Huh? I literally said in my post that I've never run into an instance of someone not being hired by their merit. I don't understand how anyone could not hire someone if they didn't have talent and passion, so we are in agreement there, unless you have a different definition of merit.

What does happen at any company that measures diversity in their talent pool, Larian included, is they will look at the diversity make-up of their teams and make an effort to find more diverse candidates for full-time roles and ensure there is multiple types of candidates in an interview cycle for a role. All this does is ensure as a hiring manager, you are able to evaluate a greater variety of people, and find that best and most talented candidate. Again, you're describing situations where people are "forced" to make some kind of decision, and making it sound like it's some bad decision like they had to leave a "better" candidate on the table, when I have never seen this happen. You want to know what companies hate to do? Firing people because they can't do the job. It wastes everyone time, costs us money, lowers team morale, potentially impacts timelines and the quality of the project. I can promise you no company would ever choose some diversity candidate who is bad at their job, just to make some number go up. If that were the case, the diversity numbers though out the industry would be in a MUCH better place than they are now.

I don't know what you're thinking about with the "in your face" agenda point. Do you have an example that comes to mind of other studios? BG3 covers topics of sexuality, race, and gender in the storylines and character interactions from what I've played, so it's not like they ignore these topics which are often debated IRL politically. It's handled with tactfulness in a fantasy setting, and the player is given agency throughout, so they may not lead down certain side-stories, but it's certainly covered in the game.

This viewpoint is so disconnected from the actual reality that it's disingenuous at best. I have worked in the games industry for nearly 20 years working with AAA and small teams. I have never felt like I've hired someone, or have had someone on my team who didn't earn their position through talent and passion. You're making up some political reality that does not exist, and being angry at something that is not happening just to weave some weird narrative that I feel is about 5 seconds from you simply saying "go woke, go broke".

It is important that you realize that diverse viewpoints makes games better, and that has to come into consideration for teams as well! More diverse viewpoints on your team will make a better RPG! Yes, you obviously need passionate and talented people, that goes without saying. But to make the best games, you need a diverse team.

I do miss the spontaneity that existed when games were smaller. It made ideas feel much more organic and flexible, and everything just happened faster with fewer people so you could pivot quickly if you wanted to. Out of curiosity, I looked on Wikipedia and this is the blurb talking about the design of Joust. It's cited as coming from Retro Gamer magazine Issue 63, but sadly it looks like the current publisher has requested it be taken down from the Internet Archive.

John Newcomer conceived Joust as a "flying game" with cooperative two-player gameplay; however, he did not wish to emulate the popular space theme of previous successful flying games like Asteroids and Defender. To that end, he made a list of things that could fly: machines, animals, and fictional characters. After evaluating the positive and negative of each idea, Newcomer chose birds for their wide appeal and his familiarity with fantasy and science fiction media featuring birds. To further increase his understanding, Newcomer went to the library to study mythology. He believed that the primary protagonist should ride a majestic bird. The first choice was an eagle, but the lack of graceful land mobility dissuaded him. Instead, he decided that a flying ostrich was more believable than a running eagle. To differentiate between the first and second player characters, the developers picked a stork, believing the proportions were similar to an ostrich while the color difference would avoid confusion among players. Newcomer chose vultures as the main enemies, believing that they would be recognizably evil. Python Anghelo created concept art of the characters as guidance for further design.

As long as it's not "spammy" and there's actual engagement or discussion on the posts I don't see an issue. But if the community being posted to isn't engaging with the posts, or it's crowding out the more interesting posts, yeah that's not great and shouldn't be allowed.

It's even worse apparently. Apparently someone looked at where the coins are going, and the coins are going to the 1337x admins, and the uploader is just getting a cut of those coins. Which explains why the admins are unlikely to really care because they're profiting off their users.

I have severe trust issues with any kind of pirated software so I basically never download it as a result, and shit like this is why. Even private trackers and "trusted" groups aren't enough for me to download most software.

I was going to say... If it takes you literally 1.5 days to simply install and after 2 days you can't even launch Steam? I'm sorry, but you have extraordinarily fucked up. Whatever the fuck is happening there is not on Windows. OP, I would love to understand what you were seeing or what was happening. And I also wonder if you are using an actual Windows OS image, or what you tinkered with or ran scripts on to maybe "clean Windows up". Unfortunately so many of those scripts are also fucking notorious for breaking some Windows functionality, like the Xbox games and what not.

Don't get me wrong. Windows is becoming worse and worse in both features and performance (AI powered file recommendations in my start menu? get the fuck outta here). But I'm sorry, this complaint in the OP is not it.

We're in such a shitty timeline right now where these CEO's realize that they have so many mainstream users who just don't actually care about the platform and just want the content, that even with significant controversy if they just ignore it, they can almost certainly weather the storm. Sure, their platform will be worse off, they'll lose users to other platforms, but it's a far cry from the Digg v3 -> Reddit situation when there was a much smaller user base who was more passionate about the site and community and they abandoned the old site as a result of those shitty decisions.

Open a crack so the cat doesn't wake me up at 4am.

Ordered! I love reading his books.

Admittedly, I just use Sonos myself. However, I do hope to one day move to something else more open.

BluOS is another solution to look at. It's still pricey, but works offline and higher quality than Sonos if you're someone who has lots of high res music files.

If you want something that's more open, but way more DIY, I found this blog post that talks about a solution using Mopidy server: https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Build-your-open-source-multi-room-and-multi-provider-sound-server-with-Platypush-Mopidy-and-Snapcast

Can't vouch for it, but looks interesting and according to the GitHub is still being updated so worth a look if you don't mind putting in some work and tinkering.

There was this quote they gave when asked about impact to the surrounding ocean.

Natick uses raw sea water for cooling, with the water returned to the ocean a fraction of a degree warmer than ambient. Due to rapid mixing in ocean currents, the temperature impact just a few meters downstream of the datacenter is undetectable. We used cameras on the exterior of the vessel to observe wildlife during deployment. We found that the datacenter provided an attractive location for sea life, and was quickly colonized by multiple species of fish and other sea life.

At a huge scale, that maybe could be an issue if you extrapolate. But as others have pointed out, data centers today already require air and water cooling which isn't likely as efficient so net gain on the environment is probably worse with land data centers in terms of cooling. And they noted the hardware inside had a higher reliability, potentially due to its pure nitrogen atmosphere in the capsule, so that's less need for buying replacement servers and performing maintenance.

No clue if this thing is actually feasible beyond small scale due to the very high deploy and retrieval costs. But in my opinion this isn't like some environmentally oblivious solution.

https://lemmy.fmhy.net is up and running!

A vote was held on Mastodon and the majority elected to start fresh versus waiting longer to work out how to do the migration. A bit of a bummer, but still happy to be back.