You might be surprised. Plenty of sites backing up whatever they can. Try archive.org and various abandonware sites.

Yep, Valve also normalized microtransactions significantly through TF2.

Once again, Valve started it as something reasonable: Cosmetic options, then expanded to allow shortcutting unlocking alt weapons through $1-3 charges instead of through game progression (achievements unlocked alt weapons at first). Other companies followed suite in ever increasingly predatory ways, and Valve got worse with it too over time.

I’ll tell you something you missed:

Steam’s DRM is notoriously easy to bypass, allowing that. They also don’t force DRM on their platform, it’s entirely developer/publisher opt-in (and they are also free to add additional DRM on top if they wish), and many many releases on Steam run fine directly from the executable without the launcher running.

Edit: For the record, I pirate before I buy, buy on DRM free platforms (GOG mainly) where possible, and use a third party launcher to unify my collection across multiple storefronts and many many loose executables into one spot.

Let’s also not forget how absolutely groundbreaking Steam was for digital distribution.

I really have a hard time accepting that they “pushed” the industry rather than that they offered a platform with features that were worlds beyond what was available at the time for game developers and publishers. No one was bribed. There were no shady backroom deals. No assassinations of competitors (in fact the opposite, doing experiments with cross platform purchases with the PS3 and with GOG). There was no embrace extend extinguish, as there was nothing already existing like it to embrace or extinguish.

Also saying that they are now supporting linux and open source is ignoring a long history of their work with linux. This isn’t something new for them. What’s new is yet another large step forward in their investment, not their involvement.

Look, like you, I am concerned about their level of control over digital distribution game sales for the PC market. But from a practical standpoint I find them incredibly hard to have any large amount of negative feelings about them due to their track record, and the fact that they are not a publicly traded company so they are not beholden to the normal shareholder drive for profit at any cost. I’d love to hear more reasons to be concerned if any exist rather than “proprietary” and “too big”.

On top of that, Steam DRM is pretty notably easy to bypass, with what appears to be relatively little effort from Valve to eliminate the methods. They aren’t doing the normal rat race back and forth between crackers and the DRM devs that you would expect.

Anyway, again I’ll say: I’d love to hear more reasons to be concerned beyond “proprietary” and “too big”.

This is probably the simplest option. I’ve seen a good number of simple yet functional and pretty sites built in markdown and converted to html via some simple tool like pamdoc.

They are, even in name. There’s some weird business structuring loophole where the “uber” OpenAI group is a non-profit, that runs/oversees the for-profit subsidiary OpenAI. It’s like OpenAI inc vs OpenAI co or some rediculously meaningless distinction.

It’s always vintage meme time at !antiquememesroadshow@lemmy.world

What a clickbait title. Not OPs fault, they just copied the original article title.

Saved you a click: This is about a short interview with one of the leads behind Fallout Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel. When 3 was coming out, Todd Howard said that for their purposes, Tactics and BoS didn’t happen.

Game lead says it sucked to hear, but he’s happy that elements have become canon in kind of a back door way, and thatcs good enough for him.

It was a different time with far less people needing clearly defined canon lore for things, and the canon of the other series Todd oversaw/sees Elder Scrolls was/is a massive clusterfuck with multiple conflicting events being simultaneously canon due to “dragon breaks” allowing multiple conflicting game endings to somehow all have officially occurred all at once. Seriously look up how the lore handles the endings of Daggerfall, or the fact that the entirety of the gameplay area of Oblivion (the Empire) had been consistently described as a (tropical) jungle in every game pre-Oblivion.

Anyway, here’s the relevant quote in its entirety, with bolding added by me that changes the sentiment from the headline significantly:

“It sucked,” says Orman. “You don’t want to be told that what you’ve done is non-canon. By the time he said that I had a lot of distance from this, so it wasn’t heartbreaking or gut-wrenching—it was just like, ‘Oh man. You didn’t have to officially say it, we could have existed in this weird quantum state where it was kind of part of things.’ But the way things go now, with the reinterpretation of IPs and the retelling of stories—and especially with the creation of the TV show, where it’s existing in the universe, but they’re taking liberties and they may have to make adjustments to make that world work for TV—lots of ideas are going to get shuffled around. There have been little bits and pieces of Tactics which you can see kind of are canon now, just through the back door over time. And that’s good enough for me. I don’t need anything more than that.”

And if you want to avoid the Microsoft stank, there’s VS Codium that has been de-Microsoft’d, like Chrome vs. Chromium.

You can disable online results permanently with about 15 minutes of web searching and adjusting settings (including within registry and group policy, but still).

With NAT existing, I’m not sure there’s a significant reason to switch anymore.

Plus the “surprise” privacy and security benefits of just… not having every network connected device directly addressable by anyone else on the global network. The face of the internet and networking in general, plus the security and safety concerns around it, have changed dramatically since v6 was first created.

Because no matter how sad you get, it isn’t going to bring the deceased back.

There’s also a huge matter of intent. OP didn’t stroll into a funeral you were attending and be an ass. Lemmy isn’t your personal space for anything in particular, it’s a public forum. At absolute worst you held a funeral at an amusement park and are getting upset that they didn’t shut down the rides and that others are still having fun.

More seriously: What could you possibly need Lemmy to inform you about regarding these things? Are you undecided still somehow?

There’s a big difference between not wanting to swim in this shit in one social media app, and trying to shut it out entirely. I don’t need additional reminders about how shit things are, especially not ones with a peanut gallery spewing the same dumb jokes I’ve seen a million times.

Does anyone else wonder where all this recent FUD about Firefox’s funding is actually coming from? No offense meant, but this really doesn’t seem natural to me.

Firefox’s funding has been this way for well over a decade. Why does it only suddenly matter now, when Google is under a lot of fire politically and making a lot of anti-consumer moves in rapid succession?

Maybe there’s a ton of people who truly weren’t aware of this, but I really have to ask what the motivation is behind the tech news outlets suddenly talking about this all again. It’s not new information. It really doesn’t qualify as news.

Firefox has been more or less doing fine for multiple decades now, regardless of the main source of their finances. While I don’t agree with their continued fad chasing, I have no concerns about the longevity or trustworthyness of their core “product”, the browser. I’m even less concerned when I consider the large, diverse, and healthy community of forks surrounding it.

Edit:

More to the topic: Gecko is why Firefox is important. More specifically, the fact that it uses a unique underlying engine. Doesn’t matter what they call it, just that there is an open source web browser engine that exists at feature parity with commericial and closed source browsers.

More edit:

As far as Mozilla’s decisions making sense in terms as a business, I really could care less. To me, Mozilla’s existence is to ensure continued adequate funding for Firefox development and maintenance.

Any further pursuits in the realm of things that would be good for open source software and privacy are important but secondary to keeping their primary product, the browser, alive.

It’s also vitally important to note that Google has a basic business contract in which they pay Mozilla to make Google the default search engine in Firefox. That is it. They don’t own Mozilla or Firefox, have any direct seat on the board, or have any postion with them involving decision making or influencing. No one knows what happens behind closed doors, but there has never been any quantifiable reason to believe that Google is pulling Firefox’s strings.

The announcement was that they were deprioritizing all non-browser projects, iirc.

Famicom Detective Club got a translation/remake for the switch. Might be that?

!unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org

Probably weirder than you’re looking for, but fun.

At the end of every exchange, someone has to be left “holding the bag”. There’s no end state that doesn’t end up screwing over someone else so you can cash out.

No, in fact. The nuclear lobby has been historically raw dogged by the malding fossil fuel and coal plant industries for decades. Up until recently, traditional power lobbies haven’t seen renewables as legitimate competition due to issues of scaling to meet demand, issues of location restricting where they can be built, etc.

We’ve had reactor designs ready to use the spent fuel you’re so damn concerned about for years now. Turns it into even less dangerous more spent fuel as more energy is pulled out of it (if you’ll excuse the incredibly simple summation). Incredibly efficient.

Fully researched. Risks, benefits, construction costs mapped out, maintenance costs mapped out, decomissioning costs mapped out, how long they’d be safe to run mapped out.

Every single time construction of a new plant comes up, there is a massive fucking push from the older “burn dangerous shit to pollute the air and generate power” industry to drum up fear again until the local community "not in my back yard"s hard enough to stop it.

Let me make it as explicit as possible: People like you, freaking out about hypotheticals surrounding nuclear power that they have never taken the time to understamd themselves, are a huge part of the reason why greener energy production is so slow to take off.

If green energy is so ready to take the fuck over and make nuclear obsolete, how in the absolute fuck do you explain what’s going on in Germany right now? Are they just too stupid to do things the right, safe, sustainable way that has no drawbacks at all? Or maybe, just maybe, there are still issues preventing reasonable widespread adoption of renewables, and the smog belchers want us at each other’s throats instead of at theirs?

Fucking hell. Let me know when you start accusing people of being bots or paid shills so I can just fucking block you already.

Man, we could generate some good wind power with how fast those goalposts are moving!

A good chunk of the world is still stuck where the options are coal vs nuclear for base load coverage. Of course people are going to push for the safest option for large load needs.

We’re generations away from worldwide energy needs being met entirely by green renewables and battery banks. I’ll never be against expansion of those technologies, but nuclear is an important middle step that is far less dangerous than the most widely used technologies for meeting base load (coal).

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.