KubeRoot

One thought I’d like to add is, not all art is meant to be “enjoyed”, and there’s value in art that invokes unpleasant, even painful experiences.

In a way, it’s the opposite of the meme, something that can be worthwhile yet painful if it “lands”, and boring/tedious and bland otherwise. Though I also know some songs that cover bleak topics that hit me personally, but are also absolute bangers, so those aren’t mutually exclusive either.

Yes, the publishers have control over that, which is why I’m saying it doesn’t make sense to praise Steam over games on it going on sale.

That’s just the thing - the publicly visible rules are about the keys, but the email that’s part of evidence isn’t about the keys. (Also, steam isn’t just distributing the game, but providing other services for workshop, cloud saves, multiplayer, forums)

Valve gives you free steam keys for your game on request, which you can sell off steam, without paying Valve a cut. This has a specific rule that disallows selling those keys for a lower price. However, not sure if it’s this case, there was an email from a Valve employee submitted as evidence telling a game developer that selling their game for less in general would be undercutting steam, and something they wouldn’t want. If the email is real and not a misinterpretation, Valve indeed was/is pressuring developers to not sell games cheaper elsewhere.

Also, sales and giveaways are exempt from the steam key price parity rule, which I would assume epic’s free games would fall under, if you applied the rule to that despite not involving steam keys.

I don’t think the example at the end of your comment is relevant, since to my knowledge it’s the publisher deciding on pricing and doing sales, and steam is still taking the same cut.

I also think it’s generally not a great thing, since it basically puts the value of the game at $5, making it not worth getting off-sale, while also creating urgency to do so during a sale. I respect Factorio developers’ choice to just not do sales at all, and state so, so that buyers know exactly what the price is.

One point on perception - doesn’t the sun appear somewhat yellow because the blue light has a stronger tendency to scatter, meaning that the roughly white light of the sun is less blue, with all the blue color of the sky being taken away from the color of the sun?

I’ve gotten such symptoms before when running out of RAM - I’m on Arch and never bothered setting anything up for that instance and I’m not sure what’s going on, but I think the system is struggling to recover memory or something before it resorts to killing processes, and would sometimes freeze for a minute like that.

That said, yeah… Kernel modules (which device drivers often are) are allowed to run at a higher level of privilege, with less oversight, more access to hardware and better performance, so if they misuse that privilege they can break things badly. And with proprietary drivers, you have no idea or control of what it’s actually doing, so you can only try to downgrade or wait and hope the company fixes it.

There are a lot of cases where rules are a bit too strict, and it’s expected you might violate them where they don’t make sense - though if you do, you might be putting yourself at risk, and if something happens, the rule might protect anyone else involved.

But what pisses me off is that speed limits are consistently ignored. People might get mad at you for driving the speed limit. Either the limits are set stupidly low and need to be changed, or society needs to get its shit together and stop endangering people. Probably both.

If it makes more sense to focus on your specialization while paying somebody who specializes in local food delivery to do the delivery… No, yeah, that kinda sounds right. The actual issues I see here are not valuing the labor of delivery and getting too lazy, and maybe an issue where people are generally too time-pressured to take a break to get the food.

modding support

As far as I know, terraria only supports resource packs, changing textures, sounds, text, that kinda stuff, right? tModLoader is a community project made by fans, and the game devs’ contributions to that are in the domain of being receptive, supporting it being on steam, and potentially answering questions or making small changes to facilitate mods.

But on the topic of changes, can’t forget how they added new content and put it behind a new difficulty, and then ended up doing that again. And then they added a special seed that has new content that bumps up the difficulty another level.

The weakest part of any security system is the people.

Well, maybe not any, but most ;D

I’m on the fence about the topic, but you’ve gotta be dense to believe CSAM has nothing to do here. The accusation is one of CSAM, so the argument is whether the scene is CSAM or not.

In a perfect world the question would be simple, but in the reality we live in, you have to consider if the art will be misused - and that’s assuming the artist is honest about their intentions in the first place.

Unless something changed, players who don’t own DLC can’t play as the DLC characters. I believe they can interact with all the rest of the content normally, just locked to the vanilla character selection (which is still broad and fun enough, and further expandable with mods).

That just makes you more vulnerable to semi-illiterate hackers!

I think in this case it’d be the user not putting in any sensitive data or downloading executables to run from an internet radio.

I’ll add Luck be a Landlord as a game that’s surprisingly fun, has no time pressure, and lets you save and quit anytime.

Also worth noting is that FTL has a great mod, Multiverse, adding new features and lots of new content. I’m not sure how well FTL works when you have little time, but if it works, there’s a lot of unique content to see.

This is certainly an odd suggestion, and not what you’re really asking for, but makes me think of Space Station 13. It’s a janky round-based multiplayer roleplay/social intrigue game. It’s free, and the game is opensource (though not the engine), which also leads to there being many servers with unique variations. It’s cheating to suggest a multiplayer game when talking about single player natural language processing games, but using actual players is probably the easiest way to pull it off.

The reason it reminds me is because on a roleplay server, you’ve got something like 20 people, each with their job to do, talking to each other, talking on common radio, etc. - and if you’re lucky, a player playing as the station AI, complete with a (modifiable) lawset they have to follow, Asimov’s laws style. And of course, a few antagonists that have objectives to do.

If you’re curious, I personally recommend BeeStation, though there are a lot of fine choices for the server, just maybe stay away from the 18+ ones.

If I understand correctly, it’s a different kind of “immutable”, since distros like Bazzite provide premade immutable images you use and anything else you need you install using alternative means, whereas NixOS is an immutable image generator that requires you to set up your own definitions for the image, but also lets you install software by adding it to that image.

In-memory kernel patching is complicated, AFAIK only select distributions support it, right? If kernel hotswap is successfully implemented this way, it should allow switching between arbitrary kernels at runtime without extra work or setup.

Of course, that’s a pretty big “if”, but a simple unified system sounds like a great thing. And of course there’s more to this than swapping kernels.

I disagree, runbacks are as much difficulty as having to recover your currency after death, or even having to recover your items after dying in Minecraft. It’s a punishment for dying, and a way to make you treat it seriously.

It can incentivise the wrong things, punish experimentation and make players stick with what they know, even if better options exist. You’re free to dislike it, and it has downsides, but dismissing it as “not difficulty” is just dishonest.