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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • That’s even harder. Specially if we aspire to have a community that protects privacy & anonymity.

    Keep in mind “rich” does not necessarily mean “famous”.
    For all anyone knows, you and me could be part of the wealthy, yet nobody here would know, no online service would deny us service. Being forced to live an anonymous and private life is not really much of a punishment, at least it wouldn’t be for me… if I were part of that wealthy I’d just lay low… I’d get a reasonably humble but comfortable house in a reasonably neighborhood where people mind their own business, dressing modestly and living life without having to “really” work a day of my life, while my companies / assets / investments keep making money so I can go on modest trips and have some nice hobbies that are not necessarily really that expensive anyway. Anyone who figures it out, I set them up. It’d still be worth it to live that life.


  • Boycotting is an expected/intended tool in capitalism. It’s part of the “free market” philosophy, the regulatory “invisible hand”. The reason you can boycott a company is because the economy is based on a capitalist free market.

    If boycotts were actually a good and successful method for the society to regulate the wealthy, then there would be no issue with capitalism. So that’s not how you “end” capitalism, that’s just how you make it work.

    The issue is, precisely, that boycotts do not work (and thus, capitalism does not really work). Particularly when entire industries are controlled by private de-facto monopolies. If they worked you would not need social-democratic laws to force companies into compliance in many ethical aspects.

    What you are advocating is not an alternative to capitalism (like communism or socialism), but a more ethical/educated capitalism that works at controlling the wealthy, just like many proponents of capitalism expected it would.




  • it’s even ISO standardized

    Not only are there other ones that are also ISO standards when it comes to software layouts, but funny enough, when it comes to physical layouts, US keyboards normally follow an ANSI standard (not an ISO one), whereas many non-US keyboards typically follow a physical key layout known as “ISO Keyboard”, so one could argue those are more of an “ISO” standard.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Physical_keyboard_layouts_comparison_ANSI_ISO_KS_ABNT_JIS.png

    right ctrl + left shift + 9 will do?

    No keyboard layout uses ctrl like that… in fact, I don’t think you ever really need to press more than one modifier in any standard non-US keyboard. Unless you have a very advanced custom layout with fancy extra glyphs… but definitelly not for the typical programming symbols.

    ISO keyboards actually have one more key and one more modifier (“AltGr”, which is different from “Alt”) than the ANSI keyboards.

    In fact, depending on the symbol it might be easier in some cases. No need to press “shift” or anything for a # or a + in a German QWERTZ keyboard, unlike in the US one. Though of course for some other ones (like = or \) you might need to press 1 modifier… but never more than 1, so it isn’t any harder than doing a ) or a _ in the US layout.


  • “Capitalism” just means that the industry (or specifically, “means of production”) can be privately owned.

    The whole idea of Lemmy is allowing smaller groups / individuals to own smaller instances, so we don’t depend on big corporations.

    So the way I understand it, it’s more of a big vs small thing, not really a “private” vs “governmental/social” ownership thing.

    Sure, Lemmy gives freedom for people so, even governments, can make their own public instances… but this all still relies on capitalism, since individual instances can still owned by (smaller?) private groups that can compete amongst each other for users, so you basically are competing as if you were just another company in a capitalist system controlled by offer/demand and reliant on what the average consumer goes after.

    This would be the equivalent of asking people to purchase ethically sourced goods and drive the market with their purchase decisions (which is actually what a capitalist system expects) as opposed to actually making laws that forbid companies from selling unethical products. That means we are not ignoring capitalism, but rather participating on it, and just asking consumers to choose ethically when they go buy a product. That’s just an attempt at ethical/educated capitalism, but still capitalism.




  • I’m not convinced that the gacha model works for every demographic. And even if it did, I’m sure it’s much harder to be successful selling that kind of crap as an independent studio with no prior experience doing that. Maybe exploiting the D&D / Forgotten Realms franchise would have helped… but after the OGL fiasco (which is a good example of how profit was affected negatively when D&D fans cancelled their D&D Beyond subscriptions on the wake of new plans for monetization by WOTC) I’m not really convinced the game would have made as much money as they can with this different focus.

    Reputation also affects profits. And long term, I’m convinced Larian approach will prove to be more profitable than it would have been had they chosen to enter the wide and unforgiving world of competing RPG gacha games by introducing “yet another one” in a market that is increasingly tight, and with a public that is getting more and more tired of it.

    Yeah, Diablo Immortal / 4 or probably even Fallout 76 made money with those tactics… but I don’t believe those profits are gonna last that long, or reach an overall total as high as could have been when you think long term. They have managed to get a lot of people to stop caring about those franchises, so I’d argue they are actually burning down their golden goose just for a short big burst of cash, instead of actually maximizing the profit they could have made from the goose had they been taking care of it while steadily producing golden eggs people actually wanna buy…


  • Even when you care about a product, at the end of the day you still have to put a price tag on it, and you’ll still have to give fair shares to all the people who worked on it, while saving up as much as you can to invest in more well cared products… without making it so expensive that not enough customers will buy it.

    Caring about the product, investing on it and producing something that is actually good and that people place in high value (so they are willing to pay more for it) is not incompatible with maximizing profit. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Larian is profitting quite a bit from all the good publicity (imho, well deserved) they are getting for not having gone down the road of predatory monetization tactics.
    Probably they would not have been as successful if they had. So I’d argue they are maximizing profits in the best way an independent game studio can.
    Choosing to not participate in Subscription services at the moment is likely also in their best interest, profit-wise. Particularly at this point and with this momentum they are having.



  • Apparently, this article is talking about the “Legacy CS:GO Version” that was available (even after the CS2 launch) for devices that were unable to run CS2. It seems that was less than 1% of CS:GO players, so they are ending support for it, even though they claim it should still be available with reduced compatibility.

    I think anyone can switch to this version in the “Beta” tab of the properties window for CS2 by selecting “csgo_legacy”.

    What is the legacy version of CS:GO?

    The legacy version of CS:GO is a frozen build of CS:GO. It has all of the features of CS:GO except for official matchmaking.

    What will happen after the end of support for the legacy version of CS:GO?

    After January 1, 2024 the game will still be available, but certain functionality that relies on compatibility with the Game Coordinator (e.g., access to inventory) may degrade and/or fail.



  • coders revealed to 404 Media that “some of Kirsina’s Instagram posts are word-for-word copies of Sizovs’ LinkedIn posts, sometimes published more than a year later.” In addition, “some of the images [Kirsina] posted on Instagram show computer monitors with code that show her logged in under Sizovs’ name.” But perhaps most striking is the fact that an administrator told 404 Media that both Sizovs’ and Kirsina’s accounts were banned “multiple times” by the Lobste.rs coding forum for “sockpuppeting”—using a false identity to deceive others—in 2019 and 2020.

    Lol… for reference, this is the twitter account: https://nitter.net/UnicornCoding

    It’s full of advertisements about the DevTernity conference… as does the instagram, which has so many professional-looking photos that feel like she was an actual model, always with different backgrounds. Is the laptop wirelessly streaming to the ultrawide screen in her Twitter profile picture? because I see no cables, she’s not even connected to a charger, how long of a coding session can you have like that?


  • It’s also ironic that they say it offers a “compatibility” that didn’t exist before. Windows 98 with MS DOS under the hood was fully compatible with older games, and it was only with the Windows XP, 2000 & NT line when this compatibility was broken and those same old games no longer worked out of the box. The only way to get some level of compatibility back was to introduce workarounds and special “modes” that they had to add to XP which often didn’t really help if your DOS game was old enough.

    Imho, getting rid of the underlying “command prompt” might have been a good thing for the more casual gamers, or the ones who were new in the hobby… but most gamers coming from MS DOS at the time were not afraid of COMMAND.COM, many of us only moved from Windows 9x when we were forced to (due to newer software no longer working, or having to change PC). To me, the newer editions always felt more opaque… giving less control for the sake of security. It was getting harder and harder to try to understand what your OS was doing. With Windows XP you no longer had an AUTOEXEC.BAT or a CONFIG.SYS for power-users to customize.