A welcome change, though I imagine the more savvy grifters have seen the writing on the wall for a while now with virtual credit cards becoming more popular. I put a freeze date on every single purchase I make that has a recurring subscription.

That’s exactly the issue here. ChatGPT’s current training set ends right around the time the Meta Quest 3 came out. It’s not going to have any discussions in there of No Man’s Sky with tech that wasn’t out yet.

Newell also has overseen Valve as one of the pioneers of the most predatory monetization in the video game industry (lootboxes, etc.).

There are no saints at this level.

In the short term? Possibly.

In the long term, it opens up space for competition, which is better for end users, advertisers, small business, and more.

You can also read about Lina Khan, the current chair on the FTC side of antitrust.

Just spinning off Android would shake up map software. It’s how they get traffic and other data.

Americans–especially those older–tend to hold favorable views of past presidents even if they didn’t approve of them in office. W had a majority favorable opinion even among Democrats in 2018, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the number were higher now.

Funny thing is, out of all the disc “cleaners” we sold while I was at Gamestop, we got very few complaints about it. Make the discs look like they went through hell but the product worked.

It’s hard to top the inkjet printers I’ve owned. I still can’t believe 30 years later home printer tech is not only unimproved but worse between lower quality production and squeezing people on ink costs.

Lenore from the Castlevania Netflix series.

Tons of consent issues for sure, but she’s gorgeous and smart as hell.

If we define the end of the Cold War as the collapse of the Soviet Union, that was over 30 years now. Considering other potential flashpoints (e.g., India and Pakistan), I’d say it’s more nuclear deterrence in general. No one wants to be the first to get into sustained conventional, symmetrical warfare with nukes on both sides.

We also seem to be seeing a shift in soft power. Now that raw footage of conflict is readily recorded and broadly accessible, regimes aren’t able to control messaging like they used to be. Still need public support to wage war, and it’s that much harder to obtain when people can see the faces of the people you’re killing.

Having grown up on Sierra adventure games, I still have a part of my brain thinking about saving and loading in bad situations from time to time.

One regime’s political-dissident-by-speech is another’s dissident-by-drug-addiction. America’s “War on Drugs” was purely political disenfranchisement along racial lines, and it’s a major reason why the US continues to have higher incarceration rates than the USSR had in many of the years the Gulag system was operational.

By the way, prison rape jokes have long been a part of those late night comedy shows, to give you an idea of just how ingrained the American prison culture is.

Seems things have shaken out (for now) regarding defederation, including less chatter about Threads than there was. I don’t anticipate much change on that until the next big influx of users, whether it’s people coming in directly through Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin or a new player joining the Fediverse.

Other than that, I’ve just seen steady growth in my communities.

Sometimes we get immediate benefits. It took a while for capitalism to take over the Internet.

Went back to college last year and Joplin’s been amazing. More off-topic, but the only thing I wish it had was better search result organization.

I sold a copy of Golden Sun to Venus Williams once.

I contribute far more now. I already have more posts on Lemmy in nine months than I did in all of the 10-ish years I was on Reddit. My rate of commenting is about the same.

I’ve also changed the way I get my news; I went retro and use RSS feeds now. I do fear there’s a risk of over-curation with a minimum of sources leading to narrow viewpoints. Even Reddit’s news bubble was more expansive than what I’ve got coming in. But my feeds and Lemmy’s bubble are what I’ve got for now.

Correcting someone’s English also almost never adds anything to the conversation at hand, which is the literal purpose of the downvote.

Star Wars Rebellion (or Star Wars Supremacy in Europe) had a GameRankings score of 50 but I had a blast with it. I must have had 200 hours in it over the years. As a 4X game, it’s definitely below average, and there’s zero challenge once you figure a few things out.

Where it succeded was by being a bit of a sandbox with a fun license. The soundtrack is phenomenal, there are recognizable names everywhere, and the moment when you get to go toe-to-toe with the Empire after scrapping together a fleet big enough is great. Problem is, it had a rough interface, obtuse mechanics, glacial pacing, and that epic fleet battle looked so bad it probably would have been better off being icons on a star field.

I also think Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII (72) and Rune Factory 4 (79) were underrated, especially the latter. I think to this day, RF4 is the best game in its genre (and that includes Stardew Valley).