luciferofastora

@luciferofastora@lemmy.zip

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luciferofastora,

Right? “Oh look, country with huge population has more downloads than country with small population!”

luciferofastora,

I imagine the answer is “what’s the real world?”

I’m being facetious. I don’t want to assume they all fit the stereotype of nerd that never leaves his room if he can help it.

They can probably either mask their hatred well enough, or they’re in a place just as bigoted, which may have fostered their convictions in the first place. They go through their interactions with the real world seething with anger and bitterness, then seek relief in video games.

At their heart, they’re no different from anyone else seeking to escape the unpleasant reality through some media - be that through building a peaceful farm, fighting powerful enemies, reading a gripping story or watching sports. They can’t actually fight the circumstances that cause their pain (or at least think so), so they flee instead.

It’s reallly just the source of their pain that’s so much more toxic, which in turn leads to a toxic result that ends up poisoning their joy in life even more. Most likely, they’ve been fed that poison by someone exploiting their vulnerability and unhappiness by giving their aimless frustration a target, reassuring them that someone else is to blame for their misery. It didn’t lessen their misery, but at least it gave the question “why am I suffering?” a satisfying and concrete answer. “It’s not you. It’s not some random and unpredictable circumstance that you have no control over. It’s these people that you can do something about.”

Except you can’t actually do anything about “these people”, but you can at least construct a fantasy of an ideal world without “these people”, where naturally you’re doing much better too. In the specific case of the toxic gamers, they’re looking to video games for manifestations of that world, for places they can immerse themselves in and be free from the troubles of the real world.

If these games fail to sate that fantasy, to provide an environment they seek where they’re powerful and “safe” from all the things that make them upset, that rage is taken to the forums and echo chambers where they share their suffering with each other to ease and validate it. It’s one thing if there’s some niche indie game made by “these people” - they’re on the outskirts of the gaming world, you can easily ridicule or ignore them. It’s another thing when there’s a game placed front and center, getting all the attention and hype for a moment, and that game is full of things that hurt you.

For a twisted comparison, imagine if a new game got all the hype and (positive) attention, despite being full of Nazis, presenting them as entirely normal or even good people. You’d (rightly) be upset too. The difference - aside from the subject - is that your upset lilely isn’t born from a stock of thoroughly curated hatred and anger. You’ll probably not muster the same rage as these people, because you don’t have it bottled up already.

I say this because I’ve been a hateful person too once. Not as bad as some of these specimens, but bad enough to know the spiral and to guess how much unhappier I could have been, how much unhappier they must be. They’re victims turned abusers, and while that doesn’t excuse their behaviour, it may help us understand where it comes from and give us an idea of what to fight:

Bigotry is born from misery seeking an outlet, fertilised by ignorance, nurtured by confirmation bias. The better our lives get, the less reason to look for someone to blame. The more we learn to think critically and question the lies we’re fed, the less that “someone” will be a convenient target keeping us in the spiral. The more we’re exposed to things that contradict our bias, the weaker it will get.

The last bit is what broke me out of the loop, the second is what saw me crawl back up the spiral and unravel my convictions.

Life’s still tough, but at least it has gotten a lot less hateful and miserable since I stopped feeding the hate and blaming others for my own deficiencies and started working on myself.

luciferofastora,

I might be the minority, but I’m more inclined to click a video that says “Plasma 6.1: Release, features and my opinions” than one that proclaims it THE BEST THING (unless it’s from a creator I already know and like anyway, they get a pass as long as the content is good)

luciferofastora,

Good on him for giving Linux a platform. Bad on google for coercing him to do so in a clickbaity manner.

luciferofastora,

Last I heard, there were some issues about who owns the IP and copyrights? I’m not overly familiar, but legal jungle combined with corporate politics may be scary enough to navigate that Miyazaki would rather be careful around making explicit statements

The anti-AI sentiment in the free software communities is concerning. (lemmy.world)

Whenever AI is mentioned lots of people in the Linux space immediately react negatively. Creators like TheLinuxExperiment on YouTube always feel the need to add a disclaimer that “some people think AI is problematic” or something along those lines if an AI topic is discussed. I get that AI has many problems but at the same...

luciferofastora,

The first problem, as with many things AI, is nailing down just what you mean with AI.

The second problem, as with many things Linux, is the question of shipping these things with the Desktop Environment / OS by default, given that not everybody wants or needs that and for those that don’t, it’s just useless bloat.

The third problem, as with many things FOSS or AI, is transparency, here particularly training. Would I have to train the models myself? If yes: How would I acquire training data that has quantity, quality and transparent control of sources? If no: What control do I have over the source material the pre-trained model I get uses?

The fourth problem is privacy. The tradeoff for a universal assistant is universal access, which requires universal trust. Even if it can only fetch information (read files, query the web), the automated web searches could expose private data to whatever search engine or websites it uses. Particularly in the wake of Recall, the idea of saying “Oh actually we want to do the same as Microsoft” would harm Linux adoption more than it would help.

The fifth problem is control. The more control you hand to machines, the more control their developers will have. This isn’t just about trusting the machines at that point, it’s about trusting the developers. To build something the caliber of full AI assistants, you’d need a ridiculous amount of volunteer efforts, particularly due to the splintering that always comes with such projects and the friction that creates. Alternatively, you’d need corporate contributions, and they always come with an expectation of profit. Hence we’re back to trust: Do you trust a corporation big enough to make a difference to contribute to such an endeavour without amy avenue of abuse? I don’t.


Linux has survived long enough despite not keeping up with every mainstream development. In fact, what drove me to Linux was precisely that it doesn’t do everything Microsoft does. The idea of volunteers (by and large unorganised) trying to match the sheer power of a megacorp (with a strict hierarchy for who calls the shots) in development power to produce such an assistant is ridiculous enough, but the suggestion that DEs should come with it already integrated? Hell no

One useful applications of “AI” (machine learning) I could see: Evaluating logs to detect recurring errors and cross-referencing them with other logs to see if there are correlations, which might help with troubleshooting.
That doesn’t need to be an integrated desktop assistant, it can just be a regular app.

Really, that applies to every possible AI tool. Make it an app, if you care enough. People can install it for themselves if they want. But for the love of the Machine God, don’t let the hype blind you to the issues.

luciferofastora,

I’ve once had difficulties running some apps on Proton that used .NET features not supported by mono, which has been updated since then and is now working out of the box.

I’m playing Trackmania on wine, I’ve played Elden Ring and Monster Hunter: World on Proton, so I’m wondering which issue you’re running into.

Regardless, building precompiled Linux native binaries is a commendable goal. Others have mentioned Flatpak, which imo is a good and user-friendly way to handle that.

luciferofastora,

They’d have to almost unanimously decide that being entirely unanimous is no longer required, bending the rules to change the rules, because that is the only way to unfuck themselves. Let Hungary object, but if they’re alone, write it into law anyway. What are they gonna do, leave? I guess if their membership is no longer useful to Russia, they might.

luciferofastora,

E-diots, I like that term

luciferofastora,

How dare he zip past the congestion with a low-density vehicle instead of contributing to it, wasting fuel (whatever type) and making things worse for everyone like a proper, respectable, carbrained citizen?

Almost as bad as subways, I tell you! Those bastards take a whole chunk of people past the traffic at once, the audacity 😤


Sarcasm aside, I do think people need this angle pointed out to them: Low-density transport options for those where they make sense help those for whom it doesn’t. The more short-range traffic happens on bikes, in busses and (light) rail, the more space there will be on the streets.

luciferofastora,

They can both be bad and there are more than two parties in every situation.

All that nuance is making my head hurt. Can’t I just say “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”? It sounds so much simpler and snappier.

luciferofastora,

Sorry, irony didn’t translate well there. It was supposed to be a parody of the binary mindset “I don’t wanna think about nuance and individual differences, just enemies and allies”.

Also, forgive my cynicism, but I’m not confident that every middle school teaches that level of critical thinking. I’m not actually sure we even touched on that in high school. I’m from Germany, but my school was rather centrist with respect to the Overton Window at the time. Much of history was painted rather black and white and avoided complicated details about morality.

luciferofastora,

To expand: I feel like it should be emphasised more that current “AI” models are, at best, hallucinating.

Their output may look real enough and for some purposes they may be perfectly suitable, but ultimately, they have no concept of the semantic objects related to the words they learn and the semantic relationships between those objects. Without that, they can’t possibly guarantee that the implied semantic connection of the combination of words they produce aligns with the actual relationships.

You can use a LLM to help translate bullet points into text of a given tone (like abstracts for theses that sound scientific), but you’ll still have to check the factuality and consistency of those texts. When using them to write texts about something you already know, that’s doable and can save you some work. But using it like in the OP to aggregate and present “new” facts without supervision is dangerous, because you can’t actually verify what you don’t already know.

But “Copilot can scrape your data to give you some pointers and spare some of the tedium of finding it yourself, but you shouldn’t take it for gospel truth” doesn’t quite sell as nicely as “Microsoft Copilot leverages the power of AI to boost productivity, unlock creativity, and helps you understand information better”.

luciferofastora,

Tinfoil Hat Time:

Linux Gaming, while increasingly viable, isn’t currently a threat to MS. There are enough reasons people will stick with Windows. But Valve are doing a good job of showing that it’s possible, that Microsoft’s hold on PC gaming isn’t absolute and that an increasing number of games are playable on Linux too (with the right tools). Wine and co. have been around for a while, but they never enjoyed the spotlight of a major videogame platform investing time and manpower into developing a dedicated gaming compatibility engine.

I don’t think MS would intentionally run it into the ground. They’d probably try to squeeze it for money, which might end up doing so anyway.

I also don’t think they’re really worried about Linux gaming. But I also doubt they’d leave Proton untouched entirely. Whether they’d kneecap it, whether they’d enshittify it, whether they’d work on interfacing it with their proprietary stuff in an attempt to put it ahead of any competition and tip potential Linux Gaming developments in favour of using their engine to more easily target both platforms at once, I doubt they could resist doing something to squeeze money from it.

Maybe the very idea that they’re challenging Microsoft’s supremacy is unpleasant to them. Maybe their analytics show enough of a trend to concern them. Maybe they just want to make sure they have a piece of the pie if it ever becomes worth something.

Or maybe the whole thing is baseless bullshit made up for attention and site traffic.

luciferofastora,

Doesn’t linking users work differently here? I thought @ampersandrew would be the canonical way to mention users, given that it includes their instance. I’m still fairly new to Lemmy, so maybe that’s app/instance-specific

luciferofastora,

I’ll die on the hill that DS2 was misunderstood, and rather than being a poor game it just caters to a specific taste in Souls games, which turned out to be the minority.

It’s rather unforgiving with Stamina and requires more in terms of positioning and timing to handle multiple enemies, such as lining them up to hit multiple in one swing or singling out a target to stunlock thanks to weaker poise. Healing also requires more consideration to pick the right window. I like that. It feels more like a harsh and dangerous world where you have to watch out for your own survival.

The Small White Soapstone often works for a quick trip to another world, earning souls, lifegems and regaining humanity with less commitment than a full summon, which encourages jolly cooperation by lowering the stakes and raising the reward. I like that.

I also like the changes to the weapon upgrades and the magic system. Pyromancy becomes an actual magic discipline, that can still be worked in alongside miracles, sorceries and particularly hexes, like having more attunement gives you more casts, consumables can restore spell uses and you can use materials to lower spell requirements, all of which affects character builds. Being able to respec means you can change or fix your build later on.

I’ll concede that the learning curve is bad. There’s more mechanical complexity to learn and less explanation than in DS1, and particularly the differences between the games aren’t obvious if you go at it with the expectations set by the original.

In a way, that makes it a bad “Dark Souls” 2, since you’re obviously expecting more of the same because it has the same name. Trying new stuff may be good, but changing existing systems is always a gamble whether the people trying and liking it outweigh those that didn’t like it or never even tried.

That many people ended up not liking them was unfortunate. Particularly with DS3 going so hard in the other direction, the approval of DS2 has diminished even further. Its playstyle just isn’t to everyone’s taste, and many people conflate “I didn’t like it” with “It’s shit”, which is a shame.

In summary, I think it’s a good game, even a good Dark Souls that innovates on the original, but it’s probably a bad entry point for the genre due to the steep learning curve, and a rough transition from more faster paced titles. I acknowledge it’s not for everyone, but I liked it.

luciferofastora, (edited )

What I find even more reprehensible than the sentiment “Without the threat of consequences, why should I be decent?” is that their own fucking book holds the answer to their goddamn question (not an expletive here, their god should and probably would damn them for it):

“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” - Matthew 7:12

The first half of this is a principle independent of religion, a fundamental social contract, the most critical idea underpinning any functioning society: Expect your behaviour to be reciprocated, and act accordingly. If you want others to help you if you need it, help people (if you can). If you want others to be kind to you, be kind to others. If you’re gonna be a prick, expect others to be just as prickly to you.

If all that keeps you from murdering people is the threat of eternal damnation, you forget that your own scripture says “If you kill people, expect that others may kill you in turn.”

Bonus: the biblical Jesus was known to hate hypocrites that pick out one piece of scripture to follow and ignore another and pharisees that carefully interpret and follow the letter of the law to find loopholes and ignore the heart of it. Those people lawyering their way around the otherwise unmistakable passages about generosity and giving away your wealth? Believe it or not, straight to hell.

More disgusting than the sentiment mentioned at the start is the hypocrisy of selectively applying it, the inconsistency in their own beliefs, the hollow facade of devotion while spitting on the principles they perjure to obey.

Signed, an apostate whose faith was shattered by fallacy of preaching love while children suffer and threatening hell while blasphemers thrive.

luciferofastora,

On the day of judgment, there’s going to be a lot of Christians facing a very unhappy surprise

I mean, even that is biblical. The passage in the Apocalypse about “What you did to the least of my brothers, you did to me” features a group of people claiming to be faithful being turned away just as they turned away the needy: “I don’t know you, go away”.

Which means we’re back on the topic of reading one part but ignoring another. How can you vote to slash social security nets, then go to church and look at that cross, the symbol of the ultimate sacrifice and of a man that said “if anyone forces you to go one mile, go two, and if they demand your shirt, give them the coat too”, with anything but shame and disgust at yourself?

In the Acts 5:1-10, there’s a story of a couple that sold an acre and gave part of the money to their parish. They lied and said it had been the full amount to exaggerate the weight of their contribution. As per the response, they wouldn’t have to give anything, but pretending it was the full amount was a deceit deserving of keeling over dead.

Yet televangelists pretend to do God’s work, enriching themselves beyond measure. Guess that threat of punishment only works if you actually believe it.

luciferofastora,

Do you mean the individual .git repository tracking changes in a given directory? Or the remote repository server that you push your changes to and can pull other’s changes from? The first one is the fundamental requirement of using git at all, the second is where it gets less trivial.

It’s not that the software isn’t available. Off the top of my mind, Gitlab offers their community version for free to download and host yourself. I think they even have a Docker image. All you need is to figure out how you would like to do that.

It’s the usual question of self-hosting - where would you host it? A server at home? The cloud? Should others be able to access it? How? What about security?

Remotes already hosted by others are just a lot more convenient. You don’t worry about the infrastructure, you just push your code. People like me might get more excited about setting up than the actual coding. It’s the bane of half my projects - gotta get that git workflow in place, think long-term, set up the “mandatory PR with tests before merge” and shit until eventually I have everything set up… and the spark of the original script I wanted to do is gone.

If you want to focus on coding, the benefit of having a ready setup are hard to dismiss.
On the other hand, setting up and configuring a server can be a one-time job, so if that’s worth it to you, power to you!

luciferofastora,

I’ve had good luck striking out on a new path with Nobara after years of only ever using Ubuntu. There was a bit of a learning curve (and I still haven’t gotten everything I wanted to work the way it did before), but I mostly got it figured out.

But that may well be a Survivor case in the sense of Survivor Bias, no idea how many people tried and decided “wasn’t worth it”.

I did have a bone to pick with pipewire because my old pulseaudio config no longer worked and I had difficulties figuring out just how to redo it in pw, but that’s probably not distro-specific.

luciferofastora,

What is atomic desktop, roughly? Google doesn’t give me a concise answer and I prefer not opening news blogs that give me an entire article on my limited mobile data plan.

luciferofastora,

It’s gotten a lot better, particularly for Steam games, but yeah, there’s still some way to go.

luciferofastora,

Thanks for the explanation! I think I’ll give that a try. I’ve got a spare disk, might slap some Bazzite on there, see if it works for me.

luciferofastora,

I asked for a rough description because I didn’t wanna bother anyone to take the time for a full, detailed explanation…

…then you come along and write a whole article on it that’s most certainly more informative and useful than anything Google would have spat out.

I love that. Thanks so much for taking the time. I also think I’ll give Bazzite / Fedora Atomic a shot. The idea of simply rebasing onto a different option to try different things is definitely appealing.

luciferofastora,

If I was that rich, yet so addicted to junk food, I’d at least get higher quality junk food. My patties would be made from organic beef, in buns that don’t fall apart, with vegan cheese from that one brand that I found exactly once, can’t remember the name of but really loved (I fucking love cheese, but that one kocked out any real cheese from the cowmpetition)…

The food would come in reusable containers with non-porous surfaces that are easy and efficient to clean, delivered fresh and hot, made to order and delivered by students (cheap labour) on bikes (saves gas money), generously tipped for their express service (to incentivise continued quality service).

It’d still be cheaper than a decent meal, still be a pig move, still just as greasy and unhealthy, but at least it wouldn’t be so embarrassing. And if it really had to be McD’s, I’d pay to have it packaged into those generic foam containers that don’t make it super obvious and delivered by unbranded delivery drivers (like generic DoorDash, Uber Eats or something).

luciferofastora,

I think of them frequently. They have my thoughts and prayers.

Not my help, of course. They should have to work for their success just as hard as the rest of us. But I hope that they’ll be able to carve out a living with their labour!

If you struggle with reading etween the linesThe implication is that they should be stripped of their capital and the power it gives them. I hope they’ll turn out decent, hard-working people (because good people are worth more than vindication), but even if they aren’t, them being able to live on little work implies a world where we don’t have to worry about slaving away for survival. That’s worth hoping for.

luciferofastora,

If I’m reading it right, the OP meant something like this:

The US block Palestinian membership on the condition of negotiations with Israel, but don’t impose the same restriction (negotiations eith Palestine) on Israel’s membership. Why does Israel get to be a member without negotiation, but Palestine doesn’t?

(Not taking a stance here, argue with the OP if you want to. I’m just contributing my understanding.)

luciferofastora,

Do you think the risk of losing is preferrable?

It’s a fucked up situation, but until enough of the voterbase is convinced or he no longer has to worry about the election, he’s in an awful bind.

The unpleasant truth is that, to some extent, the US is still a democracy, and the opinion of the people matters. If the majority of the US populace doesn’t see it as genocide, it is democratically right for him to act on that opinion.

Which means the fault isn’t with him alone - arguably, he could take the risk and attempt to inform people - but also with the voters, the propaganda that misled them and the fucked up election system.

luciferofastora,

I’m sold, where do I sign up?

luciferofastora,

I mean, I got upset like everyone else at the news that they wouldn’t be making more BG, but the longer I think about it, the longer I feel like it’s the healthier choice. Like you said, Hasbro might have pressured them to rush out the next game, instead of giving them the creative space to make that game live up to the expectations.

Conservative Plan Calls for Dozens of Executions if Trump Wins (www.thedailybeast.com)

A conservative plan for Donald Trump’s potential transition into the presidency calls for dozens of prisoners to be executed, according to HuffPost. An 887-page plan by Project 2025, led by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, says that if elected, Trump should make a concerted effort to execute the remaining 40...

luciferofastora,

Ah yes, they’re so intense about fighting capitalist oppression they’ve circled around to… checks notes defending police brutality and advocating for the further privatisation of every public good and dismantling all worker protections.

The difference between “eat the rich” and “feed the rich” is really just one syllable, right? Almost negligible.

(Also, no, they don’t call everyone fascist. They just don’t think being liberal is enough for change, when the “liberals” of the US have a history of complaining about the things they don’t stop the regressives from doing. There’s a difference between calling people “naive and spineless” and “actively pursuing oppression”.)

luciferofastora,

Dangerous to democracy? Where’d you get that idea? I’m not the one trying to install an authoritarian plutocracy.

I’m a staunch believer in educated democracy, but that requires education in the first place. Education regressives have been undermining forever, because it would inform the people of their actual democratic power.

where it actually matters

Which would be? What, in your opinion, actually matters?

My priority is a sustainable and enjoyable future. One where you can grow old without worrying about our pension or affording medical care. One where you no longer pay a cut of your work to a person just becaude they’re rich already. One where you can do the job you love without worrying about how well it pays or whether you’ll get fired.

The Liberals keep bartering for compromise instead of progress, gradually ceding ground to the Conservatives. The spoiler effect means an actually progressive third party has no chance and risks handing power to the regressives by splitting the vote. Because all the Liberals have to do is “be less bad”, you get the choice between right-of-center and far right. This isn’t democracy, it’s slowly dismantling it.

I’ll take the Liberals, because they’re “less bad”, but it’s not a solution. It’s buying time in the hope that we can actually fix the underlying issues.

Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together?

It seems like every other week a game studio is massively laying off employees; sometimes after years of development. What I’m reading is that it’s a quick way to lower expenses and pad the investors’ pockets, flooding the market with developers and reducing their value, to then hire them back a few months later at lower...

luciferofastora,

Survivor Bias - you only see the ones that “survive”, which may lead you to underestimate just how many tried and failed and vanished from attention.

luciferofastora,

There’s a tradeoff between precision and conciseness. Outside of a mathemadickal context, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s 2.72 or 3.14 inches.

Obligatory XKCD about coordinate precision

Hotlink

(You probably knew this, I just wanted to tack on a joke)

luciferofastora,

A chunk of their target audience aren’t really gamers so much as FIFA players. They don’t buy a lot of games, so they don’t mind splurging on the newest and most up to date installment of their favourite soccer sim once per year.

luciferofastora,

The money’s in the treatment, not in the cure

luciferofastora,

My hope is that community-developed Proton forks reach a point where they can stand on their own without Steam and Valve, perhaps as a component of or a sibling to Lutris, to conveniently run games from other platforms too.

I’ll admit that I don’t have a clear idea of how that would look or come about. It’s hard to beat the convenience of having the compatibility tool built directly into the launcher like in Steam, with individual prefixes and settings for different games if they have different requirements.

luciferofastora,

Slipping in mud and landing face-first in animal droppings is perfectly natural too

What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux?

I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers....

luciferofastora,

I footgunned myself with iptables once and couldn’t even google how to fix it. (Well, I could with my phone, just not the convenient google - copy - paste - run workflow)

I don’t remember the details, but I was trying to control internet access of a VM guest and ended up controlling my own too.

luciferofastora,

I regularly find myself trying to tweak some system config and opening the file read-only because I forgot to sudo vim it.

Doesn’t help that my everyday user account doesn’t have sudo privileges, so I need to su to my admin account first.

luciferofastora,

Some Sekiro, some X3: Terran Conflict. Taking on a whole squadron of enemies with a single (albeit powerful) ship to calmly dispatch them one by one is just the perfect mix of cozy and power fantasy for me to wind down between the more fast-paced sections of “Let’s chop you down as fast as possible because the longer the fight drags on the more mistakes I’ll make”.

luciferofastora,

God in Acts 5: “You lied about how much you sold this acre for, die”

God in the 21st century:

luciferofastora,

Me: “This is the file format we agree on.”
They: “Yep, that’s what you’ll get.”

They: “Why is your script not working?”
Me: “Idk what was the last file you put through it?”

In their defense, they got the file from a third party that we both previously assumed competent enough to follow explicit written instructions. Guess there’s a lesson in trust…

luciferofastora,

Recognising an issue vs diagnosing it vs. figuring out a treatment. You can notice chest pains and shortness of breath, perhaps make an educated guess that it could be a heart attack, but it’s going to take an expert to diagnose whether that’s actually the case and what course of action to take.

luciferofastora,

You might want to remember that there are also working grunts in that food chain. They already got paid to make the game, yes, but that was in the expectation of profit. If the game crashes, those execs will look for scapegoats.

Buying games feeds the vampires, but also the devs (even if only in scraps). In our current world, there’s not a whole lot of options outside of “only buy indie games” to both support developers and avoid filling the pockets of execs and investors.

A few people pirating games instead of paying for them isn’t a big deal, but it eventually turns into a “tragedy of the commons” issue like other forms of theft. Either the suppliers won’t be able to stay in business or they’ll work out ever more comprehensive (and invasive) prevention mechanisms. Remember when games were just the program on the disk and you didn’t need keys and an online connection to activate your copy?

luciferofastora,

I didn’t say they were getting paid directly, but indirectly. Their employment and income - like all other working class grunts’ - depends on their ability to generate profit for their employer. If we deny the employer their profit, the employer will take that out on their grunts. Conversely, if we pay them, that money likely will end up sponsoring further developments which - guess what? - pays the developers for developing more stuff.

Much of our modern economy is centered around credit and debt. The developers are effectively paid as a credit, in the expectation that the profits will pay the debt. If it doesn’t, that will affect further credits.

And no, I don’t remember Usenet, but it sounds like that was a good time then. How do they compare to modern games in terms of entertainment?

luciferofastora,

Did you actually read my comment? They don’t get the profit from the old game. The success pays for them to develop new games.

Asked the other way round, if the game’s profit doesn’t pay the devs, what does?

The company employing them

Why does the company employ them?

To make money

So what happens if the company stops making money? A game’s profit doesn’t pay the past developers, but it does affect their future employment and income.

I’m not defending the exploitative system that bleeds us dry for the privilege of getting to temporarily benefit from the wealth they’ve already extracted. I’m not opposing piracy. I’m very much in support of OP’s strategy.

All I’m saying is that piracy won’t fix that system, because the ones most dependent on the game’s success aren’t the exec’s that’ll be hired elsewhere nor the investors that’ll extract their wealth elsewhere, but the devs whose employment and existence depends on their capacity to generate that wealth.

Attack the system at the top, but don’t drop the bottom.

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