BougieBirdie

Lack of familiarity with AI PCs leads to what the study describes as “misconceptions,” which include the following: 44 percent of respondents believe AI PCs are a gimmick or futuristic; 53 percent believe AI PCs are only for creative or technical professionals; 86 percent are concerned about the privacy and security of their data when using an AI PC; and 17 percent believe AI PCs are not secure or regulated.

I guess we don’t have to worry about our data because the people selling us the machines tell us that our concerns are a misconception.

Also kind of the manufacturer to tell us that their gimmick is not, in fact, a gimmick

Sure, but underestimating the scope is how you wind up with a Scunthorpe problem

Pepe has been sensationalized for a while now in the media as being a hate symbol. I think it’s because you see it largely on 4chan which traditional media demonizes.

I’m not on 4chan, but it seems like it has similar problems to Steam: a large userbase and poor content moderation gives insufferable people a platform to spread hate from. These problems aren’t unique to either platform, but the news likes to latch on to them.

I hate that some people consider Pepe to be a hate symbol. He’s just an expressive frog, dang it

I don’t disagree, but it is a challenging problem. If you’re filtering for “die” then you’re going to find diet, indie, diesel, remedied, and just a whole mess of other words.

I’m in the camp where I believe they really should be reading all their inputs. You’ll never know what you’re feeding the machine otherwise.

However I have no illusions that they’re not cutting corners to save money

With the sheer volume of training data required, I have a hard time believing that the data sanitation is high quality.

If I had to guess, it’s largely filtered through scripts, and not thoroughly vetted by humans. So data sanitation might look for the removal of slurs and profanity, but wouldn’t have a way to find misinformation or a request that the reader stops existing.

Ah, I’m still waking up, so I must have misunderstood.

I hadn’t considered political spending, but I didn’t get the impression we were talking about super PACs. Those are abhorrent, and undemocratic.

My stance was that if a person wants to buy something that’s stupid, ineffective, but gives them some small degree of hope and doesn’t harm others, then they should be able to. However, I’m also of the opinion that regulators need to remove those products from the market because they’re lying to people about their efficacy.

Ideally we’d be teaching people that snake oil doesn’t work. But the current political climate suggests that Big Snake Oil has captured the regulation, so I don’t see that happening either.

Are you defending snake oil? The pseudoscience con so uniquituously used to deprive the desperate from their money that it became the term used to describe “harmful bullshit sold for profit?”

Freedom of choice or not, I suppose you should be able to spend your money however you want.

But if someone is selling people lies under the promise of medical miracles, we need to throw the book at them.

I haven’t played the game, so I’m not sure how accurate my help would be. It would be helpful to be able to look at some tooltips from these skills. But to my eye this looks like a talent / build system that’s fairly common in ARPGS.

My most basic assumption is that every so often you’ll level up and be able to pick one of these skills. They’ll provide some kind of effect which is tied to an active skill (Red, Blue, and Purple appear to be likely), or a passive bonus (Orange, Yellow, and Green I’d guesss).

The arrows are throwing me off a little bit because sometimes they point in both directions, and other times they appear to loop. Usually these might mark a pre-requisite skill, so if it shows [A] <-- [B] then that implies that before you can acquire A you must first acquire B.

If I had to guess, [A] <–> [B] implies either you can freely choose between A and B, or perhaps once you select A you must select B before you can select A again.

The loops feel weird though (notably in the yellow block). I guess that means that whatever skill you start with, you must then select clockwise from there.

There’s a great variety in how games will implement this sort of thing, but in general there’s usually a way to get a tooltip with a more complete description of what each thing does. Usually that would be by hovering over the icon, but some games include an encyclopedia of effects if they’re particularly involved.

The order in which you acquire these skills often influences your playstyle. Some people are going to prefer to get abilities that seem powerful quickly, and other people like to strategically synergize their build. For my part, I tend to prefer acquiring passive bonuses that increase my experience/luck/currency to more easily game the system.

I’m old enough to remember the chainsaw controller

Oh yeah, and if you want any online services, you’ll want to look up what those cost. I don’t know if they offer a family discount for multiple accounts

I guess ultimately it depends on what kind of games your family likes

As you mention, party games you only need one. If your family’s into single player or portables then each person needs one

How is it affordable? Well, it isn’t really. Although I guess a switch probably retails for about half the cost of a PS5

It’s funny though, if you compare it to other consoles, I think people are far less likely to buy an Xbox or Playstation for each family member. And yet, people would do that for the gameboy and DS without batting an eye. The switch is trying to be everything, for better or worse.

When we got ours, we were pretty content having just one and then playing party games or taking turns on single player games. Sooner or later though, we had to get another so we could play pokemon together. Which is a shame because my interest in pokemon seems to have suddenly fallen off a cliff and now my switch is collecting dust

So I guess all that to say: your mileage may vary

This looks like a screenshot from 7 Days to Die

This appears to be a farming plot that a player has buried into the terrain. Due to limitations in the engine, the terrain renders weirdly when it’s deformed this way. This creates a weird sort of edge in the terrain, which appears to be made of dirt, stone, and grass

If the company admits that the cost of wrongdoing might be worth a billion dollars, and then still engages in a billion dollars worth of wrongdoing, maybe the fine ought to be two billion

I’m pretty dialed into indie games. What kind of games do you like? I might be able to recommend some. I get most of my indie recommendations through word of mouth or curators.

The steam store page has an algorithm tuned to your preferences. If you’ve already been playing a lot of live service games, then it assumes you must like them. Once you start showing an interest in other games, you can probably just cruise through your discovery queue.

To skip the algorithm, you can try looking at the steam store web page in a private / incognito window. But if most of the money makers are live service or free-to-play then that may just be the default offering.

I agree that it’d be nice if they depreciated in value like in the days of physical media.

In those days though, the store only has a certain amount of shelf space. So in that sense it makes sense that they depreciated because a new game is always going to have a higher perceived value.

Digital storefronts don’t have that problem. The game can be shared infinitely without accruing a ton of publishing costs. There’s always more shelf space.

In this sense, there’s no financial motivation to depreciate. And we all know the social responsibility of big companies will be to only do what they’re forced to do.

We often feel games ought to depreciate because that’s how it’s always been. But just because that’s how it’s always been doesn’t mean that’s how it always will be.

Battlefield is an interesting case though where each game in the franchise is highly derivative of the previous game. So if each new game is essentially an upgrade of the previous one, then I’d agree that there should be an expectation that the older version is less expensive.

The same could be said about many of the giant titles. Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and most major sports games come to mind.

One final thing to think of is that many games have continuing development. It’s basically the early access model (a whole other can of worms), and you could argue that many of these games appreciate in value. Some notables have - Factorio comes to mind.

I don’t think Battlefield 2042 falls into that category though

Discounts on games creates a sense of urgency in the buyer, as most discounts are temporary. Since discounts are often shown on the front page of a storefront, it gets a lot of eyeballs on it. If someone’s wishlisted the game then they’ll even usually get a direct notification.

Another way to look at it is that the game is always available at the full price. But if you’re a patient gamer then you can expect to get a lower price eventually.

Depending on how much discretionary income you have, you might be forced to wait for a sale. Or the difference in price might be no object to you. Or you may have to hoist the black flag.

Something else to consider is that the perceived value of the game differs from buyer to buyer. If I’m a big fan of a niche genre, I might be willing to spend more on a weird game than the average user. A $30 game might be worth it for me, but you might only think it’s worth $20

And more to that point, it’s extremely difficult to nail down the exact value of a game. What honestly separates a $12 game from a $15 game when they both offer a unique experience?

Anyway, all this to say, I don’t think having sales on games is strictly a predatory thing. Sometimes a discount is the only way you’ll get eyeballs on your game, or a way to reach more of the market that wouldn’t have otherwise bought your game.

I do agree that modern AAA prices are out there. I don’t pay very much for games now, and usually AAA prices me right out of the market

I’ve got a couple sources that can probably explain it better than I can, but here’s the gist:

• Walk through each file you want to read
• Walk through each line you want to read
• Replace emojis using RegEx

The tricky part seems to be defining the range of characters you want to replace. Most emoji are in a particular block of unicode, but there could be a few outliers particularly if you want to remove kaomoji.

Here’s a Stack Overflow link where there’s some discussion on what that range will be.

Here’s a Python script that shows how you might do it for one file.

Good luck!

Oh my gosh, thank you so much!

Keyboard support is definitely a must for our other games. I’m becoming more aware of the importance of accessibility.

If we were to compare it to our day jobs, the opportunity cost for the team and me would probably be around ten grand.

If we compare the time spent to the money earned, then we’re each worth several cents an hour.

It’s a good thing I didn’t get into game dev for the money, it seems I’m quite bad at it

I’m afraid not, this came out well before the deck and I can’t afford one to test on.

I’m not sure that it’s a good target for the deck anyway where it’s a splitscreen game.