I trust Valve to be lazy and swim in their sea of profits rather than go searching for more.

They have thus far avoided serious levels of enshittification because they don’t seem motivated in maximising immediate profits and killing their golden goose.

The day they get replaced by a competitive non-monopoly is the day it becomes a race for the bottom, who can invent the most predatory way to drain profits from users? Nobody else will be able to compete, so they’ll all be copying each other on their way down.

Streaming services all over again.

Not all monopolies are bad.

On the one hand, if you don’t enjoy the game that’s fine. It’s a masterpiece, but that doesn’t magically mean that everyone will enjoy it.

That said, if you want to enjoy it more, focus on one thing per loop, everything is designed to be completable in a single loop, (or maybe a few for the more complicated puzzles if you get stuck). And if something is frustrating, do something else.

Things really go wrong if you keep smashing your head against a brick wall or if you keep jumping around and never manage to finish anything.

We’re trained to think of death as a major failure by other games, it’s not in this one, it’s just jumping back home, repairing the ship, and starting from a central location and a known state.

They might not have made it impossible, but most of this book banning crap has been political point scoring rather than actual attempts to change the literary record for its own sake. Now they’d have to loudly proclaim their book bans without admitting what they’re doing, which sounds a lot harder to pull off.

Anything that underlines the offensive nature of censorship like this is a good thing in my opinion.

I’d guess the requirement that experienced librarians make the decisions is just another way to exclude politicians and random mums with opinions from the process, I imagine most who go through a library sciences degree have already got a healthy respect for libraries which limits their willingness to play these stupid games.

I’m curious how you’d phrase it, there is a law in Ukraine and it is widely reported to apply to “men aged 18 to 60”. What phrasing would more accurately depict the current situation without having the problems you list? If you meant instead that the law itself is problematic, then I can understand that, it’s received some criticism for that side of things.

Yeah, the switch has an entire core locked off and everything is downclocked to improve battery life and control temperatures. No doubt this emulation gives everything more clock cycles (and perhaps an extra core?). Probably very short on battery and possibly very hot too.

Same could have been said about electricity not that long ago. Now that renewables are building steam the switch to electricity is revealed as perfectly logical, why not the same for hydrogen?

Hydrogen is a harder sell, thanks to the poorer density, cost of storage, and the poor efficiency of production. But given the variable production of renewables all but guarantees we’ll end up with vast amounts of excess power we can’t store, we will need a fuel we can make from electricity that we can use, and hydrogen is one of the contenders for that task. Whether it’ll be the winner is more doubtful, but something will be, we certainly will never build enough batteries to avoid giving away cheap power for things like this, and there are still things that benefit from higher density fuels that aren’t going away (planes). Accusing people of being “worse than deniers” just because they’re looking a little into the future and betting on something that might turn out to be Betamax is a little presumptuous.

Hydrogen today is a fossil fuel. But hydrogen has a very obvious method of green production, the only problem is cost of power to produce it (thus why it’s all fossil fuels right now) but the inevitability of variable power sources like solar and wind in the future guarantees excesses of cheap power, so cost of power today is not going to be the same barrier tomorrow that it is today.

As for the fossil fuel industries plan to use hydrogen to maintain business as usual in a post fossil fuels era, I really don’t care if they manage to use their machines as long as they stop using fossil fuels, so that’s fine with me.

Edit: to be clear, I’m not supporting a hydrogen based economy, since that makes no sense, hydrogen is a storage medium for energy, not a production source. There have been people pushing it as a magical solution to all things, that is stupid. As a small piece of the puzzle it could fit, if we don’t find a better chemistry for high density storage of energy with simple conversion from electricity, which is as yet an unsolved problem.

Militaries are typically tasked with protecting more than themselves. If someone invaded Britain then the military wouldn’t have to wait until the invaders had shot a soldier to start defending the country.

A better question is whether they are attacking US and UK citizens/ equipment.

As dumb as this comment is, you’ve just guaranteed that I’ll never forget the name of this problem, so thanks for that

I agree with you and Alexa, but you can always say “five past six” to avoid the [zer]o if it’s bothering you.

I remember on a German exchange at school the German student could not handle “oh” sounds in phone numbers at all. So it might be tricky for non native speakers (though I think they made more of a fuss from anger at how stupid English is than out of genuine confusion…)

You’re certainly right that their handling of nuclear was inefficient for reducing carbon output.

I’m pretty pro nuclear, but I don’t think that really takes away from their success in pushing renewables forward, they were a very early adopter of solar thanks to their very generous subsidies and probably helped fuel its growth at a faster rate, so regardless of their unfortunate paranoia around nuclear, they do deserve some praise. Perfect is the enemy of good, and given the speed the world has responded to climate change, Germanys mixed and painful transition was certainly not the worst.

The EFF is probably competitive there. But clearly they’re both on the same side of most issues, so not really a competition.