graymess @ graymess @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

When he's no longer president, he'll still have secret service agents guarding him with their lives 24/7. He's the safest man on the planet.

Considering every Fallout game from the last two decades made top 20, I'd say yeah it's probably the show lol.

lol right. The secret service, FBI, and every other agency in the country with the express objective of maintaining the status quo are just gonna let a president get killed. This isn't the 60s.

There should be no reason not to transcode onboard, right? Modern mobile devices could probably process video no problem and then the upload would be smaller and quicker than sending the original. Only issue might be long videos, but I think there's a case to be made that these types of platforms should have a firm duration cap of only a few minutes tops.

From my experience, switching diets doesn't require turning your world view upside down. Maybe if your reason for going vegan is some life-altering epiphany? But I think most people already understand at this point, they just don't want to change. I'm not speaking here with judgment.

I'm vegan at home, though I'll sometimes make some exceptions for dairy when I'm out. Explaining that to anyone who wants to share a meal with me ranges anywhere from a brief heads up to a full on ethics debate initiated by the other person. It's weirdly common how often non-vegans feel challenged just by the existence of a vegan in their presence. Like I'm not trying to have a conversation about it. This is a very practical thing for me and that's mostly how I see this "lifestyle choice." It made sense for me to stop eating meat, so I did. No internal struggles or questions about my place in the world. Just logistics about how to navigate our meat-centric food culture. So yeah, I think the biggest challenge isn't overcoming some personal hurdles, but simply pushback from people and other external factors that make it harder to change.

I understand where you're coming from. I'm not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I'm optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I'm not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.

But I think we're talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube's already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can't fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn't bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn't either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.

This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we're entering a time when we don't get those things for free anymore.

History would suggest that, but I'm starting to believe we're in a tech service bubble that's ready to pop. I touched on this in my comment, but it's becoming clearer than ever that the vast majority of the services we use today are not sustainable on a number of levels. Economically, they're all a mess.

Food delivery services are bleeding money constantly in the hopes that one day they'll find a way to profit. They won't. It's an insane business model. The actual cost of the service is many times the price of the food you're buying. Uber/Lyft already isn't keeping prices low enough to be a cheap option anymore because they've coasted too long on VC funding and it's time for them to start making money. But they still aren't and if they charged what it actually costs to operate, no one would use it. Many online platforms can't sustain themselves despite being major social media hubs. Streaming services spend more on buying up movies, shows, IP rights, and other streaming services than their subscriptions bring in.

The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse. I think we've already had it as good as it's gonna get and we're going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they've pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade. It's not just Lemmy's favorite buzzword "enshitification." I think a lot of what we expect from the Internet is not sustainable and it's not going to stick around in any form we would want.

It kind of is. YouTube has decades of history. Unfathomable amounts of video. No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube's library and be as accessible and as fast. It would cost an unbelievable amount of money in servers and maintenance let alone moderation. The problem is this is a service, like many others that exist today, that does not bring in more money than it costs. YouTube exists because it's a branch on a megacorporation tree, but even Google will eventually need to find a way to make it profitable. It is impossible to fund this for free or anywhere close to free.

I have questions.

Returned to my beloved 3DS to play a fan translation of the Japan-only Rocket Slime 3. The translation itself is solid, though there are a bunch of text rendering issues. Nothing that ruins the experience. I loved the previous game and this one is a very similar experience, but I think I preferred the mecha fights of 2 over the pirate ship battles of 3.

The gameplay balance is all over the place, unfortunately. Regular adventuring off-ship is dead easy and a little dull. The boss fights in particular are incredibly uninspired. But the ship battles wildly fluctuate in difficulty. Some I manage to Perfect without much challenge, others have me hanging on by a thread and landing me on the Game Over screen more than once.

I'm on the last chapter of the main quest and will probably give up soon on trying to complete everything as I've read the final post-game gauntlet is absolute hell.

Not OP, but I recently beat P5R years after P5 vanilla. I wasn't sure how I felt about it myself, but will try to elaborate a little without spoilers.

I found myself mostly disagreeing with the Phantom Thieves in the new chapter and electively went through the "bad" ending first. I do like the story that was explored, however, and I think it was genuinely fascinating to see how the team approached their most complex dilemma yet. Ultimately, I appreciated what they were trying to do even if it felt a little trope-y at times. That said, the ending cutscene is leagues worse than vanilla's and even kind of walks back some of what made the new story great.

I'm currently playing Strikers and I'm unfortunately getting kind of bored with it after the second area. I was very impressed by how many of Persona 5's systems translated to an action game so well, but now I'm feeling like I've already seen the extent of the gameplay and all that's left is to repeat again and again and again until it's over. The story is vaguely fun and the road trip framing is a wonderful follow up to P5's ending. The writing is fine and the characters haven't become flanderized quite yet despite being at about that point in the Persona spinoff cycle. But I kind of don't care what the cast has to say about everything. Maybe that's the problem of starting a big adventure with a full party. At every cutscene, there are at least 8 characters there to react to what's happening, which holds up for about as long as one would expect. Considering skipping out on the rest and moving on to Tactica, since that's way more my style of gameplay.

I really liked Cities Skylines, but I'm getting the impression the sequel isn't exactly being embraced by the community. Are mods not possible yet or is it that there aren't many that have been released?

Kind of weird to admit to stealing someone's purchase. Dick move, really, regardless of how dumb that was of the buyer.

It's not really worthy of Patient Gamers because I bought it shortly after launch (in an actual box at Best Buy), but the Orange Box was one of the most absurdly good deals I've ever seen. I can't even calculate how many hours I've gotten out of it because it ended up on an old Steam account, but TF2 alone is easily my most played game ever.

Fixed headline:
Israeli war cabinet to consider doing more war crimes after illegally bombing Iranian embassy

The exact reason I opted not to get this phone. I kind of don't understand why so many lesser known brands have such limited bands on their phones. Does it add that much to the cost?

I agree with much of what you're saying, as well. With Israel holding all the cards, I just find it worrying that Gaza would be forced to give up its one and only leverage. We've already seen that Israel does not care if hostages are involved when attacking a location. It's hard to imagine how much more aggressive they will be when the risk of Israeli collateral damage is removed from the equation.

It's a misleading headline, whether deliberate or not. Read the context of the resolution. It was a highly conditional ceasefire proposal that would require Gaza to give up all hostages while Israel would be permitted to continue controlling the region. Not immediate and clearly untenable for Palestinians. The US submitted the proposal knowing it would not pass just so they can act like they're trying to negotiate peace, only being shot down by the usual bad guys. It's a propaganda tactic and it's clearly working.

No, the US resolution was distinctly bullshit and did not call for an immediate ceasefire. The previous resolutions that the US vetoed did. Let's not pretend the US proposed this version of a resolution out of humanitarian interest.

Not sure that first bit of advice is a good blanket policy, but it depends on who's deciding how significant a negative trait must be to constitute a red flag. Some will take this advice to mean you should expect nothing short of perfection and that's just unrealistic. If you walk away from every flaw you find, you'll be alone. My partner and I have been together 13 years. We are well aware of each other's flaws, so we work on them and do what we can to mitigate the impact they have on our relationship. But we also both know that if either of us does something egregious that crosses the line, that ends the relationship. Unconditional love is stupid. There should always be conditions.

Anyway, I think it's useful to pair that advice with "know what your red flags are" so you can identify and separate the imperfections from the deal breakers.