I have a similar complaint about almost all "gamer gear" having RGB lighting. Why would I want that? I'm not even opposed to the "gamer" aesthetic of a lot of sharp lines and strong colors, I think that can look really good, but when my mousepad has RGB it's time to blow the whistle and stop all manufacturing until we can figure out what's going on.

It has ads unless you pay to remove the ads, which is a perfectly reasonable model for an app to use.

Cool. Great, even. Man, we're fucked.

No, of course not. If you're using Lemmy as a "protest" instead of thinking that it's a better platform, it's totally ineffectual and you'll go back to using Reddit sooner or later. Personally, I think that the fediverse is a more compelling idea than the traditional internet, so I'm sticking with Lemmy for a bit in one form or another.

I have high hopes for Lemmy, but I don't think that having a lot of users is going to be a super positive thing in the long term. It'd be great if it could feel like younger Reddit for longer than younger Reddit did, you know? Stay at least a little under the radar.

I'm not opposed to this, though I generally think that the move towards awards overcomplicated the site. It was better when it was just Gold and there was a simple tracker to say how many days of server time had been paid for.

I really appreciate how you structured these rules. Simple enough to remember, sensible enough to keep the conversation clean. Moderator discretion can be frustrating, but it's a lot better than finding out that your post got deleted because it didn't fit some arcane law that was hidden away on a sixth-layer wiki page.

That's exciting. The larger these unions get, the easier it'll be for other other workers to feel encouraged to unionize themselves. It seems like this is the biggest one yet, at least in terms of cache - I hope this makes waves.

You can still say that about AI. What people are calling "AI" now is closer to Cleverbot than true AGI.

You know when you see a game that doesn't interest you in the slightest but you know will make a billion dollars? I'm feeling that.

I'm definitely going to be using it more often. The official Reddit app is so bad that Sync being for something else is enough to make me move.

Personally, I'm stoked for the graphical update. It doesn't seem massive, but it's firmly in "makes the game look like your imagination thinks it does" territory, which'll help a lot with screenshots and - I think - the way that they direct their cutscenes. Being able to actually do close-ups without losing all fidelity will be a boon.

In terms of Lemmy, I'm just on Lemmy.world, I have no real reason to sign up for something else. I'm also on Mastodon, though.

Screens, realistically. I know that it's a "soft" addiction and nowhere near as serious as a substance, but going even five minutes without pulling at my phone, using a computer, or watching a TV starts tugging at my brain. That's something you develop as a kid and I don't see myself fixing it unless I totally "detox."

While that's self-evidently true for some of Infinite, Halo also actively avoided a lot of the dark patterns that would've kept people playing. It was, unfortunately, kind of the worst of both worlds. The battle passes stick around forever, events repeat, almost all externally-advertised cosmetics were free. It's supposed to be a system that works for the players, and it more or less does (in comparison to, say, Fortnite), but it also means that you don't have a reason to sign back in every single day and grind through something to get enough currency to buy the new skin you like, and most people aren't financially investing themself much in playing it.

Frankly, I really miss the Reddit of ten years ago, so this is great. Outside of fruitlessly pursuing infinite growth, none of the additions or changes to the site since then have improved it.

Good implementations of Denuvo have such a minimal impact on the quality of the game experience that I tend towards optimism when I hear this kind of news. That said, bad implementations of Denuvo cripple the game in a way that previous horrible DRM schemes could only dream of. I'm not planning on playing Payday 3 (I never had any fun with 1 or 2), but I hope that this is the former situation for its fans.

God, that's so depressing. I genuinely don't understand how we - any of us, in any country - are supposed to be okay with these political mechanisms filled with incompetent, out-of-touch, self-interested codgers. I'm not willing to take action, but when our entire world is being picked apart by the public sector and sold for parts by the private sector, what are we to do?

Back in 2013-ish there was a bot that would convert your karma to crypto back when it was cheap enough to just throw around like that. That was the only time in my life that I was ever paid to post, and it was like $6. I wonder how much it would be if I were to find that wallet now, but that was on an account that no longer exists. Oh, well!

Honestly, yeah, a big part of why I started using Lemmy is that the Sync developer moved to developing a Lemmy app. I'm still active on Reddit, I'm using both, but as soon as Sync for Lemmy comes out and I can uninstall that absolutely cursed official Reddit app I'll be here WAY more often.