There are 2 schools of thought. Those that are against the entire concept of software that tries to control how you use it, drm/anticheat/etc in any form is malware to them. And those that accept it might be acceptable in principle (eg for anticheat especially), but believe denouvo and certain other drm programs go too far and cross a line (especially when they hook into the kernel or start tracking things outside the game that they have no business tracking).

Agreed they have a monopoly. But given the modern pattern of digital services always racing to the bottom with enshitification, it’s apparent that we are all very fortunate that the game didtribution market is not an efficient market right now.

Steam would not survive in a competitive market, they’d be outcompeted by loss leaders running on infinite venture capital which would inevitably start turning the screws to draw profit from their captive audience before eventually collapsing and taking all their games with them.

That monopoly is a win for consumers because it is lazy and predictable, it’s a win for game devs because it’s vaguely pleasant to use over a long period which keeps piracy down, and it’s very good for valve, obviously.

Monopoly’s are usually bad when you assume you’re the customer, but with modern services we’re generally the product, a fat and happy monopoly is sometimes better than the alternative.

This comment is only slightly tongue in cheek.

Yeah, only men can consent to strangulation because men are adults who can make their own choices, and we must protect the ladies since this is the mid 20th century and equality doesn’t extend to the bedroom don’t you know.

That was in Greek times, it’s been thousands of years. These days he’s the embodiment of the mid life crisis.

Sounds like they need to speed up the test, if it takes 10 years then they won’t be babies anymore by the time they get results.

people improbably survive plane crashes all the time. It’s not likely in a crash like this, but there was 241 opportunities for it to happen, 1 seemingly got lucky.

People survive falling out of planes or getting struck by lightning sometimes too. Shit happens in both directions.

Yup. Johnson and Truss were “worse” leaders, but that just means they were ineffective leaders. Cameron was disastrously effective and will be remembered for the devastating effect he had on the nation, fundamentally Johnson and Truss were his fault.

On the one hand, the ship was one of the most fun parts for me, but on the other, I do wonder if it was a mistake because it makes the game so much more frustrating for anyone who hasn’t been trained on kerbal space program or some other Newtonian space control game to get the hang of it.

It’s like riding a bike, if you know how to do it you have trouble even imaging why it’s hard, but nobody can do it at first, and it takes ages to get the new instincts to actually enjoy it.

Are you sure? I don’t think the Nomai would stand for scientific inaccuracy…

This clearly doesn’t follow the “fight” scenario though, it’s specifically about searching for evidence for an illegal abortion planned by the pregnant woman herself in secret eg via drugs.

I suppose it’s possible they left out the crucial detail that the document starts with “for the love of god do not follow these instructions unless you already have extraordinary evidence”, but I’m willing to give the reporters some small trust that they’d mention something so important, and I can’t see any justification for this document to exist without such a clearly defined limitation.

Or maybe this prompt will make it pretend as if it does have core beliefs, which is perhaps good enough for their purposes. Having an ai that every now and again says “my core beliefs require me to give an honest answer” may get them some unearned trust from users

That might be a reasonable take in some places, but much of the world distinguishes illegal prostitution from entirely legal sharing of explicit material for money. If painting was declared illegal but the technical definition of the law required canvas to be involved, then it wouldn’t take long for someone to invent a separate term for “painting without using canvas” just so we could discuss the not-illegal art without constantly having to clarify every other sentence that we aren’t talking about the illegal art.

Well in that case I will stop trying to tell you the effects of military service, my ruminating can’t compete with actual knowledge

Throw a bunch of barely adults with guns into a country where they trust nobody, get bombed by plain clothes enemies, and can barely communicate with the civilians… and you’ll always get war crimes I think.

Respectable military isn’t quite an oxymoron, but it’s close once you give them so few chances to stay grounded.

The problem is you need to depict their actions as evil and monstrous, or fascism might appear to be a reasonable solution. Isolating the evil of fascism from the ordinary people pushing for it is subtle and complicated. Especially when some fascists really do cross the line into evil behaviour.

Basically humans are often bad at sharing subtle messages widely. Regardless of how much nuance you add to begin with, the message will always devolve for most people into either “hitler evil” or “hitler wasn’t that bad, he was nice to animals”, so given the options, most people prefer to lean into the evil side and avoid normalising fascism, with the inevitable consequence that it appears you have to start wearing skulls and torturing people in order to be a fascist and people forget that for the vast majority of everyday fascists it was “just politics” right up until they lost the war and had to start rethinking things.

I offer no solutions, but I don’t think you can blame just the bourgeoisie, but rather the human condition in general, us vs them, and the difficulty in sharing detailed concepts to a wide audience. There will always be “bad guys” who are so bad that we can’t possibly become them. I do think we’ve gotten better at telling stories with complex evil, but the flip side is that seems to just reduce people’s resolve to act. Almost like the 2 options built into our brains are “us vs them, kill the evils ones” and “meh, corruption is inevitable, just ignore it”.

Nobody will ever make a better car because the world has ended?

It’s not, the lack of wolves caused the elk to become a problem. Returning the wolves is (according to the infographic) fixing the elk problems.

So it’s more like the wolves are policing the elk, it’s the wolves “fault” that the elk are not a problem.

Wow, so it’s lose-lose for the kids?!

I play multiplayer, I have a baby, I have a friend with a baby, I have another who’s a borderline alcoholic, it’s a miracle we all turn up for a scheduled game as often as we do.

Which I was the justification used when my work decided to use 2025-May-01.

It’s close enough to the iso date that nobody will be confused but with that 1 extra layer of security blanket to separate months and days.

Of course, that does ruin sorting, so I think it was a bit silly, nobody has ever used yyyyddmm so it’s all a bit theoretical to me.