Once the online propaganda/psyops funding dries up, it’s amazing how quickly the masses move on from a controversial figure. That’s why I don’t think the MAGA infection that the US has will last long without billionaires continually pumping their bullshit. There’ll always be cultists, but I even remember seeing how quickly most folks moved on after 2021, only for a resurgence around late 2023 when lots of billionaires flooded his campaign coffers.

Yeah, it was literally announced in February 2019. We’ve had to wait over 6 years for it.

And I used it since ~2007. Sure, I’ll concede that OC existed back then, but expectations/standards were far lower. Simply starting topics or a meme template that hadn’t been done before were fine, often times even hailed. Two broken arms, jollyrancher, coconut, whatever other gross ass viral thing weren’t even pictures/videos, they were comments and/or text posts. They became Reddit legends/mythos/lore, regardless.

Anyway, that type of OC isn’t going to invigorate the masses like it used to. Any of those stories nowadays would be met with heavy cynicism/skepticism (rightfully so, I might add). I guess my point is, Lemmy has only been somewhat known for a couple of years. It takes a lot of time to build momentum. Reddit continues to enshittify ever further, just like Digg did. Times are different now, there’s a fuckton of competition in this type of social media format. What will make it successful is hard to say for certainty. I think sticking to link aggregation and topical discussions is a good start.

Lemmy is a link aggregator. Reddit is as well. Sure, Reddit has started to generate a lot more OC over the last decade, but it took over a decade for that to pick up momentum and gain millions of active users. I don’t want a mindless cesspool of half-assed OC. I mostly just want an easy one-stop-shop for news, memes, and discussions.

Oh, 100%. I’m mostly a server admin these days, I don’t do much software dev stuff anymore. As such, it’s mostly powershell or python scripts. Using a dedicated IDE for fairly small scripts isn’t really needed .

That’s a great way of putting it and definitely something I was guilty of doing when this stuff first emerged and I was experimenting with it.

Nowadays, I only use our internal LLM to generate boilerplate or simple scripts that wouldn’t take me more than 5-10 minutes to write myself to save some tedium. I think that’s what most actual devs/admins do with it nowadays, if they interface with the tech at all.

Rather, it isn’t sustainable at its current pricing model. It takes the average studio team 3-5 years to make 1 AAA game.

Microsoft’s internal studios (excluding the ones they just bought over the last 4-5 years) have made Halo Infinite and… Hmm… Is the Forza studio considered OG first-party? I’ll just lump them in as well, since they’ve been associated with MS for awhile. So 2 major games in the last ~8 years. Then you have the major studios they just bought: Bethesda and Blizzard/Activision. Bethesda has released 2 major AAA games in the last 5 years while under MS ownership (I think Doom Eternal came out before the purchase). Blizzard has done 1 and Activision has done 1 CoD game.

So MS paid $7.5b for Zenimax/Bethesda and $68.7b for Blizz/Activision, for a whopping total of $76.2b. Starfield sold around 3m copies, Diablo 4 has generated around $1b in revenue since release (chose revenue since it’s a live service game and that includes copies sold), and Black Ops 6 has sold… I’m not sure, a quick search doesn’t show any hard numbers, just Xbox propaganda that it “was the biggest release in franchise history.” (I say propaganda bc many of their larger shareholders weren’t super pleased with how much it cost to purchase Activision, so of course they wanted to spin it as being a smart investment).

And it costs MS a lot of money to license some of the bigger games to come to GamePass.

I just don’t see it being sustainable without cost increases. And if the cost goes up, they’ll turn off customers. And we’ve already seen that their cheaper, indie studios aren’t safe from being axed despite releasing successful hits.

We definitely play on the XSX as a family a lot more than the PS5 that’s collecting dust upstairs. Its smaller form factor makes it much easier to use as a gaming console in our main living area. But yeah, GamePass is a crazy good deal if you know how to use the conversion trick (buy GamePass core for like 2 years for $80-100 from key reseller, then convert it to Ultimate on MS site at a 2:3 ratio or whatever).

That being said, everyone knows GamePass isn’t sustainable long-term. Microsoft truly is killing their gaming division with such short-sighted planning.

I, too, can’t handle 30FPS on many games. Fortunately, there are still lots of recent games that can hit ~45FPS, which–while not great-- makes it much more bearable. And if it’s too poor of performance, I will often just stream from my desktop while in bed or on the couch. But again, I primarily use it for less demanding games to begin with (e.g. I’ve been playing a lot of Dragon Quest X on it recently).

I’m not saying it’s worth it for everyone, but if the choice is between its closest competitors and the Deck, I think the Deck offers more value for the money spent.

100%, this. Not even most of the P2025 ghouls really support Trump’s absurd obsession with tariffs. But it’s the only real weapon he has to threaten countries with that don’t bow down to him. It’s why I’m surprised the billionaires-- I mean Congress–haven’t taken away this toy from him yet, since a fucked US economy will hurt their bottomline eventually.

Have heard it struggles with the current games.

Truly depends on the game.

But yeah, there are quite a few AAA/higher graphical fidelity games I just won’t bother, even if it’s technically playable at a "smooth’ 30FPS. Like Kingdom Come 2 ran pretty decently on it, surprisingly, but damn did it really make the game look pretty rough.

I expect there’ll be a new Steam Deck in the next year or two.

But, honestly, I still use my Deck a shit ton, especially at work. It’s hands down the best portable emulator machine and there are tons of indie games that run great on it. It also works great as a small laptop in desktop mode. I use it almost daily at work.

It’s about damn time, there were times I’d just go watch the trailer on YouTube instead when it would be glitching out.

Now if they could just fix the UI when navigating screen caps in full screen on Steam Deck, that’d be great.

We did as well, but we didn’t directly touch it. It’s been known to be toxic for a very long time.

Narrator: It didn’t.

Edit: and yes, the Vice article was removed because Vice’s ownership bitched out over covering Collective Shout.

Wow, holy shit. How fucking far Vice has fallen. There was a time they would go the extra mile to cover wild shit that no one else was doing. Greed and the wealthy’s critical need to have control over the media ruins everything.

That really sucks, man. I fully empathize with getting fucked by a greedy government that protects the wealthy while abusing the working class. The world needs to unite against the elites destroying it.

How dare you, my drunk uncle is completely capable of boiling the oceans! He was even boasting about it at our last family dinner!

That’s ignoring their point, though. They are simply pointing out that the father in this article is not following the Quran, they’re following some other twisted ideology that uses the Quran as an excuse, despite the source material explicitly telling them not to do this type of behavior.

As a side note, I’m not religious, and I do believe that organized religion has been the cause of horrible atrocities. I just think your response isn’t really addressing what the other person was debating, but maybe I’m wrong.

For sure, I’m not saying that bugs aren’t important to the ecosystem. The way the article was presenting the information, it seemed like they’ve become much more numerous starting around 2022. To me, that indicates that the ecosystem there is out of balance (unsurprisingly, given that climate change seems to be the catalyst for this).

As a side note, I have a friend who lives in New Orleans. When she was telling us about the annual termite swarms, we were legitimately aghast, lol.

Did you see the pictures in the article? They’re blanket everything so thoroughly that the dude was able able to scoop up piles with a shovel. Feels like that is a genuine nuisance, as I can imagine they’d be clogging vents and other things with how intense the swarming is in some areas.