Bookwyrm is a Fediverse alternative to Goodreads. :)

I mean, there are some nits I can pick.

Places don’t feel as alive as they did in the original. The original was still deeply flawed, mind - but this goes even further than that.

A great example - when there was a firetruck putting out a fire in the original, you could see little dudes squirting water. CS2 doesn’t even have guys come out; the fire just magically goes away. Multiply this by… everything.

There’s no bikes (at least as far as I can tell), and the pedestrian path tooling seems to be a huge step back (the only dedicated pedestrian path I can find is technically considered a 2-lane road, but it doesn’t allow cars).

The music has these cute little segments inbetween. But there’s only like… 5 of them. Once you hear all 5, you’ve heard everything and they start to grate. The other 2 “radio stations” don’t have the NPR segments, but they do have “ads”… and by “ads” they mean exactly 1 ad that you hear every time for “Spaz Electronics”. You can turn the ads off but I’d expect more than just a single one.

Everything overreacts to anything you build. If you upgrade a road, it technically disconnects power + water + sewage for a hot second. Then you get a bunch of spam about “I don’t have any power!” blah blah even though the game was paused and they absolutely had power.

It’s really hard to see what trips Cims are taking. The original let you see the paths Cims took throughout your city, which let you make informed decisions around public transport. Now you can just see… how much traffic there is? Which doesn’t tell you anything about where Cims are going, just where you have bottlenecks. It very much encourages a “just 1 more lane, bro” kind of thinking.

Not having a wide variety of public transport options is a bummer. It feels like they left some stuff out for a future DLC (e.g. monorails).

There’s no light shining from the camera at nighttime, so it can get actually literally pitch black at night. Like “turn off the day/night cycle because this is unplayable” levels of dark. A subtle light coming from the camera when not in photo mode would’ve done wonders.

The zoning information is really hard to read. I can’t tell what areas I have zoned with something else because it colors areas from other zones as white and unzoned areas as clear… on a mostly white background. It’s really really hard to tell at-a-glance what needs to still be zoned in some cases.

The more I play it, the more it feels like CS1 is the sequel and CS2 is the original. There’s just so much that’s not done as well or that’s simply not there. The stuff they added is cool, sure… but like, I wish it was additive on top of what we had before, and not “back at square one”. It just makes me want to play the original.

I’m not OP, but generally the term is machine learning engineer. You get a computer science degree with a focus in ML.

The jobs are fairly plentiful as lots of places are looking to hire AI people now.

I mean, in the late 2000s I was kind of a shitty person. But in like 2014 I realized I was a piece of shit and started to work on myself.

I stopped basing my personality on how many girls I could land and started just focusing on myself and not on relationships. I spent 2 years guiding myself to a much better place, and then in 2016 I met my current fiance.

Why is it called Palestine? What happened to the Second Temple?

Lemmy was always on the fringe. The founders are literal hardcore unironic “China did nothing wrong” communist tankies.

I split my time like so:

• Kbin.social: 35%

• Lemmy: 55%

• Reddit: 10%

I prefer Kbin the most, but Ernest has been slow to update the main site and the mobile API is missing (meaning it’s quite bad on mobile, even with the PWA).

Sync works great with Lemmy, so on mobile I use Sync (hello from my phone).

Historically, I’ve used Relay for Reddit for many years at this point. Relay is the one third-party app that didn’t leave. So far, I haven’t had to pay anything either, and nothing has broken.

While my Reddit usage is down, I still occasionally go on Reddit both in my browser and via Relay (while it still works). I usually go to Reddit for the WorldNews live threads and to check the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit.

I do find myself missing out on news I would otherwise have known about. I don’t see dev diaries for Paradox Interactive games here on Lemmy/Kbin, for example. This makes me surprised when a patch comes out (since I don’t see the dev diaries in my feed). Likewise, there are other niche things that I only find out about way later than I used to, and that kind of makes me miss Reddit.

I also find myself engaging more with other social media. I watch a lot more YouTube and TikTok. My Google Pixel has a “for you” article feed as part of the launcher itself; I used to ignore that but find myself browsing it now. I play more games on my phone than I used to.

It’s sort of plugged the hole, but not really. Even when I’m on Reddit nowadays it’s simply not the same.

This is my “main” account nowadays; I still keep that older account around because more places federate with Lemmy.ml than Lemmy.world, so it’s handy to have accounts on multiple instances (I also have a Beehaw and a Kbin account).

Of the 4, I actually prefer Kbin, but it doesn’t have an API yet and thus doesn’t have mobile apps. I avoid Lemmy.ml because of who the admins/maintainers are, and Beehaw - which used to be quite good - has gone downhill since they can’t keep up with the growth of Lemmy. (Which again sort of adds to my point of “it really depends on what instances you cared about before the migration”, which that survey doesn’t quite capture.)

I have a Pixel. The Pixel Launcher that comes stock on the phone has a Google search thing that is not removable except via switching to another launcher. It looks like a widget, but you can’t remove it. It exists on every “panel” of the screen, below the app shortcuts.

I do use it quite a bit when making searches, but only because it’s there already and can’t be removed. If I could remove it, I would.

Shego from Kim Possible and Sam from Danny Phantom.

You’d only be able to play with people local to you, in the same Stadia datacenter. If Stadia wanted to minimize latency, they would increase the number of datacenters (thus making fewer people per instance).

PS2 was before the days of internet-based games.

Now a lot of games expect an Internet connection and a store to download things from. When those are gone, the PS4 will be scrap.

I would have tried it if I could trust Google to maintain a commitment to something for longer than a couple years (at best).

Microsoft is bigger.

Nintendo’s market cap is about $56.7 billion.

Microsoft’s market cap is $2.44 trillion, with $111 billion worth of cash (not equity, cash) in the bank.

Microsoft is 43 times bigger than Nintendo. They can pay for Nintendo with only cash, if they desire.

These trillion-dollar players are an order of magnitude larger than anyone around them. They can do what they want, same as how Apple ($2.8 trillion) can easily buy Disney ($150.5 billion) if they wished.

This isn’t an exact science, but you can use market cap to ballpark these things and get an idea of how much an acquisition would cost. For example, Twitter had a market cap of $31 billion in August 2022, and Elon bought it a few months later for $44 billion. That’s a 1.4x increase, so applying the same math buying all of Disney would “only” cost about $214 billion - which both Apple and Microsoft (and Google) could do. Nintendo would cost about $80 billion, which Microsoft could do without even taking out a loan.

The issue isn’t necessarily the price; it’s the regulators.

What are they going to do? Ban them?

Honestly if I was migrating away from Fandom I’d do everything I can to burn every bridge. Go through and edit every page to have every link redirect to the better wiki. Ignore their 2-week period, and don’t inform the Fandom overlords that the wiki is being shut down (it’s not like they’re going to check without being prompted).

I’d make them ban me, and then good luck finding an admin.

Google is shit nowadays, sadly - it used to be you could Google “Tim Buckley Jackie” and see the picture yourself. A girl’s name written on his junk near his pubes.

It got out on his forum and he banned anyone who mentioned it. He wound up doing a complete purge of the CAD forums and got rid of half his mod staff. It’s not just a 4chan thing; it was all over the internet like… 15 years ago. (Maybe longer?)

I’ve had the unfortunate displeasure of having seen it one time, so I can vouch that it exists. I can’t find it nowadays, but I can find people referencing it:

• https://imgur.io/gallery/64U1u

• https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/liy37w/webcomics_from_rise_to_loss_the_story_of/gn7abwq/

Etc.

If you do the search now you can see that Google removed some results “for legal reasons”, which is likely the EU “right to be forgotten” law being used to scrub it. But it used to exist and was well-known for anyone who was on the internet in the long long ago times…

Ugh, CAD. I thought that webcomic died a decade ago.

I’m surprised you can write a 14-year-old’s name on your crotch and send her a dick pic on your own forum, yet years later people still find your comics and share them.

Unity is a game engine that is frequently used by mobile app developers and indie gamedevs. It’s lightweight and easier to learn than its main competitor, the Unreal Engine.

Sometime within the last year, Unity adjusted their terms of service. It used to state that you were only governed by the TOS for the version of the Unity Editor you used. If you disagreed with a new TOS, you could use the older terms as long as you didn’t update the Unity Editor. This clause was silently removed a while ago, without replacement. Nobody noticed.

This week, Unity announced they are changing how they charge for the use of their engine. It used to be you had to subscribe to Unity’s developer accounts monthly if you were selling your games - this is how Unity made money. Unity has changed it so that you still have to do this, but they are getting rid of the cheapest plan (now the cheapest plan is $250/month) and Unity is now charging $0.20 every time your game gets installed. This is applied retroactively, to every game that has ever been made in Unity.

So if someone buys your game, installs it, then reformats their hard drive and installs your game a second time. You now need to pay Unity $0.40.

If you are selling your game for $1, then you effectively pay $0.30 in platform fees and $0.40 to Unity, meaning you only made $0.30 yourself. There were open questions about how this would work with GamePass, Humble Bundle, etc. - Unity has said they’ll just charge Microsoft (or whoever is the distributor) instead, without giving any details as to how this works.

This also means if you sold your game in 2012, you are now paying Unity $0.20 any time someone decides to reinstall your old game - even though at the time you were bound by a different EULA, which Unity now says is invalid and they can retroactively change the terms of.

People are saying this isn’t legal, but indie devs don’t have the money to throw at lawyers. Bigger corpo places do, but they also likely have a special contract.

People are understandably upset by this, as they are now going to be on the hook for money they don’t necessarily have. This is a threat to their livelihoods and many games are just going to remove their games from sale rather than risk losing being on the hook for a bunch of money. This means you won’t be able to buy a lot of indie games in the future.

Because a lot of mobile games are made in Unity, and mobile has a higher rate of people who install and then uninstall without really playing the game. People also install things by mistake on mobile, thinking they’re something else.

So by charging based on installs, they’re able to squeeze developers a lot more (especially mobile game developers). Competitor engines like Unreal don’t run very well on mobile.

https://lemmy.world/instances

Replace it with your instance domain.