darthelmet

@darthelmet@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Last Epoch developer Eleventh Hour Games gets acquired by KRAFTON⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Wall that sucks. On the bright side, the game has a full offline mode, so as long as I can stop or revert updates, there’s only so much they can ruin it for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ice cream trucks still around?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen one around town still. Although I suspect like 90+% of its business is just from parking right outside the town pool in the summer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨well?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is that most of our problems aren’t really science problems. Or at least the thing holding them up isn’t the lack of practical applied scientists. They’re political ones. We’ve known what we needed to do about climate change for decades but their are capitalists who stand to lose from doing anything about it, so we don’t. We have plenty of housing, it’s just being hoarded by people who do nothing with it but extract free money from people who are desperate to have a place to live. We have amazing medicine, but corporations are able to abuse IP laws to price gouge people who need it to live.

  A scientist or engineer could come up with some amazing sci-fi tech that has the potential to save us and capitalists would find some way to make it bleed us dry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨7,818 titles on Steam disclose generative AI usage, or 7% of Steam's total library of 114,126 games, up from ~1,000 titles in April 2024⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A few angles on this:

  You’re right that nothing is unimportant and I certainly enjoy it when I discover that attention to detail, but part of what makes that special is knowing that they put in extra effort into that. Acknowledging it as something that takes effort, we have to recognize the trade offs associated with that effort. Devs, especially indie ones, don’t have unlimited time and resources. So they have to prioritize. Choose your battles. What are the MOST important things that need to be in the game? What is required? Then after that if you have resources left and can control yourself from doing too much scope creep, then you can spend time on the lower priority things. If you can’t do this you might never release the game.

  Of course, what is more or less important is subjective and context dependent. Subtle, intentional details might be more important in a game with a lot of environmental storytelling like Dark Souls, or a puzzle game where you want to be careful about how you direct the player’s attention, but is probably much less important in say, an action rpg where you’re just running through hoards of random enemies slamming particle effects.

  Another thought I had related to the point about inspiration happening through the process: I don’t really do art anymore, (no real reason I stopped, might be fun again if I ever have the motivation/focus for it) but in high school I took 3 years of graphics design classes for art class. I’d finish whatever my assigned project was and then I just spent a bunch of time messing around in photoshop with random gradients, filters, and other effects. I wouldn’t call it super deliberate at least in the early stages, but at some point I’d end up with some abstract art that I liked and maybe tweaked a bit from there based on the things I saw from randomly trying stuff. I still use some of those for desktop backgrounds. I don’t think I could have ended up with any of that without some of the random stuff photoshop did. I could imagine someone using an ai image generation for similar kinds of inspiration. Although I can see how it’s also a lot easier for them to just stop there and not think about it again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come nobody does anything about North Korea?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is, for all the problems the country has internally, a “deal” with the west is going to turn out the same way it turned out for other countries: Forced “market reforms” that really just mean allowing western capitalists to exploit the country’s resources and labor. There is no good path for a country that involves western intervention. We’ll just make it worse, or at least as bad, but for out benefit.

  Besides, why would they ever trust us? We bombed them to smithereens within living memory and since then have gone out of our way to punish the people living there for whatever reason you choose to believe was our motive. If we cared about the people there we wouldn’t have invaded or embargoed them in the first place. And since then it’s not like we’ve stopped acting like that to the rest of the world. If the US cared about freedom and democracy or people’s living standards, we wouldn’t be allies with places like Saudi Arabia or Israel. We wouldn’t have installed right wing dictators in all the countries we tried to stop from having self-determination.

  The best thing that could be done if we actually cared about people’s living standards would be to back the fuck off and let people sort out their own politics without a global superpower breathing down their necks. They already fought one revolution, if they really want to change their government I’m sure they could do it without our “help.” Maybe if they didn’t have an existential enemy they could deal with their own problems more easily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You are asking this on a platform specifically filled with people who didn’t want to be on those centralized services. :P

  That said, not to be the contrarian, but I think this is one of a collection of issues where the problem is not the technology or organizational structure, it’s just capitalism. Generalizing to talk about any monopolies, there are a lot of benefits to centralized production. Economies of scale, not duplicating work/resources, etc. There is a reason why some industries, called natural monopolies, are either run by the government or a private corporation is granted a monopoly over it in a regulated way. The classic example of this is infrastructure like train tracks. You don’t need 5 different train lines going to all the same places and there’s no space for that anyway. So by having one entity run the trains, you get to avoid the problems with that.

  Going back to the internet: Centralization has some of the usual benefits of a more general monopoly: If we have one social media site, we don’t need 30 different shitty versions of a video player when the first one worked just fine. But more specifically, it has network effects: The more people who use a site, the more valuable it is for everyone else to use the site. If I go to a site to chat with people and there’s nobody to chat with, there’s not much point in being there. There is a consistent UI so I don’t need to relearn how to navigate different sites. Plus it makes it easier to find what I’m looking for or discover new things.

  None of what I described above is directly caused by greedy corporations. Those are just the dynamics that emerge from the material reality of the internet. If we go rid of corporations tomorrow, I think we’d still end up with a decent amount of centralization because of that. Like imagine all of the big social media sites dissipated tomorrow. Everything goes back to being individual sites with their own forums. What happens? I go to a site that has no users, realize it’s dead, and go back to the more populous one. Or perhaps in an effort to make it easier to find everything someone makes a site that links to all the other interesting sites, curated of course because a list of literally everything on the internet wouldn’t be useful. Maybe you add a forum to that site so people could talk about their favorite other sites in one place. The smaller sites where less conversation happens dry up and the big ones snowball until they’re so big that they’re the place to be. Oops we just reinvented Reddit. As much as I’m done with dealing with corporate social media and want to stick with the fediverse or other stuff, it is still just the case that these sites have less people, and therefore less stuff to do, than those bigger sites, so they lack some of the value I got from those. I’m stubborn enough to put up with that out of principle, but for a lot of people, they’re just going to see that they can’t find anyone to talk about their niche hobby they had a subreddit for or whatever and just move on. It’s hard to achieve escape velocity.

  THE problem then, is that these sites are controlled by corporations with profit motives. Their goal isn’t to create the best user experience, it’s just to do whatever makes them the most money. If that means psychologically manipulating people to engage more they’ll do that. If that means censoring speech that scares off advertisers, they’ll do that. If it means making the site worse and then selling people the solution, they’ll do that. If it means abusing their position of power to take advantage of creators on these sites who depend on the site, they’ll do that. And because of this centralized position of power with all of it’s inherent monopolistic advantages, they get away with this. Wrest control away from those corporations and find a way to run these centralized sites with democratic control, and most of those problems go away and we get to keep the benefits.

  It’s not obvious that there is a good way to achieve this under capitalism though. The fediverse is certainly an interesting experiment in this by allowing there to essentially be independent sites that get collated into one place with a unified standard for UX, but we’ll have to see if they can overcome inertia to reach the critical mass necessary to be a genuine replacement to centralized corporate controlled sites. I also don’t know enough about the technology to know if this is the best solution or not. So I’d be curious to see if this takes off or if people find another solution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Switch 2's price won't be impacted by Japan's new tariffs, but its games might⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The way I look at it, it would be better if we had a nice, consistent language with rules that make sense but… we don’t have that. English is a nonsense language with more exceptions than rules. So if I’m going to have to deal with something that doesn’t make sense in the first place, I’d rather just go with the flow. If Shakespeare can make up words, so can I.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Switch 2's price won't be impacted by Japan's new tariffs, but its games might⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  F-RPGs: Freedom RPGs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Help on Animal Well?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All I’ll say is:

  • try to remember how you got the frisbee
  • you’re not going to be able to do this without some action.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's up with the sudden increase in AI slop?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I just haven’t noticed really. The reality is that memes, even ones that were made by hand with a lot of effort, are disposable content. Most of them will get looked at for like 10 seconds tops before you either move on or maybe check out the comments. Nobody who isn’t obsessed with finding the AI slop is going to notice the difference between an AI meme and just a shitty photoshop job.

  That’s not to say I’m not concerned by the effects of that. Lower effort needed means more low effort stuff, but it’s not really something I’ve clocked as being particularly out of the ordinary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There are major holes in this theory⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok this one got me laughing. Congrats.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am looking to broaden my youtube channels that I follow. What female channel are you following?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Angela Collier: She’s a physicist who does videos on science or science adjacent topics. Most of her videos are pretty funny and accessible and if you’re more interested in math stuff, she has a few videos or segments of videos that go more into that.

  Girlfriend Reviews: Comedic game reviews.

  Jenny Nicholson: Video essays/rants about various pop culture things.

  Lindsay Ellis: Video essays. Although I think she’s mostly been posting on Nebula now. But her old videos are decent.

  Simone Giertze: Comedic maker. Started out doing shitty robots but has evolved more into a design channel. The videos are still funny, but the projects are more sincere attempts to make something fun or useful.

  Luna Oi!: She’s Vietnamese and does English language videos about modern Vietnamese history and contemporary life/politics from that perspective. Really interesting if your only previous exposure to the country was a brief bit about the Vietnamese war in history class.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elden ring night reign single player⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I was watching a friend who got it and he tried it solo initially before swapping to online play and it seemed waaaay harder. Not sure if he screwed up a setting and it was really the 3 player version or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Deus Ex devs say they weren't trying to make a statement when they made one of the most political games of all time: 'What I think is the right future for humanity is irrelevant. It's all about...'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A while ago I tried it out and I can concur on it feeling clunky. To each their own, but I just have a fairly low tolerance for games not feeling smooth to play. There are a lot of games I’ve dropped in less than an hour because it just didn’t feel good to play even if I might have liked some of the ideas or systems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does it feel like protesting isn't as "extreme" as it used to be?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They were successfully beaten down. More specifically, the ORGANIZATIONS were beaten down. The most successful protest movements weren’t people spontaneously showing up in the streets. They were the culmination of the efforts of community organizing. There was planning and they had people they could rely on and who relied on them. But things like unions and the Black Panthers were violently destroyed.

  Now protesting is atomized like everything else. A protest that forms by posting to show up somewhere at some time on social media with signs is a collection of individuals rather than a group. If you’re just surrounded by strangers you don’t know, are you going to be able to take more radical actions?

  That’s not to say none of the more serious/organized protests are happening though. There were those water protectors who tried to stop that pipeline. There were the rail worker and dockworker strikes. I don’t know how organized it was, but it was heartening to see the LA protests start out by actively protecting people being targeted by ICE. And perhaps there are more that just didn’t get any media attention. But in any case, you see how hard they try to crack down on those. But sometimes they can succeed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Some genuinely mind boggling innovations in UX and AI (not to mention battery) would have to happen to make it even close. There is just way too much that is too awkward to do on a smaller screen or without a proper kbm + the posture of sitting at a desk. You never really see anyone actually using those sci fi handheld devices. They always just kind of magically pull up whatever information is needed without us seeing whatever inputs were required to get there.

  Only sort of related: But I always find it funny when I see some older sci fi able to imagine some technology way ahead of it’s time, but fail to think through the implications of how humans will actually interact with it. That’s the part you actually have some info and intuition on even without the technology. If I lived in the 60s I might not have been able to tell you whether we’d ever be able to fit the computers that take up rooms into the palms of our hands, but if you showed me a handheld computer and asked me to suspend my disbelief about the technical wizardry behind it, I could probably tell you whether or not I think someone would actually use something in that way because technology changes, but people don’t. Until we go trans humanist we still have the limits of two hands, 10 fingers, etc.

  One funny example of this for me is the pad from Star Trek TNG. There are actually two relevant pieces of technology here:

  1. A portable computer that can presumably at least display and edit information.
  2. A ship wide computer that can do all sorts of complicated tasks, has artificial intelligence, a voice interface, and can be accessed via terminals, including personal ones around the ship.

  Despite this, they couldn’t put two and two together and imagine that the pads might be connected through the ship’s computer. When crew members want to send information they have on the pads, instead of just sending data through the computer to the other person’s pad/terminal… THEY GIVE THE PHYSICAL PAD TO THE OTHER PERSON LIKE ITS A PIECE OF PAPER!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Its Waymo cooler⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If we lived in the cars universe the cabs would be low wage workers instead of property, so the media wouldn’t actually care.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you think the solution to selling progressive politics to young men is ?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well it would be a good starting point if we actually had progressive politicians. The Democrats lose because they have no substantive platform for actually helping people because doing that would go against their donors. To be clear, it’s the same for Republicans. There’s a reason why the government just ping pongs between the two parties. The only reliable base either party has is the one that’s more culturally aligned with them, whatever that means at the time.

  If they literally ever credibly ran on basic issues like housing, food, healthcare and the elections were fair, they would win. But they don’t, because they can’t, so they will never have consistent support.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it wrong or uncommon to judge people primarily on their worst moments/acts?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends. Consider the inputs and outputs of this judgement:

  Inputs:

  • How bad was the act itself?
  • What were the intentions behind the act? A mistake? A crime of passion? Or a deliberate act of greed or malice?
  • Was this just a one time thing you don’t think is indicative of their future behavior or is it a part of a pattern of behavior?

  Outputs:

  • What are the stakes of this judgement? Are we trying to punish this person or at least prevent them from doing the thing again? Or is this just for our own moral or social understanding?
  • Can the person be rehabilitated or is it a waste of time trying to give them the benefit of the doubt?

  Just as an example I think about sometimes: Sometimes you will get some older politician running for office. They have done and said some horrific things in the past. You point to that as a reason they shouldn’t be elected again. Someone comes out of the woodwork (I’m sure entirely organically /s) and says something like “can’t people change? Don’t they deserve a second chance?” And sure. People can change. And if that politician wants to go work at a McDonalds or something I’m not going to go out of my way to cancel them, but when we have millions of people who could be elected, most of whom, didn’t, idk, support segregation, why does this guy in particular deserve another chance to be in a position of power when he’s already used it in a bad way? In terms of your example, maybe if the sex offender is remorseful and goes to therapy for the issue, they could go reintegrate into society… just maybe not in a job that involves directly working with children right? That sounds reasonable? We can acknowledge the steps they took to reform themselves but also recognize that they lost the right to be trusted at certain kinds of things?

  There are some crimes though that are so bad that they can never be forgiven. I don’t think the oil execs who deliberately lobbied to effectively cause the end of the world so they could keep profiting off of it for decades should be forgiven. I don’t think there is a punishment severe enough to serve justice for such a crime. No amount of work they could do to try to fix the problem could undo the damage which they have already caused. There is no actual means of redemption.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon pitches a new game⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe. But you’d need servers. And that would cost a lot of money for something aiming to be that scale.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon pitches a new game⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  My (completely uninformed) theory: It’s competitive advantage. Indies succeed on their creativity, but that works because there are thousands of indie devs out there and we get to see the best (and luckiest) ones. It’s not easy to replicate that creativity by just throwing more money at the problem. So what is a company with ooodles of money but no creativity to do? Make games that only a company with way too much money could make. No indie dev is going to make the next Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed or Fortnite because they just don’t have the budget to make that happen. So they know that even if they keep churning out generic crap, at least it’s generic crap with very little real competition.

  Of course then all of them got the bright idea to compete in a game business model that is inherently winner take all with already well established leaders. So yeah now it just seems like they’re lighting money on fire for fun.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ads when you’re pumping gas⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  True. That is the generalization of this rule.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ads when you’re pumping gas⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ads are like a gas (the physics kind). They expand to take up all available space.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you keep track of what games you have played over the years?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a complete list, but I made a spreadsheet to help me keep track of the games I bought but then never or barely played to try to get me to revisit them in some organized way. Outside of that, there’s just the steam library. Anything further back from my time playing on consoles is kind of just lost to time and memory unless it was a particularly memorable game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking for the perfect 5 year anniversary gift?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know how I haven’t heard this before. What the hell was that song? lol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elden Ring Nightreign’s Massive Steam Launch Tarnished by 'Mixed' User Reviews Over Lack of Duos Co-Op, Voice Chat⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I wasn’t planning to get the game because of the 3 player thing but I already knew that… why are people buying it then getting mad about it? Is the steam store page just not clear enough about it? In which case, fair.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games are just objective master pieces?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah the souls games are something I like in spite of all of the things wrong with them. There is just so much jank and bizarre design decisions.

  I kinda hate that all of the games that have tried to copy them have done so to a point of not critically evaluating everything in them. And then they have all the same flaws, but none of the unique charm that makes me look past them for FROM’s games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Elden Ring’ Movie in the Works From ’Civil War’ Director Alex Garland, A24⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What… uh… I can’t imagine this movie being weird enough to feel like a movie based on a FROMSOFT game while still being accessible to the wide audience needed for a big budget fantasy movie to make money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it weird to sometimes wonder wether everything you know is wrong?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Why does it happen? Because the world is crazy and if nobody does anything about it then it starts to feel like you’re the crazy one. It also doesn’t help that there’s all this propaganda out there to make you feel that way.

  But what do you do about it? Questioning your beliefs on a factual or analytical level is very useful. I don’t think I could have reached my current beliefs in the first place without that openness to new information and critical eye towards what I knew.

  But I think the important thing is to separate that out from what you VALUE. What are the things which you care about independent of what the facts are? Do you value treating people kindly? Then it shouldn’t matter if it turned out that some other group was actually inferior. That shouldn’t change that core value. Now if you only value people based on how useful they are, then thinking that someone else was inferior would change how you treat them.

  Thinking about my own beliefs and values, my political beliefs have changed a lot over the years, from vaguely American liberalism to some kind of communism, but my values haven’t changed. That’s because the values nominally espoused by the mythological American national identity are good ones. What’s not to like about freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness? Democracy sounds great!

  But as I learned more about the world, it became more clear how America failed to live up to those values and more precisely, didn’t really hold those values, or at the very least had subtly different meanings of them that created wide gaps in how those values were acted on.

  “Freedom” in America is something you can buy. The more money and power you have, the more free you are. And the freedom to use that power to exploit others consequently means you’re less free if you’re poor.

  “Equality of opportunity” that is blind to historic inequality and power structures creates this illusion that everyone had a fair shot to succeed or fail and therefor “deserve” where they end up where in reality we never started on equal footing and where we end up is largely an accident of birth. Rich people aren’t necessarily better or harder working than poor people. People don’t actually get to keep the value of their work, it’s just not taken through taxes, but by capitalists in the form of profits. (Also, this is another values thing, but even if the assertions of meritocracy and equality of opportunity were true, I still don’t think a society with this level of poverty and inequality is an acceptable outcome even if people somehow ended up where they were through their own failures.)

  Democracy in an unequal society where the rich can put their thumbs on the scale isn’t really democracy. Plus when you learn about the founding of that “democracy”, you learn how explicitly it was set up to favor those powerful few over the many. This is kind of one of the things that makes me feel crazy. I didn’t read about this on some obscure internet blog or commie book, literally everyone in the country learns about the founding in school and more or less learns it’s anti-democratic bend. It’s not hidden, it’s just that everyone kind of forgets it or doesn’t really internalize the way it relates to our experiences. Also, if we like democracy so much, why do we effectively suspend that democracy for half our waking lives when we go into work? Why shouldn’t people have a say in that? “Nobody’s forcing you to work” doesn’t really work when the alternative is starvation and homelessness.

  I still want the ideal, I just recognize the ways I’ve been lied to by people who claim to share that ideal. And that’s where you have to be careful. Not everyone is honest about what they want. ( Sometimes even with themselves) There’s the saying on the left “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” because for some of these people, when you really confront their beliefs with evidence that contradicts it, instead of growing and changing, they just reveal their true colors. Some people who talk about equality while being racist aren’t just misinformed, they actually do believe in hierarchy and the concept of equality is merely a way to rationalize away the that hierarchy. Sometimes you show people how the US fails to be democratic and they reveal that they don’t even think democracy is good. That people are too stupid or evil to rule over themselves.

  So yeah. Test your beliefs about the world, but the only way you have a metric to test them against is if you know what your values are in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ori studio in crisis: No Rest For The Wicked could be their final game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah I’m sort of interested in the game but I wanted to wait for full release. I get that a lot of indie games are helped tremendously by the money and player feedback they get out of early access, but if if the whole bottom falls out because not enough people bought the game you’ve very openly told people “this isn’t finished, don’t buy into this if you aren’t willing to be a part of the testing process,” then something is very wrong. Early access income should help bridge the gap, but you shouldn’t be entirely reliant on it.