Doing the Lord’s work in the Devil’s basement
If you like to write, I find that story boarding with stable diffusion is definitely an improvement. The quality of the images is what it is, but they can help you map out scenes and locations, and spot visual details and cues to include in your writing.
What’s hilarious about this is that they are so sensitive to being described. As a filthy liberal, you can call me weird is be like hell yeah strange-pilled bizarre-maxxing. Call me a communist I’ll be like you know it brother, stalin-with-laser-eyes.gif.
But call a right winger a weird fascist and they’re whining “well now let’s not resort to insults”. Why can’t they tolerate what they tend towards? Doesn’t sound very empowered to me.
Jesus Christ man 😂 you’re looking for a moral angle but there is no moral angle here. A business has the right to design their transactions however they want, even if that design explicitly excludes people like you.
Some people are easy-going, they are more prone to trust, they want to test a product they don’t write an essay about it about it they just put their CC info in, try the thing, and cancel the sub if it’s not for them. If they forget to cancel i refund their money cause i need a happy customer more than i need 20 bucks. You don’t need to call them rubes just because they’re invited to the party and you’re not.
Hey man I’m not saying you’re wrong, but you’re touching on another important thing which is trust. On average, high trust people are just easier to manage, especially when you’re a small outfit. It’s better for everyone if low trust users bounce away because of the cc wall. They’ll come back once the product has some brand recognition or social proof.
Again, it’s a filter. You give me card details, that means you seriously want the product and also that you trust me. If i treat you right and give you a great experience you’ll be subscribed for years, purchasing add-ons, and recommending me to your friends. That’s much more valuable for me than skimming 20 bucks a month because you forgot to unsub.
When it’s a big corpo sure they’ll do it cause they don’t give a shit about their customers or even their reputation. I’m honestly not saying it doesn’t happen. But when it’s a no-name with a small online product they can’t afford that shit. If they put a credit card wall it’s most likely because they were getting too many people on the free trial, and were having a hard time telling actual future customers from drive-bys. This solves that.
lmao what a nuanced point of view, you seem to have vast personal experience of this kind of things
Or maybe they should keep their free trial and just filter out randos with a credit card wall. It’s a simple and cheap way to keep your user base high value. And as attested by the OP’s meme, it just works!
Is that from one of those “rationalist” influencers?
Yes, it’s a classic.
Pre-market fit it makes sense to be 100% free, as you want to gauge whether your product is attractive to people.
Post-market fit you already know the product has traction, so now you want to gauge whether it is attractive enough for people to pay for it.
Having worked at a bunch of SaaS products, it’s actually not that shady (at least in those cases i’ve seen). Free users are low value but they can cost a ton in support and commercial effort. Asking for a credit card upfront is just a simple way to filter for people who actually intend to maybe buy the product.
OP’s reaction is not a bug, it’s the feature.
Otherwise it’s just sparkling sedition
microtransaction hell
As far as i know the full game is entirely playable without spending a dime more than the price of the game. You can join an infinity of multiplayer servers or play the game solo from start to finish and beyond, and you still get the yearly update which, despite your statement, includes much more than “a new mob every six months”.
I personally don’t mind that cosmetics and entirely optional non-game-advantaging additional content are paid, as it is what bankrolls the studio to keep pumping out free updates every year. How do you propose they finance this otherwise ?
The anti left media blitz before during and after this election has been nothing short of disgusting. You’ve got people from a party actually founded by Waffen SS accusing the left of being anti-Semitic (because guess what, they’re not wholly approving of the genocide in Gaza). No fact check no push back just straight up “plutôt Hitler que front populaire”. They don’t even hide their shame anymore.
Minecraft falls squarely in this category. I paid 15$ some 12 years ago and am still getting a yearly update for free.
And yet if you go in the MC community, one of the most common complaints people have is that the updates are never enough and the Devs are lazy etc… I guess this goes to the point of this article, people can easily be trained to have unrealistic expectations.
I’m not crying for Mojang/Microsoft but I can’t imagine how it feels to be an indie dev and have people shit on you because the work you do for free is not good enough.
IMO it’s largely a consequence of the center-left and center-right (Hollande, Macron) completely abandoning the working class, and demonizing the left whilst cozying up to the far-right (mostly Macron, though Hollande definitely slid right over his term).
While i am no fan of Hollande and establishment socialism, I feel like he’s really the butt of the joke here. Whatever we do, we always seem to punch left.
He was president for 5 years, yeah it was limp-dicked as fuck and it veered right in mid-course, but if you remember, he was basically elected on a platform of not being Sarkozy. The people were so KOed by his mandate that Hollande’s whole angle was to be the “back to normal” president. And that’s a promise he kind of kept, if you look at his time, sandwiched between two hyper-mediatic hard-right presidents, well yeah it felt like the kind of politics our parents talked about. Not great politics, just normal not-sadistic politics.
I think there are a few tricks that still make it possible. First, nothing says that you have to, or really that you can simulate a universe 1:1. When you think of it we already simulate millions of universes in video games, but they are dramatically simpler than our reality. So, our parent reality could be much more complex than our own.
Consequently, physics could be vastly different from one layer to another. Maybe in the real reality, entropy isn’t that significant and quasi-perpetual motion is possible, making energy super cheap. Maybe the limits in our universe like the speed of light and Planck constants are just hardware caps to prevent us from using too much compute.
In French we use the term “diagonale du vide” (the empty diagonal)
Why can’t a woman take illegal drugs? Control of your own body is a philosophical concept not a legal one.