You’d be better off calling in a drone strike. Capable of hitting the target from beyond visual range (over the horizon) with a low risk of missing due to the explosive payload, and zero chance of being heard or seen by any camera in the area.

Sarcasm aside, a gun is loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage to those around you, and the bullet will over penetrate the camera, continue to fly, and possibly hit someone downrange of the camera. Especially since cameras like that are obviously located in high traffic areas with a large number of people passing through. So under ideal conditions where you hit your target, odds are good that you will also hit a person. And in the event that you miss? Well, you most likely just shot someone. Isaac Newton is the meanest son of a bitch in space for a reason and 9mm is the preferred pistol round for the police and military because its generally larger size and smaller powder charge compared to other rounds means that it has a lower velocity and is therefore less likely to pass through a target and the wall behind them and hit somebody in an adjacent room.

By 2003, I believe EA and Microsoft had also implemented CD Keys with a limited number of uses, usually 5 or so. If they hadn’t by then, it would be by 2010 at the absolute latest.

The war on secondhand sales of games and software had been going on since CD Keys themselves were introduced in the 90s, and probably in some other format in the 80s that I’m not aware of. Digital marketplaces were just the next logical step in the fight and the carrot of convenience for people to sacrifice their sense of ownership.

I think this is why Steam is well-loved today and why people say that they keep winning by doing nothing. When Steam came out, everybody hated it. You gave up ownership of your games and the online aspect was obnoxious with early 2000s internet. But they continued to add features of convenience - friends lists, achievements, stable servers for all kinds of games (like indie games), modding support and tools, the ability to download patches in the background, a user score/review system, frequent sales, etc. And now, Steam has so many features that it’s become a positive feature for a game in people’s minds while so much of the competition only has the lack of ownership and forcing people to download their launcher to offer.

In a comment on another post about this the other day, I saw someone claim that they had to resort to CCleaner to remove Chrome off of their system after this update. Chrome wouldn’t let them uninstall the browser manually.

Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, I haven’t used Chrome in a while and I’m not gonna install it just to try (or ever again - I like my ad blockers, thank you very much). But, with the current state of the software landscape, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true.

I mean, they were at one point urging their admins to “take over other instances and kick out all the non-communists,” so…

Plus, there’s a reason that Blahaj defederated them. Toxic people will be toxic.

I can’t imagine VR as a whole made anything other than chump change until 2018+, but it was indeed there and chugging along quietly.

The graph specifically calls out the Oculus Rift as the start of what it considers the VR segment.

I would consider things like the Virtual Boy as VR to some extent as well, but I do see the logic as to why they only started the line with the Oculus. Before that it probably wouldn’t even show up as the money there was a drop in the bucket of a tenth of a percent of anything else, but it’s also widely considered that the Oculus and the Vive were the first really viable commercial VR headsets that started the VR game niche/genre. Before that, VR could probably be considered as niche as eye and head tracking hardware for sim games, and I don’t think that I’ve ever heard somebody mention those when talking about money in the games industry. Or even mentioned them in general outside of conversations like this. I don’t think most people even know that that kind of stuff even exists.

Where the hell are you getting your numbers? Everything I see says that Steam made a record 16 billion in 2025 while PC gaming as a whole made 43 billion. That would put Steam somewhere around 27% of the PC market.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/gamesindustrybiz-presents-the-year-in-numbers-2025-year-in-review

https://www.eteknix.com/steams-revenue-surpasses-16-billion-in-2025-new-estimate-shows/

You’re misreading how the graph is laid out. The y axis is the combined total revenue of the entire video game market, with each new piece of the market being added on top of the older ones over time (although arguably arcades are the oldest form and should be below consoles). VR is the newest niche, and so it goes on top of everything else as it adds its revenue to the gross total of the entire market, despite only being a tiny piece of that sum.

In your layout, consoles/arcade would be at the top with everything else underneath them.

We’ve also seen the death of third spaces and a major wave of helicopter parenting that simply could not exist before the way it does today.

My parents were shocked when me and some people around my age were ambivalent about getting our driver’s licenses as teens, because for them it was like the first real bit of “adult freedom” in their lives. But by the mid 2000s, it was a very different world from when they were kids. Malls were dying, 3rd spaces were being monetized or removed, and existing in public for free was already becoming a difficult prospect. The idea of being able to go to a place to hang out had already been dying off when we were kids. What were we going to do, spend our time after school working to spend that money to drive somewhere that we’d then have to spend more money at to just hang out? When we could just sit around and play video games for free? Owning a car largely just meant suddenly having bills to pay and more responsibilities.

And the advent of cell phones (and social media) made it even worse. The prospect of people getting a call at any time from their parents asking where they were and who they were hanging out with was starting to raise its head as an issue. Today it’s even worse with the tracking apps on kids’ phones and devices in their backpacks or cars. I still remember the first and last time I posted something on Facebook. Right when Facebook was first starting to get big, a friend of mine made me a Facebook account. My first and last post was a comment about how 8am classes sucked, which my dad commented on “But they’ll go anyway.” Immediately upon reading that, I wondered to myself why anybody would willingly subject themselves to having their personal thoughts broadcast and judged/criticized like that and never logged in again.

This is actually the result of specific differences between Florida’s laws around publishing crimes in the news compared to other states. I forget what the right term is and the exact laws, but basically in Florida everything can end up in the news right away while I believe other states limit what can be published before the court rules on a crime below a certain threshold, so the crazy stuff stops being interesting and gets forgotten about long before it could ever get published in other states.

Or something along those lines.

Even before renewables/green energy, we’ve had problems with surplus power in the grid. It’s actually one of the biggest issues for infrastructure to solve in moving away from fossil fuels. We simply don’t have the storage capacity, and nobody has any real plan or path toward a solution as of yet, as far as I know.

For probably a century or so now, power companies have been paying manufacturing industries to run their heaviest equipment with nothing in them just to bleed extra power out of the grids during lows in demand because power stations can’t change their outputs fast enough, especially things like nuclear energy. Even stuff like coal or natural gas plants have a spool up or down time that can’t keep pace with the changes in demand.

Part of the issue for industry in the US as well is that we also generally lack a lot of important manufacturing resources. We get something like 65% of our aluminum from Canada. When the tariffs were first going into effect and Trump was throwing a tantrum about Canada, the auto industry declared that they would be shutting down factories within a couple of months if the tariffs went into effect because they wouldn’t be able to afford the aluminum to continue production in the country.

TBH, it wasn’t that far outside of the basic corporate Dem playbook. Incredibly stupid and definitely lost her the election, for sure, but Dems have been “courting the moderate Republican” (is this “moderate Republican” in the room with us right now?) since Clinton left office - if not longer. It was the most strange and open version of it I’ve ever seen, but I wonder how much of it was her doing and how much was pushed by the party and the party’s campaign managers. Practically all the party ever talks about is how they have to reach across the aisle and convince conservatives to vote for them. We saw it with Hillary as well. They alienated the leftist vote and their own voters to push more conservative policies and lost themselves the election.

Kamala and Walz had a goldmine when they started calling Republicans weird, and they suddenly stopped like 8 days later. If that wasn’t the party muzzling them, I don’t know what is.

To be fair, they did specify right-wing Lemmy instances, not right-wingers in general, and I can’t think of any instances that would meet that definition off the top of my head.

But Hexbear definitely has a reputation as some of the worst of the worst of the normal instances. Blahaj defederated from them despite Ada trying to get the trans communities of both instances connected because of the harassment, brigading, and outright transphobia Hexbear inflicted on Blahaj users for not being the right kind of leftists. You can still find the community discussions on the topic in the general instance posts. They even tried to claim that Blahaj was being transphobic to them. You know, the LGBTQ instance created and ran to be a space for trans people and others first and foremost.

Hexbear is also known to have at least once tried to convince their mods to “take over other instances and ban all the non-communists.”

I believe that at this point if you were to download the stuff to spin up your own instance, Hexbear is on the list of instances that are defederated by default because so many instances have defederated them because of their behavior.

Yes, that is not what the word “originally” meant, yes it is partially completely the result of right wing propaganda, yes “political correctness” and “sjw” have similar issues

Fixed it for you.

It is a common conservative tactic, taking the language of something meant to improve the lives of minorities in some way and turning it into a negative thing. As you said, they did it with “politically correct” in the 90s, “social justice warrior” in the late 2000s, “woke” in the 2010s, and are currently working on “DEI.” It’s how they control the narrative and normalize their hatred. And it’s why Tim Walz calling them “weird” was so effective and why they got so upset by it - and why I’ll never forgive the Democrats for muzzling him when we finally had a weapon to fight back against this insidious colonialism of language.

The fact that you believe that there’s a middle ground where the definition isn’t an attack on minorities means that they’ve succeeded in shifting the Overton Window and you’ve become used to the hatred yourself. Every single one of those terms that you mentioned was redefined for the sole purpose of being used to attack anybody who dared to openly talk about being a minority or exist as a minority.

The “woke” are as real as the “blue haired girls with pronouns SJW getting off the ‘Down With CIS’ bus and assaulting people” of 15 years ago, and the token representation that you’re talking about is what’s known as “rainbow capitalism,” not “woke.”

“Self-righteous, superficial, performative, and preachy” are the exact words used to describe a gay man daring to exist in public or talk about being gay in any way and not hide away like Section 28 and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell are still in effect. That’s what “woke” means when used under the new definition: a minority dared to openly behave like a minority in public and not be ashamed of it.

No? I agree with you on the radar. This other comment was simply about repeatedly stating that “the US is not the whole world.” Nobody ever said that it was or implied some kind of US-centric worldview/behavior. The other commenter merely stated who the regulatory body is who would be involved in yelling at you for turning on the radar equivalent of a fog horn if you were in the US, probably because those are the laws and regulations that they’re familiar with.

Near something important? Yeah, you’re most likely getting a hasty visit from the local MPs. But outside of those areas, you’re going to get chewed out by a government branch like the FCC in the US or the ANFR in France.

But saying that isn’t me saying that “France is the whole world” or something. I just happen to know what part of the French government is involved in regulating radio frequencies in the country.

Living near military installations would be the big exception. I live probably about 20 miles from a massive radar facility that can track planes from across the Atlantic ocean, and doing anything within the area to set something like that off would probably have the MPs knocking on your door long before anybody else. I think even flying drones above a certain height isn’t allowed for miles around.

They never implied that the US is the whole world. They merely mentioned what I assume is the regulatory body that they’re familiar with.

If I said that the regulatory body who would be knocking on your door in France is ANFR (L’agence nationale des fréquence), would you complain about how France isn’t the whole world?

I get that we’re all sick of American-centrism, but that was a really benign comment. They have no way of knowing what your country’s regulatory agency is offhand.

I think there’s a cliff between affordability/knowledge and payload capacity that has kept this from being practical. Then there’s the traceability aspect. Where and how you buy it, how it’s controlled, etc. A drone controlled by a smart phone can be traced back to that phone, for example.

A drone is far cheaper than a missile, but the military can drop thousands on a drone and not blink an eye. That’s not something that’s practical for the average person, and the skills required to build one are also at the higher end of hobbyist level skills. It’s similar to 3d printed equipment. 3d printed guns are a thing, but it’s generally easier to go buy some PVC pipe for a barrel and a nail for a firing pin. Or just buy a gun, they’re about the price of RAM nowadays. People have even printed RPGs and man portable anti-air/anti-armor missile launchers, but it’s not something even your average skilled hobbyist can do.

The day somebody makes a flying pressure cooker out of an R/C car, though, all bets are off.

Yeah, and guns don’t kill people. People kill people!

This is making some heavy assumptions about what the average MAGAT knows about Jesus. As far as most of them are concerned, Jesus’ favorite gun would be an AR-15.

For them, the Bible is merely a thick paper tweet to be used to smack anybody who disagrees with them like a cartoon character smacking a dog with the newspaper.