KoboldCoterie

Well, I did alright on the people, but I got almost all of the landscapes incorrect. I'll also admit to guessing on a number of them; if I had to explain exactly what I was basing my answer on for ones I said were AI, I'd have missed 2 more, because I just couldn't see anything that looked off, it was just a hunch.

Because you were guaranteed that what you were downloading was what it said it was, and was high quality, and would have the correct tagging and album art and all of that.

It's been shown repeatedly that a large part of piracy isn't about cost, it's about convenience. It was easier to pay $0.99 and get what you wanted when you wanted it, than download 8 files off of Napster and hope that one of them was actually a decent bitrate and was the song the title said it was.

Back when eMule was a thing, it was super common to spend an entire day downloading a 700MB video file at 5kb/s, only for it to be Fight Club instead of whatever you thought you were downloading. It's the same thing with music.

I'd heard this happened but I didn't believe it until I moved from Maine to Massachusetts and went back to visit for the first time. Got pulled over and ticketed for doing 59 in a 55, on a road I (and everyone else) used to drive 65 on every day. Only difference was the MA plates.

At least (in this case) it's making reasonable suggestions. Watch Tom Scott -> Here's another Tom Scott video you haven't seen. Even so, the GUI in the app has just become a complete mess. I don't use it too often, but it feels like they redesign it in between every time I do.

So at what point (in your opinion) does it become okay to discontinue a paid game? Are they supposed to still be running servers for games from 1997, so the 2 people who still remember it can occasionally log into the dead matchmaking service for nostalgia? Obviously this is a ridiculous example, but if your answer isn't "Yes, they should", then that means there's a point somewhere between that and now when it's okay to shut down the service, so where is that line?

Why curate your Steam store when you can allow utter garbage into it that just effectively steals people’s money?

What's the solution here?

They used to curate everything heavily, but new studios and indies had a tough time getting their games reviewed and added. So they implemented Greenlight, their user-curation platform so users could tell them what they wanted to see. It just became a huge popularity contest, and getting your game on Steam became about how much marketing you could afford to buy. Now, they let anyone with $100 in, and it's very easy for an indie studio to get their game on Steam, but it's also easy for all of the garbage to get onto Steam.

What solution would you propose, that both lets legitimate indie studios get their games on Steam, especially studios producing games in less popular / niche genres, and also edges out the objective garbage, while not incurring huge costs on developers or using a bunch of Valve employee time to personally curate every submission?

Edit: For that matter...

Why have a sensible customer service when you can blame customers themselves and offer no refunds, you know, despite the fact the refund wouldn’t be necessary if you curated your store?

Steam's refund system is one of the most generous, if not the most generous, in the industry. What are your complaints with it? I'm legitimately curious.

Why do anything people are asking for when you can nickle and dime them with dumb shit like trading cards?

I'm not going to defend trading cards, because they're stupid as hell, but how many have you ever been forced to buy?

Gabe is just as bad as every other CEO. Arguably he’s worse.

You know what Valve hasn't done? Gone public. It would make them - and Gabe personally - an incredible amount of short-term money, but they haven't done it, and thank fuck for that, because it'd be the beginning of the end of the PC gaming industry as we know it.

Edit #2: If you're one of the people downvoting and not commenting, you're a coward.

Night shift sucks. I used to do 10 × 12 hour shifts in a row, then flip over to days on my next set.

I think that's just your particular job's shifts that sucked, not night shifts in general. I couldn't imagine switching between nights and days, fuck that noise. Normal 5x8 or 4x10 night shifts are great (for some people, if your lifestyle can support it).

One implant to rule them all, one implant to find them, One implant to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them

It's cute that they're calling layers and transparency "some of Photoshop's best features". That's pretty insulting to Photoshop.

Fair enough. :)

Don’t the wages reflect that they have no bills to pay though?

I mean that'd be fine if they weren't charged absolutely unreasonable prices for everything they have to buy.

Prisoners are paid on average $0.14 to $1.41 per hour (depending on state and job), according to this website.

Even a fucking phone call cost prisoners $10-$15 per 15 minutes until Biden put a cap on it this year, and it's still $3 per 15 minutes. So basically, a prisoner needs to work for at least 2 hours and in some cases as much as 21 hours, to earn the privilege of a 15 minute phone call? Come the fuck on. Nevermind the price of commissary items.

I can understand not paying prisoners $25 / hr or whatever, but $5-$7 would still be low but far more reasonable rates. Further, if a fucking private corporation is using prison labor, IMO they should be paying the normal market rate for labor in that industry, even if some of it is put into a fund in the prisoner's name and released to them when they're released from prison. (This might actually help recidivism, as prisoners would have some money to help them get back on their feet when they were released; that's pure speculation, though, and I have no source to back it up.)

If we say "Capitalism is ruining our lives", it's fine, but if someone from Russia says "Capitalism is ruining your lives", folks are ready to throw down.