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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • To start with, you’re right. Digital distribution in general is volatile for consumers. While I will say that Steam, at present, is leagues better in that you must download the game purchase in order to play it (meaning, you have a direct copy of the game on your hard drive, which will remain there even if the game is removed from the Steam store), it is not outside the realm of possibility that this could change in the future.

    That said, publishers having their own launchers, I’m sorry to say, has absolutely nothing to do with their fears over “the valve guy” retiring (his name is Gabe Newell, by the way), and significantly more to do with making more money. These publishers figure if they can get you, the consumer, to buy their games directly from them, they can make 100%+ of the money, instead of having to pay Steam a percentage for any transaction. Due to the limited scope of these Publisher-run launchers, purchasing a game from them is even more volatile than purchasing from Steam (at least in the current climate), in such that if the Publisher suddenly finds their launcher is not bringing in customers (which, on average, compared to the draw of Steam at present, they generally don’t) publishers could simply drop their launchers and the catalog of games you, the customer, may have purchased from that launcher would go with them… again, yes, this could happen if Steam went down, but presently, pound for pound, the publisher’s launchers are far more likely to fall than Steam will.

    Also… for any of these services (Steam or publisher launchers), you have to download the game locally in order to run them. The games are not streaming as most movie and music content is. As such, once you install a game, you could crack them to remove any DRM attached to them (barring any game that’s strictly online), then, yeah, you can self-host/store these games yourself all you want. If you buy games from GOG they make this even easier for you.


  • I mean… The Enterprise is always doing questionable things with that deflector dish.

    My head cannon says the Enterprise explored a wormhole to the Farscape universe, did a reverse gravaton beam on Moya, then immediately went back through the wormhole… And that’s how Moya got pregnant.

    Would also explain why all starships in the federation, after that point, were female (no dangly deflector)


  • Sorry, no. This is not accurate either. According to Unity’s own FAQ regarding the subject… Which you can look at right here…

    Do installs of the same game by the same user across multiple devices count as different installs? We treat different devices as different installs. We don’t want to track identity across different devices.

    So, again, if I install the game on 3 different devices, Unity considers that 3 installs. If I build a new computer later, then reinstall the game there, it’ll count as a new install. The scary thing is… what if someone hates you as a developer? They now only need to buy your game once, then setup a script to roll VMs and install your game on VMs (each VM counts as a seperate device), and you, as the developer, will be hit with the new install cost each time.

    Additionally…

    Does the Unity Runtime Fee apply to pirated copies of games? We are happy to work with any developer who has been the victim of piracy so that they are not unfairly hurt by unwanted installs.

    The issue here is… the developer would already have been charged the fee for a “pirated” install, because, how is a developer supposed to even know their game was pirated in the first place. Here, the developer may already be financially hit for a pirated game and now has to spend time and resources with Unity to convince them that some percentage of installs are pirated installs. Earlier in their FAQ, Unity claims they do not have a “phone home” when a Unity game is run, so, how are they determining installs in the first place? “Aggregate data”… or, another words, “trust us”.


  • First of all if you’re a poor (and possibly solo) developer who could only spring for the lowest tier you’re being charged the highest rate per install. That rate is 20 cents… per install… not per purchase… per install. If I buy the game once and install it on my desktop machine, my laptop, and my steam deck, the developer has to pay 60 cents. one of those computers breaks down and I need to reinstall the game, that’s an additional 20 cents every time. I have a young nephew who thinks nothing of installing a game to play for a day or two then uninstalling it to make room for another only to reinstall that first game again later. He does this with a lot of games… almost all of which are Unity games (I know, because he wants me to play these games with him quite often, so I see that logo pop up). Come January 1st, every time he installs that game, BOOM, developer owes 20 cents. My nephew isn’t special and, if he’s uninstalling and reinstalling games like that you can bet there’s 1000s of other kids doing the same! Hell, you don’t even have to be a kid. I might play a game for a few months, uninstall it, then reinstall it years later. That’s another thing… this 20 cents is perpetual! As a developer, what happens when you’re done with your game? You do have the time or energy to maintain the game anymore? This pricing model doesn’t care. You abandoned your game 5 years ago? Don’t care, 100 people installed your game, you owe us $20!


  • My issue with typescript… and, correct me if I’m wrong… is it doesn’t exist without Javascript. Typescript needs to be compiled down into Javascript to be run. It has no stand alone interpreter (that I’m aware of) and definitely not one baked into web browsers or NodeJS (or adjacent) tools. In essence, Typescript is jank sitting on top of and trying to fix Javascript’s uber jank, simultaneously fracturing the webdev space while not offering itself as a true competitive and independent language for said space.

    That’s my amateur two cents for what it’s worth.


  • I believe that AMD has flipped the script on this in recent years. From what I recall, AMD has been actively releasing a large amount (if not all) of their drivers as open source for integration into the Mesa driver (which I think is the same driver than handles Intel graphics as well). Arguably speaking AMD GPUs work more out-of-the-box now than NVidia do.

    That said, I switched to an AMD card about a year ago as an upgrade from an Nvidia. My Nvidia never gave me issues, it was just getting a little long in the tooth (gtx 1050 ti upgraded to a RT 6600)




  • If being inside the person did not matter, then remove the fetus and bring them to term outside the body as this question seem to imply this to be a possibility. If you do that, then everyone will apparently be happy as the mother would not risk body harm and those to whom the fetus has no relation but seems to choose to stick their business in anyway can be happy in the fact that all fetuses will come to term in absolute safety.

    Not possible then? Ok. Then it remains the mothers sole discretion.

    Corporations are not people. They are neither born nor live in the same sense as a human being, The legal rights of a corporation have no bearing on a mothers right for bodily autonomy.



  • An anti-vaxxer does have a choice, but so does the society around them. If you do not vax you run the potential of carrying a larger load of a decease that can harm and/or kill me and/or my family simply for having been in the same space as you. I do not want that risk and if enough of society believe that risk to be too great, then you, the anti-vaxxer, must vacate the public space.

    Abortion is explicitly different as, for one, it doesn’t physically effect any other human being except the mother. Now, beyond my feeling that this question is quite explicitly a smug attempt at a “got ya” question, in the case of an abortion, the Mother is the whole of society, and, like in the anti-vaxxer case, the society gets to determine what’s best for the whole… to be clear, that means the Mother has sole determination to whether to carry a pregnancy or to abort.



  • This does bring up an interesting observation… The Temporal Agents apparently have no qualms about coming to not only take back their gadgets and gizmos after someone from the past uses them, but seems to just drop in on the past and cryptically hand out missions to those same ancestors out of literal nowhere! This time travel stuff can be so mentally damaging that even those agents trained to directly work with it (Captain Brackston, for example) can mentally break. Whatever stress La’an was shouldering at the start of the episode has now surely compounded.

    You would think that Starfleet of the future would have put together some form of “Temporal Psychology” department, or something. People who’s jobs are to go back to ancestors emotionally effected by time travel, and help them deal with any trauma. Telling La’an to, basically, just “shut up and suck it up” is a horrible way to deal with someone who, essentially, just saved your existence. I get she can’t talk to any of her contemporaries, but surely someone from the past could pop-in and act as a counselor of some sort.

    IDK… I felt the temporal agent’s cold response to what La’an had to deal with was rather un-starfleet.


  • If your phone is Android… then the phone’s operating system is “open source” ( for reference ). Also, the kernel of Android is Linux, which is, itself, an Open Source project.

    Now, those are just the core systems that run an Android phone. Obviously not every app on the phone is Open Source. Most likely, not even the majority of apps are open source. That said, if you look into it, you’d probably be surprised to find far more Open Source apps on your phone than you think there are.