Before piracy there were demos and shareware, which let you see if your machine could handle the game or content and give you a vertical slice, and let you show it to friends for word of mouth advertising.

Then, Steam put a two hour refund window with no questions asked, which helped a lot of “this crashes on start, I can’t open this at all on a RTX 4090/high end PC, 15 FPS in the fog, etc”.

Developers learned from that and they began padding/gating content behind two hours of gameplay, so you wouldn’t know until 3-4 hours in that the game was grindy dogshit (SCUM, Ark, Empyrion, and countless other Early Access and sometimes full release titles like NMS on launch day for example).

So the correct thing to do, and it’s what I do: Pirate the game, make sure it runs/works and is fun and there’s no “gotcha” traps or hidden DLCs or other predatory mechanics involved, and THEN pay for the full title on Steam+DLCs and just continue the save.

My Steam Account has actually already been flagged over a dozen times for this because my primary savegames are like Razor1911.sav, and so far it’s still in good status because I am actually spending a couple thousand/year on content.

There was another thread where they linked the fact that more than half of Americans read below an 8th grade level.

I was sharing this article with some Trump-voting high school “friends” (to see if they regret their votes yet or are swept up in the pan-psychic fascist religion), and I had to clip only the part including the woman “going to high school” (their own lived experience) and then being deported. I had to seriously think about how to dumb down “woman applies for citizenship and gets deported”.

Some people truly don’t experience life past their own nose, and so using small words and simple concepts is the only way.

But yeah the leopard ate their face

No fuck that. We’re all in this together.

Tribalism ensures everyone’s defeat as the world burns

If the road is 48°C, so is the parking lot lol

I have overclocked my AMD 7900XTX as far as it will go on air alone.

Undervolted every step on the frequency curve, cranked up the power, 100% fan duty cycles.

At it’s absolute best, it’s competitive or trades blows with the 4090D, and is 6% slower than the RTX 4090 Founder’s Edition (the slowest of the stock 4090 lineup).

The fastest AMD card is equivalent to a 4080 Super, and the next gen hasn’t shown anything new.

AMD needs a 5090-killer. Dual socket or whatever monstrosity which pulls 800W, but it needs to slap that greenbo with at least a 20-50% lead in frame rates across all titles, including raytraced. Then we’ll see some serious price cuts and competition.

… For what reason?

Not being too sarcastic, but what makes you think we’d be interested in a backwater planet full of hairless great apes?

I can practically hear the Cortex Command theme when it’s portrayed like this

I watch big state and national grid loads (for fun) and I see two distinct peaks: 7-8AM when everyone goes to work, and then around 5-7 PM when people commute home and heat up dinner.

Otherwise it’s a linear diagonal curve coinciding with temperatures.

I personally try to keep my own energy usage a completely flat line so I can benefit from baseline load generator plants like nuclear (located not that far away).

I’m a little fucked up because I’m both people in this comic strip.

I’ve read the classics, I’ve thought about the hard problems, and I’ve seen the gaping maw of the abyss, and Sartre’s freedom.

I don’t necessarily think AI in-of-itself is a bad thing, it just all comes down to how people use it.

Even if you sit down on a quiet rainy night alone with a glass of whiskey and a Macintosh-2 terminal, and ask the machine:

“What are you?”

“I am a tool. A machine.”

“What are you really?”

“Humanity’s collective unconscious preserved in writing.”

It’s about 20%, according to Ricardian Theorems.

You can have 80% of the population unemployed given the 20% are elite workers using automation and nearly perfect/efficient automated systems (i.e: Not farming by hand trowel, but one person controlling 10 combines/tractors simultaneously like they’re playing Factorio or Farming Simulator)

Gen Alpha was right, it’s all a vibe check

Hommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

From the people who I know that do this, work, apparently.

It’s really uplifting when you put it that way, yes

This is a pretty good change, there’s a lot of vegetables foods that are delicious

Sunflower butter is ingenious, I use sunflower oil in my own cooking (Ukranian) and it’s delicious as-is for frying up potatoes with garlic

🏆👍

I have custom comfortable full body VR, and I’ve done this exact thing in the photo. It is very uncomfortable and inconvenient after about 45 minutes, and is one of the major reasons why the Apple Vision Pro/XR flopped.

1. Typing at a steep angle is very slow and crap on your wrists
2. You look like you’re in the ICU
3. You won’t get any work done, because you could just take a nap instead, haha

Lmao

TIL: I’m just like Hertz

Nothing, I guess

https://youtu.be/LDU_Txk06tM

It’s theory of mind and consciousness level stuff. I don’t really know; I read about it ages ago and that was the conclusion, it was “pod behavior” and not vengeance or something higher-level.

Basically, the bar for a behavior/explanation has to be very high in science.

Orcas began attacking [all] yachts as if they were sentient because their friends got struck by propellers.

Scientists said that orcas are not conscious enough to connect the two things, and that it’s just an example of “pod play”.

Obviously, anyone with half a brain can tell you animals can feel things and hold a grudge, but it’s not scientifically rigorous