Oh believe me I have also seen precarious tall stacks of rocks that manage to stay standing for much longer than you would expect. Usually it is because they are surrounded by a forest of other much more solid formations of rocks or the ground is solid and well suited to support a base stone.

Sometimes though I see someone waving to me smugly from atop a precarious stack of rocks amidst a sea of other precarious stacks of rocks and I chuckle to myself and wave back condescendingly… and then feel guilty about the ugliness of pre-emptive disaster tourism.

There was a time when tech talent would uproot their lives for the US because it offered collaboration, publishing, company-building and a big conference circuit. Now they run a gauntlet at the border, where even a green card or citizenship does not guarantee they will not be hassled.

Thus it can be seen how when industries aren’t mitigated in their self defeating behavior by unions, the associated job market and domestic industry can be driven to collapse and there will be zero ability to slow the process down once it begins spiralling.

Unions, even if you are a super smart techbro who understands EVERYTHING about the world better than other people because you understand computers… you still need Unions or else the company you are working for will inveitably blow itself up and leave nothing but a crater behind.

yes but gestures at spaceship it is org mode tho!

org mode and pandoc :P

This is a good thing honestly, fuck Spotify it ruined music as much as any single company/service could.

How do you get all the candy into the baseball bat tho?

The muscle memory is hard to fix

Also this is software, we should celebrate and embrace the fact that the same tool can be customized to look and be organized differently to maximally ease users into learning it. This is one of the super powers of software!

No thanks, I prefer human DJs and you should too, they are better.

I actually think a multipurpose digital screen could be quite useful and fun on a refrigerator, not needed or necessary at all but I think in a less enshittified timeline an open source version of this, possibly even an e-ink screen, could actually be nice. It would make far more sense as a whiteboard type object that you attach to your refrigerator though and obviously this entire concept is predatory on so many levels it is mindboggling… but the idea of having a sort of communal digital screen on a refrigerator isn’t a bad idea itself I don’t think as hard as it is to imagine a reality where an appliance like this was designed in good faith.

Just play an indie game, these games will only enshittify more and more.

Fuck Google

:( Yeah well I don’t know anything about the developer but I imagine Google announcing they were going to fully enshittify Android by locking down probably took a lot of wind out of their sails even if the decision is being walked back, it shows the longterm intent of the people managing Android and it is actively hostile to developers who make things like Syncthing that threaten Google’s control.

Elsevier is just a mafia model applied to academia, it is hardly a business in any meaningful sense of the word “business” where an entity employs paid employees to do actual work.

So that’s it. Sorry for the long, rambly wall of text, but I feel like for responses to be truly helpful, people should know exactly what it is I’m looking for.

absolutely! no reason to apologize

Bigger changes like vehicles and destruction would turn the game into something else entirely and even if they were only available in a side mode, I reckon Valve has numbers showing that not enough people would care enough to actually play it (like the Battle Royal mode, which I’m still salty they removed).

This all falls prey to the self fulfilling prophecy of only listening to your toxic competitive playerbase though.

Call Of Duty has a DIZZYING number of fun modes but it still has competitive Search & Destroy lobbies too, the only conflict here is in an actively hostile competitive scene treating any change even if it doesn’t effect the competitive modes as a threat to be dogpiled on.

Ignoring all the monetisation, which is basically a pipeline into gambling addiction for kids.

Also, I refuse to ignore this in any conversation about Counter Strike, it is fucked up.

CS 2 is a free game, it is nearly a carbon copy of one of the first major popular competitive shooters and it has an intense amount of marketing around it for esports.

I think the game would have had to actively been sabotaged to not have a playerbase at this point.

Global Offensive was a paid game, Counter Strike 2 is a free game, I would obviously expect more people to play a free game than a paid one.

shrugs this is the self-fulfilling prophecy of this kind of game design, there are WAY more players that would have been interested in that kind of thing but they left a long time ago because they were ignored in favor of the toxic competitive playerbase.

It is optimizing for a local maximum, one which is a dead end and only appears to be the only way forward because the parameters have narrowed so far for what the game can be that there is no longer any room to get out of that rut because everybody else who didn’t fit on that local maximum has left and is no longer giving feedback on why they got bored and left.

All of this casino crap is just attempting to forestall the inveitable that the community will not let anything change because the developers self-selected for a community of players that are toxic about any kind of change even if it doesn’t effect them.

Eeew they got rid of surfing/made it way slower?

I would be way more disgruntled about this if Xonotic didn’t exist, that was one of the few spontaneous aspects of CS that I found fun to explore on custom servers.

No, CS needs to evolve, the core competitive mode can stay the same but the game will continue to lose players if it doesn’t add other content and if it refuses to actually grow in anyway other than its predatory monetization schemes…

CS core is so solid that we could even play the same unchaged maps for another 20 years and would gradually play them differently year over year. i know this, because we did.

Yeah, good for you and the narrow things you want out of FPS games! That sounds soul-crushingly boring to me given all of the fun new FPS games that have come out over that period that have been way more rewarding, dynamic and interesting to experience.

I am not saying your experience is invalid, I am saying it is boring in most people’s opinion. Competitive focused players who enjoy playing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over again don’t understand they aren’t the entire playerbase or that they also aren’t enough to really sustain a game either. To be honest in my opinion this is one of the most insufferable aspects to playing a game with a competitive community in it and why sometimes I purposefully avoid games like that given how those players are usually very vocal, hate anything new and will reliably be toxic about the game growing in different directions even if it doesn’t effect the modes they play.

A good counterpoint to this is Team Fortress 2, Team Fortress 2 has competitive elements but it is also just a fun game, it has lots of fun different modes and lots of different content. It isn’t just a minimal core competitive experience with some casino crap strapped on to make it look flashier, TF2 is so much more than that and frankly CS2 isn’t.

I don’t like Live Service games either, which is why I don’t like Counter Strike because it is like a Live Service game except no new actual content is ever added, just loot boxes, casino mechanics and carrots on sticks that exist outside of the actual gameplay.