by any reasonable metric you choose Valve is at best as deeply invested in MTX
Completely agree with this. I honestly believe the best apples-to-apples metric is to look at their most popular games and compare the mtx across them, in which case Valve doesn't exactly come across as good in the comparison.
In terms of publishing, with the exception of Aperture Hand Lab (basically a little tech demo), they haven't published any third party developer's game since 2010. For the purposes of this conversation, I think it's fair to count EA subsidiaries as EA.
When you make no games you make no MTX
Absolutely, this was the counterpoint I was trying to make about the raw "number of games" argument.
EDIT: Oh, I see the misunderstanding! I mean "published" as "financially backed the development, advertising and releasing of the game", not "published to their storefront". Same word with multiple meanings can be a major source of misunderstandings.
EA has released way more games with no games-as-service stuff in them than Valve in the past decade.
To be fair, EA has released way more games, period. This is across every category. Valve is primarily a digital marketplace company that sometimes makes a game, and has been for a long time.
Also, I didn't include EA as publisher, because it would drastically change the conversation. It's not part of Valve's overall business strategy (again, because they're primarily a marketplace company now) so it's not apples to apples. They simply don't publish externally developed games, because why would they when they run Steam?
Just googled their latest 2 releases to compare. Sims 4: For Rent, a cash-grab low-effort Sims DLC, doesn't have microtransactions while Counterstrike 2 does.
EDIT: Neither does their last full game release, EA Sports WRC. Their upcoming game, F1 24 looks like it's absolutely riddled with mtx though.
As someone who tried and failed to make sauerkraut recently and therefore went deep down the fermentation rabbit hole, this is pretty damn hilarious.
Getting the exact right parameters (salinity, PH, temperature, etc) to encourage the exact strains of bacteria that you want is actually harder than it sounds.
Or it could be that I'm dumb, that's also a distinct possibility.
I agree with everything you say here, but I thought the setup-payoff joke structure and the fact I intentionally swapped testing and production for comedic effect made it obvious enough. I guess Poe's law strikes again.
My completely uncorroborated gut feeling is that it's because each celebrity caught doing horrible shit causes a massive media frenzy, so even if (and I don't know if this is true) the numbers of horrible people are proportional to the overall population, there's a bias because each one is named and shamed unlike non-celebrities.
Yup. As someone who's worked a little bit on GDPR compliance, it's not some magic wand you wave at your data. Any data they receive after the request is also not covered by that request. Also, only EU citizens and residents are legally entitled to make a request. A company may choose to comply with non-EU users, but that's purely their choice.
Comments that contain any info about where you live, your ethnicity, disabilities (cognitive or physical), gender, where you work, etc must be deleted as part of a forget request, so that might impact LLM training data.
Personally identifying information can be somewhat of a grey area in some situations as well. If I were to say I'm from New York, that'd be personally identifying. If I were to say I'm a fan of a sports team in New York, that's not (even if that implies my location). If I were to say I'm a fan of a New York sports team, my favourite pizza place is in New York, my favourite park is in New York, etc etc, that might arguably be identifying, even if each of the pieces by itself is not.
EDIT: Oh, and I forgot one of the most important parts: it's not like there are any spot checks or anything. You'd need someone to actually lodge a formal complaint, with some kind of evidence they haven't done what they're supposed to, and the procedures are different for every EU country. They are normally very involved and complex. Essentially, you'd need to lawyer up and care enough to slowly and painfully shove it through the legal system.
I saw a Penn Jillette interview a long time ago where he explained that quite a few other magicians fake their recorded stage performances. They'll perform a simpler trick, get the audience reactions, and then use camera trickery to make the trick look far more impressive for TV. This was in the context of him claiming that he absolutely doesn't do that.
You can always refund it. Even if you've gone over the 2 hours for an auto-accept refund, if you explain the issues in the ticket Steam will always accept it in my experience.
Even got a refund for a game after 20 hours of game time due to them adding aggressive client-side anti-cheat.
Romania is also heavily invested in the outcome of this war. If Ukraine falls, Moldova is next. Moldova is majority ethnic Romanians, 1/3rd of all Moldovans have a Romanian passport (and are all entitled to one anytime), and Romanians feel very strongly about their defence.
Essentially, because Russia very clearly revealed Moldova is number 2 on the list, Romania is pretty all in.
So on the gaming front, pretty much any mainstream Linux distro would work for that. Proton is pretty damn stable and great on any distro that supports Steam. If you like Bazzite though, you do you.
For pen testing, must-have skills are nmap, bash, sqlmap, wireshark and the burp suite. If you know how to use all those, you've got basic coverage of most common attack vectors (password cracking is also covered by bash, there's 101 different password cracking algorithms in various CLI spps).
I'm a lazy ass who doesn't care much about customization, hopefully someone else can help you with that :))
Might take some effort and learning bash and WINE + winetricks to get that running, but hey, you're gonna need to do that anyways for the pentest stuff :)
If you want something useful, maybe some more info on what you use your computer for? Advice for a glorified web terminal would be "Click the Firefox icon". Advice for learning bash would be a massive rabbithole.
App suggestions are also very dependent on what you use your computer for.
I didn't mean to claim that the British Empire were the good guys. I was just pointing out the silliness of only looking at one very narrow fact to make a country look good, while ignoring the wider context.
Completely agree with this. I honestly believe the best apples-to-apples metric is to look at their most popular games and compare the mtx across them, in which case Valve doesn't exactly come across as good in the comparison.
In terms of publishing, with the exception of Aperture Hand Lab (basically a little tech demo), they haven't published any third party developer's game since 2010. For the purposes of this conversation, I think it's fair to count EA subsidiaries as EA.
Absolutely, this was the counterpoint I was trying to make about the raw "number of games" argument.
EDIT: Oh, I see the misunderstanding! I mean "published" as "financially backed the development, advertising and releasing of the game", not "published to their storefront". Same word with multiple meanings can be a major source of misunderstandings.