The idea is to create fear. Make Palestinians scared to go to aid centers, so you can look ‘good’ on the world stage by allowing in a minute amount of aid, but minimize how many people it actually gets to.

Netanyahu is insisting that Iran is only months away from having nukes. Experts disagree. My personal opinion is this is another ploy of his to stay in power, since the “war” in Gaza has been winding down.

At this point, you’re better of self-hosting, or even co-lo hosting. Cloud environments are good when you need to scale faster than servers can be shipped (or plan to scale down before the costs add up), but $5k a month is literally a new, decently-beefy server every 2-3 months.

In terms of solving the money issue, I feel like the only solution is a shared-cost/ shared-ownership model, where you get an initial pool of money together for the initial build-out, and then monthly costs are divided equally among all members. You can’t rely on donations, you need collectivism.

Yes, but by definition all of them are also playing the game, and given that this is mostly a novelty feature (and also based on how shockingly little use the user-facing chatbots I’ve seen in professional settings are utilized), I personally doubt that the chatbot energy usage will top the game’s.

My guess is there will be 90% of people who use the feature once or twice before ignoring it forever, 9% who will use it occasionally for e.g. video creation purposes, and 1% or less who will actually sit there and use it a bunch just to talk to. That would about match up with ChatGPT’s general usage trends.

It’s just tribalism. They think everything is zero-sum, and that the candidates to their left are actually just as tribalist and selfish as they are.

Every time I see someone say that most people haven’t swung a sword/ shot a gun/ been in a fight/ been in an accident, etc, I always wonder if I’m the one in the bubble or if they are.

In tight quarters like Europe, most countries would not allow this for a country they’re not actively at war with, no. If someone flies something into your airspace and isn’t actively attacking you, the presumption of an accident is normal, and shooting down aircraft would be considered pretty extraordinary. Hell, even the US didn’t actually shoot down the spy/weather balloons that China flew over them until they’d basically crossed the entire continental US. This law is only happening because they know Russia is doing this intentionally, the drones are armed, and they’re unmanned. If any of those factors were different, they probably wouldn’t be doing this.

…but there is now a clarity across Europe, and not just in Paris, that regardless of Vance’s reassurance, Europe has to have the capability to operate autonomously of the US. Trump is self-evidently not reliable, and his benign assessment of Putin’s intentions is not shared.

Planning for a European reassurance force in Ukraine is under way, as is planning for a potential Russian attack on Europe. Since February, France and the UK, through a combined joint expeditionary force, have formed the nucleus of that planning, but this has broadened, with new political leadership increasingly coming from four members of the Weimar+ group: Poland, France, Germany and the UK.

Honestly, I think Europe’s disillusionment with us will be better for them in the long run. The fact that they were waiting on Biden to take the lead in Ukraine, whose fecklessness over lending credence to Russia’s prima facie bogus claim of the war being US vs Russia made him hold back many strategic options from Ukraine, meant that they were also not thinking about what Russia’s aggression meant for them, and reacting accordingly.

I think the original purpose of Article 5 (in terms of US intervening vs Russia) has probably been dead for a couple decades now, and it’s good that Europe won’t be finding that out when Russian troops are rolling in, and the US backs off.

the capitalization of the game names is also completely unnecessary in this example

is it fine to disregard writing conventions just because its possible to understand the meaning without them

s

For anyone wondering:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Minecraft and Forza Horizon 5

Look at that complete lack-of-an-Oxford-comma just sitting there, mocking us.

R* sucks. Their asshole-simulator games-turned-live-service-cashgrabs have never represented anything but the worst of the games industry. GTA6 getting canceled would be an excellent opportunity for millions of people who would’ve bought it to spend their time playing something better.

Fight me.

I’m a huge open world and/or sandbox nut. Non-linearity is my jam. Kenshi, Rimworld, AssOdyssey/Shadows, Project Zomboid, Witcher 3, X4…

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good story, but story takes many shapes, and not all stories are pre-written; plenty are emergent. I grew up playing with Legos (and still do), and me making whatever story I wanted (or that emerged along the way) was part of the appeal.

Honestly, apart from FF8 and TW3, and now Expedition 33, I haven’t found many games with written stories that grabbed me. I read books when I want that fulfillingly-crafted linearity.

“It’s been 3 months since we cut off all food and medicine to the civilians in your territory. Next we’re going to fully occupy your territory, and kill you and anyone we assert is part of you. Hey wait, what do you mean you won’t negotiate with us?”

Yes and no. Most of the cost-reductions in hardware manufacturing lifecycles come from minimizing materials loss and optimizing design efficiency. The components don’t actually just get cheaper to produce over time on their own, from a material perspective. That means that material shortages are much more likely to have a big impact on cost (up or down) than new manufacturing technology, for the same chip.

I don’t think they’ll do that for already-released games, but I wouldn’t put the big 3 (Sony, MS, Nintendon’t) from doing the barest ‘remasters’, and replacing their digital versions of those games with the ‘remasters’.

This is the incident that made me cancel my WoW sub, and close my Battle.net account. Never again trusting them, even under Microsoft (or rather, especially now under MS).

Oh man, 2011… I’m a millennial, and even I was already out of college in 2011. My ‘kid’ games were $80 USD in the 90s. Here’s an article from 2014 that someone made about how insane N64 game prices were.

Star Fox 64 – $79.95 (Source: GamePro #106) - 1997

GoldenEye 007 – $69.95 (Source: GamePro #108) - 1997

Super Mario 64 – $66.99 (Source: GamePro #97) - 1996

According to the CPI Inflation Calculator, $80 USD in 1997 is $160 today.

I am surprised, and happy.

Obviously. The list you rattled off looks like you did a Google or YouTube search on “gaming influencer” and picked a few random names.

I didn’t Google for those, they were, as I said, the ones I do know.

Don’t spout off uneducated opinions about subjects you don’t know anything about.

I know quite a lot about the gaming space. That doesn’t require me to go look up every middling alt-right YTer or streamer.

If you have an actual take on what I posted, apart from my rw examples being too well-known or something, feel free to post it.

I think you’ve mixed up the timeline in my comment.

• Pre-gamergate era (2010-2014): channer-esque misogynists like JonTron are heavily popular on YT, but there is no political pipeline established. They are just voicing their own shitty thoughts, and their audience is almost exclusively young white males.
• Gamergate (2015): Right-wing politicians and shock pundits like Shapiro take notice of the large amount of misogynistic content that a lot of gaming YTers are spouting as GG gets national attentions, and think, “hey, those sound like people I can capture”.
• Early Alt-right pipeline (2015-2019): figures like Shapiro and Yiannopoulos start making content intended to target gamers, usually ‘shock’ videos with gamer-derived terms like “own” (the libs), and/or are interviewing right-wing-aligned gamer influencers, and the gamer->conservative voter pipeline is developing.
• Late Alt-right pipeline (2020-onwards): there are tons of right wing YTers, streamers, and talk-shows that target young white males, especially gamers, telling them that everything they dislike is due to ‘wokeism’, ‘DEI’, etc… you know the rest.

Even before that, there was this whole corporate wokeness marketing trope that really drove the concept into the ground

You’re using ‘woke’ unironically, in the way that the Right does. Neither of those things you posted are Woke, they’re just pandering. Woke means aware of the systemic biases in our social institutions. Your examples aren’t “wokeness”, they’re Feminist Capitalism (and Rainbow Capitalism also gets called ‘woke’ by the Right).

It’s like kids all running with this popular meme, only for parents to sudden adopt it and it’s not cool any more. So, right-wing spheres to pick it off of the ground, dust it off, and just carry that energy forward, which is unfortunately what they are good at.

No, that was never what wokeness was (and none of those companies ever called themselves that), it’s just that right-wingers started calling anything they didn’t like “woke”, despite their examples having nothing to do with wokeness.

Leftists are shit at messaging. Like, really really shit at messaging.

Leftists have great messaging. If you think messaging is a Leftist problem, I think you’ve confused Liberal, Progressive, and Leftist.