I don’t want to get shot at all and do what I can to avoid it (like not hang out at elementary schools). But if it comes down to it, I would rather a blap in the ass than the face.
I remember being so excited about reforger during that reveal stream.
Then it was multiplayer only/primarily. And it was 30 bucks. And there was no form of incentive to buy it (discount on ArmA 4, free DLC for ArmA 3, etc).
And then it apparently ran like dogshit. Like, more dogshit than arma games usually run.
I am glad you had fun writing that blog post but, for any purpose that matters: Yes, it is possible. And we are already seeing the pathway to it
Increasingly build a narrative that encrypted communication is for CSAM. The tor crowd are already doing a good job of providing fuel for this.
Argue “terrorism” for the rest. “Fortunately” people have realized the mess in Israel/Palestine is a lot more complicated, but it is only a matter of time
Strongly pressure/incentivize the major app/social media companies either disable it at the app level or maintain internal keys to decrypt messages (effectively disabling it)
End result? Only “tech savvy” people will know how to set up their own entirely parallel “internets” (similar to tor). And then the phone and OS app stores increasingly lock down on third party apps for “security”. Hell, I can even see a world where Redhat and Ubuntu strongly discourage these tools from being allowed in any official repositories because they want the government contracts for their premium OSes.
Will e2e truly be “banned”? No. But the only people doing it have insanely janky phones and linux.users with laptops. Which means it is nigh useless for the vast majority of whistleblowers and that “secretly being gay or a woman” becomes a huge mess where the vast majority of people will never understand how to protect themselves.
In terms of actual vulnerabilities? Probably comes out comparable? You have more eyes which means more opportunities for code review. But that is going to boil down to how rigorous the code review is and whether it is just people rubber stamping “trusted” developers.
Its controversial for a lot of reasons but a couple years back there was the university professor and his grad student who intentionally introduced vulnerabilities into one of the big projects. I forget at what point that was caught or what project, but it happens every few years. And likely happens a lot more that we don’t know about.
But mostly? When I am assessing software for a production situation, the security of an open source library versus a proprietary one isn’t even on the list. Depending on the company I am investigating the contributors, but that happens whether it is a company or a github page.
What really matters to me is how critical it is and what the support model is. Because if a vulnerability takes a week to get properly fixed or results in significant development slowdowns in the aftermath: It is worthless to me. Whereas a company that is on the hook to go all hands on deck and crunch their developers (because that always helps and doesn’t cause problems down the line…) to fix an issue within N hours? That shit means I don’t lose any sleep when the poo hits the fan.
We are going to be seeing a lot of this over the next few years. And it is mostly the same as “EA bought and killed all these studios” back in the day.
The live game market is more and more crowded every year and Destiny 2 is winding up the same arc it has been in since Destiny 1 (I think?). It is hard to tell what the reality of “45% below the full-year outlook” means, but player retention HAS been falling and that is a good indicator.
If Bungie had stayed independent or stayed at MS they would likely be in the same place. Well, at MS they would have gotten gutted with 343 last year.
Its similar to HBS getting gutted under Paradox. I still think it is bullshit that, of all studios, HBS was not given the chance to “fix” Lamplighters considering their amazing track record in that genre. But also? I don’t know a single person who was excited for Lamplighters League. We all heard “Harebrained Schemes is making a new game” and immediately got our hopes up for something like Shadowrun or Battletech. And then we got LPL which… is fine. But, regardless of whether they were at Paradox or independent, that would have likely led to massive layoffs because of the flop.
And we are going to see a lot more of this, same as we did in the 90s and 00s. Between economic uncertainty, increasing interest rates, and just general “flops”. Because EVERYONE thinks “extraction shooters” are the next big thing. But… we are increasingly seeing questions of whether Tarkov is even particularly successful. Same with lots of other games. And publishers are less likely to say “Well, you’ll get it right next time. here is another couple million bucks” in the current climate.
But also: What would be the point of open sourcing your engine so that a russian company can work on it or use it? If you are going to be doing back channel exchange of money to outsource improvements then that is a REAL good way to get your assets seized. And the commit history will be a good indication that something hinky is happening. And if you are going to back channel it you just give them a private FTP server or something.
I am not huge on warthunder so I can’t really speak to the technology. It looks like it has some good scale capabilities though. So I could see this as being the first step to try and pull an “Unreal Engine” and branch out that way. Although, odds are this will be closer to a Cryengine.
Friendly reminder that the lead dev of RetroArch, TwinAphex, is a known transphobe who has a history of harassing and stealing code from actual emulator developers to pressure them into directly supporting RetroArch
Regarding the directly anti-trans stuff: I won’t be linking to that since it involved a lot of dead naming and claims of causing the death of a person and… yeah. You can find that with a bit of googling.
So, when possible, use the actual emulators. There has been a MUCH bigger push over the past decade or so to provide user friendly UIs and to actually care about UX. And there are other frontends that aren’t libretro/retroarch.
No. You came into a discussion of why it is important to support good news outlets with “Well, Philosophy 101 taught me that there is no such thing as an unbiased or good news outlet” and continue to not understand the difference between “8000 civillians have been killed in the retaliatory bombings over the past few weeks”, “8000 people died as a result of the Hamas terrorist attacks in the past few weeks”, and “The root cause of World War 2 is…”
It is an inherently bad faith argument coming from a position of ignorance, at best. So maybe I don’t know your background, but I very much can make informed decisions on what your expertise, or lack thereof, is and can see strong indications that you are doing your best to not scream “fake news, fake news”.
Again, you are comparing a historical discussion to reporting on current events. They are very different situations with different expectations.
I get that you are happy that you learned something interesting in philosophy class. And that is a very important thing to understand. I love discussing the nuances of history and the motivation behind different wars (and understanding those would help a lot with current conflicts…). But it has very little to do with the nightly news or being aware of current events.
It isn’t a “critical discussion”. It starts from a fallacy (if perfection can’t be reached, why bother?) and continues to completely misrepresent the purpose of news media.
Because going back to your “When did World War 2 start?” non sequitor:
The nightly news has little to no reason to even have a stance on that. In fact, if Anderson Cooper were to get on screen and say “World War 3 started today”, it would be immediately followed with “The fuck? Okay, Fred is drunk again and I need a new script… sorry for cursing, I hope we bleeped that.”.
What the news WOULD report on is “Israel has begun a bombardment of Palestine in retaliation for a string of terrorist attacks”. A GOOD outlet would then say “This is one of many flash points in a decades long conflict going back to the foundation of Israel in the late 1940s”, an explanation of the open air prison that is Gaza, and possibly a deeper piece on the ongoing terror attacks from both sides.
As for a longer form documentary or article: Again, what matters is “fair” comparisons.
If an article is insisting that the evil Americans bombed Japan to oblivion because they were bored: I would think less of them because that is not what happened. And likely make a note to never watch that outlet again.
If an article pushes the argument that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were primarily posturing and a threat to Russia: I would still be a bit disappointed, but that is a commonly held theory with a lot of supporting evidence. The main thing that it ignores is what Imperial Japan was doing to Asia and what they were trying to do to Hawaii.
Similarly, if an article argues that Imperial Japan were pure evil (they were) and that the nukes were justified: I would still give a LOT of side eye because that is likely propaganda.
But if the article discussed the context of the Japanese atrocities, the struggle for every inch of land on previous islands, and the political statement of being the first to use these new horrifying weapons: That is a good article. I don’t even necessarily care whether they have an opinion of “good” or “bad” or “It is not our place to have one”. The key is they provided information so that others can better understand what came before.
Nah. I think they just assumed more people remembered the ad campaign by (if memory serves) The New York Times where they more or less showed every step used to investigate and verify a story before reporting. Also, I would be amazed if that was actually the NYT’s campaign which… probably sums things up.
Before they were mismanaged to the shadow realm, Vice was similar. The idea that they very much were “good news” and ACTUAL freedom of speech/the press in contrast to “I want to say all the slurs”
If we are playing “who got here ‘first’ 50 years ago” then I think we all best get to stepping so that the US Military has all the pipes.
Like I said: Look in to fine grain blocklists. Block ALL the tracking cookies because fuck that shit (and if you think ticking “don’t give me curated ads” does anything…). But consider permitlisting the better ad sources so that the internet isn’t completely run by profitable hate groups… like we see happening.
But many outlets have learned to make clear demarcations between editorial and reporting. It isn’t always obvious if you aren’t looking at it, but it is the idea that actual data is reported “honestly”.
For example: Take a look at how most outlets report on the Israel/Palestine war. Some will list IDF casualties for Israel and civillian casualties for Palestine which introduces immense bias (I want to say Al Jazeera does this?). Others will use verbiage like “N Israeli citizens were killed. N*100 Palestinian civilians died” which introduces bias on the other side. A good outlet will use the same verbiage and data for both sides.
And that is immensely useful. Because, again, to harp on that war: There is so much FUD out there that it is REALLY hard to know what is true or not. And sure, social media is a lost cause. But so are a LOT of news outlets and that is why the hospital bombing immediately entered “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” territory.
And no, I am not going to list an “objective or unbiased” outlet. Because that never leads to a good discussion. It always results in “Yeah, well here is an example of them not being perfect. Checkmate” and, more importantly: People who understand the need to care about this should learn how to evaluate for themselves. Rather than rely on some rando on a message board to tell them how to think.
Its a bad marketing campaign because it is easily turned into threads like this. Also, I have no idea if USA Today is good or not (I genuinely have never even thought about it).
But it is worth understanding. News outlets need to get funding from somewhere. Some are state funded and I should not need to explain why that introduces biases. Others take massive sponsorship deals from companies and ensure that John Oliver will always have something to talk about. And others run ads to varying degrees of curation.
The last option is subscriptions and those are few and far between.
Its more or less the same thing we saw with ads in general over the 00s. More and more people learned how to block ads so more and more websites needed to add obnoxious flash based ads and insane uses of javascript and so forth to get any impressions. And fewer and fewer “good” companies wanted to advertise to adblock heavy audiences which led to more and more trojans and so forth. Which leads to more and more ad blockers and…
In the case of news media? We mostly see this manifest as less investigative journalism and more listicles and “clickbait” articles because those at least get the facebook crowd to click.
So it is very much worth looking in to more permissive blocklists and even permitlists. Block tracking cookies because fuck that shit. But permit sites that you “trust” to have reasonable ads and look in to finer grain blocklists that still allow the actual ads to be displayed, even if they aren’t the ones based on Amazon figuring out you have a foot fetish.
No arguments there but that is kind of why I said we are in Act 3 now.
Act 1 is largely the (mostly plotless) period between Vor’s Prize and Second Dream. It is setting the stage for the game, mostly, and is the kind of filler people would be told to “push through” if this were a tv show. The goal is to get us to the point of “Oh yeah, I vaguely recall that guy” every time Tyl or Vor or whatever show up.
Act 2 is where we have been for the better part of a decade. The Operator is a thing and their relationship with The Lotus is a driving force for a lot of the narrative. This probably ended with The New War, but we’ll need to see how Whispers plays out. This sets the stage for Albrecht and The Man In The Wall.
Act 3 is what we are in right now. The Operator and The Drifter are a thing, we are going to meet-ish Albrecht and Hayden Tenno, we are probably going to learn a lot about The Man in The Wall, and we are already fighting his minions as part of Zariman and Duviri.
I do think going in blind and playing The Second Dream is one of the top 100 experiences in gaming. But even DE have stopped considering The Operator to be a spoiler (and it is mostly just us players who still call it “spoiler mode”).
Which, going back to MMOs/Live Games. Cataclysm was a MASSIVE thing when it happened in WoW. And now it isn’t even the status quo that new players experience. Same with the Charr invasion in Guild Wars 1 or, probably, whatever is going on in Destiny at this point. Because “you have to play through 30 hours of content before we can even talk” is just not viable.
I forget if FF14 just gives level skips or also content skips to start in the expansions (and pretty much EVERYONE acknowledges A Realm Reborn is mediocre. And nobody can play the previous original campaign anymore). And Elder Scrolls Online doesn’t even start you with the original main quest at this point. You need to actively trigger that (which has implications for the game mechanics but…).
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