It is a little insane how many games release on any given day. On July 15, 2025, 150 “titles” (of which 78 are actual games, not demos or DLC) were added to the Steam store. I would guess that their data includes all titles, but even just 78 real games on what should be a slower-than-average random Tuesday could totally contribute to 34,000 games released in a year.
I see lots of discussion about the solution / what used to be done, but I want to point out why unofficial servers stopped being easy/standard/possible to run.
The first time big money entered esports was on private Starcraft LAN tournaments. Blizzard sued to get a cut of the proceeds, but because the privately-owned software (game and server) was running on privately-owned hardware, the courts ruled that Blizzard got no money.
AAA companies learned from this that allowing the playerbase to run their own servers meant losing out on money, so most AAA multiplayer games with even a small chance of ending up as esports make it so they can only connect to servers operated by themselves, longevity of the game be damned. If they weren’t so desparate for every scrap of cash they could possibly generate from the game, I would bet most multiplayer game would still let you run your own servers, like they used to.
Graphics are, like it or not, the main thing the majority of people look for first when they go to buy a game, and raytracing is a ridiculously easy way to achieve that in comparison to the time and skill required to elevate traditional lighting to that same level of beauty. PS5 and XSX both support raytracing, and PC graphics cards that don’t are coming up on 10 years old at this point.
Any AAA developer is going to see those two facts, that it’s way cheaper and runs on most of the market’s hardware, and abandon development work on traditional lighting. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is RT-only, and it was a huge success.
DLSS is in a similar boat - it reduces the need to spend time and money on optimization.
Now, let me be clear, I lament both of these facts. I think raytracing looks gorgeous, and DLSS is usually a nice performance boost for minimal tradeoff, but I don’t think every game should look photorealistic, and some games just don’t look good with DLSS on. What I’m saying is they both make game development cheaper and faster for very little relative downside, so I wouldnt be surprised if all AAA games required raytracing within the next few years.
Your intro does not make it clear - is it not all bad?? Why claim “propaganda” just because the US does it too? Fair enough if you want to spread awareness of all forced labor equally, but your response makes seems to me like you think it’s not actually happening in China, only in the US (which if true a source on that would be nice, not just sources about it happening in the US).
I disagree with many of his views, but I definitely wouldn’t call him right-wing. He seems to me more like a libertarian from before “don’t tread on me” actually meant “please tread on me.” Hell, he’s said the CEO of Nestle should be shot.
The trick is to throw yourself at the ground and miss
Only for chicken, for salmonella reasons, and steak, because I’m terrible at judging doneness without it.
Here, though there isn’t anything super concrete.
Should be noted that some states actively forbid gun registration.
I would guess you’re doing a much larger range of motion relative to each joint, squatting “ass to grass” but doing calf raises just from standing. Your ankles don’t move as far generally as your knees, but if you want to maximize calf gains, do them off a ledge so you raise from the bottom of the range of motion to flat-footed.
You’ve both mentioned the same “Israel has a right to defend itself” quote. I’d be curious to know when/where he said that.
You’re either purposely trying to turn people against Sanders or willfully ignorant. He’s been speaking against Israel forever.
It’s for the federal charges
None of the people I know who own Teslas (mix of pre-owned and bought new) are on here, but by poking around I did find a random person with a normal Tesla parked out front on Google street view, so it’s not just cybertrucks.
I also sought out my partner’s neighbor who has a cybertruck in the driveway every time I’m there, and that wasn’t on there, so I have no idea where dogequest might be sourcing this info.
In a physical medium, it’s way cheaper and easier to make light color thing dark than make a dark colored thing light. “Dark mode” books would require dyeing each sheet black, then painting the text on top of each sheet, rather than what is currently done, where we bleach each sheet white, then dye the text into each sheet.
Somewhat related - this is why printers use CMYK, rather than RGB. Computer screens use pure light, so they simply emit whatever combination of light they need to, and your eyes add them together. In a physical medium, however, what we see is based on what is reflected, i.e. not absorbed. Hence, each color of ink, in additive terms, is two colors together (cyan is green+blue, magenta is red+blue, etc). When you combine CMYK colors, you can precisely control what wavelengths of light are being absorbed in order to reflect the correct color.
I dropped KCD 1 after ~30 hours for the same reason as you, but at least KCD has some justification - the whole point of the game is to be an ultra-realistic simulation of medieval life, a roleplaying game in the truest sense of the word.
Your character starts out not even knowing how to read, even though you, the player, obviously do to interact with the GUI. He’s the son of a blacksmith who never would have learned anything else, so he, the character, has to spend time learning basically everything, even if you, the player, already have it figured out.
You and I think that design is unfun. Clearly, though, there’s an audience for it, as KCD 2 sold something like a million copies on launch day and instantly recouped their development costs.
If AI was solely being used to advance scientific progress in exponential steps as it has for things like protein folding, I suspect these outlets would be all for it.
This isn’t the primary driver of capital investment in AI, though. AI is booming mostly because corporate executives see it as a way they can get the fruits of skilled labor without paying for it. I don’t have any more way of knowing these particular leftist organizations’ reasons than you do, but my assumption would be that their perspective is that AI in this context is literally the most powerful tool the bourgeoisie have ever had to exploit workers - one where the end goal is to not even need the workers anymore. You couldn’t design something more perfectly antithetical to leftist values than this application for generative AI, as it is created by using the owned products of others’ skilled labor to make it possible for the owner to remove the worker from the equation. Copyright and IP law is a weapon to combat that.
Edit - typos
There was a ~1.5 year old reddit thread that talked about this
Skin color is directly related to latitude. Darker skin means more melanin, which absorbs more light and protects against sunburns and thus skin cancer.
Eye color factors are less confidently known, but darker eyes generally have a better time in bright daylight.
Regarding those two, it’s also worth mentioning that the Inuit people don’t follow those patterns, as while they have less sunlight, they also have to deal with reflected light off the snow.
Hair texture is like eye color in that we’re only mostly confident, but tight curls also probably protect from the sun.
It’s also been posited that epicanthic folds might help against freezing winds, but there’s no real evidence for that.
Any two party system is the mathematically-inevitable result of first-past-the-post voting, nothing more or less.