I bought a couple things on epic early on because I thought competition would be good. But epic kind of sucks and has no Linux support, so I stopped.

That’s why I did it too, but let’s be fair, dice are supposed to be random.

Yeah, I realized in my older age that I don’t actually like a lot of random. I liked new Vegas where you either had the skill or you didn’t. In tabletop games I like dice pools to make the results less evenly distributed among all possible outcomes, and then options like fate points and “succeed at a cost” on top of that.

Some people I guess really like the random dice effects, but usually it just makes me grumpy. To each their own.

Most of my save scumming comes from being annoyed at the random factor. Like I have a +8 on Skill and it rolled me a 3, failing? Nah that’s stupid. Reload.

Less random, less save scumming. You can have good systems with low random factors.

Inspiration helped in bg3, but it’s a pretty limited resource and can still fail.

I did save scum once in a fight where I rolled four natural 1s in a row. The odds of that are too low for me to believe that was legitimately random.

Uh… What?

Game A has 100 recommends, 300 not-recommend

Game B has 90 recommends, 10 not-recommends.

Is A more highly recommended? In a meaningful way?

Sometimes I think they’d make more money for the shareholders if they did a good job.

Like all these shareholder driven decisions might ruin Microsoft’s brand and lose money long term. Many shareholders are long term and will be left holding the bag if the company goes down the shitter

Business Idiots. The people in charge are too far removed from real users, their products, and any real consequences.

Really should break Microsoft up into tiny pieces.

Yeah I think I filtered out like anime or hentai or something years ago, so I don’t see that kind of game anymore.

I’ve tried both. I think part of it is friction from little behaviors that I expect to be like Google sheets but aren’t. I don’t even know what they are until I hit some keys and excel does the “wrong” (but probably reasonable) thing.

I feel like Google sheets is a better experience than Excel, at least for my personal usage. I’m not enterprise though, and not trying to run it like a database or anything crazy.

This has negative appeal for me. I don’t want to buy slop in games. I don’t even want to use discord. It’s the children who are out of touch.

Now excuse me, I have to go yell at some clouds.

ls never asks you to create an account or to update.

Don’t give anyone ideas.

“Pay $2.99/mo to see hidden files!”

I think most games get shut down when they still have players. Plus they could release server code so people could host their own games, like in the olde days of the 1990s. They don’t because they’re primarily concerned with profit.

That aside, “it brings joy” is not sufficient on its own as a justification. Heroin brings joy, but you likely wouldn’t say that’s a fine gift for a child. Why is that? Probably because we recognize the potential harms and unhealthy habits. Maybe you accept the risks and harms of digital slop are acceptable. I don’t think I’d want to encourage that in children.

I worry about how I would raise a child in this landscape. Two of the people I know with kids, the kids don’t care about video games. One of the kids is super into iPad games, and that feels like a haazrd brewing.

Maybe I’d try to stick to real games for any child I was responsible for, but I don’t think that would survive impact with peers.

Physical cards last for years. Maybe the online game will be around in ten years, but maybe not.

I have most of my magic cards from my youth. They’re a thing I own. I can do what I want with them- play the game, use them for decorations, sell them. Digital shit is transient with few options for the buyer.

There was an article on a tech news site recently about how to unshittify windows. Just like 4 pages of stuff to turn off and uninstall.

People in the comments unsurprisingly were like “Linux is free and getting better all the time”. People were mad. So mad.

If you are using sudo all the time something has gone wrong

Setting up a windows VM at my old job took like a few minutes, but I already had virtual box (I think that’s what I used)

And I needed to see some software running in a Windows box while editing the code that talked to it.

Yes, you can fucking do “stand on the table and make a speech” work. You know how? By breaking it up into detailed steps (pun intended), something that LLMs are awesome at!

My intended point was the LLM at run time taking user input wouldn’t be able to do “make a speech” if the game engine doesn’t have that concept already encoded. And if the game is presented as “take user input and respond believably” then users are going to ask for stuff the engine can’t do. Maybe there’s no animations for climbing. Maybe they did some shortcuts and the graphics look bizarre when stuff is elevated.

I wasn’t talking about Skyrim specifically.

But also you’re being unpleasant in this exchange, so you can win.

lol if you had read the rest of my post you would have seen I admitted you might be right. But go off, I guess.

Depends on what you need to do. You could mount a folder to get files in or out, for some cases.

Have you used virtual machines before? Done software development?