All it would take for Valve to lose their effective monopoly on PC game distribution would be for someone else to make a better product.
Every other major PC game distribution platform (besides GOG, and they’re far more niche than Valve) has essentially started their attempt to unseat Valve with enshittification baked in, and it was obvious.
I’ve seen demos of software that uses AI to split a song into multiple tracks, one for each instrument. THAT is pretty cool. It’s not lossless, you’re going to lose some of the human performance because the AI has to reconstruct the sound for each instrument and it’s not going to be 100% perfect, but it’s a really neat (and useful) tool.
Notably, it’s not the kind of thing you generally see when tech bros are touting AI.
If you have something that you can’t afford to part with, you don’t let it leave your person. It goes in your pockets, or in your carry-on.
If you have something that needs to get somewhere safely, and you can’t afford to lose it, and you can’t carry it with you onto an airplane, you don’t put it in your checked luggage - you ship it. With insurance.
Everyone either knows someone, or has had the experience themselves, of losing luggage due to an airline’s neglect. It’s a known risk.
Although I agree that they couldn’t just end it at the bottom of the ocean, if it were written better it could have had an ending that actually tied into the rest of the story, rather than what it wound up with. The whole thing just felt like a lot of missed opportunities.
Instead of a tragic - but sensible - ending, magical aliens showed up after Earth was kaput, and gave him what he wanted. There is nothing to tie this ending to the rest of the plot besides the main character, no agency involved in its happening, no nothing. It’s unsatisfying. It’s a deus ex machina, and not the good kind.
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:
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.
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…
Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
Mostly I just wondered why the movie was made in the first place. Sure, examining the tragedy of creating an intelligent being that cannot mature and cannot let go of emotional attachments by design is interesting… but the meandering, pointless story had like three places it could have ended and just … didn’t, finally topping it off with a ‘bittersweet’ ending that seemingly had no purpose besides to give some catharsis to the audience despite being so out of left field that it had no relation to the rest of the story. It could have been an art book showing off the scenery instead of bothering to throw an aimlessly wandering robot child into it.
Kpop Demon Hunters initially looks like a girlie movie that was shoehorned into being an action flick.
It’s a drama, interspersed with enough comedy and action to make you forget that it’s a drama. The story isn’t anything special, but it has well-done emotional beats backed by a soundtrack that elevates it. It is absolutely worth watching. (And the animation is fantastic.)
Don’t go into it expecting a cinematic masterpiece; it’s made for kids. It is also, however, a kid’s movie that is intended to entertain the adults who take their kids to see 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.
Okay, that’s actually kinda great.
It has no meaning. It’s a meme purely for the sake of being a meme.
The word that always comes to mind is ‘literally’ which has come to mean ‘figuratively, but with emphasis’ and it drives me nuts - because it removes the word we have to say ‘this is a thing that you might assume is figurative, but it’s not, it actually happened’.
If you own it on GoG you don’t need a pirate copy - just save the offline installer.
I’m pretty sure their point is that millennials are unable to accrue enough wealth to become conservative.
A sizable portion of Lemmy’s userbase is in a country that aggrandizes free-market capitalism, and we’re getting to the point with it where its flaws are becoming impossible to ignore. Meanwhile, most of us grew up well after the peak of anti-socialist sentiment.
TF2 had a long and prosperous life. It’s 18 years old at this point. There are a few live service games (usually with subscriptions) that have survived longer, but TF2 had its run, and it was a good one. I bought it as part of the Orange Box and I absolutely got my money’s worth and then some from it.
As for physical media - I don’t know if you were around for it, but there was a period before Steam took over the industry when most major PC game releases had CD keys you had to input and validate before you could play the game. Do something the publisher doesn’t like? The key gets revoked and you can’t play the game any more unless you buy another license. There were entire underground communities devoted to cracking the CD key validations in games. Now you just use Luna or Steamless and call it a day.