True, however game jams are often used to learn/reinforce learning for new tech, right? I question how much of it is the sunk cost of having to learn a new… well… everything.

I’d be very interested to see a breakdown by game characteristics. Genre, but particularly 2d vs 3d. I think Godot is well known for 2d, less so for 3d.

Probably the people—accurately—pointing out that Mozilla has also adopted Manifest V3 along with Google. Google is doing it to curtail (“kill”) ad blockers. Mozilla is also now in the advertising game, and secretly began a telemetry program which is opt-out only. And, given how we shouldn’t trust orgs with financial motive, very well could opt you back in with future updates exactly as Microsoft does.

Plus, their current CEO has a history, and Mozilla as a whole faces dicey times ahead if their Daddy Google is forced to stop buying exclusivity deals by the U.S. government.

So take your pick I guess.

They hook you into an ecosystem. That’s it, thats the game. I don’t think it has too much to do with insecurity. Group chats and video chats with people outside of imessage is awful. Group chats lose a lot of features because SMS was all there was for a long time. Standard (not Google-ified) RCS is still too bare at the moment so I don’t think the looming rcs fixes that aspect of it.

I highly recommend Death Must Die. It is early access, as a fair warning. But it successfully mixes up Hades with Vampire Survivors and a few others. Runs great on Deck as well. The dialog can be cringe and the story is clearly under development. But if you want a fun gameplay loop–this is the game.

Yes generally, but it can be very cheap. Some places sell block accounts which let you pay a one time fee for a set amount of data. Black Friday deals are coming up, and you an usually get amazing deals (1TB for under $5, able to be purchased multiple times, or subscriptions which work out to a couple dollars/euros a month).

The other thing you’d need is an indexer. Some are free, but for the best experience you’d want to pay for acess to a private indexer. Usually a few bucks as well, almost all of the big ones run sales this time of the year.

For subtitles: there are several solutions. Jellyfin (and Plex) support finding subtitles that you either download with a tool like Bazarr, or via Jellyfin/Plex’s own interface. Bazarr auto downloads them based on your parameters you give it though.

For me, it is the mindless reptition or task accomplishment. Showers work well because I don’t have to think about what I’m doing, which frees my mind up for something else. There’s no rush, there’s plenty of soothing ambiance, and it just works. I find doing chores around the house can trigger the same type of state. Putting dishes away lets my mind wander and problem solve. So does putting away laundry, dusting, sweeping, stuff like that. I usually need to wear earbuds and play an ambient noise to help me along.

But showers are still the best. You hit the nail on the head in your description about why it works. I think the key is anything relaxing, but not too relaxing such that you get drowsy.

Well, Hamas specifically has rejected a 2 state solution twice in recent history. Their official stance is to not negotiate for it and instead kill all jews and end the state of Israel. There’s no chance at peace til Hamas is gone, rightwing Israeli government is gone, and Iran’s nutjob religious class no longer control the state and export its cancer around the world.

So you agree with the IDF in that targeting civilians is self defense?

Or are we playing pedantic games again where we try to rationalize bad things by wearing victimized status one moment while murdering children the next? Maybe the IDF and Hamas are both responsible. Hamas aren’t freedom fighters like my fellow lefties are making them out to be. They want a theonomic system. And they have one.

This is literally the reason Apple changes the bubble color. iMessage is encrypted by default and uses normal data instead of MMS. That’s the indicator.

This entire spiel about bubble color envy is ridiculous. Features are the separation. The media will whip things up with their sample size of a handful of cherry picked anecdotes. But almost every teen has an iPhone and uses iMessage in the USA. Apple has over 80% of that market.

What Google wants is for Apple to implement Google’s proprietary RCS implementation, not RCS proper. Because RCS proper lacks a lot of features that people take for granted with iMessage. That is presumably one reason Google forked it and requires it to run through their proprietary middleware.

Edit: Don’t get me wrong. I would love for an open standard to overtake the proprietary bits from both Apple and Google. But Google is disingenuous here. They are complaining because, despite their efforts, they can’t crack the market. Teens aren’t bitting for Android. iMessage has network effect going on, so Google is trying to crack that open since they can’t get a compelling overall product and ecosystem for a valuable demographic.

I’d rather there be open standards. But that means Google RCS has to change as well.

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I’m so happy to see someone else is finally talking about this. RCS, as implemented by Google, is distinct from the actual open RCS standard. Google added a proprietary middle layer which is how they get features working which RCS doesn’t support.

And that proprietary middle layer (Jibe being part of it) is why there aren’t a million third party RCS clients out there. Google must give API access. They are gatekeepers. And they only share keys with strategic partners (Samsung being one of them, telcos with their own app like Verizon used to have being another).

But in the end Google did what Google does best: fragmented a product. And now Google holds the leash for RCS proper. I bet Apple isn’t too keen to route all customer data through Google servers even when encrypted. Because it’s another piece that Apple doesn’t control.

I’m going to guess they wouldn’t kill the men and then rape, murder, and dismember the women and children on video to post it in celebration.

But maybe I’m wrong. With reductionism, anything is justifiable.

Citi Bank took my parents’ home and thus any inheritance the family had coming. So one can theoretically go murder those executives’ children as compensation and be morally right, yes? Or is putting in more identifiable terms highlighting how insane that logic actually is?

Native Americans can invade American preschools and cut the throats of all the toddlers similar to what Hamas has uploaded to the internet with Israeli kids, yes?

Don’t you see the slippery slope and immoral position you hold here?

Bad people love to wear the mantle of victim because it justifies all the evil shit they do.

Exactly. I’m a far-leftist, and I’m as disgusted with leftist hot takes the same way I was when poor old defenseless Russia invaded Ukraine and started murdering their children.

I’ve blocked and purged so many leftist creators in 24 hours it is unreal. Spreading legit anti-Semitic (really anti-Jew) conspiracy theories (“curious how nobody stopped it” and the like). Reframing these terrorists as freedom fighters like you said. Blaming this on the U.S. somehow (because we made Iran do this via Hamas as proxy; but Iran has clean hands don’t worry they are just another oppressed peoples).

Far too many leftists, like their right wing nut counterparts, are contrarians at heart. This is what happens when political ideology becomes a personality trait; it becomes akin to a religion.

So thoroughly disgusted by it all. Bad enough what’s happening over there in Israel and Palestine right now; bad enough with all the innocent lives being lost; but then to justify industrial grade rape and murder of men, women, and children? And cheer Palestinians on as they record, edit, and upload their barbarity?

I’d like to believe that a lot of it are disinformation ops, but the sad reality is probably that a fair number of people have nothing left to live for because their lives are shit so the world burning down for others isn’t such a big deal for them.

Mastodon often feels to me more like Facebook for software developers

I wish. I’ve tried to curate mine as such.

My mastodon feed is awash in spam from authors hucking their LLM generated stories. Constantly. And random low viewer count streamers spamming hashtags every hour 24/7.

It’s crazy how much LinkedIn-like sociopathy is out there right now. Makes sense given the huge spike in new accounts we’ve had in the last month.

Citations Needed had a mini series where they discussed why this happened. The US government will give material support to movie and game studios in exchange for some creative control over the content. That’s why so many movies with military equipment in it are rabidly pro-war; the studios don’t get access to the real equipment without the government’s support, and they don’t sign off on extremely critical scripts.

COD and similar games don’t just pop out of a void and still strive for some semblance of realism. That is a huge selling point after all. So the government gets involved, even if in little ways. Same way China gets to censor movies, either by omission or fundamentally changing things, around the world.

Interesting to see if this reverses the beginning stages of some EU countries pushing back against supporting Ukraine (specifically Poland, which was a shocker for me). I’m sure that bit was all very real Politik what with their elections coming up and domestic issues to handle… but still. The U.S. is one bad election away from permitting expansive war in Europe. And some European countries are seemingly tiring of Ukraine taking the hits for them?

Not OP, but generally the arguments I’ve been told are:

Microsoft is an abomination (true).

“Don’t make me explicitly state types; it is too confusing!” Installs 20 libraries including fucking pad left to eek out basic functionality.

Strongly typed haters are right up there with curly brace haters.

From Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine:

"The project begins in the programmer’s mind with the beauty of a crystal. I remember the feel of a system at the early stages of programming, when the knowledge I am to represent in code seems lovely in its structuredness. For a time, the world is a calm, mathematical place. Human and machine seem attuned to a cut-diamond-like state of grace.

…

Then something happens. As the months of coding go on, the irregularities of human thinking start to emerge. You write some code, and suddenly there are dark, unspecified areas. All the pages of careful documents, and still, between the sentences, something is missing.

Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background. It cannot simultaneously do something and withhold for later something that remains unknown[1]. In the painstaking working out of the specification, line by code line, the programmer confronts all the hidden workings of human thinking.

Now begins a process of frustration.

[1] clarifies how multitasking typically works, which was usually just really fast switching at the time of the book.

It also allows them to completely gate the feature via tiers, like they do with other things in their environment. I’ve written about Power Platform since it is a pretty accessible tool for a lot of people. But it is also a shining example of Microsoft’s almost microtransaction-like enterprise vision of the future. Everything is great in the preview. While they collect usage data. Then they tuck the most useful and common functionality behind various paywalls, including per usage paywalls. They leave just enough in the base tier to draw people in and get them committed to the platform.

It will not surprise me in the least if basic features are removed and paywalled after the preview. It would not surprise me in the least if they repeat what they’ve already done and prevent users from using built-in python functions unless the user pays up.