I have to know what the Detroit soccer team did to get so high on that list. Somebody here must know. Please!

Anybody who tries to arrest him will be at war with Israel and probably the US and probably a lot of other nations. They will break their treaty with ICC before they start that war and everyone fucking knows it. Why do we pretend?

No, it means they were ONLY held accountable because they lost the war.

Nobody prosecuted Churchill for Dresden

People’s take on this stuff always seems so naive to me. All war ever can be viewed as an attempt to arrest the leader of another group for “crimes”. When you get arrested… that means you lost the war. Winning a war means you didn’t get arrested.

The ICC is such a silly stupid waste of human attention. It’s like an idea that children came up with after watching Star Trek. It has no utility whatsoever for our species. We fight, we have winners and losers. If you start a fight with somebody stronger than you, you are gonna have a bad time. If you start a fight with someone weaker than you, others will think you are dishonorable. That doesn’t mean you get arrested.

RTS did go mainstream and it indeed turned into games very different from old school SC et al.

Plants vs zombies and LoL are the descendants of the genre and are or at least were, HUGE. Tower defense and moba are the two evolutionary paths that RTS took.

Tower defense is super mainstream, but moba, while huge isn’t really mainstream in my opinion. But one things for sure, they don’t have much in common with SC except the lineage.

It’s the same thing the right does with government. It is a truism that there is all sorts of “inefficiencies” where the money is going to the wrong people for the wrong stuff.

In both cases, it’s sort of correct and sort of wrong. Corporations, governments, and any human institution beyond a certain scale (a few hundred people), will leak wealth into places it shouldn’t. It’s an unavoidable feature of our species as best I can tell.

It’s fine to accept it, it’s fine to be angry about it. It’s silly to blind yourself to it in some places and whinge about it in others.

I was agreeing with you and being a little sarcastic. Of course you are right, there is nothing genetic about it.

There is very little incentive for native English speakers to learn a second language because English is far and away the most popular second language.

Which I’m sure is a contributing factor to the complete lack of investment in second language education the anglophone world.

Amazingly native English speakers the world over seem to have this genetic predisposition! All of us just can’t seem to get it together when it comes to becoming multilingual.

OR… maybe it comes from being born into mastery of the language everyone else on earth is trying to learn. I get three words in Spanish out before my conversation partner asks to switch to English. What am I gonna do? Stamp my feet and demand I get to practice my hobby and deny them the opportunity to work on a valuable career skill. Nah. We’ll speak in English.

Your ancestors (assuming you are British) created a global language hegemony. My ancestors moved from southern Italy to the US and learned their language.

Started playing with arch this week for the first time. Got a pretty good laugh when I realized that I forgot to install a dhcp client and had to boot the install media again to add networking.

I appreciate what they’re doing and I’m going to keep poking at it, but my first impression is that philosophy is driving and the utility is in the back seat.

I’m not sure there are realistic strategies for the region that would be similar. Who is going to take over administration of Gaza when Hamas is out? Israel is. Germans didn’t hate British people. They did not spend generations teaching their children that Americans were subhuman scum. Your average German was able to snap out of the delusion easily. You and I both know that isn’t a plausible reality in Gaza.

I’m not saying there is a need for genocide. But Hamas could agree to terms tomorrow and the war would end. Then it would start again. There can be no peace in that place. Not while both peoples live there. Maybe when Iran builds nukes? MAD is pretty high price to pay but it might sober everyone up a little. Hard pill to swallow.

Ha, I roasted you for having the good sense to let somebody else handle some of this stuff for you.

Nobody in crazy rabbit hole club is allowed to do anything the easy way!!

I definitely did not claim it was braking privacy. As far as I can tell it was just querying an update server but for some reason it was doing it with such frequency (hundreds a minute for hours out of the day) that I deemed it was broken and that the OS was not managed well.

Other people took a more suspicious view but mostly they just lost my trust that they had any business running a system on my network. If you google around you can get more nuanced takes I don’t actually know if they ever fixed it.

HAOS is a managed operating system, which is perfect for people who want to automate their home but don’t want to manage a Linux machine. It’s a little wild to me to see a person in this community advocating a managed OS. Like, what are we even doing here??

I killed HAOS and set it up in docker because it was phoning home a lot. Sometimes there were hundreds of dns queries a minute to HA servers. No thanks.

I wasn’t suggesting these folks are fighting the good fight. Just that once you start taking over the government you aren’t really a street gang anymore, you are a revolutionary force.

To me at least the word rebel does not mean good guy, it means a person bent on the usurpation of state power. That’s it. A gang is a group of criminals. They can be both, but it sure seems like gang is the less important descriptor.

I really don’t have a deep knowledge of what is going on here but I am curious about the language we are using. Why “gangs” and not “rebels” or something similar? Seems like these groups are attempting to wrest control of the state. Anybody who has a richer perspective want to help me understand it better?

That is the traditional argument. I saying that game budgets have passed the point where it is responsible to use them for marketing tools and they have to be products in their own right.

Those insomniac leaks show that Sony is feeling the squeeze and is looking to find ways to make its first party offerings cheaper (strategic layoffs). When you need to sell 10s of millions of copies for the product to be successful, platform exclusivity is going to be a tough sell in the boardroom. Especially when the hardware wars has already been fought and Sony won it by a lot.

I think it will be a few years before the rest of the business catches on, but I actually think he is right about this. If you spend 100s of Millions on a game, you need to make money on it. It’s not some cheap thing you can use as a loss leader to sell some hardware. Winning the console war is no longer as smart of business as it was in past decades.

You have to look at the other platforms as retail partners instead of competitors. Game budgets are way too big to justify exclusivity in 2024.

I had this conversation a thousand times in 2003. Felt like talking into the void. Everybody in this country just wanted to watch the bombs go off.

The length of a day is variable. You would have to update the second (and every unit derived fro It) after every big earthquake, and a thousand other events.

The solar system does not give a shit about your preference for base 10 numbers there will always be (roughly) 365.25 rotations per revolution and you don’t get a choice about that.

The business has changed so much since the 80s when all these ideas were conceived. So much of what fans consider “good business” is all outdated nonsense. When all this started, the software was cheap and the r&d on the hardware was the big investment you had to pay off.

Now, the hardware is a loss leader (or at least a wash) for the first half of the generation. The big first party exclusive games are loss leaders. The only way you make money is off services, and third party game sales.

Sony is trying desperately to figure out how to make its big cinematic 3rd person action games cheaper because they are killing them. PC releases are part of the solution. But the business is still unsustainable. They made a huge bet on live service gaming at perhaps the worst possible time.

MS on the other hand has a huge “shipping games” problem. Game pass needs at least one big deal release a month to keep growing and they just don’t have it. Game pass revenue probably can’t cover buying those games in from 3rd parties every month, so they have to make their own and they haven’t been able to make hits. So, they make what they can, buy studios, and ship retail versions on any platform they can to help offset the cost.

Jeff Gerstmann’s take seemed about right to me MS isn’t only competing with Sony, they (and Sony and Nintendo) are competing with Netflix and Disney plus and every other entertainment service out there. Sony isn’t their enemy, they are a potential retail partner, just like steam.

These big single player tentpoles are an endangered species if nobody figures this out. Platform exclusivity is very bad business but it is taking the suits a few years to break out of the old culture, and the consumers even longer.