Infrapink
@Infrapink@thebrainbin.org
Hi, I'm Infrapink! I used to be @infrapink, but that instance is down. I'm also @infrapink and @infrapink
- Comment on Number of hours you need to work to buy GTA VI around the world 1 week ago:
Initial thought: My country is looking pretty good, quite a bit better than the Brits!
But then @plyth pointed out that the numbers of Russia and Türkiye are drastically different between the Euope and Asia maps, so I decided to do a bit of digging.
The Europe map just says they used "a mathematical formula that determines the working time", but the other maps indicate they used the median income rather than minimum wage, so let's go with that.
According to the Central Statistics Office, median weekly income in the first three months of 2026 AD was €1074.61, which works out to €26.87 an hour assuming a person gets paid for 40 hours each week. €26.87/hr * 2.19hr/GTA6 = €58.83/GTA6). Which, uh, considering GTA6 is going to cost €79.99, either these people aren't using the median. Someone earning the actual median wage would need to work just shy of three hours to afford 1 GTA6, and that's not taking taxes into account.
All right, let's check the UK. According to the House of Commons Library, the median weekly income is £767, which for a 40-hour week works out to £19.18 (that's €22.38, which is a fair bit lower than the Irish median. I wonder if Brexit has something to do with this). If the map is using median income and ignoring taxes, it means that GTA6 will cost £95.68 in the UK, which it fucking won't (because it's €111.62). The BBC reports that it will cost £70, which is about normal; the UK price is normally computed by taking the cost in yankeebucks, applying an exchange rate of 0.9 English lira per yankeebuck, rounding it to the nearest £10, and subtracting 1p. At the actual price, the map indicates that the median income in the UK is £14.03 an hour, which is just £1.32 above the minimum wage for people over 20.
(Some of the above figures have a discrepancy of 1% of the unit of currency due to rounding).
So yeah, I have no idea where these people are getting their numbers from or what maths they're doing.
- Comment on Number of hours you need to work to buy GTA VI around the world 1 week ago:
It's going to be €80.
- Comment on Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles 1 week ago:
yet all of the comments below their post prefer physical
Comment sections are not a representative sample. These are people who actively follow Sony news and care enough about physical media to leave angry comments.
I prefer physical media myself because I'm a middle-aged fogey, but if you want to see how PlayStation players as a whole are buying games, you have to look at Sony's financials. Since Sony are a publicly traded company, those are publicly available
The relevant data is on page 12 of this supplemental document
In FY 2025, Sony made G¥121,159 on physical game sales and G¥949,799 on digital game sales. Those numbers exclude DLC, which is listed separately (and combined with lootboxes). In short, Sony make 7.8 times as much on sales of digital games (excluding DLC and microtransactions!) as they do on physical games. To put it another way, physical game sales make up just 11% of Sony's revenue from game sales (again, excluding DLC and microtransactions). And that figure has been trending downward ever since the PS3.
The obvious caveat here is that lots of indie games never get physical releases, which skews the ratio toward digital. That's true, but the same page of the document shows that of games that get physical releases, 76% of sales are still digital.
The fact of the matter is we're a dying breed. Most people today either prefer the convenience of digital games or are just indifferent. Comment sections may say one thing, but actual data shows a massive trend toward digital games.
- Comment on Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles 1 week ago:
I'm mostly just surprised that Microsoft didn't do it before Sony.
- Comment on Are Lemmy and Mbin the same instance? 1 week ago:
Mu.
Lemmy and mbin are different software. You are on lemmy.ca, which is a Lemmy instance. There are other websites that run Lemmy, notably lemmy.world, beehaw.org, and sopuli.xyz. They are different, independent websites, but they all run Lemmy, and thus are all Lemmy instances.
All these sites communicate with each other because Lemmy is based on ActivityPub, a protocol for letting social media accounts on different websites talk to each other. (A common analogy is that email lets people on different websites communicate because it's all based on SMTP).
My account is on thebrainbin.org, a website that runs mbin. mbin is less popular than Lemmy, but there are still a few other websites that run it, including kbin.earth and fedia.io. Each of these sites is an mbin instance, and because mbin, like Lemmy, is built on ActivityPub, all those websites are able to talk to each other.
Now you might be thinking that, because Lemmy and mbin are both built on AcitivityPub, then logically accounts on Lemmy instances should be able to interact with accounts on mbin instances and vice versa. And if you think that, you are correct. The reason you see posts from Lemmy when using an mbin account and vice versa is that the various instances all use AcitivityPub to talk to each other, even though they're on different websites.
But it doesn't stop there! Mastodon is also built on ActivityPub, but aims to be like the website formerly known as Twitter, whereas Lemmy and mbin both try to be similar to Reddit. But because it's all ActivityPub, accounts on Mastodon instances and interact with accounts on Lemmy and mbin instances and vice versa.
The same applies to other ActivityPub software, such as Sharkey (imitates Tumblr), Akkoma (also Tumblr), PeerTube (YouTube), and WriteFreely (blog).
- Comment on What's a word for "I actively endorse it for others even though I dislike it”? 2 weeks ago:
"Not my cup of tea"
- Comment on Kingdom Hearts AI art accusations hit Square Enix, and that sure looks like slop to me 2 weeks ago:
OK, so Disney licensed their characters to OpenAI for three years so they can be legally used in Sora-generated videos; I figure Disney gets a cut of OpenAI's revenue proportional to how often people use Disney's characters. This includes Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm in addition to core. The article says that some vetted Sora-generated videos will go up on Disney+ (so nothing violent or sexual). And apparently they'll be doing something with OpenAI's stuff on Disney+.
So it's a contract, but they didn't buy a company. Well there goes that hope.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Yes, languages get mistaken for each other all the time when one is not familiar with the writing system, and sometimes even when one is. I have struggled to understand posts in Spanish before realising they're actually in Portuguese, which I don't speak. (Also I'm pretty sure Norwegian and Danish are actually the same language).
Can you tell the difference between Telugu and Kannada just by looking at them? How about Arabic and Persian? How about Arabic and Ottoman Turkish? Persian and Kurdish? Yoruba and Xhosa? Ukrainian and Kazakh? Sumerian and Akkadian? Actually, could you tell the difference between Akkadian and Old Persian? They are both written with cuneiform characters, but the characters themselves are apparently as different as hiragana and hangul.
If your sentence is written entirely in Chinese characters, there is no way for somebody unfamiliar with them to determine whether it's Japanese, Mandarin, or Hokkien. And if somebody hasn't seen enough Japanese text to figure out the difference between kana and Chinese characters, they still won't be able to tell the difference.
As to why Google can't tell, Google doesn't actually understand anything. It's based on a massive database of which characters and combinations of characters come next to each other (and there's also some Markov stuff to account for common spelling mistakes). If your search string is made entirely of Chinese characters, it's going to get hits on websites written with Chinese characters, many of which will be in Mandarin. Google.com probably isn't able to detect your UI or browser language settings. To ensure you get results from Japan, try using google.jp instead, as it will prioritise Japanese results.
- Comment on Kingdom Hearts AI art accusations hit Square Enix, and that sure looks like slop to me 2 weeks ago:
Nintendo don't use generative LLMs because of the copyright issues. Disney are even more lawyertastic than Nintendo. Hopefully a small batallion of Disney's lawyers will show up at Squenix's offices and tell them to cut that crap out.
- Comment on How much money do you think Superman could make if he offered his services to NASA as a launch vehicle? 3 weeks ago:
$0. Because first and foremost, he is a goodie-two-shoes who wouldn't charge for it. And even if he was willing to charge, doing so would mean compromising his secret identity.
- Comment on Is there a sublemmy where people suggest ideas for a sublemmy? specifically, a sublemmy to review fediverse instances. 3 weeks ago:
Even on Lemmy (and also PieFed), they're officially called communities.
I use mbin and we call them magazines fir some reason.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
I would make it illegal to buy a house if the buyer already owns a house which is unoccupied for at least half the year.
Patents expire if six months pass during which the patent holder does not make any products which use that patent. The countdown dies not reset if the patent is sold or traded away.
Companies must publicly post everybody's wages once a year.
All job ads must include wages offered and all benefits. Candidates can try to negotiate higher wages if they wish, but they at least know where the floor is.
Any digital product sold or "licenced" with DRM must be patched to remove the DRM if the verification server goes down (Stop Killing Games is actually making some solid progress on making this into EU law).
Sex workers sharing a home out of which they both work shall not be considered a brothel.
Living off the proceeds of a prostitute will be legal as long as there is no coërcion. The existing law mostly makes it illegal for sex workers to rent homes or support disabled friends and family members, while pimps simply ignore the law.
- Comment on What’s your favorite video game that most people didn’t like ?? 5 weeks ago:
No, I'm actually quite big.
- Comment on What’s your favorite video game that most people didn’t like ?? 5 weeks ago:
I genuinely think Daikatana is a decent (but flawed) game.
- Comment on If I have PMOS would I be allowed to participate in the Olympics? 5 weeks ago:
You're thinking of Caster Semenya. She's XX, she just happens to have unusually high testosterone levels.
If you aren't taking testosterone... I have no idea, but I would imagine you could compete as whichever gender you wish.
- Comment on Call of controversy? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 imagines a revived Korean war 1 month ago:
It's a prequel starring Phoenix's Japanese ancestor in the 19th century. I haven't played any of the games so I don't know how it translates. I do know that Sherlock Holmes had to be renamed Herlock Sholmes because copyright can be ridiculous.
- Comment on Does anybody actually work from 09:00 to 17:00 1 month ago:
Workin' 8 to 5
What a way to make a livin' - Comment on Does anybody actually work from 09:00 to 17:00 1 month ago:
Where do you work and are they hiring?
- Submitted 1 month ago to [deleted] | 87 comments
- Comment on What gaming console you owned disappointed you the most and why ? 1 month ago:
The Game Gear has an entire CFL bulb behind the screen. A popular mod is to swap it out for some LEDs, which consume an order of magnitude less power.
- Comment on How is Alexander the Great so great he gets that name, but not so great that just “Alexander”doesn’t disambiguate him? 2 months ago:
Atilla is a pretty common name in Hungary and Türkiye.
- Comment on What’s the difference between communism and socialism? 2 months ago:
The terms themselves are somewhat vague and slippery. Marx and Engels used them interchangeably. The USSR and China really tainted the word communism, which is why socialism is much more common nowadays.
As I understand it, communism is a form of socialism. Socialism is ultimately about worker control over the means of production, rather than private capital. As such, socialists inherently support strong unions, and the sensible ones also support social welfare, minimum wage, and basic income so that business owners have less leverage to exploit their workers.
If you just take workers' rights to it logical conclusio, you get market socialism. This is an economic system in which all privately-owned (including publicly-traded) companies are replaced with worker-owned coöperatives, which still compete in a market.
Communism goes further. Self-identified communists will tell you that communism is a moneyless. classless, stateless society where the means of production are held in common by those who use them. If this sounds like anarchism, it basically is.
However, communists in the 20th century were mostly vamguardists. This idea, pioneered by Lenin, advocates for a vanguard of smarties who understand communism to overthrow the government and impose communism from the top down, fixing the system on behalf of those workers too stupid to join the revolution. Workers who did not support the revolution would see that everything was much better with the communist vanguard in charge, and would embrace communism. If a few insisted on being counterrevolutionary, they would just need to be reëducated.
The Russian Revolution was heavily criticised by anarchists at the time, on the grounds that if the revolution does not rise from below, it is simply a coup that makes Lenin an uncrowned tsar. They were correct, and thus the word communism was utterly tainted in the capitalist world to refer to oppressive dictatotships that are (nominally) anticapitalist.
For what it's worth, Lenin himself described the USSR as state capitalist, whereby the state ran all industry on behalf of the workers until the workers came around to the glorious revolutionaries' perspective. Because those in.power never want to relinquish it, the ruling soviet aggressively cracked down on and suppressed trade unions, because organised workers were a threat not only to capitalists, but also to the nominally communist government. To maintain a veneer of being about the workers, farms and factories were administered by soviets vetted and approved by the government, who could be guaranteed to operate as the government wanted.
- Comment on Steam is basically a PC gaming monopoly, so why isn’t anyone mad? 2 months ago:
I use Linux and I prefer GOG to Steam
- Comment on Top-selling video games ever (2025) 2 months ago:
Isn't WOW a subscription?
- Comment on Legal action over 'unfair' Steam game store prices given go ahead 5 months ago:
Steam is a DRM system.
I am not being flippant or facetious. Steam is literally a DRM system with a shop grafted on top. That is what it has always been. If a game is on Steam, it be definition has DRM.
- Comment on What is the optimal handle to chain length for a flail? 5 months ago:
Same as nunchakus.
- Comment on What is the optimal handle to chain length for a flail? 5 months ago:
[https://acoup.blog/2019/06/07/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-v-just-flailing-about-flails/](The optimum is no chain at all).
A flail is a really bad weapon. The chain makes it difficult to control, puts you at great risk of hitting yourself, while not giving you any reach advantage. Real flails were medieval agricultural tools that were sometimes used as improvised weapons, but if you had access to an axe or spear, you would use that. If you have a big spiky ball of iron, it's much more effective to put it at the end of a rigid wooden staff and whack people with it that way; in other words, a mace is strictly better.
That said, real chain-based weapons do have their uses. The lkusarigama is made by attaching a sickle to a wooden handle with a long chain. It is used to entangle and disarm your opponent, at which point you can close in and slash them with the sickle end. Since it involves swinging a sickle on the end of a long chain, it would never be used in pitched battle lest you hit your comrades, and in any case spears are more useful when armies clash. However, kusarigamas were quite handy in one-on-one combat; since they were easy to conceal and could be disguised as agricultural tools, they were primarily used by ninjas and city guards
So to give an answer to your question, if you're going to use a chain-based weapon, the optimum length is long enough to completely wrap around somebody. And in that situation, you want a fairly light, small business end, not a big metal ball.
- Comment on Players are returning their Dispatch copies due to Switch censorship 5 months ago:
GoNintendo got an official response from Nintendo
Nintendo requires all games on its platforms to receive ratings from independent organizations and to meet our established content and platform guidelines. While we inform partners when their titles don’t meet our guidelines, Nintendo does not make changes to partner content. We also do not discuss specific content or the criteria used in making these determinations.
Vague, but it definitely sounds like the issue is with a ratings agency, not Nintendo.
- Comment on Players are returning their Dispatch copies due to Switch censorship 5 months ago:
Sega own Bayonetta, Nintendo just license it and pay PlatinumGames to make it.
- Comment on Why do video game skeletons put themselves back together? 5 months ago:
You cannot kill what doesss not live