This is what really shits me. “Oh, the sports companies won’t be able to fund themselves.” If that’s true, too fucking bad. Our laws shouldn’t exist to arbitrarily prop up certain industries even when we’ve decided that the industry is causing harm.

But also, it’s just fucking not true. You can make an argument and say “oh but gambling companies fund 60% of the sport league” or whatever number it is, and pretend that banning gambling would cut the NRL’s budget by 60%. But that’s just not how it works. They’re sponsors because they were the highest bidder, not the only bidder. You’d just go to the next highest bidder if gambling sponsorships weren’t allowed. In the short term, maybe a 10% loss of revenue at most. Realistically, in the long term, it’d be negligible.

Same goes for pokies at local pubs and clubs. Australia has 0.3% of the world’s population and 18% of the world’s poker machines. And if you look specifically at poker machines not located in casinos it goes up to a ridiculous 76%. The entire rest of the world doesn’t allow poker machines at local clubs like we do, and their venues do just fine. The cries that venues would die off if they couldn’t have pokies are just nonsense.

They’d have very little chance in a copyright suit and they know it. Because you can’t copyright game mechanics or general concepts, and those are the things Palworld pretty obviously copies.

even now you can still host your own website / services at home without any specialized gear

Yes, as I said, that’s the only thing I’ve done myself—in particular, at times I’ve run it off of my main desktop, and at other times on a Raspberry Pi with an external hard drive attached—but that’s specifically not what I was asking about because the previous comment was specifically talking about non-developers who might have that basic HTML understanding and just want a server where they can throw up an HTML file and have it served up. A goal that’s more technically involved than a wordpress.com site, but less involved than self-hosting a LAMP stack and running the Let’s Encrypt certbot.

(Plus, of course, the growing prevalence of cgNAT making self-hosting impossible for many people necessitates the use of a hosting company or user-friendly web service.)

Yeah I learnt static HTML and CSS circa 2007, but even then it felt like what we were being taught was very out of date.

I’ve never actually used any form of hosting for my own pages. I’ve run the LAMP stack on my own local server, and I’ve used services similar to WordPress, but never dealt with static web sites hosted by someone else. Do they not make TLS really easy for you in that circumstance?

I’m not talking about WordPress.org, but WordPress.com. The basic blogging service. It’s all WYSIWYG.

Fwiw these days balance bikes are considered better than training wheels for people learning to ride. Training wheels are ok if you actually need to go somewhere accompanied by an adult on a bike, but they’re terrible for learning. They don’t teach you how to steer or balance properly; a balance bike does. In fact, training wheels can teach bad habits that are difficult to unlearn.

Yeah but a basic Wordpress.com site could do exactly the same thing for free. Or for super cheap if you want your own domain.

Reverse image search says yes, Singapore.

That bastion of socialism.

I doubt it. Other forms of AI could be useful, but generative AI? I doubt it.

And tbh even deep learning through neural networks doesn’t seem to be making the leaps we’d hoped for. AoE4 promised, prior to release, a machine learning–based AI would be delivered down the line. It’s now almost 3 years since release and we haven’t heard a thing about it.

Maybe eventually we’ll be able to easily train a machine learning algorithm to play any game at a wide variety of skill levels (or at a very high level, if not at customisable levels), but it doesn’t seem like it’s any time soon.

A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.

True, and that’s important context if you’re trying to get a deeper understanding of how Julius Caesar came to have the power he held before his assassination.

But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

It literally was though. Not a military intelligence tool, but a big business intelligence one.

Niantic was founded by Google and their first product, Field Trip, and their first game, Ingress (a much better-designed game than Pokémon Go, btw) were pretty obviously about gaining geolocation data for Google to improve their products like Maps and Shopping.

Honestly I’m a light hobbyist myself. My exposure to history is primarily via YouTube channels like the excellent Historia Civilis (their series on Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Roman Republic is stunning) and via games like Age of Empires.

I just don’t understand how someone interested in antiquity can possibly fall for Trumpism. The fall of the Roman Republic was presaged by a guy literally trying to get elected to office so that he could escape prosecution for illegal abuses of power, and the legal system standing aside and saying “yeah, we’ll let you do that in order to maintain the peace” and then falling into civil war anyway.

How much of that sounds familiar…?

Ok this got a chuckle out of me. But yeah, I don’t see any problem with people expressing agreement verbally.

Imagine a real conversation where you’re only allowed to agree with someone with nods, never saying “yeah I agree completely” or any other verbal feedback.

Honestly I didn’t even read the article. Shared it purely based on the headline.

You say “handful”, but it still hand thousands of players, and the thing that makes me sad about this screw up is that of those who played it, it was probably someone’s favourite game…

…Is what I was going to say, until I looked at the Steam charts. It hit an all-time peak of 607 players, with estimates of total ownership ranging from 9.5k to 25.1k. It very well still may have been someone’s favourite game and I feel really sad for them that it’s gone, but wow the game still did so much worse than even my expectations based on the reporting.

See also: Born Sexy Yesterday

See this, this I get. This is an actual reasonable problem. And we could be talking about it wrt Retold, since Freyr is a day one DLC.

Personally I’m not too concerned with it because even if you ignore Freyr, the cost of Premium is $25 AUD more than standard, and it includes two future DLCs (which they’ve already said will be $15 USD, probably $20 AUD each). So Premium is worth getting just for the two future pantheons. And since Premium includes Freyr in addition to the future pantheons, it ends up not looking like an added cost in the way it would otherwise.

But it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth that there’s actual playable content not included for free that’s available day one. And it would leave me very angry if the prices had ended up such that the best deal for everything except the day-one DLC actually cost less than the best deal for everything including Freyr. But all this discussion about cosmetics. Not even interesting cosmetics like unit skins, but something that’s basically just profile pictures. Is annoyingly distracting from that conversation.

You buy it for the expansions. The Chinese, one more as-yet-unannounced pantheon, and Freyr. The other stuff you get with Premium is basically irrelevant.

I’d much rather have a conversation about the day-one DLC of Freyr, and the fact that they’re charging for the future Chinese pantheon despite Chinese being available in 2014 Extended Edition and no previous Age of Empires Definitive Edition removing a civ that was previously available (indeed, aoe2 and aoe3’s DEs both added new civs in addition to all the existing ones). Granted, there are extenuating circumstances there, in that the EE Chinese DLC was so terrible it basically killed the game and they’ve promised the upcoming expansion to Retold will be “all new Chinese”. But it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

This discussion about what is basically profile pictures is some irrelevant bullshit as far as I’m concerned. I don’t give a shit about it, and I find the rhetoric from people claiming they do care (especially that one person claiming that this is a reason they’ll avoid Retold entirely because it’s “an advertisement, not a game”) extremely unconvincing. It’s eye-rollingly stupid to care about this when there are real things to get upset about both with this game and in the wider gaming industry.

where I’m actually playing a game and not an advertisement

That’s more than a little bit hyperbolic.