can be a lot of fun, though in this case the “agent” whose interactions can give rise to all sorts of situations are other players.
- Comment on Groceries are expensive and they're too busy talking about culture war 2 weeks ago:
You can literally have TWO right-wing parties entirely in agreement with right-wing policies on those things which have the most impact in the lives of pretty much everybody out there whilst playacting politics with culture wars so that one of the claims to be “leftwing”.
If you’re American (and nowadays, also from most countries in Europe), this description probably sounds very familiar …
- Comment on Groceries are expensive and they're too busy talking about culture war 2 weeks ago:
It’s exactly the point of culture wars to distract people away from the complete total crash in the quality of life for the many due to the bipartisan total agreement in shoving as much money into the hands of the wealthy no mater what the consequences for the rest.
You see it all around the World - the more the “center” “mainstream” “pragmatic” parties agree on managing their country for the good of a few and screw the rest, the more they loudly and exaggeratedly (with the subtlety of 5 year-olds doing putting on a play) “fight” around things like trans-sexuality which are morally solved by the simple logic of “it’s not of my business what others do with their bodies”.
You saw this shit first in the US because that country is the one more advanced in the whole thing of the Money Elites owning the Political Elites and thus them Pillaging the Wealth Of the Many (after all, the US has being doing the whole Pillaging Of The Wealth Of The Powerless for literally decades, just mainly abroad in places like the Middle East and South America, so politicians there have a lot of practice and are pretty much a self-select bunch of Psychopaths and Sociopaths, plus the Press there has long morphed in exactly the same direction becoming little more than Propaganda).
- Comment on Battle.net's discord permissions 4 weeks ago:
And with those permissions they can also do it themselves whenever they see fit from their systems without asking you about it or informing you about it.
Mind you, the really juicy stuff that can be used to make money from is all the information about anything and everything you might be doing in Discord which can be sold to, amongst others, advertisers, rather than the active management stuff.
Somebody in Blizzard activelly decided that merelly letting you post in and read posts from Discord via Battle.Net wasn’t enough and it’s pretty valid to wonder if the decision path was “let’s do a full Discord client in Battle.Net to make it even better for our customers and for that we need permissions for just about everything in Discord” or “let’s get access to information about just about everything our customers do in Discord and we need to make a full Discord client in Battle.net to justify that”.
I know that the answer I would bet on 2 decades ago before the enshittification era isn’t the same I would bet on now.
- Comment on Battle.net's discord permissions 4 weeks ago:
Oh, yeah, permission to manage a person’s friends list in Discord and even block them is a totally “reasonable request”.
/s
- Comment on Why does China have so many multi billionaires if they are aiming to be a communist country? 4 weeks ago:
It was always from the very start meant to maximized the freedom of the Landed classes, nobody else.
- Comment on Disc drive needed 4 weeks ago:
Remember the audio cable that had to be installed inside from the CD player/burned to the motherboard?
If you didn’t install that you couldn’t actual hear the music from audio CDs (which had a different format than data CDs) because it was the player itself processing on the fly the audio tracks like the in the standalone audio-only CD players, rather than it coming in as data to the processor (this was probably done like that because the processors back then were pretty weak plus PCs didn’t have that much memory and audio CDs had the data in PCM format, which is not compressed, so we’re talking tracks of 90MB in systems with less than that in memory).
- Comment on Disc drive needed 4 weeks ago:
Amongst other things it dependend on the country.
As a kid in 1980s Portugal, I used to go to a store selling software for the ZX Spectrum (which loaded the software from audio tapes) where the guy just had a bunch of tape copiers and would copy the game as you waited. This was in the outskirts of Lisbon, so hardly an out of the way place.
Good thing too - that’s how I got my hands on an Assembly compiler and decompiler (this was before the GNU tool suite) and really started my way into programming.
So it was de facto legal enough that somebody could have an actual store doing it.
- Comment on Disc drive needed 4 weeks ago:
I was literally in between jobs living in The Netherlands and by chance was watching CNN International and saw the second plane hit the Twin Towers as it happened.
So, live, a 1/4 of the way around the World.
- Comment on Bloodbath Ahead For EA As It Looks To Cut $700 Million In Annual Costs Under Saudi Arabia 5 weeks ago:
It massivelly depends on what changes and how well in terms of software design the whole is done, and judging from what I’ve seen, for multiple reasons (it’s easier to exploit yound and naived developers and those don’t know how to do good software design; performance tends to be a big thing in games dev and performance optiomizantion generally goes against good software design; it’s an area that tends towards experimentalism rather than well though integrated software design) gamedev isn’t an area of software development were software design tends to be good.
- Comment on Mass layoffs expected at EA as the now-private publisher reportedly tells its new debt masters that it's going to cut $700 million in annual costs 5 weeks ago:
It think they were talking about the undead monster one.
- Comment on Bloodbath Ahead For EA As It Looks To Cut $700 Million In Annual Costs Under Saudi Arabia 5 weeks ago:
It’s even better than that: it’s buying the farm by indebting the farm itself to then butcher the cattle, sell all buildings, sell the lands and sell the tractors, keeping the money.
Private Equity keeps the money from selling the valuable parts of the company whilst the debt is owed by the company, which is now bankrupt and if they properly use Bankruptcy Law they might even manage to extract a bit more money out of the rotting corpse.
- Comment on Bloodbath Ahead For EA As It Looks To Cut $700 Million In Annual Costs Under Saudi Arabia 5 weeks ago:
The Saudi Absolute Monarchy aren’t exactly know for their concern for the average person or their ability in managing anything that’s not the kind of business which is basically a self-operating money printing machine, like Oil.
- Comment on Bloodbath Ahead For EA As It Looks To Cut $700 Million In Annual Costs Under Saudi Arabia 5 weeks ago:
Well, the natural evolution from “keep on squeezing existing IP without inventing anything new” is "“keep in squeezing published games without publishing any new games” .
- Comment on Bloodbath Ahead For EA As It Looks To Cut $700 Million In Annual Costs Under Saudi Arabia 5 weeks ago:
Given their bubby buddy relationship with the Zionist Supremacist Nation, it’s more likely “Saudi Victory Over The Persians”.
- Comment on Bloodbath Ahead For EA As It Looks To Cut $700 Million In Annual Costs Under Saudi Arabia 5 weeks ago:
So, destroy its game making capabilities and just make money for the next 20 years from of microtransaction on existing content.
Kinda of a natural progression of AAA game publishers given the way things are nowadays.
- Comment on Do non-English speakers learn to code in English, or in their native language? 5 weeks ago:
I first learned Dutch as a non-native speaker (I’m Portuguese and lived in The Netherlands for almost a decade) and only after that did I start learning German, and knowing Dutch is both helpful for it (due to things live verb order in the sentence and many, many words being very similar) but also problematic because of the false friends and also because whilst speaking one language words from the other often pop-up instead.
I’ve picked up Spanish because of speaking Portuguese as my native language, but unlike with that language pair were I always know for sure if a word is on one language or the other (probably because Portuguese is my native language), with the Dutch - German language pair that’s not at all the case and they seem to interfere with each other a lot in my mind.
Even though I learned Dutch first and to a much higher level, I don’t really get a feeling of strangeness with German probably because they’re both strange to me.
That said, I do get that strangeness with Spanish, were there are also some weird unexpected things vs Portuguese (like going along a sentence which is pretty much the same thing with a different accent but there’s a single word that’s totally different), though not in composite words since neither language has that.
- Comment on Do non-English speakers learn to code in English, or in their native language? 5 weeks ago:
It’s tradition!
- Comment on Do non-English speakers learn to code in English, or in their native language? 5 weeks ago:
The Dutch word for “who” - wie - is the same as as the German word for “how”.
Nastiest false friend I know because it’s a very common use word in both.
- Comment on They eliminated cashiers and keep the profits. NY Democrats are fighting back. 5 weeks ago:
And yet people still work as “Cashier” if they can get the job,
Wonder why…
Oh, wait, it’s because the alternative of having no job and no income IS EVEN WORSE.
Welcome the Capitalism!
- Comment on Sony doubles down. Only responds to their investors, not the consumers. I've never bought a digital console title. That will continue. 5 weeks ago:
Two things:
- GOG games DO NOT HAVE DRM to play. That’s their store’s unique value proposition. So if you still have that machine with that OS all working you can keep on playing those games forever even if GOG no longer exists. In practice in my experience of over 3 decades as a gamer, you’ll start having problems soon enough even if you refrain from updating that machine’s OS, as the OS version stops being supported as do the apps in it (for example, somebody from my family had Windows 8 until recently and eventually Google mail stopped supporting his browser version and there was no newer version of the browser that still supported Windows 8 - btw that person now has Linux) plus eventually even the machine hardware fails. Point being that an installed game is generally locked to the machine it has been installed in and the OS in it, since during installation it has probably configured a bunch of stuff in places like the registry (it’s not as bad in modern Linux were you can probably get away with just moving the entire home directory and hope for the best, but in Windows it’s still pretty bad). So you’re better off backing up the offline installers.
- I don’t used Heroic but I do use Lutris and the latter has an option to save the game installer when it downloads it from GOG, some maybe Heroic has it too. Given the files Lutris lists as downloading when I “install from GOG”, I bet those files are the offline installer ones.
- Comment on Sony doubles down. Only responds to their investors, not the consumers. I've never bought a digital console title. That will continue. 5 weeks ago:
You want the Goldberg Emulator which is basically a replacement for the steam_api DLL that lets you play those games offline.
Mind you, not all games using Steam DLL will work with it, but many if not most will by just replacing the game’s steam_api DLL with the one from the emulator.
- Comment on Is the world more volatile now or is it just the abundance of news? 1 month ago:
There’s a big Economic Supercycle which lasts about 100 years, or around 3 generations.
We’re now at the most painfull point of that supercycle, when wealth has accumulated in too few hands as has real power, inequality has exploded, social mobility has crashed and growth has ground to a halt, so the elites have switched from capturing most of Economic Growth to pillaging existing wealth from the rest of the population - a handful of people are fine, most people are getting poorer and young people most definitelly don’t have the opportunity to “be anything you want”.
All this, of course, translates into social discontent, increased autoritarianism from those in power in order to keep said power (just notice the fast growing desire from widespread surveillance amongst mainstream politicians as well as the increase in anti-demostration legislation in supposedly Democratic nations) and political movements subsidized by the elites (i.e. the populist Far Right) that scapegoat foreigners (immigrants, “interference” from other nations) for the pain that most people are feeling so that they’re not punishing the local elites for their pillaging and the way they mismanage the country.
All this in turn translates into more wars: if you’re scapegoating foreigners for the pains in your country and/or there is not enough economic growth for the elites to grow more wealthy, then it’s only natural to go to war with other nations, either to “punish” them for their “fault” in the pain of the population or to take their shit to make the local elites richer.
Naturally, when people are discontent and have no real hope to change the way the place they live in is managed or they live somewhere that keeps getting attacked by foreign military because their elites want to steal your shit, a lot of them turn into “extremists”. Also a lot of things which are pretty natural and democratic things to do start getting painted as “extremism” by the mass media owned by the above mentioned elites and/or made illegal by said elites (when directly in power) or the politicians they bought.
And then most of this shit feeds around into reduced Economic growth, so less of it for the elites to capture, hence the elites pillaging even more, propagandize the “foreign enemy” even more, push even more for Far-Right parties and reduced democratic rights even more.
Social flows from Economic and Economic flows from social.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Bear hugs?!
- Comment on Fappucino 1 month ago:
So, both technically and rhetorically a wanker.
- Comment on The most unrealistic part of Odyssey is the journey taking 20 years 1 month ago:
Looks like the good old “Didn’t took a right at the crossroads and continued forward instead and then kept on insisting ‘I know the way’” driving problem.