So… I noticed over the past few weeks that apparently Somebody had been running “guerilla marketing” and Wuchang was apparently the most important game ever released?

And now it apparently became the center of another culture war?

… What the flip? It looked cool but it very much looked likea “good first try” and the Iron Pineapple video mostly aligns with that.

You DO realize your banks are the payment processors in that case, right? And they are also working through an intermediary to facilitate said transfer (which has almost all the same problems as above). The money still has to get from Bank A to Bank B which gets even harder if they are in different countries.

And just to preempt “then why not just do everything with bank transfers?”

1. Credit card companies provide a LOT more fraud protection.
2. We basically do. You transfer money from your bank to your card (either as debit or credit). Your card then uses Visa/Mastercard to transfer money across whatever barriers to the destination card which then is transferred to the destination account

While I like the sentiment… most of those are just fuel for “This is why I only buy name brand stuff” and is right up there with “Linux is super easy. Just start from arch and…”.

• Operation Harsh Doorstep: Fun as a proof of concept but I would barely call this playable as it is in VERY VERY early beta. And, scale wise, I would actually say it is more like Insurgency than a BF. Yeah, player/bot counts can get high but the actual objectives and mechanics feel a lot more like Insurgency if it embraced PvE.
• Angels Fall First: Amazing back in the day. Deader than 2042 these days with a one week peak of 18 players. And the bots… aren’t great
• ET Legacy: You are inherently going into a game that the players have been playing for 20 years but it is a REAL good game and I find you can still get a decent server

Of those, the only one I would even consider recommending as a BF Alternative is Easy Red 2. That game is AWESOME and it reminds me a lot of playing the SP campaigns of old Battlefront. I do think there are serious balance issues with AT infantry versus armor but… I also think armor in general is too powerful (it should not take three AP rounds to the engine to disable something…). That said, I can’t speak to it as an actual MP game since I haven’t actually tried.

Honestly? It gets a lot of crap but I would actually say to check out Battlebit Remastered if someone wants a multiplayer Battlefield that isn’t EA. Regularly still hits 750+ concurrents and I still genuinely can’t tell why the entire internet turned on it. I come back maybe once every few months for a couple of games and usually feel like I am contributing which is more than if I play ET Legacy or Tribes 2 online these days.

I don’t remember if they published the ACTUAL sex tape and I assume I would have intentionally refused to look then like I do now.

Posting non-consensual media of sexual activity is wrong, full stop.

Posting the AUDIO of that? yeah, if Joanie were dropping n-bombs and being hateful I would be all for a tabloid rag to ruin her (already pretty ruined by WWE and Paul “HH Helmsely” Levesque) life over that.

To quote the almighty dril:

issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them.’

Good.

He was a notoriously evil racist, was alleged to have commit almost ric flair levels of sexual assault over the years, and has an argument for singlehandedly killing the unionization of pro wrestling and leading to the modern “independent contractor” mess.

Might have go go chug some gatorade and visit his grave.

I am not particularly familiar with that but it will have an uphill battle. Replacing online transactions is a challenge but is feasible. And while I will always clown on cryptocurrency, I do wish at least one had actually taken off to fulfill that role without focusing on To Da Moon scamming.

Getting to the point that you can pay for food on holiday is a much less feasible one for a purely software project run without the backing of Special Interests.

I am an artist in OtherCountry. You want to buy art from me. How do you do it?

Physical money? Okay. You now need a way to track that YOU sent 40 bucks in the mail and that I received 40 bucks in the mail and that is (at least) two different national postal services involved. And now I need a way to convert 40 YourLandia dollars into OtherCountry pounds. AND we need to make sure all of that happened quickly enough that exchange rates didn’t meaningfully change

Digital money? Who is running the site? How many different sites do I need to have accounts on to accept payment from all the countries I want to sell to?

At the end of the day: For any transaction that is not face to face transfer of hard currency (and even then but…), you need an intermediary that both parties trust. Payment processors are that intermediary. Sometimes they are the person taking my IOU and turning it into money so that you can give me a hamburger. Sometimes that is effectively a courier making sure your money gets to me no matter where on the planet we are.

It is what lets us have transactions that aren’t “Okay, you drop your armor and I’ll drop my money and then we’ll slowly change places and… who the fuck just ran out of the bushes to steal the money I put down while waiting for you to put down your armor? And why are you now both doing the Carlton?”

The point is “I dunno, do something” when you don’t even understand what you are talking about is literally what trump was trying to do.

There are already plenty of alternatives to nVidia and MUCH more successful efforts to even avoid the kind of “Well, you COULD use libre office but it won’t support what we do to the docx format next week” stupidity. And… they all basically depend on TSMC which is even funnier.

Similarly, if you actually understand what nVidia’s (hardware) product is, you will know why it fundamentally doesn’t make any sense to split it up. Because the only way that works is “Okay, build all new fabs, all new research divisions, all new software divisions, etc to make the exact same product but with a lot more waste because you need perfect yields”.

No. The solution to this is to incentivize the competition to make it actually competititon. Intel is… moving on. But we already see government orgs around the planet prioritizing AMD purchases. Sometimes just for cost reasons, but it encourages those vendor agnostic shims to continue to exist and, hopefully, will increase AMD’s market share.

But “I dunno, do something to make it go away” is the kind of stupidity that we would expect from the president of the united states. If you can’t contribute to a conversation then… don’t. Or, better yet, actually ask questions rather than immediately jumping to regulation from known compromised agencies.

That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.

Because you essentially need a global presence to at all be worth using. That is why it is a joke that NOBODY accepts American Express and only the shadiest of international ATMs accept Discover (saved my ass in Germany back in the 10s though)

You are literally saying that we need to look at why there aren’t more global mega corporations.

Do we need to explain why “I dunno. make the government figure it out. Worst case scenario they nationalize a major international company that is the backbone of many industries around the globe” is not a great idea in 2025?

Like, the US is its own particular level of fucked up. But other countries aren’t THAT far behind in many regards.

Not just successful. But praised.

Even on Lemmy, if you go check out the initial threads on the Steam censorship you’ll see lots of “It is just incest and furry shit. Of course that should be banned” style comments. Less so here, but plenty of other boards and influencers immediately then chimed in that porn addiction is the real problem and you should watch a stream of a nice bigoted white man rather than give in to it and blah blah blah.

And it didn’t even start there. It ALSO isn’t the start, but the attack on Pornhub a few years back was a big watershed moment where this exact same attack was used (pressure the credit card companies to not do business with a morally dubious site). On the surface? Pornhub is full of revenge porn and child porn so it needs to be destroyed. No rational person would disagree with that… and everyone quietly ignored all the data showing that (and this was early 2020s…) facebook and twitter and instagram and so forth had MUCH more of both of those. But hey, Pornhub Corp complied and actually instituted some REALLY good policies that more or less equates to signed consent forms for every single performer. And… they were still on the shitlist. But everyone had stopped caring.

The reason for a “fourth party” is because so many of these are fully international.

The dream of cryptocurrency as actual currency (rather than just reinventing stocks) was the idea that you could use your bitcoin wallet to pay for a pizza in Kansas, London, other London, Shanghai, or Timbuktu with no perceived difference. That IS what visa/mastercard provide.

Get rid of that “fourth party” and now every single online service needs to have office space in every single country so that they can accept and convert purchases on their own. And the end result will just be dropping the majority of the world.

How would you do that?

This isn’t even a google where they are separate products with shared revenue streams and dependencies.

Gamers, AI, Data Centers, and Crypto all use the same hardware. In fact, those gaming chips (and even a lot of embedded machine chips) ARE the same chips that go to super computers and major data centers just with more imperfections and thus lower peak performance.

Yes.

My point is that saying games that have been going strong for over a decade “always ends up being a rugpull” is… it doesn’t make it look like you understand what a “rugpull” is.

Yup. I REALLY hate those 11 year long scams. Hell, WoW is going at 21 years but it is gonna screw everyone over ANY! SECOND! NOW!

Also jesus fucking christ, WoW can drink.

It is arguable how much it is needed if games/libraries are coded “correctly”.

If a game is not resource intensive it won’t consume a lot of resources. This is why people who don’t understand power supplies might pop a breaker if they boot up the least AAA game but won’t have issues playing Stardew and the like. Or why you can get a few hours out of some games on the Steam Deck and MAYBE an hour with others.

If this is meaningfully effective then it speaks to something with the underlying Sony libraries (I forget the technical term) space filling resources. It sees memory is free so it uses memory and so forth. Which is pretty common with a lot of database/queuing software and why good practices tend to be restricting those with VMs.

Nah. Fuck the remnants of polygon (buncha scabs) but I think they are right that this has to do with setting a threshold/target for a potential handheld SKU. Basically the same thing MS had with the Series X vs S.

Just to provide a bit more. A common way of thinking of it is you have a static and a dynamic energy cost. Running the CPU at all costs a certain amount of power (static). But doing actual work on it costs more power on top (dynamic). So a completely idle chip is just the static and a balls to the walls run is static and 100% of the dynamic.

You can potentially turn off parts of chips to reduce the static cost (e.g. run with 4 cores active instead of 6) but that tends to require significant hardware support. And… most literature on the subject tends to e that it is still better to just run until the proverbial sweat runs down your crack because you’ll consume less power than if you had run lower for longer.

I mean, I can definitely see an argument for barely knowing somebody for over a decade.

But the friend of a friend that I always have to check my phone for the name of? We may have been eating lunch together a few times a month for the past six or seven years but we ain’t inviting each other to private islands or committing horrific crimes together. That is AT LEAST acquaintance level shit.

Exactly.

But that is the republican mindset. “We can’t go after X because that would hurt our team” versus the moral response of “Cool. Round up all the people raping children and chemically, or physically, castrate them”

It depends how it was printed.

As a SUPER simplified basic: Any 3d print consists of walls/perimeters and infill. The walls are the exterior surfaces of the print. The infill is what is inside. And the vast majority of prints tend to be sparse infills. So rather than solid plastic beneath those walls, you mostly just have air and a mesh structure of some form.

So if the wall is thick enough (generally referred to as “number of walls”)? Sure. If it isn’t? You’ll just see the void inside the shell itself and make things much worse.

What is generally done to reduce “3d printed texture” is a mixture of smaller print layers (so the ridges are much thinner), printing with more walls, and actually lightly melting the exterior surface (either through chemicals or heat).

VKB are probably the kings of the mid-range sicko HOTAS market and I am like 90% certain they 3d print the shell of their sticks for the Gladiator (?). But they do such a good job that I genuinely can’t be certain. Whereas the vast majority of ploopy builds… aren’t that.