Nibodhika
@Nibodhika@lemmy.world
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 2 days ago:
Sure, and by that definition it’s also not magic in LoTR
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 2 days ago:
So? It’s still super advanced technology from our point of view. Next you’ll tell me that Dune, Warhammer 40k or the Empire trilogy by Isaac Asimov are not advanced technology either because they’re stagnant too.
Technology is not the main focus of Star Wars, but they do have super advanced technology.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 3 days ago:
I never said Star Wars was sci-fi, it’s not. But it does have super advanced tech which is the issue being discussed.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 3 days ago:
Absolutely, there are lots of examples, but the first that comes to mind is Warhammer 40k, they have super advanced technology and magic coexisting and sometimes intermingling.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 3 days ago:
Any universe where they have super advanced tech they’ll treat it like we treat cars, because cars are also super advanced tech, it’s just a tech you see daily and are familiar. How do you expect characters in a super technologically advanced world to react? They see that every day, it’s not news to them.
- Comment on Is it weird to sometimes wonder wether everything you know is wrong? 1 week ago:
Great, go with that, what if?
What if trans people are just mentally ill? Well, if they’re mentally ill then that implies that there’s a cure, we don’t know what that cure is, therefore treating it like an illness is pointless. Instead we should treat it like a condition, i.e. something that the person has to live with. Other examples of conditions are ADHD or Autism, and how do we deal with those? Well, the first step is always for the person to accept that they have that condition and make arrangements so that they can live a “normal” life, these might include taking prescription drugs to normalize their brain chemistry but also behavioral and environmental changes to make their situation more comfortable, including asking people to have leniency on stuff like tardiness which is difficult for them to control. And how is that any different from a trans person taking hormones and asking people to use different pronouns? Why does it matter to me if the person wants to transition? It’s their body, I don’t care if someone does plastic surgery to change their nose, why should I care about their genitalia?. So what if being trans was a mental illness? Until a cure is found nothing changes, whenever a cure gets found then we can reopen the discussion, but unless a person is being a menace to others I oppose the idea of mandatory treatment, so it would be up to trans people whether they wanted to change their body or their minds, and I know what I would choose 100% (I’m a mind, I have a body, changing my body doesn’t change who I am, so that’s an easy choice for me).
What of gay people are just deviants? First you would have to define deviant, but in any sense of that word it honestly doesn’t matter, because what two consenting adults decide to do, deviant or not, is their own business. So why should you care?. The only “valid” answer here that I can think of involves religion, but we live in a secular society, where we recognize freedom of religion, therefore your religious ideas can’t be imposed onto others, so it’s not a valid argument in our society either.
So long story short, what if trans are mentally ill? Nothing changes, they should still be able to choose the sort of treatment they would prefer for their “illness”, and hormonal therapy, surgery and asking people to use different pronouns is a valid treatment. What if gays were deviant? Nothing changes, any group of people where all of them are consenting adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to. So what if you’re wrong? You still should behave the way you already do, so nothing changes.
- Comment on WoW's Leeroy Jenkins, one of the internet's oldest memes, turns 20 years old—and after looking back on what we wrote in 2005, I feel like we've failed Leeroys everywhere 2 weeks ago:
I get what you meant but a couple means 2, so someone uploading once a week for a couple of weeks means he uploaded 2 videos, which could just be coincidence, not a pattern.
- Comment on Does alcohol speed up evolution? 2 weeks ago:
No. Alcohol is not mutagenic, the issues it causes in fetus are not DNA related. On the other hand smoking or other carcinogens definitely do affect DNA so they could “speed” evolution. Unfortunately any species advanced enough to smoke will also be advanced enough to be able to control the environment around them to a certain extent, so besides the one good trait getting develop you would also have dozens if not hundreds of bed ones that get preserved because the species is somewhat above natural selection.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Also, I can tell you from personal experience, cards were working Monday during the blackout. Not on wireless machines obviously since we had no cellphone reception, but for example Supermarkets were letting you pay with a card.
- Comment on Looking for a local co-op game to play with my SO (Steam Deck) 3 weeks ago:
One of my favorite games to play with my SO is Out of Space the vibe is very similar to Overcooked but it’s procedurally generated and a lot more chilled out, i.e. less chaos.
- Comment on What's the point in getting married? 4 weeks ago:
First of all getting married is extremely cheap, just a small fee in most countries.
A marriage is a legal document that brings many legal consequences, from tax to residency and even hospital and death care there are many reasons why that document might be important for you. If you’re going to spend the rest of your life with someone else, it makes a lot of sense to do it, it makes lots of stuff much easier.
- Comment on I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game 4 weeks ago:
- Factorio, I know you said you couldn’t get into it, but try peaceful mode, it’s a great game even without enemies
- RimWorld, it’s an excellent colony management game
- Dwarf Fortress, this is the big boss, it’s really hard to start, but it’s the most complex simulation game out there. If you can get into it, it’s infinite hours of fun.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 5 weeks ago:
15 or so years ago people were saying the same thing about decentralized social media. Yet here we are.
No we weren’t, Email has been a thing for much longer than that. Everyone always knew decentralized social platforms were possible.
In any case you’re only scratching the surface of my points which is why you think they’re shallow, you haven’t answered a single one of them in any satisfactory way. Your answers get it 80% of the way there (which is the easy part that anyone knows how to do), but the last 20% is what makes this impossible in any practical sense of the word.
The main problem that Steam/GoG/Itch/etc solve is not selling games, but providing a secure validated platform where games can be sold. And this is the hard problem to solve on decentralized platforms. To answer you question, why do I buy games? there are 2 main points:
- It’s convenient
- I want to support the devs
Neither of those points work on a decentralized platform. It’s not convenient because of the payment hassle and trying to figure out if something is legit or not. When you buy stuff at Amazon even if it’s sold by someone else you’re safe that if you get scammed you will get your money back, on a decentralized platform that’s not the case, you will need to be extremely aware of who’s the seller, which instance is it being sold on, etc, etc. This alone completely obliterates the convenience of pressing a button and getting a game, so in this any decentralized platform will be worse. And the second point also is related, I can’t know if I’m supporting the devs or some random person who’s re-uploaded the game. Sure, PGP signatures would be nice, and we can use that to add a checkmark next to someone, except you need a centralized PGP public signature registry, so you’re no longer fully decentralized, and if you add a solution to it (e.g. blockchain of public PGP signatures of known sellers) it’s still possible to simply create another seller with a similar enough name, or create the official name before the official entity does it so you look more official than the actual official site.
In short people would not easily know if they’re buying from a pirate or from the devs, so that takes away convenience and support for the devs, the only two reasons I buy games. Valve/GoG/etc manage this very easily because they’re a centralized platform that control what gets on their store, so they can easily validate if the thing they’re selling is being sold by the actual dev, and even so there have been cases of indy games getting plagiarized and re uploaded by a different party. But in those cases, Valve took the loss, refunded the users and took the game off the store, in a decentralized platform that won’t be possible because the scammer is the only person with the power to do that, so again, less convenient, less secure.
Which leads me to payment, you think that just integrating something like Paypal is enough? first of all the moment you do that you loss the decentralized battle, now everything is centralized on the payment method and they can arbitrate stuff, so you haven’t solved anything by being decentralized.
Finally with all of this if you’re a company developing games why would you choose this platform? it provides nothing to you and there’s a 100% chance that anything you sell there will immediately be copied and resold by someone else. Which means that on corpo-mind if they wanted to get in there, they would strengthen their DRM policies to try to prevent this.
It’s a nice dream, but there are too many things that make this very difficult if not impossible to happen. Proving ownership of external stuff in fully decentralized systems is simply impossible, which is why stuff like HTTPS relies on centralized nodes for validation and why NFTs while a great idea on paper are synonym with scams on most people’s mind. Even if someone was able to create such a platform, no one would use it, so it’s just pointless. Which is not to say that there aren’t strives we can make in that direction, e.g. trying to enforce a common protocol for APIs which would allow multiple stores to be accessed from a single app is a nice start, a blockchain for ownership of games that can be part of that API used by stores to allow to cross-buy is another interesting idea (although the store would probably still charge something to activate the product, but essentially we’re moving the fee from the publisher to the customer in exchange to allow him to only pay a fee to activate the same game on multiple systems). Etc, etc, etc, there are plenty of nice ideas on how the situation can be improved, but a fully decentralized store should not be the end goal.
PS: The fact that you didn’t mentioned OpenBazaar in your reply is a relatively good indicator that you haven’t given this problem enough thought to understand the pitfalls you’re missing.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 5 weeks ago:
This will never happen. The problem with decentralized stuff is that anyone can put anything, so piracy will be omnipresent there, why would you pay for a game when the seller next store is giving it away for free (or much cheaper), and how would you distinguish between “EA” selling the Sims 1 there and “TheRealEA” selling the Sims 1 there for the same price. Also decentralized card information is a bad idea, so you would either need a centralized paying hub, setup your card with every seller, or only be able to use crypto to pay, all of those are bad in their own way. But it’s a nice dream
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 5 weeks ago:
Why? What can Visual studio or Clion do that vim can’t? Lots of what those two can do are easy to setup, but I can’t think of anything that vim can’t do (and can think quite a bunch that those two can’t)
- Comment on Nintendo Maintains Nintendo Switch 2 Pricing, Retail Pre-Orders to Begin April 24 in U.S. 5 weeks ago:
I agree with most of what you said, I don’t think the price is as high as people make it out to be, but:
So if it will be the cheapest console of its generation
Cheapest version of the Steam Deck is still cheaper for very comparable hardware, and while generations don’t align I think the Deck is closer to the Switch 2 than to the switch 1, and a Deck 2 would be miles ahead of a switch 2.
- Comment on Doom (2016) now DRM free on GOG 5 weeks ago:
Not always, they only started to offer Linux support after Steam, and even then it’s just a very small part of their catalog and none of their own games/products, so I think it’s fair to say they don’t offer Linux support but sell some products that do.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 5 weeks ago:
Why not use something like Nvim on both?
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 5 weeks ago:
I wish more game/software had Linux support. I know there’s wine but still
There, FTFY
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 5 weeks ago:
I agree, there are very few really good IDEs and the majority of them are closed source. The only open source one I can think of off the top of my head is Kdevelop, and last time I tried it it was not great.
That being said, I think the reason for that is that most FOSS projects are stuff someone started and maintained because they wanted an alternative with XYZ, and for IDEs a good chunk of people who could build excellent IDEs don’t even use one, so they don’t even start to work on it. The reason is that vim/emacs are so great it’s very hard to beat them, I think a good configured vim/emacs can beat anything the best IDEs can do, and while configuring vim/emacs to get to that level is difficult, it’s stile much more easy than building an IDE from scratch. So you’re left with a gap where beginners don’t have any tools because experts don’t need them.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 5 weeks ago:
Godot is objectively better as an engine, you might still prefer Unity for the amount of content you can pay to get, but if you’re doing everything yourself Godot is miles ahead of Unity. I always give this example because it’s so dumb but perfectly illustrates my point:
If you’re writing a Single player game, you don’t care which controller pressed a button, otherwise if for some reason there are multiple controllers connected only one of them will provide input to the game. In Unity the way to deal with this is to make multiple mappings, e.g. Controller 1 button A means jump, Controller 2 button A means jump, etc, etc. Unreal has the same thing, Godot used to be the same, but a quick look at the code base and a couple of lines of code later and boom, Godot now has an Any Controller button A means jump mapping.
This sort of thing makes Godot objectively better than Unity. There are other things too, but this one takes the cake for me.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 5 weeks ago:
Why shouldn’t it? As long as your system detects the pen and sensitivity (and Linux is excellent at peripheral support) any program should be able to use it properly.
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 5 weeks ago:
It is still being released but they had the designer/writer from the 1st one leading the writing team, but fired him due to “creative differences” so don’t expect anything similar.
- Comment on What's a cancelled game you really miss? 5 weeks ago:
This one gets me as well, Paradox had a great history of maintaining and upgrading the base game with money made from DLCs, some of which are content/feature related and others are way cheaper and are cosmetics, all of that while providing mod support. And that model would have been awesome in a sims like game.
- Comment on Nintendo ‘warned to expect 145% tariff on Nintendo Switch 2’ 1 month ago:
Then why are you getting angry while checking this sub and this post? Seems like you’re also getting worked up over it.
I’m sorry you’re in a bad situation, I get it, I’m also not in a situation where I could even buy the switch 2 even if I wanted to. But this is a big deal, the USA have fucked themselves up in the ass so hard that people outside of it might get hit with it. The price of the switch 2 is just one of the tips of this iceberg, the price of the PS5 is another, but in a short while the same thing will start to happen to lots of electronics, including hospital ones, which could increase the price for everyone depending on how this plays out.
Unfortunately for the rest of us the US is a BIG extremely consumer market, and if they get taken off the picture the profit margin decreases and prices need to hike to keep up.
- Comment on Suggestions for mouse only games? 1 month ago:
I have also recently been playing Mini Motorways and found it more fun than Mini Metro (too bad it’s not available on Android, since mini metro is one of my favorite phone games)
- Comment on Suggestions for mouse only games? 1 month ago:
CK can be daunting, I recommend you choose which time period you like best and go with that game, e.g. if you like sci-fi go with Stellaris, if you like WWII go with Hearts of Iron 4, etc. liking the time period where the game is set can make a huge difference in you willingness to learn it. For example if you don’t like medieval it might be daunting to track lineages and hereditary traits and how the ownership of land works (I once lost an entire kingdom because of it on CK2), but if you like WWII maybe seeing historical facts reflected on mechanics or learning military tactics is more interesting to you. All of those games are very different from one another, but they’re also very alike, starting with one that’s just the right one can help you pass the steep learning curve.
- Comment on BDS calls for boycott of Microsoft and Xbox gaming products over alleged Israeli military connections 1 month ago:
Whoosh?
- Comment on BDS calls for boycott of Microsoft and Xbox gaming products over alleged Israeli military connections 1 month ago:
They can even call them something cool like Steam Machines
- Comment on Are Nintendo's $80 online game prices a result of tariffs or is Nintendo just using them as an excuse to price gouge as corporations do? 1 month ago:
IIRC the price was announced first, and it’s the same in other countries so I don’t think that’s the reason. Which means that lets asume they will use Japan’s tariffs of 24% on them their base price goes from 80 to 99.2, plus in the USA prices are usually pre-tax so you also add tax on top of that, this varies from state to state, but a quick Google puts it at around 5%, so you will actually be paying $104.16 for them, and $117.18 for physical copies, or $126.63 if they’re manufactured in China and you get that tariff instead. This is just one example of what these isolationist policies will cause, be prepared to have that happen to everything.