I’m typically the one to remind people you don’t own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.
Eh… You don’t “own” them in that the First Sale Doctrine doesn’t apply, sure, but plenty of Steam games are DRM free, so you can store your own backups, if you want to. That counts, in my books.
Like, how much more do you need? ETA: That’s more than you get with Switch 2 “physical games”, isn’t it?
I was debating doing something like this; install my build in the crawlspace below my desk. It’s just an exterior wall, so running a big enough channel through the wall would mess up the insulation. :(
That’s a sweet setup.
Hit the nail on the head.
Millions and millions of print books are destroyed all the time, and very rarely is anything of value lost. Libraries, thrift stores, and used book stores get inundated thousands of books donated to them, most of which nobody wants. Unless you, personally, are going to take on sorting, transporting, and storing dozens of duplicate copies of books in poor condition, and have some purpose for them (presumably?), then get off your high horse about the destruction of bulk-purchased used books.
Individual copies of mass-published books are not precious. Only rare books are important for preservation. And, even then, digital copies are much more practical for long-term storage than physical books. Anna’s Archive’s preservation project as a shadow library is only possible because data storage is very cheap, infinitely replicable, and practically free to transport.
Nope. Ebooks are a license, so the First Sale Doctrine does not apply. Buying ebooks is nearly useless, legally.
The podcast is called “Better Offline” for anyone else searching.
I really like the 3 episodes I’ve listened to so far. Thanks for the rec!
Not sure if I’m learning much from it, but it’s nice to hear someone explaining what’s wrong with AI hype and stock-market-driven capitalism clearly.
Depends on the item and your goals.
If you’re a “car person” who always wants to have the latest model, then maybe leasing a car makes sense. Every 3 years, you get a new car.
Phones are similar; there are some plans where you are expected to return the phone every 1-2 years. If you really want the newest model all the time, then that might be a good plan for you.
But for a printer, that only makes sense if you’re a business with medium print volumes and no IT budget. For home use, that’s insane when a cheap last printer will last decades. We have a B&W laser from 2 decades ago and a used colour laser we got for free/very cheap (the power button is broken but it otherwise works great). I’m guessing we pay about 1-2% of an HP subsription.
This is a bit of a side point, but this quote seemed off base to me:
“People are paying for these games!,” he exclaimed. “This is not happening for … books.”
50 Shades of Grey was an all-human alternate-history Twilight fanfiction that was largely plagiarised.
There are also entire genres that are becoming successful for independent authors, mostly self-publishing on Kindle Unlimited like LitRPGs (basically fantasy novels with videogame-like systems) or Jane Austen variations (like Pride & Prejudice retold slightly or very differently).
I think the Long Tail of the Internet is changing a lot of industries, creative or otherwise, not just indie games.
MAM has, effectively, no ratio requirements at all since it’s so easy to get points. There’s some system to reward seeding low-seed torrents and large-file-size torrents, and to stay in good standing you only need to seed for 72h. Hell, they give out freeleech tokens like candy, too.
If you start by downloading some low-seed books to keep the swarm alive, you’ll have enough points to buy VIP status indefinitely. And because of that system, basically everything on the site is available and downloads in seconds. It takes me longer to transfer audiobook files to a phone than it takes to download.
By definition, it is. 85-115 is the 1 standard deviation range for IQ and encompasses ⅔ of the population (roughly). So, 115 is “average” or “high average”.
115-130 is above average, while 70-85 is below average (“mild intellectual delay” used to be the term I think? Not sure if that’s still current). 145+ was “genius” and 160+ was “super genius”, back in the day; I assume those terms aren’t used anymore, but I haven’t looked into it. IIRC, about 97% of the population is 70-130 IQ.
My brother is a “genius”; I am not. (I was never told my exact score on the IQ test found for me as a child, but I know the range, and in both our cases came from a psychologist).
I’m more “successful” by most standard measures of success, but that might have more to do with his (undiagnosed and unsupported) autism than his IQ. (Career , house, family, etc.) In math, for example, he could get 100s without effort, until university. I could get 100s with significant but not extreme effort, or coast and get 80s-90s until university. We both got top scores on math contests at the local (academic) school level.
I don’t really think IQ is very valuable for having a “good” life. Emotional regulation, introspection, mindfulness, and other soft skills are more important, imho, and I’m actively working on trying to build more capacity in those areas, and they’re leading to more success for me than my speed at learning a narrow subset of things (what IQ measures).
I’m dealing with a lot of harm from how constantly being labeled “smart” was damaging for me, paired with my at-the-time undiagnosed ADHD. I struggle with a lot of imposter syndrome, need for external validation, and oscillating sense of self worth.
TL;DR: “Emotional intelligence” trumps IQ for life skills and general happiness, equanimity, and “success”.
Isn’t a cracked (old, I think?) Kindle the only way to pirate KU/DRM titles? At least, that’s what I recall from the last time I looked into it. There’s a book I really wanted to format shift from KU since Google TTS was fucking up all the proper nouns, but I gave up. (It was an obscure book that isn’t available anywhere pirated.)
Yeah, I agree. I’m not at all interested in what score they gave the game; I’m more interested in what they liked/didn’t like and, more importantly, why they felt that way. Then I can get a sense if the game will match my tastes/interests.
Weird to hear that. My only issue so far has been how hard it is to get movement speed on boots. Granted, I’m only just about to start Cruel, so my playtime is low compared to many, but I’m absolutely loving all the boss encounters, particularly with the dodge mechanics. And not needing to worry about socket numbers, colours, and links on gear.
Maybe I should read what others are saying, but I have nothing significant to complain about so far, aside from move speed being a bit too slow.
That sounds really cool. Thanks for sharing; I hadn’t heard about this one previously.
I was gaming exclusively on the Deck from January to the start of December…
…But Path of Exile 2 I’m streaming from my desktop to get acceptably clear visuals and smooth framerates. I’m back heating my house with my desktop.
Holy shit, that’s huge. I was trying to wrap my head around those numbers.
Russia is about 3½ times Canada’s population, so 30K deaths is, per capita, equivalent to about 8.5K deaths in Canada. That’s higher than all-cause mortality in Canada from ages 1-35. Just from HIV.
Whoa. That’s not good.
Or, another perspective:
More than 1% of Russians are infected with HIV. (Estimated 1.5mm out of ~140mm.)
Regardless, they need to have it in their terms of service that they can host the file, encrypted or otherwise, on their servers and reserve the right to serve the files to other users.
But yes, that’s true that they can’t necessarily access the files they’re hosting/serving.
To be fair to Discord, it has to work that way. They serve the files to you anywhere in the world on any device you use, don’t they? That requires hosting the content.
But it could very well be used for other purposes, too, of course.
Loving it.
On the Steam Deck, it was playable, but I couldn’t find settings that looked good and were visually clear, so I finally got around to setting up Sunshine and Moonlight (in-house streaming) and it’s amaze balls.
I’m using a script that switches my desktop to a virtual monitor that’s the Steam Deck’s native resolution, and I recently upgraded my house to a WiFi 6 mesh network, so it’s working almost flawlessly. (I often get crashes on startup, but it’s never taken more than 3 tries, then no issues.)
I’m still only in act 1 (limited playtime) but I’m so excited to be playing PoE again, and PoE2 is perfect for playing with a controller.
I don’t want to simp for a corporation, but what is Valve doing that’s anticompetitive?
Like, don’t they need to be doing something to limit competitors’ access to the market to be anticompetitive?
Steam requires base price/same price parity for selling Steam keys, but they’re literally giving their services away to developers for free in those cases, so that’s pretty clearly not anticompetitive, right? And there’s no requirements that I’ve seen written anywhere that they require price parity for non-Steam-key sales.
And, based on the massive numbers of bundles of games I’ve bought with Steam keys with total historical-low game prices below best-ever Steam sale prices, they pretty clearly don’t even enforce this rule strictly (it seems like so long as the total bundle price is in line with individual title sale prices, they’re fine, even if consumers get other games as well.)
So I’m not sure what the basis for this suit is. Not saying it’s healthy for the market to have an effective monopoly in this space, but the reason Valve is maintaining its marketshare is because they’re consistently offering the best value to consumers compared to other storefronts, which isn’t illegal.
/Insert “prove me wrong” meme
Oh, that’s good to know. I read that Switch 2 games are just cryptographically unique keys to allow download and play of the games.
And good point about the installer vs. just having the game files in a folder. Yeah, it’s not like GOG where you can download an offline installer file.