DdCno1 @ DdCno1 @beehaw.org

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963

Joined

2 yr. ago

That's neat, quite different from old installers not recognizing newer hardware properly (who can blame the devs after several decades?) and instead stating that the game would not work. There was a German gaming magazine (Computer Bild Spiele) that always put a system check in front of game installers (even software installers) on their discs that would compare your system to the title's minimum specs, using a simple stoplight (green=far exceeds requirements, yellow=just meets them, red=below minimum specs). It's kind of similar to modern online services like "Can You Run It".

I tried to install a very old game from one of these discs recently and it didn't quite know what to make of the hardware. IIRC, my 32 GB of RAM was more than the developers of this check anticipated and it reported that I didn't have enough RAM (the game needed 32 MB).

The Before Times.

Sure, but 2002 was a bit too early for ARM chips in what was essentially a cheap children's toy. They were still too complex and expensive for this kind of thing at the time - not to mention, there were few emulators that ran on this architecture available, so it would have to be specifically developed.

I have - and I've been chasing that high ever since.

I would assume that most people are just just listening to their favorite game reviewers as if they were listening to a friend talking about games. It's a parasocial relationship and it's more important what a certain person seems to be thinking about a title than how well-founded this opinion is.

When was this? 1978?

Good thing the Shield TV Pro can serve as a Plex server. Just don't store your content on short thumb drives plugged directly into the device - they can overheat and corrupt, since the device appears to be using them as heat sinks. Use a USB extension cord or hub.

and [not] staunchly anti-Socialist

This is incorrect. When the concept of the social market economy was first brought to the public attention by the conservative German CDU in the late 1940s, it was meant to be a counterpoint to the "unsocial command economy". Being staunchly anti-Socialist was a core policy of most large democratic parties in Western-European countries, not just West-Germany, as a reaction to the massive and very close threat from the East. Relations only began to thaw in the 1970s, only for the Cold War to heat up in the 1980s.

Yes, I know, this is the past and today, things are different in terms of rhetoric on the old continent, but this was when the economic systems that are still in place today were created.

Quite.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes. Nearly every real-world economic system sits somewhere on a spectrum instead of neatly slotting into one category only.

You're forgetting that these countries also have among the highest economic freedom in the world, protect personal property and investments, provide a stable and reliable environment to conduct very capitalist business. The economic system is capitalist, not socialist. There is no planned economy, most industries are in private hands. Strong regulation keeps capitalist excesses in check as you've correctly identified, while the high taxation levels the playing field by financing a robust safety net and other government services everyone benefits from.

In Germany, the term for this kind of system is social market economy, with social being a qualifier and market economy the system.

Youre seriously just parroting anti socialist propaganda

How utterly predictable.

Capitalism came to be the domination economic model in the 1600

Mate, stop reading Marx like a history book. Seriously. Captitalism wasn't a thing yet and has many differences from the mercantilism of that time period, including importantly that it existed within a completely different system instead of encompassing all or even most of the economies of the time - and the wars of conquest, subjugation and extermination of other people was not a new invention of the colonial era. How is that any different from what e.g. Roman or Arab conquerors did centuries earlier, just to name two?

perpetuating warfare for profit, slavery to maximize profits and genocides to stifle any resistance or perpetuate the values of eugenics and racism

Are you even remotely aware of the crimes of Mao and Stalin? Their body counts doing exactly that far exceeds everyone else's - but they did it under that red star you like so much, so it's all right.

but yeah communism is bad because of famine

You never had to worry about your next meal, correct? I'm getting the distinct impression that you can't even comprehend the horrors of e.g. the Holodomor or the Great Leap Forward. Yes, man-made famines are actually bad and communism is responsible for a few of those (which are also among the worst famines in all of human history) - or is that "anti socialist propaganda" as well? Was it Capitalist saboteurs, national-republican agitators or kulaks who were actually responsible?

while a large subset of the population live in squalor to support such opulent lifestyles of luxury

Ever seen Stalin's dacha compared to the communal block houses that the ordinary Soviet citizen had to live in at the time, poorly heated, cramped homes where many families lived in the same apartment, with not an ounce of privacy or dignity? The gap between those two was far greater than between the average e.g. French home and a French leader's home under evil capitalism right now. Hell, someone living on welfare in any Western European country 50 years ago was already enjoying a higher standard of living than your average Socialist worker could even dream of at the time.

Break down the word capitalism

Now you're getting ridiculous.

the only time American capitalism ever allowed the working class to thrive was a brief moment of 4 decades after FDR legislated socialist policies

You're so close to getting it, it hurts. Remember that part about tweaking and improving our societies and economics to counter the weak aspects of capitalism? Roosevelt did precisely that to counter the fallout of the Great Depression, which was a direct result of unregulated market capitalism. He was not a Socialist, far from it, but he recognized what worked.

It is also incredibly important to mention that the benefits of his economic policy were highly segregated. Whites were first in line, every time. This was not an attempt at egalitarianism.

Also fascism is capitalism in decline and monarchy is irrelevant because we are talking economic models.

You can not be serious. Fascism is noteworthy for not having any clearly defined economic policies, but if there is one thing it definitely does is meddle with the economy to a far greater greater degree than what capitalists are comfortable with. At the same, time, Nazism in particular was aligned with some (but far from all) big business interests and implemented a significant number of privatization efforts. Also at the same time, the Nazis were deeply suspicious of, among other things, free international trade and the stock market, core pillars of capitalism. It's complicated.

And monarchies that were not capitalist were feudalist which is just a less refined version of capitalism.

No, you can't just attach the "capitalism" label to economic systems you don't like and clearly don't understand. Feudalism - from an economic perspective - is closer to the moneyless utopia of true socialism.

The only thing missing from your comment is that any kind of socialist country that has already existed wasn't actually true Socialism and thus doesn't count. If I hadn't mentioned it, it would have likely come up eventually, because you're seriously doing nothing but frantically churning out every clichéd talking point that you can remember about this topic (edit: the reply is even worse).

The obvious answer is that every single attempt at communism has produced far worse economic, environmental, developmental and ethical results than capitalism - while at the same time loudly promising to make everyone equal and happy. Isn't it worse to promise freedom and decent life to everyone - instead of just the chance of "making it big" - and then completely failing at everything while limiting every kind of personal freedom and right, including the one of being the architect of your own happiness? It's not even a competition.

I also highly doubt you would argue that the other side of the autocratic coin - Fascist systems with human rights abuses and poor ethics that are comparable to the worst communist systems on one hand, with usually completely incoherent economic policies on the other hand - are any better. Neither are absolutist monarchies.

Capitalism is highly flawed, no doubt, but if we look at the countries on this planet that are the most successful in terms of economics, equality, personal freedom, human rights, etc. then we find countries that made it work through regulation and strong government institutions. We should try and learn from those and use the slow nature of democratic change to tweak and improve our societies and economics based on what they have shown to work in the real world.

Doesn't look like it. My impression at least is that the whole story has mostly died down already in the frenzied news and social media landscape. The chaos and carnage of the upcoming Trump administration will dominate the news for the foreseeable future and do the rest. There will be a brief uptick in attention during the trial, but that's about the most I would expect.

Hardly unique to people living under capitalism though. Most people tend to identify with the system they are living under, including systems that are much worse than ours.

I'm sorry, but I can't find it right now, it's a vague memory from a textbook or lecture.

An instinctive, machine-like reaction to pain is not the same as consciousness. There might be more to creatures like plants and insects and this is still being researched, but for now, most of them appear to behave more like automatons than beings of greater complexity. It's pretty straightforward to completely replicate the behavior of e.g. a house fly in software, but I don't think anyone would argue that this kind of program is able to achieve self-awareness.

The real question is the percentage of journalists who are using LLMs to write articles for them.

Unity is really good, contrary to its reputation (at least on PC). The parkour flies flows nicely and doesn't suffer from the grappling hook bypass of Syndicate, it's still the best-looking game in the series, there's a lot of attention to detail and the story doesn't overstay its welcome, even if it sometimes annoys with time jumps and the series habit of having to cram in historic events that you already mentioned. Yes, the map is overflowing with icons, but at that point in the series, that's to be expected.

Compared to Black Flag, parkour, combat, stealth (especially stealth), presentation, architecture and NPCs are vastly superior, but it's less whimsical and of course doesn't have those fun (if repetitive and far too easy, unless you go for the big ships right in the beginning) arcadey ship battles and boarding attacks. Black Flag is definitely better at hiding and spreading its collectibles out, making discovering them a bit more of an occasion instead of an (admittedly still highly addictive) checklist chore due to its larger and more varied game world as well as the novelty of being able to leave your ship at any time, even in the middle of the ocean or near a tiny sand bank to go out and explore.

An amoeba struggling as it's being eaten by a larger amoeba isn't self-aware.