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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • For the consumer, obviously.
    Patents exist to protect the profit of the inventor, specifically because once you have spent the RnD money to make something, someone else can take your finished idea and create your thing without having to cover those costs. Their entire point is to make sure stuff stays more expensive and exclusive for longer.

    But the issue isn’t that patents or even software patents exist as a thing, they are important to protect against copying, it’s that seemingly almost anything no matter how simple, vague or universal it is can apply and get patented, and whoever owns those patents then doesn’t have to use or license them, instead they just sit on them waiting to strike with a lawsuit.

    Like one of the Nintendo ones which is the genius and detailed idea of “you can capture objects and ride them in a virtual world using the controller input in a vidya gaym!” - a concept entire unique and one that hasn’t been ever used before in a game, now prohibited to be done by anyone else until 2041.




  • And your partner uploads those videos to TikTok? Because I’m not saying every video on the internet has to be a nine hour video essay that’s going be be watched by five devoted people, I’m saying that an alternative to TikTok, which is what we are discussing about here, can never work if you have to self-host those videos because the entire point of the platform is about making viral content.

    Obviously self hosting for personal/limited use works, that’s how the internet worked for two decades before all of these platforms even existed. Before Youtube and Imgur and Twitter and Tumblr, I had a magazine subscription that came with a free email address and a hosting service with a whopping 50MB of storage, and that was plenty enough.





  • couldn’t non-chinese car companies just make better/more affordable EVs?

    If we assume they actually were that affordable in reality, then the answer would be yes.
    The accusation is that the Chinese government is financing and supporting their domestic EV manufacturers in an effort to artificially lower their prices to levels no other manufacturer could ever match in an effort to dominate the market and remove all competition - at which point they could increase their prices drastically and recover the “investment” as there would be no-one else left to compete.

    If it’s true or not, I can’t say, I haven’t researched the subject enough. Those votes at least showcase that there is no clear consensus about it.


  • You can play Cold Steel 1&2 as your first if you want a more modern introduction to the world and like the persona style school setting stuff, but CS3 is when the stories of all the previous games start merging together, so it’s very highly recommended to have played Sky, Zero and Azure before that or you will miss a lot of it.

    Also there is a 3D remake of the Sky trilogy coming, starting sometime next year with the first game. Though so far it seems to be Switch exclusive.








  • Yup.
    The previous family share was gathering your library of games with the “console” in a single box and giving that entire to your friend. If you want to play anything, you need the box back.
    Steam Families is now a common bookshelf, grab a game if it’s there and play.

    Now we just need a way to use that shelf with the same account so I don’t get booted from my steam deck games just because I left something running on my PC and vice versa.




  • Depends on the game. There is no functionality in Steam for buffering them offline, it’s just that some games run the check for all achievements every time you load a save or gain a new achievement, while others only do it for the one you just gained.

    That’s why I have “complete 40 substories” in Yakuza 4, but not the one for finishing 20 of them - it triggers when you complete the 20th, and never again.
    Meanwhile I imported a complete save to a different game for mod dev debugging purposes, and it unlocked every single achievement the game had the moment I loaded that.