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 'Valve does not get anywhere near enough criticism': DayZ creator Dean Hall says the 'gambling mechanics' of Valve's monetization strategy 'have absolutely no place' in videogames 3 days ago:
- Comment on 'Valve does not get anywhere near enough criticism': DayZ creator Dean Hall says the 'gambling mechanics' of Valve's monetization strategy 'have absolutely no place' in videogames 3 days ago:
The price is off-putting because we can see the sticker in order to get sticker shock. But lootboxes and gambling have no upfront sticker, the cost is obfuscated and extended over years. In that regard, Paradox is much more transparent.
That being said, my beef with them is their "subscription for DLC" model, at least the version I saw being rolled out for EU4. That and the free updates tend to be fairly unbalanced if you don't also buy the corresponding DLC for that update. That seems skeevy... but still not as skeevy as lootboxes.
- Comment on Grandmaster, Popular Commentator Daniel Naroditsky Tragically Passes Away At 29 1 week ago:
Critikal created a great tribute to his mentor on YouTube, should go watch it. RIP
- Comment on Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It’s Like to Own a Cybertruck 2 weeks ago:
It's a Jeep thing.
- Comment on GOG say their preservation program has been "harder than we thought", thanks to DRM and elusive creators 2 weeks ago:
That's journalism right there.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
I don't know, I think a rag calling itself Windows Central might have a bias towards Microsoft...
Even the tone of the article sounds like their arms are tired from carrying their water.
One thing after another, Microsoft is forced to respond time and time again to ongoing rumors that it's leaving the hardware space.
A new Xbox rumor started this weekend that's now blown out of proportion, as usual.
Can you bitch any harder?
- Comment on Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? 3 weeks ago:
I'm not allowed to say "huh, would ya look at that?" Calm down.
- Comment on Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions! 3 weeks ago:
I think Jak and Daxter now has a native PC port.
- Comment on Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions! 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks ago:
100% with you, well put
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks ago:
Sure as shit, there he is, lol
- Comment on Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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] 4 weeks ago:
Give it time
- Comment on Sony is reportedly set to release an updated PS5 DualSense controller with a removable battery | VGC 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks ago:
Common Brasil W
- Comment on Valve apologizes for ruining a Steam game's launch 1 month ago:
Ah, I did miss that part of the article. My mistake.
- Comment on Valve apologizes for ruining a Steam game's launch 1 month 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 1 month 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? 1 month 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 2 months 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? 2 months 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? 2 months 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 2 months 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 2 months 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) 2 months ago:
Almost had me, not gonna lie!