Aceticon
@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Battle.net's discord permissions 6 days 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 6 days 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? 1 week ago:
It was always from the very start meant to maximized the freedom of the Landed classes, nobody else.
- Comment on Disc drive needed 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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? 2 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? 2 weeks ago:
It’s tradition!
- Comment on Do non-English speakers learn to code in English, or in their native language? 2 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. 2 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. 2 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. 2 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? 2 weeks 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 2 weeks ago:
Bear hugs?!
- Comment on Fappucino 2 weeks ago:
So, both technically and rhetorically a wanker.
- Comment on The most unrealistic part of Odyssey is the journey taking 20 years 2 weeks 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.
- Comment on Hell yeah. 3 weeks ago:
So libraries have turned in to dens of Hookers & Blow?!
- Comment on Why is AOC a big deal? She just speaks common sense and calls out absurdity. Have we really gone that far off the rails where we don't do it ourselves? 3 weeks ago:
Hard-right even.
We’re I live, Portugal, the policies of the Democrats are closest to those of a local party called Iniciativa Liberal (Liberal Initiative) who are considered Far-Right ultra Neoliberal (and were started by people with A LOT of money rather than being a naturally growing movement).
In most of Europe the mainstream parties (whether they used to be center-left or center-right) nowadays are Neoliberal, but the version of that ideology of the US Democract Party is harder than even the old center-right mainstream in Europe (which is how even an EU under a majority of the EPP - which are the EU level group of such parties - is still a lot more pro-consumer than the Democrats, though things have been getting worse).
- Comment on Miyamoto: Games based on developers’ personal interests resonate around the world, not those aiming for global appeal | VGC 3 weeks ago:
It’s the same kind of advice that used to float in the Tech Startup world before it became dominated by money men and frauds: the best project is one that scratches and itch you have.
- Comment on 'Starvation Wages' at Giant US Corporations Force Workers to Seek Taxpayer-Funded Aid 3 weeks ago:
In Britain they call their version of this shit “Working Poor”.
- Comment on Teserract may be opensource, but adding myself would feel disingenuous 3 weeks ago:
If you’re to the left of Kissinger, you’re a “leftist” to the kind of people who think secret shadowban lists which are dynamically fetched from an external server are a good thing.
- Comment on Former Valve writer says PlayStation killing physical discs is no conspiracy: "You, the consumer, have made your choice, and the choice is for digital" 4 weeks ago:
Download the offline installer and now you have possession.
Further, because GOG enforces no DRM or mandatory sign-ins, so that means that you also have control over that copy of the game - you can install it and play it however and whenever you see fit.
For GOG games were you downloaded and kept the offline installer, the only way that the righsholder has of stopping you from installing and playing that game is to sue you, which is:
- Almost certainly not worth it for then due to the cost of taking somebody to court for it versus what they would gain if they won.
- They actually have to have an actual legal basis for unilateraly changing the licensing agreement with you and hence be allowed to block you from continuing with the activity you have a license for (installing and running that game), which they almost certainly do not have in pretty much the whole World since EULAs aren’t valid there (they’re considered an attempt at, after a sale is completed, forcing unilateral changes to the implicit contract which is the sale, so have no legal validity)
With other stores they can just force the store to take down the game and now it’s up to YOU to sue THEM to get restitution and the “not worth it” is now something that goes against you (unless you have access to a Small Claims Court in the jurisdiction you’re in, are you really going to sue them for a 50 bucks game?)
In fact, physical media is worse than digital GOG games, because the former can have phone-home DRM or mandatory sign-ins so you have possession but not control.
- Comment on Alternative medicine 4 weeks ago:
How about you and your strawman find a room, since you see really into it.