Ages ago, politics was a matter of “Well, we both want to improve the country, but it seems we disagree on the approach.”
Now, politics is “I would like to improve the country” vs “I would like OVER HALF THE COUNTRY TO GET FUCKED IN THE ASS because they’re all LEECHES AND FILTHY RATS. Just look at these studies that are all blatantly hallucinated lies I made up.”
I long for the old conversation.
The good news is, anyone deciding to do this won’t make headlines; so especially as other agencies are wrapped into ICE’s mission, this might happen more often and we won’t hear about it.
We definitely see a gross incentive where companies don't want people to become citizens because it allows their labor to be cheaper.
I think back in Trump's first term, he had one policy that I genuinely agreed with - that the H1B Visa program should have a very high minimum salary to it, returning it to its intended purpose of being used for rare, high-talent specialized positions. As it stands, HR will just invent overly specific criteria so that they can deny local citizens jobs, claim they can't find anyone, and then hire cheap H1Bs - and threaten them with deportation anytime they complain.
Needless to say, because it was a good idea and anti-corp, Trump dropped it almost immediately.
Hollywood and the anime industry have done much the same - helping people around the world normalize the feeling of living in their home societies.
I'm from the bike/pedestrian-friendly community of /fuckcars. It's a far whiter immigrant mentality, but I imagine trends like that wouldn't have occurred if not for Dutch immigrants; or even American immigrants visiting the Netherlands, most specifically the Not Just Bikes channel.
If this is George, I think I once had a chance to see him in person. It’s weird that an animal is a famous celebrity for its actions, and still kept preserved in a zoo.
The scary thing is how much the stock market resembles pyramid schemes. Even if we are never going to eat our ice cream out of hats, if everyone believes we will, then ICRHAT stock will go through the roof and many of those investors are rewarded for their delusion.
I’ve kind of thrown in a bit of favoritism towards Euro companies and responsible development.
I don’t think I’m going to make bank on that. I just…don’t want to be financially invested in my own country right now.
See, this isn't even the take I'm focused on.
Gabe is definitely not a "perfect good" for the world. No billionaire is. But so many of them are so far down on the list of evils corrupting our country, I get annoyed at the level of focus applied to every person with more than exactly $1,000,000,000 worth.
Would I agree that no individual should have that much value, yes! But they've done different things to get there. Some of them exploited people's addiction to certain games, which is just not as harmful as the others that have destroyed entire markets or gained their entire net worth by lobbying the US Defense Industry into waging wars.
Other billionaires literally just performed in very popular concerts and some people find them evil simply because of the size and quantity of those ticket sales. At that point, you very much have to question the motivation behind the hate. It could almost be said to aim to starve a political movement of all potential donors.
Some people have no sense of scale and nuance.
I am fully aware Bill Gates is a shady guy who has done bad shit to destroy consumer choice in OS. There is still a massive gulf between him and outwardly vocal evil billionaires like Bezos and Musk.
I get annoyed that even here on Lemmy people will say all billionaires are equally evil. While still faithfully giving their money to Valve/Steam/GNewell.
I'm in a workplace that has tried not to be overbearing about AI, but has encouraged us to use them for coding.
I've tried to give mine some very simple tasks like writing a unit test just for the constructor of a class to verify current behavior, and it generates output that's both wrong and doesn't verify anything.
I'm aware it sometimes gets better with more intricate, specific instructions, and that I can offer it further corrections, but at that point it's not even saving time. I would do this with a human in the hopes that they would continue to retain the knowledge, but I don't even have hopes for AI to apply those lessons in new contexts. In a way, it's been a sigh of relief to realize just like Dotcom, just like 3D TVs, just like home smart assistants, it is a bubble.
Facts don’t wake up MAGA diehards. Feelings will.
Right now, they’re in the cult through tribal mentality and loneliness. Imagine if a moral compass suddenly asked you to boycott “Every website ever made”. Even if that imperative was fact-based, many couldn’t do it.
Not discounting the part where they’re insanely evil, but many are afraid to face reality at this point.
I feel a bit of shame that back in the Win7, Xbox Series S era of Microsoft I was sort of cheering them on as an underdog in several markets.
But it does seem like every large company is driving these zero sum efforts now. Anyone that high up is chomping for workforce reduction.
If larger-scale changes don’t prove possible, I still want Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism act as a way for majority workforce in a company to declare “No, this way is insane, fire whoever suggested it” earlier rather than later.
It frustrates me that the independent, “keep to myself and don’t trust the government” personalities love gas/oil and not solar panels/batteries. Can’t remember a time we invented a war in the Middle East to steal their sunlight.
Both this and Five Nights at Freddy’s have an interesting problem, where they’re based around an entertainment franchise that goes wrong - but the franchise itself necessitates repeated attempts and failure.
There’s a few media that I felt much less invested in when this happened in. In my case, it’s all “VR simulations” with super hazy justification.
The Escape Key closes most popups, dialogs, modals. It’s also non-destructive, so it won’t close a program; any “save changes” dialog will be cancelled.
“I’m sick of investing in video games. They’re always so unreliable.”
“You literally only ever invested in two companies.”
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/straw-tyler-perry-taraji-p-henson-release-date-photos-news
I just picked this up from seeing it was one of the top films on Netflix, and really enjoyed it. As you may expect from the premise, it expands its message to encompass some of the large problems facing America and life as a whole, even while much of the runtime occurs between one large room of a bank, and the parking lot outside.
When I looked up the movie afterwards, I was surprised to see there was apparently a very negative reaction on Rotten Tomatoes - down at 47% on the audience score. Even after reading some of the comments, it seemed hard to identify what causes the reaction. There's one plot development late in the movie that becomes a bit of a hard sell, but it didn't take away from the overall emotional tone.
Many of us only view a game's release in passing, and view it as an "event". Groundhog Smasher came out, it failed, and we don't hear of it again. Additionally, many of us associate "online" games with being "live service" - expecting the developers to announce a new skin, battle pass, game mechanic, or character every other week.
But some online games are just purely enjoyable, or get enough unremarkable patches, or sometimes don't even need a high playercount, to be enjoyed for years after the developers stopped emitting news.
This subject also gets confusing with cross-play games; even if one game has hardly anyone in its Steam playercount, sometimes between Playstation and Xbox there's just enough left to garner a following.
Which games do you play, or know about, that most people would've thought to be completely closed down, or at least had totally forgotten about?
Given how little libraries advertise, this is something that I found recently. Like many, I missed being able to easily/quickly rent games via Blockbuster. But, it turns out many librarians keep up with modern preferences and keep quite a few games for checkout. Even when the one closest library doesn't have something I want, it's often available in the others on the network.
Especially as Nintendo lifts their prices to $80, this may be something to seriously consider for people that have felt burned just two days into playing a game that isn't as fun as it looked in trailers.
We habitually spend a lot of time in daily routines, and we hear about cool stuff from the same sources. As such, we tend to lack awareness of things that don't have the capability to advertise broadly. So, what's something you expect many people don't hear about or consider for use in their life?
The 50 States, 50 Protests, One Movement initiative is running its next event combined with Indivisible, Swing Blue, and Women's March on April 5th. More at https://www.mass50501.com/
City prosecutors will dismiss a misdemeanor battery citation issued to the Post Falls woman who plainclothes private security guards dragged out of a legislative town hall Saturday and the city of Coeur d’Alene has revoked the security company’s business license.
A Mass. teenager fought with her younger brother over a cell phone. Hours later, ICE detained her.
A Mass. teenager fought with her younger brother over a cell phone. Hours later, ICE detained her.
The stick didn't work out super well, so now it's time for the carrot.
In interviews with NBC News, prominent members of the "Abandon Harris" maintained they made the right decision to either not vote for Vice President Kamala Harris or cast their ballot for Donald Trump despite previously being in the Democrats' camp.As NBC's Jillian Frankel reported, members of the m...
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23598266
> Summary > > Key leaders of the “Abandon Harris” movement, which encouraged voters to oppose Kamala Harris due to U.S. support for Israel during the Gaza war, are now expressing unease about Trump’s incoming administration. > > Many in the movement, including prominent Muslim leaders, voted for Trump hoping he would bring peace to the Middle East. > > However, concerns are growing over his Cabinet picks, such as Mike Huckabee and Tulsi Gabbard, which some see as troubling for Muslim communities.
Storyline? What kind of lore-addled whackjobs needed a storyline to get invested in two teams of knuckleheads killing each other endlessly in the Nevadan wasteland? Back when I played video games, it was two bleeping and blorping pixels that would gladly use their own guts as a rope to strangle the other. And you were lucky if you got any blorping!
Anyway, it ends on a happy note so you may as well enjoy it. Merry Smissmas!
Trope or not, gods just end up being a common target for games about heroes escalating in power while fighting increasingly world-destroying consequences.
So, for each post, name a game and describe it, with the assumption being that every description automatically ends with the phrase:
"...and then it ends with you fighting a god."
For game designers, encouraging aggression is often a good thing. Too many players of StarCraft or even regular combat games end up "turtling", dropping initiative wherever possible to make their games slow and boring while playing as safe as possible.
But in other games, often of multiplayer variety, hyper-aggression can sometimes ruin pacing in the other direction. Imagine spawning into a game with dozens of mechanics to learn, but finding that the prevailing strategy of enemy players is to arrive directly into your base and overwhelm you with a large set of abilities, using either their just-large-enough HP pool, or some mitigation ability, while you were still curiously investigating mechanics and working on defenses.
Some players find this approach fun, and this may even be the appropriate situation for games of a competitive variety, where the ability to react to unexpectedly aggressive plays is an exciting element for both players and spectators.
Plus, this is a very necessary setup for speedrunners, who often optimize to find the best way of trivializing singleplayer encounters.
But other games have something of a more casual focus, which can give a sour feeling when trying to bring people into the experience without having to reflexively react to players that are abandoning caution. Even when a game isn't casual, aggression metas can trivialize the "ebb and flow, attack and defense" mechanics that the game traditionally tries to teach. This can also lead to speedruns becoming less interesting because one mechanic allows a player to skip much of what makes a game enjoyable (which can sometimes be solved by "No XGlitch%" run categories)
So, the prompt branches into a few questions:
- What are fun occasions you've seen where players got absolutely destroyed for relying on various "rush metas" in certain kinds of games, because witty players knew just how to react?
- What are some interesting game mechanics you've seen that don't ruin the fun of the game, but force players to consider other mechanics they'd otherwise just forget about in order to have a "zero HP, max-damage" build?
- What are some games you know of that are currently ruined by "Aggression metas", and what ideas do you have for either players or designers to correct for them?
For those who want a summary; it's been going okay, but could've gone better. I decided to space out my tinkering and keep going with life, since these days my life is not so bound to my desktop. (It's also possible some details weren't recorded quite right. Many search tabs were closed)
I've been aware of the impending death of W10 in October 2025, with fears that hackers will start taking over the OS at that time. My main reason for avoiding Linux was game support, but Valve has been handling that well.
I decided to set up a Linux Mint 21 drive, which at first was difficult because my first USB stick had corrupted sectors (took some time to determine that was the issue). Then, when I booted in...it didn't support my wi-fi (it claimed it did, then couldn't connect, even when pairing with my phone). My first plan was to set up a nice, isolated 500GB partition on my nvme SSD (a drive I'd mostly used to store games) for Linux, and have it refer to the NTFS partition for games. (I would later learn this doesn't work well, and Linux is optimized for ext4).
Then, I learned this NVME had an "MBR" partition table, and I still had to convert it to GPT. While there's several tools for this, they complained due to the placement of my partitions, not leaving enough space for the table. I tried moving the entire gaming partition 1MB to the right...and got the same error.
After deleting the (backed up) partition to finish GPT conversion, I learned two things. One, that it was actually complaining because when giving the converter the target Device, I had given it the "Device:" labeled in the Disk management, which was "/dev/nvmen0p1". Guess what the P stands for at the end? So, gentle tip: The "Device" is not the "device", it's the partition - and diskpart does not present the resulting error well. Second thing I learned was that Windows had somehow put some of its boot setup on the NVME back when I had installed it on my computer; so now Windows wouldn't boot. (I'll see if I can fix this later. Windows' fault, not Linux's)
The good news is, I had downloaded a copy of Mint 22 (1 up), and THIS got full wi-fi and audio support. A little strange I had to go so recent for basic old-hardware support, but it could've been something else odd going on. I installed Steam, got a cryptic error about 32-bit NVidia drivers I ignored, and with my library moved back (and fixing ownership through chown, something Steam thankfully provided a relatively clear error message on) it's been able to run a few test games!
Having my browser and some basics up, I can kick back on YouTube and tackle whichever pressing things I think of first. I don't have replacements for 2 or 3 Windows products I like, but overall the setup has gone well, and a few of my annoyances actually go to my USB drive store, and Windows. Overall, much better than a decade past when I last tried Linux.
To keep Windows as an option, I'm planning to run a Windows installer repair boot to my original drive; but am admittedly worried whatever caused it to install boot info to the NVME against my instructions last time will, once again, screw up Linux. I may also try seeing if GRUB can locate Windows and boot it successfully. I feel somewhat blind on the topic of setting up / fixing the OS bootup.
I can tell this process is much simpler if someone has only one drive, backs things up to an external device, and then installs cleanly. Only on that vein, I wouldn't mind recommending it to others. Still, that's only in part because Microsoft has steadily made things worse and worse on the Windows front. (And, of course, I'll still be using it for work)
EDIT on day 3:
It's still been rocky. I became a bit pinpoint-focused on Hitman 3/"WoA" as my testbed to verify gaming was working; as it was more demanding and had proton dependencies ready. I selected a mission, got into the loading screen, and...got a black screen on the level, before a crash to desktop. Interestingly, the system was pretty unresponsive during the crash. Checked ProtonDB, nothing familiar about the issues. Failing so early felt like a dead end for Linux Mint as a gaming system, especially as it was one of my favorite games.
I had mentioned in prior comments I had skipped Bazzite worrying it would be the equivalent of RGB lighting and mostly unnecessary for gaming. But, if it's their claim to fame, I may as well try it. I had partitioned the OS away from the /home folder where I had copied my backup Steam games, so I went ahead with the reinstall. The Fedora-based partition selector was not so clear about its errors/required fields, or good at suggesting defaults for /home, /boot, and /boot/efit mounting; I ended up looking up recommendations (200MB boot? etc) on another laptop. To be fair, it's probably a less common use case, but still worth highlighting this part could've been clearer.
Bazzite worked! It was quick to put up a working Steam install, and Hitman levels loaded great. It took some time getting used to the new OS layout, but I'm not strongly opposed to it - it's a bit tablet-like, which makes sense since the OS targets ROGAlly users as well. That, in itself, is something I can live with. Of note, I wasn't terribly offended by Windows 8's largely hated tile layout and lived with it for years. I did not even need to compile the Xbox One dongle controller driver from source, as I had from Mint - worked out of the box!
Some things that stood out to me as annoying: The distro obviously makes efforts to cut down on options/buttons to simplify the experience and avoid overwhelming people. The biggest place I saw this is the file explorer, which insists on keeping you out of "/" and hopes 90% of your interactions will be with Documents / Pictures / Music. Given how many drives I had to interact with, this felt pretty crippling. Even after auto-mounting old drives I'd like to fetch things from, it still didn't show them in Open File dialogs within apps.
Bazzite tries to rise above the package managers of other distros by running any other necessary OS in containers. I'm no container pro, I've used docker for my job at times, but I tried going ahead with documentation. Treating it as an Ubuntu or a Fedora install, I had an extremely hard time getting VeraCrypt (a familiar app from Windows) working; using official .deb downloads on the website, or the package managers that had it listed. When I did finally get it installed off COPR, the "distrobox-export" command documented to add the app to my "Applications" did no such thing, nor did it explain what kind of filesystem entry it was trying to create.
As of yet, I still don't actually know where Bazzite's list of Applications is physically located, even after running some "find -iname" / locate commands. This might be nice to get to because the right-click menu on each one is sparse (again, simplified for users), and doesn't let me customize a few .desktop files not launching how I want them to. (A long time ago, something that really bothered me was Windows calling Steam's taskbar entry "Steam Runtime Helper" with no known way for me to fix it. But for Linux to also seemingly lock me out of solutions feels frustrating)
Some other things became worse. I set certain preferred keyboard shortcuts for window management, and Bazzite overwrote them to defaults - MULTIPLE times. That really set me off. When in the Activity View, many of the GUI apps did not have close buttons. I'm practiced with using tapping WIN+1 multiple times to go to the "third open Firefox window" - this is something apparently not supported on Linux, and I can't understand why. The OS takes a long time to recover from sleep mode, and needs ~10 seconds to re-discover my mouse. A few times, I came back to find the visuals garbled from some sort of display driver failure.
And, while Bazzite was very very good with games, as we all know falling just short of what we're used to niggles at our senses. Helldivers 2 worked - but a white-bar border at the edge only went away after tweaking launch options from ProtonDB. I launched Dead by Daylight, and while everything was visually fine, there was notable input lag, most visible on the game's reflex-based "Skill checks". I play a lot of games, and had gotten VERY used to "Install > Play > Done", so thinking about being so unsure on every game purchase worried me.
I have a number of small indie games that don't receive Steam's attention - often coming in from the web browser as .zip files with an EXE somewhere at their root. It's common for me to only spend less than 30 minutes downloading, trying it out, and maybe commenting on the creator's page. This is not a good workflow for Linux, given that launchers like Lutris make you fill out a long form with the position and title of the app before you can launch it - and give no immediate feedback or log output towards its launch failures.
I did research some of the many things annoying me, but of course Bazzite is still a niche offering and I was unsure at times whether to expand my searches to, eg "fedora disable screen anchors" or "gnome disable screen anchors". Often, I guessed I was the first person getting an issue.
When browsing the web, handling basic communications, even some games, I'm kind of comfortable with Bazzite. It's very very possible that a number of these issues would go away with some time and practice. But, I'm at an age where time is at a premium and it's VERY valuable to get a number of things "just working" without much concern. For those reasons, I'm definitely strongly considering going back to Windows.
I really hesitate to blame the strong array of choice for linux distros here - it's highly possible some comment will shout "Try XXXdistro!" and that would be the one where I'd magically run into zero problems, and all UI annoyances are things I could configure. But, getting that right so quickly seems unlikely. I may have shot myself in the foot with Bazzite, but I knew I wanted gaming as a focus, while as a consequence I got a lot of things locked down - to the point I couldn't even find configuration to tweak the things most breaking my workflow.
Whenever you purchase a game on Steam, you’ll now be met with a warning, stating that you're buying a license and not the game itself.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 dev Tim Willits explains why the game was able to achieve massive success when so many big budget games have failed lately.
