You’re the hero the internet needs.

Yeah, and at that point I’ll also just wait for a 50% off sale, whereas I would otherwise have been a day 1 purchase.

I feel like this happens a lot, honestly - there’ll be a game I’m really excited for, and either it’s got some shitty DRM, or it’s a timed Epic exclusive, or whatever else, and then a few months later when I could be playing it, I’ve mentally moved on to other things and I end up just buying it much later on deep sale if at all.

There’s a lot of games coming out all the time; if I get past that initial hype period around launch without buying a thing, it’s 50% or more off, or I won’t buy it at all.

It’s really a shame, because I was super excited for MH:Wilds, but the confirmation that it will include Denuvo killed my enthusiasm completely.

if you have a more effective metric in mind, I’d love to hear it instead of just pointing out flaws

I mean, isn’t the whole point of this comment section to discuss the merits and flaws of the proposal you’ve made? If we’re not discussing the downsides, too, what’s even the point?

That said, an ideal system would be a measure of the quality of content, not the quantity of content so, as another user has suggested, some measure involving net upvotes might be more effective. Yes, obviously a user can create multiple accounts to upvote everything and fuck with that metric, but I kind of doubt many folks would go to the trouble.

Maybe some combination of PCM and the average number of votes divided by the number of active users could generate some sort of quality metric. At the very least it might be a measure of engagement.

Spam Resistance: Creating multiple accounts to inflate MAU is easy. Generating meaningful posts and comments is harder.

Isn’t this actually just spam encouragement? A community with a bot that posts 50 low-value posts every day will have a much higher PCM as a result, and that behavior is more obnoxious to users and moderators who have to see it and deal with it, vs. someone creating a bunch of accounts, which is largely invisible to everyone else.

This is the shit government should be working to correct, if they weren’t all in it for the money just as much as the corporations.

Corporations and the general population have an innately antagonistic relationship. Corporations want to make as much money as possible, the general population wants to spend as little as possible, so their goals are diametrically opposed. (I’m pooling Uber drivers in with the general population here, because they’re in the same position - being opposed to Uber’s goals.)

Corporations inherently hold more power in this relationship; they have more money than even large groups of individuals, so they can hire expensive teams of lawyers and accountants and professionals of all kinds to further their goals, while it’s difficult if not impossible for normal folks to organize against a corporation in any meaningful way.

In a system that worked, the government would be working to protect the population from corporate interests. They’d be spending the bulk of their time identifying and closing loopholes like this one, and enacting laws to make exploiting these loopholes not worth it, and generally would be the arm of the people.

Instead, corporations pay government, and the government looks the other way - if not directly supports them - while they fuck over everyone they can - and the planet, while they’re at it -to reap wealth. And this shit is the result.

I’d actually be interested to see a cost breakdown between this and just buying a newspaper subscription; it looks like he spent about $100 on materials, plus then there’s the ongoing costs of electricity (negligible), printer ribbons, and paper. Ribbons appear to be about $1 / ea if you buy in bulk, and I don’t recall how much printing you get out of a single ribbon, but let’s assume a 24 pack is enough to last you a year. Paper seems to be about $30 / 1000 sheets, so assuming he sticks to the single-page-per-day format, that’ll last almost 3 years.

So up front costs, $100 Ongoing costs, $35 / year, roughly.

Newspaper subscription is about $150 / year, so this’ll actually be cost effective if he keeps it up. Of course, you’re getting a lot less news than you would from a newspaper subscription, so the relative value is questionable there.

I swear some of those long-form video essays on games have longer runtimes than it would take to just play through the game from start to finish, but that’s okay, I’m still here for it. Love me some excruciatingly in-depth analysis of video game minutia.

The example in the article reduces a recipe print from 47 pages to 1 by using AI to remove all of the filler garbage and leaves just the recipe instructions. Slightly different than just rearranging elements.

I mean, the link is right there in the screenshot: https://dubvee.org/modlog?other_person_id=4948197&type=ModBan

You were apparently permanently banned from their instance due to being toxic, and what you’re seeing in that screenshot are the individual communities mirroring the ban from the instance to the community level. What “toxic” consists of is really known only by the person who issued the ban, and whether or not you even care is really up to you. It could have been for something legitimate, or it could have been completely bogus, and I’m not going to scour your comment history to try to figure it out; chances are you know what you did, and if you don’t, it’s probably just some mod on a power trip, who knows?

I’d go so far as to say no op eds at all. If I’m paying for news, I want factual, high quality, ideally unbiased news, not some chucklefuck’s opinion. I can get some chucklefuck’s opinion all over the internet for free. (Case in point: You’re getting it right now, for free, by reading this comment.)

Looks like MacOS and various Linux distros had a deformed, illegitimate child.

Cutting spending by 20% while not reducing output will definitely accomplish that, too!

Yeah, I suppose I should clarify - that was in response to the objection to paying for pirated content; it’s different from the service provider’s point of view, but from the end user’s point of view, they’re paying for pirated content either way.

This doesn’t seem that different from paying for usenet. It’s not like they’re making DVDs of pirated movies and selling them on the street corner; they were basically just aggregating content and the service they were providing was making it easily searchable and accessible, not doing the actual pirating, from the sound of it, unless I’m misunderstanding the situation.

I wish I could show my country next to my username or something lol.

You could use a vanity username with a flag emoji in it, if you really wanted to.

They claimed that the FTC never alerted them to any wrongdoing before filing the lawsuit, so how could they have known they were violating the law?

“The police never informed me I was doing anything illegal before arresting me, so how could I possibly have known?”

Ignorance of the law isn’t a defense against breaking it in any other sector…

Assuming you’re making the change in your browser’s default search settings, and not editing the URL every time you do a search, it takes a minute or two once, and it’s done forever. No harder than adding an adblock rule and it also removes a lot of other bullshit, too (since it’s just defaulting you to a ‘web only’ search).

Just because it’s an edge case doesn’t mean 30% of your userbase won’t encounter it!

I work at a company whose entire business model is providing QA to other companies. I work directly with some very large, public companies, and some smaller ones. Almost all of them have some form of dedicated in-house QA, which we supplement.