Amazon is a service. That service is becoming materially worse (I have a harder time finding what I’m looking for because of the flood of substandard products and Amazon’s preferential search treatment practices, and even when I do find what I’m looking for, there’s a sizable risk that it’s a fake). This is very much enshittification; they captured the market share, and now they’re squeezing it. Anything that makes them more money but is worse for the consumer, they do. Anything that is better for the consumer but costs them money, they don’t do.

There are two factors necessary for a truly free market that prevent any capitalist system from actually being a free market. They are:

1. Consumers need to have perfect information about the products and the companies that make and/or sell them - in other words, companies must not be able to hide their sins.

2. There needs to be zero friction for new entrants into the marketplace, whether that is from costs to start up a business, or anti-competitive behavior from other companies with money to throw around.

It is impossible to achieve either of these in the real world.

Ugh. Well, sounds like I made a good choice dropping it…

The Sword of Truth series.

I read the first book as a teenager. I was rather skeezed out by the roughly one-third of the book that was a poorly-disguised authorial kink fantasy.

Then the second book had a lovingly detailed description of a witch gaining demonic power by getting railed by a demon.

Whoever wrote those books, didn’t have much consideration for the reader.

Sizable chunks of the Old Testament were documentation, rather than formatted with the intent of being engaging. It’s like how a family bible often has genealogy hand-written inside it, except it’s the contents of the book itself.

For the longest time, Sanderson was utterly terrible at writing romance, and it was very obvious. A lot of it was probably due to a lack of personal experience. He’s gotten better, but a lot of the ‘lack’ you’re feeling in his writing probably stems from the same place. Despite writing about dark topics - apocalyptic events, oppressed populations, the failures of heroes, etc. - he is missing the edge that you get from other authors who write similar stories. Personally I don’t mind, and I really enjoy his books - but I can understand why others would find them bland.

If you own it on GoG you don’t need a pirate copy - just save the offline installer.

Personally, I wouldn’t include Proton in the costs of the Steam Machine. The Deck already is benefiting from it immensely, and I would consider it to be a cost of expanding into Linux gaming in general - especially with the Lenovo handheld and other devices starting to jump on the bandwagon as Microsoft continues to take repeated dumps on their userbase. Its R&D costs are being won back by the market % Steam takes on any games bought and played in Linux, which means that it can benefit from that continued revenue stream rather than the one-off hardware sale.

The hardware has to break even. The software already has.

They’re buying the parts directly from the manufacturers though, so cutting out the retailer middle-man could offset the R&D costs.

What? You need to expand your knowledge of apple types. I’ve had a similar variety; a bit floral, but not bad.

I have that and an ‘OnLive founding member’ T-shirt that I wear to tech events. Especially when I suspect there’s going to be something tone-deaf getting launched.

I got both for free.

Your standards are weird. Several of these games are considered the current pinnacle of their genres.

It’s not just Microsoft any more though. Practically any time you have a prompt for something in software/web pages that benefits the company, the only options are ‘yes’ and ‘maybe later’. It’s become so ubiquitous that I’m genuinely surprised when a prompt like that actually has a ‘no’ option.

Your entire family being made to suffer. If you care about your family, at least.

The implication is that they’ll have to jump ship to Linux, and thus become a member of the unixsocks community.

If the server runs a significantly cut-down rendering model, you can do things like culling player models when you can’t see them. No more wallhacks.

Symphony was incredible for the time, but its difficulty was all over the place and pretty much becomes zero in late-game. Many, many Metroidvanias by indie developers have far surpassed SotN in quality.

It’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I understand that nostalgia plays a big part in that.

You can run it streaming from a PC. The architecture of the source PC can be anything that’ll run SteamVR, assumedly.

Why did you post essentially the same thing, but with different wording, one hour apart? Into the same community?

It sounds dumb because you’re just posting LLM spam and you won’t ever actually do the thing.

Also, YAML. Yech.