• 7 Posts
  • 180 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • I am curious what these advancements in infotainment are.

    I heard that the cars run a digital assistant (like Siri or Alexa) and give it access to vehicle sensors, so you can ask questions like “Does that restaurant on the right have good reviews?” It sounds like a cool feature, but I just hate digital assistants in general, so I would never use it.




  • I would play a warrior. I can make combat as interesting as I want. If I want, I can plan out grand tactics of pushing enemies into each other and into traps. If not, I can turn to the reliable “I stab the goblin with my sword” even if I am wielding a mace and fighting a dragon.

    I cannot play mage because I am too loss averse and hate using mana/spell slots. I would never play rogue because the idea of playing a close range damage dealer that wears cloth armor is a good recipe to end up spending most of the combat on death saving throws.



  • From what I understand, the devs are not injecting their political views into the Lemmy code. That does not mean they have not had a pro-tankie influence on the Lemmy community. As the original developers, they also set up the first major instance, lemmy.ml and they moderate that instance to have a tankie lean. Since it was the first instance, many people created their first account for it and it was the de facto standard place to start communities. As far as I know, it is still one of the most active instances.


  • I assume it is a case of monopoly abuse. There are things you are allowed to get away with as a minor player in a market because no one has to do business with you.

    For example, GoG can insist that developers give them a game build without DRM since they are a minor software store and a majority of their customers know they can buy software other places.

    Steam, on the other hand, is used by almost all gamers. For many gamers, it is the only game store they use. If a game is listed on the Steam front page, a large portion of the games market will learn about the game. If Steam decides not to list a game, customers may assume that the game is not out yet, regardless of the amount of advertising they see for it. The publisher would need to have a special advertising campaign saying “yes, the game is out already but you have to use this other game store to buy it.”


  • Letting companies sell DLC outside of the Steam Store sounds like a bad deal for Valve but they look like a good company for publicly following through with it. If too many companies are abusing that policy, Valve is well within their rights to revise the policy and ban the behavior, taking the resulting PR hit. What they are not allowed to do is act like the good guy publicly while secretly and selectively enforcing a ban for companies that they are mad at

    P.S. If Valve does ban selling DLC outside of the Steam Store, it would make Steam an unusually restrictive store. I can open up Steam and buy DLC for any game by Wise Wizard Games, associate that DLC with my online multiplayer account, then download the same game (for free) on iOS and Android, open up the new copies, log into my online play account, sync purchases, and play my newly purchased DLC from another app store. I have never heard of an App store not allowing it but most game developers do not implement it because it costs them money to code it up and they make money from people who buy the same contents multiple times.





  • There were the cures that worked in theory but did not work in actual cells. There were the cures that worked on mice but did not work on humans. There were the cures that cure cancer but have a higher fatality rate than the cancer. Those cases cover just about every cancer “cure” you read about in the news.

    Then there are all the cures that work for some people some of the time. Big pharma has patented them and is selling them for enough money to cover all of the other cures that did not work (and give everyone a very nice bonus).

    Seriously, if some phara company could cure cancer, why wouldn’t they? They can sell it for 100k per treatment, make enough money for each of the 10 biggest investors to buy a small country, and then close up shop.






  • Handheld computers are competition to the PlayStation in the sense that Sony would want everyone who owns one to buy a PS5 instead but not in the sense that those consumers having an option is hurting sales significantly. I could not find actual numbers, but analysts seem to be estimating that Valve has sold about 6 million Steam Decks in total. For comparison, Sony sold 1.5 million PS5s last quarter, which is devastating since they sold 2.8 million the year before.

    Also, that sales gap is going to get worse in the short term. Instead of raising Steam Deck prices or reducing profit margins, Valve has decided to stop selling systems until RAM prices come back down.