network_switch
@network_switch@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Australia Completely Loses The Plot, Plans To Ban Kids From Watching YouTube 4 days ago:
i can see why from my personal experience. Even back in like 2014 I viewed YouTube as home to crackpot conspiracy theorists because of friend’s I’d seen go down YouTube rabbit holes and pretty much go crazy. Facebook and YouTube. Facebook was home to stupid image macros of stupid conspiracy theories. YouTube for crazy hyper edited conspiracy nut videos. YouTube where someone wants your email or number so they can send you a video you should watch and you learn the person you met is crazy
To this day other social media platforms have cycled in and out as conspiracy theorist and school shooters favorite platform. YouTube has never cycled out since it enabled anyone to upload video
Instagram has always been the self hate/image problems/terrible life planning thinking life after your 20s then a person gets to 30 and realize they actually want to have happy next 30 years too and they shouldn’t have spent all their money and time chasing dreams they made each day watching other people on Instagram. 6th graders with skin care routines and wanting to show off a lavish lifestyle at like 11 years old, that’s Instagram.
YouTube and Instagram are the worst to me. Facebook used to be worse than Instagram and YouTube but YouTube and Instagram have gotten more important and worse while Facebook has become less important over time while probably being just as bad as before
- Comment on Steam Survey for July 2025 shows Linux approaching 3% 4 days ago:
I’ve been advocating for Linux for a long time. At least to people I know use nothing but the web browser. Gaming and art have been a slow grind. Gaming Steam Deck was the game changer for single player gamers.
Art, it’s people that never use software close to their fullest but feel like they have to use what their favorite YouTuber/social media personality uses. Professionals I never encourage a switch unless they’re paid too. Already stressed doing edits in the software they know to make a deadline let alone adding in learning new software
Hobbyist and aspiring indies, you don’t work with a team of a dozen editors, try Kdenlive. Solo music artist, try ardour especially if you don’t even plan to drop your day job for a full time pursuit of a music career. At least practically every hobbyist I’ve met that focuses on digital drawing/painting uses Krita
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 2 weeks ago:
At least Germany, Spain, and Italy have resurgent far right political movements. I am not about to trust government payment systems to not eventually be abused as technology makes control and surveillance easier. A holy book can be replaced with whatever new age self-help, health movement, anti-<ethnicity/sexuality/religion> movement. All it takes is some instability and desperation and people will support whatever or turn a blind eye to whatever they may think is not their problem or they may potentially benefit from. Good for the EU to run their own payment systems. When a conservative wave takes a large enough majority in governance someday, it’ll be the same problem as Visa/Mastercard/etc
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 2 weeks ago:
To me it’s an inevitability that if the EU weans itself off Mastercard/Visa, then EU based payment processors whether credit based or something like SEPA payments for a digital EURO would be censored. The EU would be happy to handle their own business and that may just end up no different than American companies and the American government. The European right can fight against porn while fighting for independent finance infrastructure
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 2 weeks ago:
You’re a dick. Hope you get better
Practically the whole world has been having an authoritarian/conservative shift. I would not expect the EU and ECB to be a progressive force for sex work. The EU has been pushing to break encryption for a solid decade now. Visa and Mastercard process 90% of transactions outside of China. They’re huge. I don’t see why ECB leadership would be particularly less conservative and risk averse than Visa and Mastercard. Bankers are usually on the conservative side of politics
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 2 weeks ago:
We already have the example of now itch and steam getting hit by payment processor restricted on content. YouTube and advertisers wanting to not be shown on categories of content and demonetized channels. I remember headlines about Pixiv and payment processors some time ago
Lose access to the major payment processors and they’ll lose far more than 7%. Until there’s a means of payment thats popular enough to replace centralized authority payment processing, it’s an easy choice for businesses to sacrifice their sex related sales to not sacrifice the larger portion of their sales that they’d lose without support of major payment processors.
The way things are going, there’s going to be the need for popular NSFW specific stores that don’t use Visa/Mastercard, private bank transfers, or national bank transfers. There’s a split in internet video where porn sites are separate from stuff like YouTube. This payment processor content moderation is in the same vein as advertisers on YouTube and other social media networks
- Comment on Itch.io is delisting NSFW games due to pressure from payment processors 2 weeks ago:
The various groups trying to ban payments for NSFW products and whatever else they don’t like would just target the ECB and member states to restrict transactions they don’t like
- Comment on Ubisoft CEO responds to the Stop Killing Games petition, stating the publisher is 'working on' improving its approach to end-of-life support, but that 'nothing is eternal' 3 weeks ago:
Games from half a decade ago
Pretty sure Brood War and Counter Strike never stopped working. In the past on PC, developers released the files needed to host your own servers for online games. Ubisoft has been gleefully trying to kill offline single player games for over a decade though. The best we can hope for is that Ubisoft fades go irrelevance or even fully close shop so money can flow to better gaming companies
- Comment on Mass Effect 5 is "still in pre-production" says director as BioWare shifts full focus to the sci-fi RPG amid dev reshuffles and reported layoffs 3 weeks ago:
So 2030 at best for a new game
Bioware dodged making a milky way game after ME3 and didn’t make anything compelling for andromeda. 2030+, 18+ years after ME3 release, got to keep any expectations super low especially after Veilguard happened where that at least had the David Gaider lore bible to finish off the plot threads of the first 3 games. Bioware characters and multigame plots from scratch modern Bioware, that is not an exciting prospect
- Comment on Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed 3 weeks ago:
I think that’ll still be the problem with it being in the storefront at all. Some parents org makes large enough fuss about porn games on Steam and payment processors demand stronger moderation rather than have their brands associated with Steam and whatever may be released on it
- Comment on Valve gets pressured by payment processors with a new rule for game devs and various adult games removed 3 weeks ago:
I don’t think there’s a way for Valve to avoid this. Like I don’t think it would be enough to mark games as only available for purchase without support from the major payment processors/rails. Like disable those and add crypto payment support and only use those for those games. Those games being on the store that major payment processors support, they’ll not want those on a store they support
This is a case where probably should be another store that doesn’t use major payment processors but until alternative payment rails became popular, it’d be a low sales volume store. I know cryptocurrency has negative connotations because of the community, but I think those currencies are the only long term solution for people making porn games or whatever type of content that may have rich/powerful groups wanting to suppress
- Comment on ROG Xbox Ally Is $700 And Xbox Ally X Is $1050 4 weeks ago:
I’m guessing maybe having the Xbox branding entails some certification fee? Also is the base Z2 supposed to be stronger than the Z1 Extreme? It’ll be rough to compete with older Z1 Extreme handhelds and presumably any of the Z2 family of chips that come with SteamOS
- Comment on EA reportedly shelves Need For Speed completely to focus on other projects 4 weeks ago:
I tried to play through Unbound and I couldn’t deal with the writing. It was “hello fellow kids” to me which I feel has been a worsening problem with video game writing since Borderlands 2. Even worse with it feels to me like video game writing really tried to moralize moral grey’s or bad behavior or make characters not just people that want to go fast, make money, feel cool, getting in trouble with the law for going an incredibly dangerous for anyone in your vicinity speed disobeying traffic signals, probably associated with organized and just trying to survive, …, they’re actually people just trying to express themselves and find community of deep down kind and good people
Also I felt like I was playing rich/sheltered kids ideas of street racing and people that live in the night. Way too idealistic. Should be way more cutthroat, emotional burnouts just trying to go fast as their happy/thrill place. The sheltered/rich kids fantasy comes to mind when games try to make living among graffiti and gangs as like living among street art and community health organizations. It’s the digital nomad view of local (underground) cultures
- Comment on EA reportedly shelves Need For Speed completely to focus on other projects 4 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t know how to fix the series so that it’d sell. Same as burnout. The arcade open world racing game with a sterile storyline is dominated by Forza Horizon. Cop chases don’t seem to spark excitement like before the PS3 era. Street racing doesn’t seem to spark excitement like the pre-PS3 era. I’m thinking every game after NFS Carbon hasn’t been able to capture any sense of mystique of street racing and that just may be that street racing isn’t culturally significant anymore. Fast and the Furious isn’t about street racing anymore
With Forza Motorsport seemingly on the way out, there’s room for a multiplatform Gran Turismo competitor. Something that’s gamepad centric rather than wheel. Seems just as hard to resonate with gamers as these other racing games though
- Comment on Linux users: Are we over-reliant on Steam? 4 weeks ago:
They’ll streamline better over time. These open source WINE frontends/orchestrators may as well have 2 eras, before and after Proton. Before Proton they had little developer interest so development was slow. After Proton, influx of users and more developers interest in working on open source Linux gaming tools and Lutris rapidly got better and Heroic popped up. PlayOnLinux got left to historic obscurity in the history of Linux gaming
So I’m not concerned about Steam reliance. Everything outside of Steam is so much easier because of Valves open source contribution and the growth of the community. Pretty much because of Valve, Lutris/Heroic/etc became better at a faster pace and will continue getting because of what Steam did for Linux gaming in the past decade
- Comment on 'Xbox Hardware Is Dead,' Says Founding Team Member, 'It Looks Like Xbox Has No Desire — Or Literally Can't — Ship Hardware Anymore' - IGN 5 weeks ago:
I’ve watched a video of hers before. My takeaway was that Microsoft is a heavily bloated company that suffocates internal development but with the OG Xbox and early 360, they were like a side bet that didn’t have a great deal of oversight from MS Windows/Office/Server mega money eyes.
They didn’t have a great deal of internal dev studios but they were really good at identifying third party exclusives to pursue and early on managed them and the few studios they did fully acquire well. It worked well for the first Xbox and first half 360. It differentiated the Xbox/360 from Nintendo and Playstation
Then I guess success led to changes in leadership aimed at growth and using Xbox as a platform to push more MS services and they lost the focus and ability to identify and secure great third party exclusives. That coupled with not having internal game dev teams in numbers and experience like Nintendo and Sony meant if they didn’t hit with their living room smart device dominance ambition, they’d just have a worse PlayStation. That’s what they ended up with with the XOne - a worse PS4. Then it happened again with the XSX because of lack of execution with their internal studios. An XSX just became a PS5-lite library-wise
- Comment on Randy Pitchford asks fans if they'd swallow future Borderlands exclusivity deals, almost 10,000 people say just put your damn games on Steam 5 weeks ago:
Pitchford is the only person in the industry that seems to love the smell of their own farts as much as Tim Sweeney
- Comment on A US law firm is taking NordVPN to Court over "deceptive" auto-renewal pricing – here's what we know 1 month ago:
Canceling NordVPN was a pain. It took numerous emails across numerous days for them to cancel and remove my credit card info. Lesson learned, I only pay with PayPal where I can revoke permission for recurring payments or pay with crypto. Went expressvpn to the cheaper nordvpn then to proton unlimited
- Comment on Steam Deck and SteamOS hit 20,000 playable games 1 month ago:
I have one. I think it’s too big. It’s fine if I’m playing with my elbows rested on something but anytime my elbows aren’t backed by something, it’s not ideal. And then whenever I travel, with a case it is bulky. I got a Switch 2 and that feels great to carry around regardless of less ergonomic hand grips
- Comment on Steam Deck and SteamOS hit 20,000 playable games 1 month ago:
Real just need Steam Deck performance and screen size but like 100-200 grams lighter. I’m guessing once AMD starts churning out 3nm UDNA APUs will be the time for PC handhelds to go a lot more mainstream. FSR4 will be a great boon for low powered gaming
- Comment on Steam Deck and SteamOS hit 20,000 playable games 1 month ago:
I’m pretty sure people have been playing Tales of Berseria on Steam Decks for 3 years and it still says unsupported. Seems perfect to me
- Comment on Nintendo warns Switch 2 GameChat users: “Your chat is recorded” 2 months ago:
The first time some coworkers told me things they discussed with other work friends over the internal chat service, I was in shock over the stupidity
- Comment on Even Starfield's community patch modders are growing 'disenchanted' with the sci-fi RPG, as volunteers depart in droves: 'If nobody comes forward, we may have to retire the project' 2 months ago:
Maybe it would have been better received 10 years ago but I don’t know about being beloved like the elder scrolls or fallout games. 10 years ago was Fallout 4 but even in Skyrim era, it’d be great graphics but without the wonderful whimsy
Starfield is too normal. Bethesda games excel when they take the weirdness of the world seriously. Starfield is too serious conceptually. Elder Scrolls, just the concept of everything being canon because of dragon breaks and other weird aedra/daedra/chim/godhead shenanigans lets writers write wild while it still fitting in as serious in universe
They’ve managed to do that well enough with Fallout even though it’s supposed to be alternate reality world. Still wacky even if not as lore interesting as TES
Starfield is too unimaginative of a sci-fi universe so far. It’s too normal and because of that, they can’t write whacky in a way that people buy into and love. So then they end up judging the game by its systems and mechanics and technical merit way more than they do elder scrolls games or fallout.
Also base/ship building is given too much focus for a single player game. These games aren’t pretty enough to be a single player game that gets beloved for base building like Animal Crossing
- Comment on Next gen PS and Xbox consoles scheduled for 2027, tipped by cancelled Blade Runner game 3 months ago:
I have a Legion Go with Bazzite. Happily playing the Oblivion remaster on it. Just have to set the TDP to 20+ to get stable 36fps+ at low settings. Looks good to me
Besides that I mostly play Hades 1/2, Warm Snow, Victor Vran, and turn based JRPG games and the Yakuza games turn based or action. The only thing kind of hardware intensive graphics are the latest Yakuza/Like a Dragon games. Hades and Warm Snow have me interested in trying more rouguelites. Afterimage is getting me into metroidvanias. A bunch of games-games.
Yakuza and the JRPG can be narrative heavy but usually more over the top nonsensical or whimsical which I enjoy a lot more now that I’m getting towards middle age and edgy like I had thought as a teenager and in my 20s don’t feel as “adult” like how I now recognize “adult”
- Comment on Next gen PS and Xbox consoles scheduled for 2027, tipped by cancelled Blade Runner game 3 months ago:
Definitely the least excited I’ve ever been for a console. 1st Xbox SX buyer that eventually traded in for a PS5 and it’s incredibly redundant with my PC. At this point I’m happy playing on Steam Deck level graphics settings. Next consoles need a better gimmick than better ray tracing, bigger open worlds, more fetch quests to advertise scale
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 3 months ago:
I think DarkTable is as powerful if not moreso than Lightroom but Lightroom has AI image processing tools that will get things done quicker.
The whole of software dev is dominated with open source softtware. So like PostgreSQL, text editors like Lapce or Zed, KVM/QEMU/Virt-Manager, torrent programs like qBitorrent, VPN like OpenVPN or Wireguard. Pretty much all the video game console emulators. For a while you would get Linux game ports that would use proprietary wrappers but eventually WINE would become better anyways. Don’t know if there’s a proprietary software better than QGIS for that. I love Distrobox and Boxbuddy. Git.
Web browsers based off Chromium or Firefox, OBS, Handbrake, VLC, ffmpeg, image magick. Krita and Blender are competitive with proprietary software. I think the latest Pinta is solid as a paint.net analogue. Audacity is super popular. Ardour for more complex things. Kdenlive isn’t as good but solid enough for the vast majority of people in my opinion.
Topaz Gigapixel is top but Upscayl is good. I always liked Windows Task Manager but on Linux I think Mission Center is just as good. None of the open source stuff competes against Topaz Video AI in my experience
KeepassXC password manager. At some point I stopped using winrar and was all in on 7-Zip and Peazip if not just using the Linux file roller software that the distro came with. I’m happy with Jellyfin over Plex. There’s Kodi. Over the years I always see people use draw.io
- Comment on OpenAI Finalizes $40 Billion Funding at $300 Billion Valuation 4 months ago:
Insane to me with how much competition there is that are just as good along with all the free stuff available. It’s not like early YouTube growing an insane amount of content before it started monetizing heavily. OpenAI is one of like a dozen, probably more, generative AI companies that are all close to each other in quality