HarkMahlberg
@HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth
People keep asking me, and I haven't really had an answer, but now yeah, I'm thinking I'm back.
- Comment on Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? 4 days ago:
I'm not allowed to say "huh, would ya look at that?" Calm down.
- Comment on Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions! 5 days ago:
I think Jak and Daxter now has a native PC port.
- Comment on Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions! 5 days ago:
Push 1v1 caused a lot of shouting matches between me and my brother. 10/10 would play again, that shit was genius.
- Comment on Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? 5 days ago:
100% with you, well put
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 5 days ago:
I can relate. I played DOS when it had a camera locked to a 90 degree arc. XD
- Comment on Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? 6 days ago:
Sure as shit, there he is, lol
- Comment on Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? 6 days ago:
That is why I get tired about the "individual action" suggestion, that I alone could stop using Amazon and hurt their sales, I could de-Google my life and keep my privacy, or recycle plastic and save the ocean, or swear off AI to fuck with Nvidia.
But all that is a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of people who all readily handed over their lives to these companies and haven't left (or can't). And governments who abdicated regulatory authority to them, which have allowed them to run rampant.
They're still making it so these massive companies have force in my life. I alone can't do anything about that.
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 6 days ago:
Since you mentioned publishers that haven't been greedy, I'll throw a few more out there that I think are worthy of support. They don't need launchers, that don't need accounts, they don't have predatory subscriptions. They just make great games.
- Supergiant Games: Transistor, Hades, Hades II
- Larian Studios: Divinity Original Sin, DOS II, Baldur's Gate 3
- Playstack: Balatro
Otherwise, I'm totally with you. The account-walling of the Internet as a whole has pissed me off royally and I see no reason to give those bastards what they want.
- Comment on Updates to Xbox Game Pass: Introducing Essential, Premium, and Ultimate Plans - Xbox Wire [prices going up] 1 week ago:
Give it time
- Comment on Sony is reportedly set to release an updated PS5 DualSense controller with a removable battery | VGC 1 week ago:
Actually scratch that, the face buttons are mushy as hell and there's nowhere to rest your thumb. I miss jump inputs like I've never played a video game before. None of the every single generation of Dualshocks I've used had such sloppy buttons.
- Comment on Sony is reportedly set to release an updated PS5 DualSense controller with a removable battery | VGC 1 week ago:
God I hope so. My DS5 battery died within a year. It literally loses a full charge overnight, and even when it still worked it only reported battery percentage in 12% increments. My still-chargeable DS4 was still accurate to the 1%.
I still use the DS5 wired because screw e-waste, and ergonomically it's adequate. But the battery problem makes it the worst controller Sony's ever made, and I'm including SIXAXIS in that assessment.
- Comment on Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law 1 week ago:
Common Brasil W
- Comment on Valve apologizes for ruining a Steam game's launch 3 weeks ago:
Ah, I did miss that part of the article. My mistake.
- Comment on Valve apologizes for ruining a Steam game's launch 3 weeks ago:
The article says that Valve is only going to make the game a Daily Deal for a single day. The polygon commenters have it right, why not make it a week?
Why not buy 138,000 copies, one for each user that wishlisted the game, and give those out gratis? At $15 per copy, that's only 2 million dollars. That's a pittance for a company the size of Valve.
- Comment on Bosch dishwasher needs app for many neccessary features 4 weeks ago:
So here's the hot take I took from his video: yeah, an internet connected dishwasher is dumb, but so is a LAN connected dishwasher. "I don't want to have to maintain my own app to run this thing, keep this thing secure," damn straight. That little open source app is probably gonna get abandoned at some point, I don't want to have to fork it and fix things and patch vulnerabilities.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 5 weeks ago:
BG3 is the only game I can think of that's worth an $80 price tag and the moniker of "AAAA." There is a frankly ludicrous amount of stuff in this game. The amount of effort it just have taken, let alone to ship 8 fully featured patches, borders on lunacy.
- Comment on AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare 1 month ago:
You misunderstood, I wasn't saying you can't Ctrl Z after using the output, but that the process of training an AI on a corpus yields a black box. This process can't be reverse engineered to see how it came up with it's answers.
It can't tell you how much of one source it used over another. It can't tell you what it's priorities are in evaluating data... not without the risk of hallucinating on you when you ask it.
- Comment on AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare 1 month ago:
Wild to see you call for a "sane take" when you strawman the actual water problem into "draining the oceans."
Local residents with nearby data centers aren't being told to take fewer showers with salt water from the ocean.
- Comment on AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare 1 month ago:
Beyond the copyright issues and energy issues, AI does some serious damage to your ability to do actual hard research. And I'm not just talking about "AI brain."
Let's say you're looking to solve a programming problem. If you use a search engine and look up the question or a string of keywords, what do you usually do? You look through each link that comes up and judge books by their covers (to an extent). "Do these look like reputable sites? Have I heard of any of them before?" You scroll click a bunch of them and read through them. Now you evaluate their contents. "Have I already tried this info? Oh this answer is from 15 years ago, it might be outdated." Then you pare down your links to a smaller number and try the solution each one provides, one at a time.
Now let's say you use an AI to do the same thing. You pray to the Oracle, and the Oracle responds with a single answer. It's a total soup of its training data. You can't tell where specifically it got any of this info. You just have to trust it on faith. You try it, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. If it doesn't, you have to write a new prayer try again.
Even running a local model means you can't discern the source material from the output. This isn't Garbage In Garbage Out, but Stew In Soup Out. You can feed an AI a corpus of perfectly useful information, but it will churn everthing into a single liquidy mass at the end. And because the process is destructive, you can't un-soup the output. You've robbed yourself of the ability to learn from the input, and put all your faith into the Oracle.
- Comment on Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs? 1 month ago:
understand that you do not need to use vacation hours for statutory holidays
Our HR software already accounts for federal holidays. When you put in the request for time off, you give it a start and end date on a calendar control, and it calculates the number of hours you plan to use, working around holidays, weekends, even existing PTO requests.
I'm not saying you should buy that software, but I am saying it's a solved problem... It's automatic, the user doesn't need to do anything special.
Now we have other forms that COULD be automatic but AREN'T which causes big issues when people make simple typos... But I don't see the need to run an energy consuming LLM to implement that feature.
- Comment on Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs? 1 month ago:
I'm gonna take this comment, blow it up to poster size, and put it in my office, right in front of my webcam so I can watch my boss squint trying to read it.
- Comment on 4chan will refuse to pay daily UK fines, its lawyer tells BBC 1 month ago:
I used to think that was a good idea too: sequester 4chan, make it the sin-eater of the internet at large.
But as we learned through 2014-2016, from Gamergate to the alt-right to MAGA, 4chan didn't need to break for them to go elsewhere. And not just elsewhere, but everywhere. A single 4channer could make multiple reddit accounts, twitter accounts, and fake facebook profiles. But what allowed their work to reach larger audiences was to use /pol/ to coordinate their brigades across the internet. 4chan's anonymity and lack of persistent logs made that easy. Russian state actors infiltrated their ranks as other anons. As obnxious trolls looking to get a rise out of people, they had huge blinds spots and failed to see this for what it was (or looked the other way). Once installed, they could launder propaganda by making it look like it was coming from seemingly American sources, all across the internet, all at the same time. The anons were Putin's useful idiots.
The argument of sequestering the social pariahs to 4chan implies they are physically locked up there, imprisoned but satisfied, uninterested in engaging the internet at large. But clearly that isn't true. You can't leave the Nazis in one corner of the bar - it becomes the Nazi bar. If you want to fight them, you have to remove them from the common spaces, and then remove their own spaces. Unfortunately, the cancer of fascism has metastasized all across the internet, now originating from people who have never heard of "this four chan." Fighting that is going to require us to stop falling for the paradox of tolerance and start kicking the Nazis out, whether we have laws to do so or not.
- Comment on 4chan will refuse to pay daily UK fines, its lawyer tells BBC 1 month ago:
4chan has been all too eager to spread Russian propaganda for over a decade, and has been a festering sore on the internet even longer still. I wouldn't let the paradox of tolerance bind us to 4chan of all places. OP is right, nothing of value would be lost.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong - Special Announcement Stream (starts in 48 hours) 1 month ago:
Almost had me, not gonna lie!
- Comment on Can we talk about the Roblox situation? 1 month ago:
Warning, this article is graphic but it goes over nearly everything that is fucked up about Roblox.
- Comment on [Update: Valve Responds] Mastercard Denies Pressuring Steam To Censor 'NSFW' Games 2 months ago:
If they do, that includes them. Decision makers at all levels, nobody gets to say "hey I didn't make Mastercard act this way." Because the status quo would have been to carry on processing video game payments, even in the face of a minority faction like Collective Shout.
- Comment on [Update: Valve Responds] Mastercard Denies Pressuring Steam To Censor 'NSFW' Games 2 months ago:
Unless MC and Visa are run by people who already agree with Collective Shout and are just using them as an excuse to enforce this policy.
- Comment on The Hype is the Product 2 months ago:
Quantum huh? I was gonna guess it would be brain chips given Muk's obsession with it.
- 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' 2 months ago:
Eat shit Yves.
- Comment on The Star Wars Outlaws flop - Guillemot blames waning interest in the franchise 2 months ago:
Did Guillemot not hear about Andor? The costs of a Disney Plus subscription vs a $70 game aside, that show respected the viewer's time and intelligence in all the ways Outlaws didn't. But I'm not surprised the heads of Ubisoft lack basic retrospection. Regurgitating past successes is all they know how to do, and how could they be wrong? Must be the rest of the world. :/