Which means that playing it is also free, no?

Free to play depends on what the operating model actually is I’d say. Some pay to win mobile game is worse than free with paid cosmetics, which in turn is worse than something like freeciv.

Because of inflation and such, but the important aspect of them is being super rich compared to everyone else (hence we don’t count people that have a billion of some much less valuable currency), and that’s a very old problem.

Billionaires aren’t new. I also don’t really think LLMs will be as impactful as they get hyped or feared to be, and actually think AI as a whole outside mere chatbots will be positive if not the revolution it gets hyped as.

Honestly I do think there has been an improvement. It might not seem like that when viewing the past, but the past is easy to overestimate- we don’t have to live it anymore.

As to civil rights, it should be pointed out that while recent years have seen regression in the US, its not always a regression to the point that things were at back then, and more importantly, the rest of the world does not necessarily share the political woes of the US.

Mastodon might not be legally exempt, but depending on how much effort the UK government puts into enforcing this, large swaths of it might be functionally so. Most instances presumably arent hosted in the UK, and while some of those outside that country might block traffic there or be big enough for the UK government to order ISPs there to block them for noncompliance, theres a decent chance that some smaller, foreign run instances might simply ignore whatever the UK is doing, and if a UK user signs up to one of these, or uses a VPN to use one that does block the UK, and can still get the content from the rest of the network due to federation anyway, then the platform as a whole could potentially get away with ignoring those rules in a way that a single large site couldnt.

It isnt exactly unheard of for regulations to be placed in the design, sale, or labeling of stuff because of misuse, to be fair. Even assuming the fault of using a tool wrong is with the user, assigning blame does not actually do anything about the problem. If enough people consistently misuse a thing in a certain way, there can be a general social benefit to trying to stop that type of misuse even if the people misusing it “are the problem”, and since those people clearly arent going to just start using the thing properly just because someone pointed the finger of blame at them, addressing the problem is likely to take some kind of design or systemic change to make it more difficult for them to use that tool in that way.

No? Im saying those factors should be understandable, they just need to do the relevant testing to figure it out before building something the public could visit. Hence mentioning due diligence.

Between the pink color, two arms and rounded face, I guess it does kinda look like one of those human-descended “All Tomorrows” creatures.

I’ve long found the notion that the lesson of Jurassic Park, if a fictional story like that must be taken to have one, should be something like “science/genetic engineering is bad” or “you can’t control nature” to be a bit silly, given that, well, it’s a zoo. With pretty big animals, to be sure, but dinosaurs were animals still, not kaiju or dragons or whatever other fantasy monster, and some genetically modified to be somewhat bigger and lack feathers would still be such. It’s a story about some people building a zoo badly because they didn’t do their due diligence about the animals they had and cheaped out on staff and the systems they had for containing the animals, and somehow people get the take away that “these animals are special and can’t be safely contained” rather than “letting rich people cheap out on safety is a bad idea”.

Were one to write a broadly similar story where someone cheaps out on a park containing elephants and tigers, and they get out and maul some people, it’d be obvious, but give the tigers scales and make them born in a lab and suddenly it’s a monster movie.

The sheer irony of stonetoss comparing something to facism

tbh just with how the fediverse works I would not trust vote counts here whatsoever. The downside of having no central authority over the network is that anything that lets one instance affect the whole network, like votes from bots on one instance being federated, cant be entirely trusted.

Im probably guilty of writing a lot of those tbh. Its always a toss up if I get a joke, think I get a joke but get it completely wrong, dont get a joke, or dont even realize something is a joke.

I feel like I’m the reverse, I used to find salt and vinegar a decent flavor if not the best, but can no longer stand it.

In my view, any fabric stiff enough to hold noticeable wrinkles and creases is also too stiff to be comfortable, so this one might not be so relevant for the sorts of clothes I own I guess.

Because I thought it might look fashionable (colorful neck ornament that doesn’t look pretentious or fancy the way jewelry can), but found it too uncomfortable to wear and so just kinda leave it around not knowing what to do with it?

I feel the same way about folding laundry. The clothes are still clean after going through the wash regardless of if theyre folded up in a specific way afterwards.

The implication I rarely see explored of the meme that “everyone (presumably excluding the FBI agents) has an FBI agent watching specifically them (and not just a whole group of people, which would presumably mean they were watching someone else most of the time) at all times”, is that half the population would have to be FBI agents.

Honestly this whole situation seems fishy to me (no pun intended) on all sides.

On the one hand, I get where the sentiment I’ve seen all over that this is just the publishers attempting to screw the devs over to avoid bonus payouts comes from, and it may even be true, there’s basically no reason to trust a big company and the ones in the entertainment industry are notorious for trying to avoid paying the people that actually make the stuff they sell.

On the other hand, the 250 million number I see thrown around is a huge amount of money, even if distributed evenly, and if not distributed evenly, would be a huge amount especially for the people at the top (which sound like the people that were fired for the most part?). I could easily see that creating a strong incentive for those in charge of the studio to release something even if it wasn’t ready. And it wouldn’t really surprise me if it isn’t, just given that virtually every major release of late across the industry seems to arrive both after delays and in a seemingly unready state, even the ones releasing in early access. Were that the case, then the move the company made to delay the game and remove people at the top pushing against that would make sense.

The trouble I have is, both these notions (that the publishing company might be delaying the game without need out of financial motivation, thus screwing over the devs, and that the leadership of the development company might be resisting a necessary delay out of financial motivation, which would presumably screw over the customer) seem self-consistent and plausible to me. The publishers claims are probably a bit more suspect given that from what I hear they have a history with scandal like this, but that isn’t really enough to make me feel confident that they have to be the ones being untruthful here, so jumping on a bandwagon feels premature until we have some information that rules out one of the two sides claims.

I’d make some statement about how this whole incident demonstrates the pitfalls of combining capitalist profit seeking with art, but between how many times the gaming industry has been burned by that already and how anti-capitalist lemmy tends to be, I suspect everyone here probably would be familiar with that anyway.

All countries under any possible system eventually fail, because of entropy eating away at complex systems if nothing else gets it first. What makes a better judge of a country is what living in it is like for the time that it exists.

I know these are generally fake, but they always grind my gears a bit. Literally just screenshot the full message with the “not delivered” part and resend the screenshot until it goes through.