I actually enjoyed the story. Some of the themes and motifs were heavy handed, but that’s par for the course. Honestly, the biggest issue with the story is that players have come to expect a big plot twist. Bioshock 1’s twist hit first-time players hard, so later games have tried to replicate that. But the issue is that it only hit players hard because they never knew it was coming. They only remember it because it was truly shocking the first time you played through it.

So now players have come to expect that from the series, which means the series can’t replicate it; When players are looking for a big plot twist, you can’t really hide it anymore. Because as soon as you start foreshadowing it, players catch on. And if you’re too subtle with your signals, then players who have been looking for it will say that doesn’t make any sense.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t a huge fan of the story at first. It took me a few hours and a few quests to actually get into it. It suffers from Kingdom Hearts 2/The Witcher 3 Syndrome: The two hour long intro/tutorial is absolutely the worst part, which is a shame. The game really begins to shine once you get to Meridian, but that’s several hours in.

That copyright thing was never actually tested in court though, because they settled before the trial began. The “copyrighted keys” argument was what Nintendo originally used to bring the lawsuit, but it was never actually tested because it never went to trial. In fact, many legal experts say it likely would have been thrown out in Yuzu’s favor. But Yuzu didn’t have a legal fund, so they couldn’t afford to actually take it to court and fight it.

FWIW, the PlayStation was meant to have the Nintendo button layout too. In Japan, O is synonymous with “yes/good” sort of like a check mark (✅) and X means “no/bad”. So the X and O buttons were meant to be used in that way. But western game devs didn’t know that, and designed their games with X as confirm and O as decline.

Take it a step farther. Why is cheap grain available on the market? Because European import regulations were relaxed to support Ukrainian grain exports.

In case you weren’t aware, grain is one of Ukraine’s largest exports.

It’s primarily meant for people who have slow connections. If you’re downloading a game over DSL or satellite (which is often the only thing available unless you’re in an urban/suburban area) then the 5GB of extra compression could be a huge time difference. It’s also true for metered connections, where you have to pay by the GB, or where you have a data cap.

I mean, she’s never tried to hide the fact that she’s Russian. And she also hasn’t hidden the fact that she dislikes Putin. But lots of Europe is struggling right now. For instance, the farmers protesting across many parts of Europe, as a result of the war and Ukrainian exports.

I mean, the real end solution is to host your own server. Then you can federate/defederate with whoever the hell you want. As long as you don’t do anything to get banned from a specific instance, you’ll be fine.

But that’s more work than most people are willing to put into a Reddit clone.

Yeah, the combined modem/routers are almost all garbage. You really are better off bridging it and letting your own router do the work. Because the ISP has a vested interest in giving you the cheapest router possible.

It’s easier than ever these days. The hardest part is figuring out how to configure your router to point devices to it. Because router manufacturers love to bury that setting somewhere deep. For actually setting up the pihole, it’s usually just a matter of flashing the memory card with the right image, then finding some decent block lists. But even the block lists are easy to find nowadays.

I blocked the servers with my pihole. Coincidentally, my two smart TVs are the two most blocked devices on my network. It’s not even close.

This was with only ~1 hour of TV watching, while the device in the third spot is my phone (which I had been using all day). And yet the second TV still had almost 3x as many blocked requests.

Smart TVs are fucking invasive.

This is actually why they include the personal anecdote. Supposedly it’s easier to copyright a recipe when some sort of creative writing is attached. Because the bare recipe isn’t creative or unique enough to be considered copyrightable.

That’s because the Switch’s USB port isn’t actually a USB-C. Their port falls outside of the standard size/dimension specs, because they wanted the Switch to slide smoothly into the dock instead of having a positive click like a standard USB-C should.

This is why using a standard USB-C on your Switch can actually brick the device. Since the port is non-standard, the pins are much easier to accidentally short when plugging a standard USB-C into it. There was a big string of people complaining about bricked devices shortly after the Switch launched, and eventually players just learned to only use the official Switch chargers. But that’s only necessary because Nintendo told the USB-C standard to go fuck itself, and made a port that is almost the same (and will technically accept a standard USB-C port) but does everything slightly differently.

The Switch charger also has a power switching option, since the Switch draws more power when it’s docked than when you plug it in directly. So the power supply is set up to detect whether or not the dock is connected, so it can supply more power.

Exactly. The biggest hurdle to getting new FOSS off the ground is adoption. It’s really hard to gain inertia when the vast majority of users refuse to switch. When they already know how to use the closed-source version, they’ll be resistant to change. Even if the closed-source version is less user friendly and more annoying to use, people will still continue to use it because they don’t want to start learning something new. Unity did Godot a massive favor, by scaring all of their users away and leading them straight into Godot’s open arms.

It would be like if Microsoft did something stupid enough to cause 50% of Windows users to switch to Linux overnight. Even if Microsoft later rolled those changes back, a lot of users have already installed (and started to learn) Linux, and aren’t going to go through the trouble of switching back again. And by that point Linux will have an established user base and will be able to maintain and grow that population much easier.

That would be a dumb move on his part. Stock manipulation that blatant would have the SEC chewing on his entrails in a matter of minutes.

The most likely scenario is that he was paid at least partially in company stock. This is fairly common for the C-level, because it allows them to loosely tie their income to the company’s stock price. When the company does well, the C-level makes more money.

So he likely had an automated recurring sale set up, to sell off part of what he was being paid. So if he’s paid 25 stocks per pay period, maybe he sells off 15 automatically and keeps 10. This allows him to remain more liquid (or diversify his investment portfolio by reinvesting that money into other companies’ stock,) so he isn’t keeping all of his eggs in one basket. It’s the smart thing to do, but can also be bad PR if the stock for your company tanks right after your automated sale goes through.

At most, he could’ve timed the announcement to happen right after his stock sale. So he can automatically sell when the price is still good, then watch it tank immediately after the sale. That’s not stock market manipulation per the current rules, (because he didn’t actually change how much he was selling, or change when the sale would happen) but it’s still scummy.

And he was at EA for several years before it was voted Worst Company in the World two years in a row.

Yes, they retracted the original policy changes with one of those boilerplate “we’re listening to the community” apologies. But the fact still remains that they have done it once and could just as easily decide to do it again in the future. One of the biggest reasons people shifted to Godot is because it’s free and open source. Godot (like many other free open-source softwares) had struggled with adoption until now. But now that Godot has exploded in popularity and game devs have begun learning it, the hardest hurdle is already passed and there isn’t much incentive to switch back to Unity.

It’d be like if there was a mass exodus from Windows to Linux. And then Microsoft apologized for whatever caused the exodus, but everyone had already installed and learned the basics for Linux. There would be very little incentive for everyone to change back to Windows, because as Linux gets more popular and development progresses, it gets easier to use and more robust.

The biggest hurdle for switching to a new platform is overcoming user apathy. After all, users will choose to use what they already know, even if it’s slightly inconvenient. That’s why the first phase of pretty much any software launch is making it look similar to something that already exists. If you can greet users with a familiar UI, they’ll be more likely to consider adoption. But Unity managed to actively drive users away from their platform (and into the arms of an open-source competitor) so the biggest hurdle has already been jumped.

No dev worth their salt is going to trust Unity period. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Investing in FOSS has never failed me, and Godot is growing exponentially as a result of Unity’s actions.

Yeah I can almost guarantee that the original plan was always for him to leave. He was going to be the scapegoat with a golden parachute, allowing the company to keep the unpopular changes while disbursing the bad publicity. It’s exactly what he did with EA too.

Basically reddit’s Ellen Pao plan. Bring in someone unpopular to make the unpopular changes, then let them go with a massive payout while keeping the unpopular changes.

But then Unity realized that the companies weren’t going to forget about the unpopular changes and it wasn’t going to blow over. Companies started bailing left and right and switching to other engines. At that point Unity realized that the smoke was actually a full blown fire, and started doing whatever they could to try and regain some trust. But by that point it was too late, because companies had already seen the potential for abuse. And as the saying goes, when someone tells you who you are, believe them. So now companies are unwilling to go back to Unity, and Unity is grasping at straws.

Certain things do run better on Linux. So if a game heavily relies on one of those things, it’ll run better. But there’s still a lot of game engine stuff that is experimental or just plain non-functional on Linux, so the games that utilize those are basically unplayable.

Until fairly recently, things like Ray tracing and DLSS were windows-only, because they almost universally used DirectX, which is a windows API.