That could work if these firms were somehow competitors, but these aren't Sony-aligned studios they're buying, these are studios that were releasing games on Xbox.
This is definitely a case of, "what makes stock line go up? New games, Big names, More stuff!" Then later, "uh oh, did that and stock price not going up. Layoffs mean less cost, now stock line go up again!"
As someone who used to really like Phil, I agree with this. He's clearly banking on his popularity as a "celebrity" within the gaming community to put a smiling spin on what is a clearly horrible business record.
The question here is not whether Microsoft does the same things that all businesses do (i.e. be evil Capitalist monstrosities that run people's livelihoods over in the name of investor greed)- that much is obvious.
The question is whether Phil Spencer is actively enabling this behavior and also covering for it- which he is.
And that is why, as the article suggests, people need to stop treating him as anything other than a corporate representative who wants to extract as much value as he can before it all runs into the ground.
The article didn't say he needs to go, they said people need to stop treating him as though he is actually on the side of consumers and employees, rather than investors.
The literal last line of the article is
I hope moving forward Xbox fans and the media hold Spencer more accountable for future mistakes, cuts, and failures.
PSP, followed by Gameboy Color, followed by Advance SP.
I recently got a Retroid4, and took an amazing trip down memory lane with Mana Khemia, MG:AC!D, FF Tactics Advanced/A2, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, and a bunch of pkmn ROM hacks. All of them easily held up today.
Unless SteamDeck counts, in which case it wins hands-down.
I think that calling BOtW similar to other full-scale console games of 2017 like Sniper Elite 4, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, Nier Automata, Prey, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, RE7, or AssCreed Origins, is a biiiiiiig stretch.
It was a huge jump for Nintendo (it was basically putting GameCube-level games on a handheld), but it was still far behind other consoles. Witcher 3 (2015) even eventually released on the Switch in 2019, and it was massively graphically gimped compared to *ahem* real consoles.
I didn't say it's not good, I said it's not equivalent to console releases of that year. Graphics isn't everything, and I still enjoy playing Pax Imperia and Nox, but that doesn't change that it was a handheld game, not a console game. Pokemon Red/Blue were also some of the best selling games the year they released, but that doesn't make the Gameboy equivalent as a console to PSX or N64 either.
I legit have been considering buying a minidisc player, just for the sheer cool factor of them. Sometimes truly special form is lost as function evolves.
With Thursday’s party-line vote, the FCC redefined internet service as similar to legacy telephone lines, a sweeping move that comes with greater regulatory power over the broadband industry.
Leading FCC officials have said restoring net neutrality rules, and reclassifying ISPs under Title II of the agency’s congressional charter, would provide the FCC with clearer authority to adopt future rules governing everything from public safety to national security.
“Broadband is a telecommunications service and should be regulated as such,” said Justin Brookman, director for technology policy at Consumer Reports. “The Title II authority will ensure that broadband providers are properly overseen by the FCC like all telecommunications services should be.
“These 400-plus pages of relentless regulation are proof positive that old orthodoxies die hard,” said Jonathan Spalter, CEO of USTelecom, a trade association representing internet providers.
My god the fucking irony. The trade association made up of Broadband ISPs, arguing that they shouldn't be regulated as Telecom providers, is literally called... USTelecom.
"Don't treat us like ducks!" said the trade association representative from USDucks.
I am not a huge fan of generative AI, but even I can see it's potential (both for good and for harm). Today I found out about Suno in another thread on here, and tried it out. As a mid-millennial (1988) who grew up with CD players and still thinks MiniDiscs and ZIP discs are the coolest cartridge formats, aesthetically, that thing absolutely blows my mind.
We are like, 5 years into generative AI as a widely-available technology, and I can use it to generate entire songs on the fly based on just a couple sentences, complete with singing. I can use it to create logos and web graphics on my laptop in a matter of seconds, as I build a webpage. I can use it to help me build said webpage, also running locally on my laptop.
And it's still accelerating. 10 years from now, this stuff could be generating entire movies on-demand, running on a home media box.
I have a deep love of change, just intrinsically. I have medical issues which have meant that since I was a kid I've been accutely aware of my significantly shorter prospective lifespan, and I think that really drives the desire in me to witness major changes and historical events, sort of like truly internalizing that I (literally) can't afford to wait for slow change.
That doesn't mean I want to see changes that cause suffering, like wars, it means I want to see incredible changes that have the potential to better peoples' lives, like electric vehicles, space exploration, ^socialistrevolution^, advancements in healthcare, etc. I am hopeful that the wide-ranging availability of AI, beyond just corporations, means it has the potential to be one of those changes (I'm also wary that it may end up just being subsumed by Capitalism into enriching the already-wealthy even further).
I still feel that desire that many tech-folks do, to buy a plot of land in the middle of nowhere and just raise llamas and serve artisanal coffee to the parents of the kids that come to play with the llamas, and never look at a computer again, but I still want the world to be out there advancing and getting better even if I don't engage with every new advancement directly, myself.
Isn't that a prerequisite for enshitification? Publicly-traded companies are required (by law, I think) to maximize profits for their shareholders, even if that means utterly ruining their original product (Reddit, Boeing, etc.), yes? What do you think?
Enshittification happens due to greed and power; It's just the process of removing the false mask of mutually-beneficient business that Capitalism uses to hide its true self.
First you make users think you're beneficial to them, so they get locked in,
then you make businesses think you are beneficial to them, and get them locked in,
then you give up that facade and admit you don't care about benefitting anyone but yourself.
You can enshittify something even as an individual; it's not being publicly traded that makes it easier or more likely, it's that being a large enough business to be able to successfully enshittify without losing all your customers probably means you're publicly-traded.
Corporations are inherently the vehicle of non-mutually-beneficial capitalist profit-seeking. They cannot really be anything else. That's what differentiates them from e.g. a profitable 'mom-and-pop' grocer.
The purpose of incorporating as a business is to limit liability by separating the assets and incomes from the owners and investors, in order to allow profits to be gained without actually engaging in a good-faith exchange with prospective business partners/customers (since corporate bankruptcy limits their ability to recoup losses from the individuals running the business).
Weapons are a means to do harm, but they are not something that the mere ownership of implies a threat from; most people do not being their guns everywhere. If they do bring it somewhere, that indicates an adversarial stance towards the place or persons who they're meeting. Put another way, "gun ownership" is very different than "having a gun present at all times with which you could threaten someone".
Corporations, on the other hand, are at all times and in all business dealings leveling that threat of one-sided liability/risk, because it is intrinsic to them as corporations. You can own a gun without threatening to shoot anyone with it. You can't operate a corporation without threatening to evade rightful liability.
So it's possible to be a "responsible assault rifle owner", but it's not possible to be a non-exploitative corporation.
I fired up 7DTD a couple months ago, and I definitely did not feel like it was anywhere close to being done. Releasing out of EA feels like they just want to be done with it.
"Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC."
i avoid hype but as a massive fan of the original kcd and the honesty of this reveal, im hyped! wont be pre-ordering though, never pre-order its bad for the industry and consumers.
This is really intriguing, but am I reading the instructions correctly? Call me dumb, but I don't know how to reinstall Win10 Home; I don't have a recovery CD or anything like that. I'd also need to back up everything first... which would be a pain...
I admin linux systems all day at work, and in my spare time on my home lab rackmount setup that lives in the spare bathroom, and I say that to make clear that I'm extremely comfortable with Linux. I got a gaming laptop recently and loaded Ubuntu onto it, and was very underwhelmed with the gaming performance on it. My SteamDeck ran many of the games better, and there were a bunch issues with the OS not being able to keep the integrated graphics card vs the discrete one straight (e.g. switching the load order on reboot, making games constantly try to run on the integrated card), that just made me eventually give up and put Win11 on it. At this point, I'd love for Valve to release a "SteamLap" gaming system, because clearly Linux needs that tight control over the hardware config to get games working well.
Yeah, it was frustrating because using Ubuntu for gaming on it was the main reason I got the laptop, but I couldn't deal with changing launch options in steam every time I rebooted. Hasn't soured me on Linux gaming, still hoping for that bright future. :)
They're position basically boils down to "Facebook won't tell us what problems were identified with the domains that caused the blocks, but it's better to have guards against malicious domains than not". That is a false dichotomy.
A better response is, "unless Facebook is actually disclosing what issues with the domains caused the flagging, we should not allow them to block news websites, especially when they've been critical of Facebook". To do otherwise is basically just giving them carte blanche to block domains whenever they want to, and assuming on their behalf that they're being honest and benevolent.
They go on to make excuses for Meta all throughout the article:
Whatever issue Facebook flagged regarding those ads — Kendall is not clear, and I suspect that is because Facebook is not clear either
While this interpretation of a deliberate effort by Facebook to silence critical reporting is kind of understandable, given its poor communication and the lack of adequate followup, it hardly strikes me as realistic.
For an even simpler example, consider how someone forgetting a password for their account looks exactly the same as someone trying to break into it. On any website worth its salt, you will be slowed down or prevented from trying more than some small number of password attempts, even if you are the actual account owner. This is common security behaviour; Meta’s is merely more advanced.
As someone who works in security, this is actually a hilarious indictment of how inadvanced Facebook's security would have to be to be mistaking actual organic shares and reposts with malicious boosting attempts, and once again is assuming innocence on their behalf where no assumption of innocence is warranted.
Even their sarcastic line,
If you wanted to make a kind-of-lame modern conspiracy movie
is an unwarranted dismissal of assertions that Meta polices political content on their platforms as being akin to a conspiracy, even though we in fact know they do that. Reporting has shown that Meta does actively take political stances and translate those into actions and policies in their sites.
Hanlon's Razor is about assumptions sans evidence, because of the natural human tendency to automatically interpret actions that harm you as intentional. It's not, however, meant to discount evidence of patterns of malicious behavior by actors known to be problematic.
And this is not a new, one-off behavior on Facebook's part:
The person you're responding to is one of those people that thinks Steam is the DRM, because 1) it checks games against your account the first time you run them, and 2) they don't provide offline installers like GOG.
Yep, I follow The Verge, Kotaku, and PCGamer for gaming news, and I think PCG and Kotaku both have a weekly "Steam releases you might have missed this week" article, and they're always the stuff that no one who checks Steam new releases would have missed. The authors aren't actually diving deep to discover the hidden gems, they're just checking the top releases that aren't AAA publishers.
I get there's not that much money in video game journalism anymore now that they aren't all getting review copies to drive ad revenue (you can actually thank Steam for that in part, since it's more trustworthy for most people just to read user reviews there, and the other part you can thank all the paid YouTube game reviewers for, since publishers much prefer them to an outlet they can't directly write the ad copy for).
Valve won't stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism
I'm glad that the author recognized the actual root cause of their argument, which is that Capitalism is bad and ruins everything, but why blame Steam for essentially just existing in a Capitalist world? They didn't choose that, and they're certainly doing a hell of a lot more than almost any other company their size that I can think of to resist shitty Capitalist practices.
It really feels like this author is just saying, "they're resisting anti-consumer enshittification practices now, so the only place to go is down, ergo 'timebomb'!".
"Every person who isn't a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!"
The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.
What specifically are you envisioning? If this is just a general kind of, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" supposition, I don't think that really holds any water; it's just a platitude. If anything, Steam being so ubiquitous could more easily make it's eventual decline a catalyst for legislation to give software license ownership stronger consumer protections. The idea that we should either condemn it now or stop using it, before its decline, makes no sense to me. Is GOG better? Sure. Can it fully replace Steam? No. Is Steam better than Epic, Origin, UPlay? Absolutely. I'm just not sure what the real point of all this condemnation is when they're by far trying, by and large, to treat consumers well. It's just blaming Valve for not being totally and eternally immune to the effects of Capitalism.
the ‘one good company’
No one claims this. The only thing remotely close to that which people claim is that Valve is uniquely positioned to be one of the best digital games distribution platforms due to its private ownership insulating it against shareholder demands (which is by far the largest driver of enshittification), which is also true for GOG, but obviously Valve is still beating them out in capacity and capability currently.
there are plenty of examples to the contrary
Of course, it's a company. But it's still a billion times better than most of its competitors.
The only "DRM" that they have is checking the game against your steam account the first time you run it. Is that great? No. Would it be nice if they offered offline installers? Of course.
Sure, and when that happens we should (and many will) abandon the platform. But since, as you seem to be implying, all businesses under Capitalism will eventually enshittify, there's no point abandoning it beforehand, because any alternative you move to will also eventually do so.
Introduction
This RFC describes a protocol to dynamically hand out ip-numbers on
field networks and small events that don't necessarily have a clear
organisational body.
History of the protocol.
The practice of using pegs for assigning IP-numbers was first used at
the HIP event (http://www.hip97.nl/). HIP stands for Hacking In
Progress, a large three-day event where more then a thousand hackers
from all over the world gathered. This event needed to have a TCP/IP
lan with an Internet connection. Visitors and participants of the
HIP could bring along computers and hook them up to the HIP network.
During preparations for the HIP event we ran into the problem of how
to assign IP-numbers on such a large scale as was predicted for the
event without running into troubles like assigning duplicate numbers
or skipping numbers. Due to the variety of expected computers with
associated IP stacks a software solution like a Unix DHCP server
would probably not function for all cases and create unexpected
technical problems.
the consensus I’ve gotten is that the MTXs are largely meaningless because they’re so easy to get in-game
I would push back on this a bit. Some of these items are easy to acquire small quantities of, but are not available in infinite amounts, such as (as far as I know) the fast travel tokens. I am 20-ish hours in, and I think I have 8 fast travel tokens, which means that I really just don't use them, and hoard them for emergencies.
Convenience is addictive, and people absolutely will have trouble not pouring tens or hundreds of dollars into MTX once they get a taste of the convenience it offers. Ask ESO users how many don't have ESO Plus; it's incredibly common to have, because it gives you free fast travel and a dedicated, infinite inventory for crafting materials. It's weaponized convenience.
Other items in DD2 I've used CheatEngine to dupe, but I think most people (and obviously, no one on console) aren't going to be able to figure out hex editors, and shouldn't have to.
Influence is about perception, and though it may be other people who are acting on that perception, it is still very carefully and intentionally managed by Meta. Lots of people think Facebook is too important not to be a member of, or that you can't get hired without a LinkedIn, or that you can't use the internet without giving up your info to Apple, Google, or Microsoft, so why even bother trying not to... and they're all false narratives that those companies use their size and money to create and maintain the perception of, even if it's of course the individuals that go along with those narratives. Facebook doesn't have to hold a gun to your head to make you act a certain way.
So yes, Meta absolutely is directly impacting the Fediverse by announcing their intent to offer federation with Threads.
That being said, I acknowledge and agree that moderation is poor, which is, once again, why you should federate. To let people know they don’t need Meta. To show them how to escape the exploitation and harassment.
You're gonna have to break this down for me, because I'm not seeing the logic.
So I'm a Threads user. I now start seeing Beehaw posts in my feed. Let's say that I'm seeing them alongside Threads-originating posts containing "exploitation and harassment". How does my seeing those Beehaw posts in Threads automatically translate to thinking, "I should leave Threads and join- not Beehaw, which is federated, but another, non-federated instance"?
Or are you advocating for individuals in non-Threads Fediverse instances to do some kind of manual outreach campaign?
Federating with Threads only hurts Meta. It does not help them in any way.
This is completely false. The entire reason they're federating is to instantly get access to a much larger pool of UGC for their users to interact with. And of course they get to also choose who to federate with and who to block, so they can choose instances that have the kind of content they want, all for free, while suppressing instances they don't like. If your instance starts to try to "convert" people off of Threads, they can (and will) just block you.
Users who create accounts on Threads because they actually want to communicate with people they’ve heard of helps Meta. Defederating helps Meta.
Threads has more users than ALL fedi.db-tracked fediverse instances combined (Threads: 160m, Fediverse: 10m). They don't need us for users, they need us for content. Just like Reddit, there are usually a few dedicated 'content generator' users on any given instance, who post the bulk of the UGC. Gaining access to those is Threads' goal. Federating is how they achieve that.
ad-free spy-free platforms that give you actual control over what appears in your feed
You won't know any of those are ad-free or spy-free (which is not true anyways, fediverse instances are absolutely being scraped), or know you could control those if you left Threads.
All you'll know is, "I like this (Beehaw) thing I'm seeing in Threads, so to see more of it, I should use Threads more.
Federating doesn't prevent that either, but at least you won't be rewarding them for it by engaging with them. If Meta wants to sink ActivityPub (or rather, subsume it), it will, and no actions we can take will prevent that, bar forking the standard in some way.
In fact, not federating with Threads is the only potential way to ensure that our instances don't become reliant on functionality that Threads adds, even if we can't save the ActivityPub standard itself.
As someone who works at a very large company that is also affected by DMA, this is not how any company whose legal teams we've spoken with are interpreting this requirement. Data portability is being solved with export standards, so that users can (more) easily migrate to other services. Streaming someone's data over to another platform where they may or may not have an account, or ever intend to go, wouldn't fulfill that requirement, because if the user wishes to move to a non-federated instance, that would not be possible. Portability also cannot be 'favored' under DMA.
That is a separate issue from interoperability, which only works if Threads is allowing federated instances to fully interact with their users' posts, with no loss of functionality, which was at least originally not the plan.
If your instance starts to try to “convert” people off of Threads, they can (and will) just block you.
And then responded to it by saying:
…why would they do that?
That is literally asking why they would block instances trying to convert users into fediverse users instead of Threads users.
Do you work with Meta?
Do you?
me: Data portability is being solved with export standards, so that users can (more) easily migrate to other services.
you: Are you not aware that WhatsApp is also interoperating to comply with DMA? Another Meta company?
I think you are conflating portability with interoperability. Those are 2 separate requirements.
Portability is about preventing platform lock-in, making it so that users can leave a platform (i.e. Threads), and take their data with them to another platform (any platform, not just ones of the originator's choosing). This is not solved with federation.
Interoperability is the ability for users of one platform to interact with users of another platform, without platform-imposed loss of functionality. Whether ActivityPub can serve as a replacement for an API is something that courts in the EU would have to decide. It is certainly not 1:1.
Scraping public data is entirely different from collecting your contact history, location history, web browsing traffic, decrypting WhatsApp traffic, etc. etc. and on and on.
Fediverse instances can also do most of this. They know your IP and email, and the stuff you reveal about yourself. You could de-anonymize many users with those 2 plus the info they share about themselves on here, with a bit of OSINT work. Any fediverse apps could also get access to contacts or other locally-stored info on your phone.
"But I wouldn't use that app." Well then you wouldn't be someone using Facebook either. People using Facebook would also be the people granting shady fediverse apps undue permissions.
I'm not arguing they're comparable; I'm the one out of the 2 of us arguing not to have any interaction with Meta apps, including via federation. I'm arguing that you shouldn't be trying to sell a false sense of anonymity with fediverse instances. You said they're "spy-free", not "far less intrusive than Facebook". The latter is true. The former is not.
The US’s latest attempt to chill speech online, KOSA-a bill to effectively force everyone to identify themselves to online platforms-is picking up steam and looking like it will pass the Senate.
That part has (maybe-ish?) changed with these most recent amendments. Per the EFF:
The Bill’s Knowledge Standard Has Changed
The first change to the bill is that the knowledge standard has been tightened, so that websites and apps can only be held liable if they actually know there’s a young person using their service. The previous version of the bill regulated any online platform that was used by minors, or was “reasonably likely to be used” by a minor.
The previous version applied to a huge swath of the internet, since the view of what sites are “reasonably likely to be used” by a minor would be up to attorney generals. Other than sites that took big steps, like requiring age verification, almost any site could be “reasonably likely” to be used by a minor.
So in a best-case interpretation under the new text, a site whose ToS does not allow minors to use it would not be required to check everyone's ages to verify no one is a minor, in order not to be liable if a minor accessed adult content on it. The problem is, the bill isn't actually explicit about what qualifies as the site having knowledge of children using it means:
Requiring actual knowledge of minors is an improvement, but the protective effect is small. A site that was told, for instance, that a certain proportion of its users were minors—even if those minors were lying to get access—could be sued by the state. The site might be held liable even if there was one minor user they knew about, perhaps one they’d repeatedly kicked off.
The bill still effectively regulates the entire internet that isn’t age-gated. KOSA is fundamentally a censorship bill, so we’re concerned about its effects on any website or service—whether they’re meant to serve solely adults, solely kids, or both.
No site is going to want to be the ones that an AG tests out their new lawsuit hammer on, so it's likely to end in 1 of 2 ways: either verifying the ages of all users of the platform, or prohibiting all user-generated content to prevent adult content being posted. Republicans are fine with either of those outcomes. The sad thing is the Democrats who either also are, or who don't understand the impacts but are voting on it anyways.
You've got it backwards. China's increasingly tight social controls, and increasingly antagonistic stance with the US, just means that they're the least likely country to report you to US companies and state governments. I have no plans to ever go to China or Hong Kong.
Chinese social media companies remove posts ‘showing off wealth and worshipping money’ while the gap between the country's rich and poor widens ( www.theguardian.com )
Targeting posts boasting of personal wealth appears to be part of campaign to ‘purify the internet cultural environment’....
Google Search adds a “web” filter, because it is no longer focused on web results ( arstechnica.com )
GamesIndustry.biz: Microsoft's mystifying mismanagement ( www.gamesindustry.biz )
If you're a developer working for Xbox, what can you do to secure your job?
It's Time To Stop Giving Xbox Boss Phil Spencer A Pass (Opinion) ( kotaku.com )
What is your favourite game console?
It sounds dumb but my pick would be the SNES. There's just something about 16 bit games I love....
Maybe hot take: as a handheld, the regular switch is an awful handheld
Have you ever held a switch? Its long, flat and the controllers suck. Awful dpad and bad sticks....
It’s the End of the Web as We Know It ( www.theatlantic.com )
Net neutrality is back as FCC votes to regulate internet providers ( www.cnn.com )
Generative AI is still a solution in search of a problem ( www.axios.com )
Does enshitification happen because companies are publicly-traded?
Isn't that a prerequisite for enshitification? Publicly-traded companies are required (by law, I think) to maximize profits for their shareholders, even if that means utterly ruining their original product (Reddit, Boeing, etc.), yes? What do you think?
You can now buy a flame-throwing robot dog for under $10,000 ( arstechnica.com )
Why are there two different genres both called ARPG?
ARPG aka Action Role Playing Game....
7 Days to Die is finally leaving early access, but console players will have to buy the 1.0 version again ( www.eurogamer.net )
Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract ( www.nbcnews.com )
"Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC."
kingdom come: deliverance II reveal ( yt.drgnz.club )
i avoid hype but as a massive fan of the original kcd and the honesty of this reveal, im hyped! wont be pre-ordering though, never pre-order its bad for the industry and consumers.
Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions ( mbin.grits.dev )
Credit to @bontchev
Has anyone used AtlasOS? ( atlasos.net )
This is really intriguing, but am I reading the instructions correctly? Call me dumb, but I don't know how to reinstall Win10 Home; I don't have a recovery CD or anything like that. I'd also need to back up everything first... which would be a pain...
Meta cancelled climate change ads, then cancelled a local newspaper that reported about the ads, then a blogger who reported on the paper's cancellation, and now has escalated to blocking all of LGF ( littlegreenfootballs.com )
Steam is a ticking time bomb ( www.spacebar.news )
Low tech DHCP ( jlai.lu )
Dragon's Dogma 2 MTX
So there's obviously been a lot of existing discourse on DD2's micro transactions, and I'm curious to get the thoughts of people here....
Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: "Block Threads to Remain Listed" ( wedistribute.org )
Kids Online Safety Act gains enough supporters to pass the Senate ( www.theverge.com )
The US’s latest attempt to chill speech online, KOSA-a bill to effectively force everyone to identify themselves to online platforms-is picking up steam and looking like it will pass the Senate.