I relate to the kid. I once slept under the couch cushions because it was more comfortable to be kinda warm than to be cold sleeping on top. Buddy was the first to pass out and it was like 2 am and I didn’t know where an extra blanket was.

They have the money and the technical talent to make a good launcher. They just appear to choose not to.

This is completely the case. You can’t tell me the makers of Unreal Engine couldn’t figure out how to replicate at least some of the more commonly used features of Steam. Of course they can do it. Someone somewhere in the corporate ladder decided they don’t need the extra features to compete with steam. Maybe burning money on the exclusivity contracts and game giveaways will work out in the long run, but I doubt that when they flat out said they’re spending more money than they earn in their 800+ person layoff just a few months ago.

Instead of offering anything to be a better platform they are burning money on the platform in hopes they can pay their way to dominance by paid exclusivivity and giving away games. One of those isn’t bad for users. Now consider what Epic offers beyond being able to buy and download a game. Nothing. Epic is only a storefront and they’ve had years to work on this at this point. Steam has gained dominance and maintains it in no small part due to all the additional features available to everyone. Do you use the steam workshop for any of your games? Have you used the steam community forums to troubleshoot a problem? Do you use big picture mode for a more console like experience? Do you customize your controller settings with the pretty expansive controller support built into steam? The overlay? How about the custom profiles and badges and trading cards? Epic is only a storefront. That’s it. That’s all that’s on offer. So they supplement it with bribing devs to be exclusive to their store and giving away games to try and attract users.

Wikipedia is one of the most impressive collective creations of the modern world. One day corrupt politicians will ruin it. They’re one of the organizations I donate to every year in my futile hope they preserve it as long as possible. Articles like this just reinforces the need to vote for people who aren’t actually cartoon villains. May not vote for SC but we do for who appoints them.

Discord is really bad for preservation of information. I can still find forum posts from 10 years ago on a given topic all over, but discord links seem to expire and break all the damn time and it’s hard to search through. It sucks that discord has become the defacto choice for user community space.

This imploded so quickly I’m impressed

Big “I pledged it” energy here.

I found I could visaully block the pop up and use keyboard controls to still play a video. It did break navigating the page though because while I couldn’t see it popup it was still there.

Yes this is the most critical. The apps that have been made are a good stride in the right direction but the fediverse is not intuitive to use

I’m conflicted on a lot of this. At the end of the day it seems like these LLMs are simulating human behavior to an extent - exposure to content and generating similar content from that. Could Sarah Silverman be sued by comedians who influenced her comedy style and routines? generally no. I do understand the risk with letting these ‘AI’ run rampant to displace a huge portion of the creative space which is bad but where should the line be drawn? Is it only the fact they were trained material they dont own people are challenging? What recourse will they have when a LLM is trained on wholly owned IP?

Divinity original sin 2. The anticipation of BG3 has got me re playing old rpgs and trying out some new ones.