Is there pirate software on F-Droid?? (I’m assuming that’s what OP is referring to based on us being on /piracy)

Well, they’ve already lost £200M on Suicide Squad alone, so here’s to hoping they can continue losing money thanks to their greed.

Oh boy. £120 to just unlock the base characters or “dozens and dozens” of hours of grind for each of them.

We’ll see how this goes, but I see this going the way of Suicide Squad. I wonder when, if ever, Warner Bros. Is going to learn that players are actively pushing back against corporate greed and live service games are already way past the limit of microtransactions that players deem acceptable.

No no no WB, you wanted to make it live service, now you deal with it keep adding content for the next 5 years.

Obviously very far from reality, but I wish live service games were required to have a clear, binding plan for how long they’re going to be supported and what’s the exit plan. If they’re a service, they should have an enforceable contract.

That would help buyers not buy a game that is going to be sunset in a year, and/or prevent publishers from releasing cash-grabbing garbage with no evident business plan or idea on why players are going to find the game worthy of giving them money for years.

I believe so. I have some roles in my team I’m hiring for, that have reading code and fixing small bugs as one of the requirements, but not developing code from scratch. (It’s a sort-of field engineering role).

We do test for both things (treating the “developing code from scratch” as bonus points rather than a strict pass/fail) and some people can find and fix bugs in a couple minutes, but are incapable of writing some basic python to iterate through prime numbers and store them in an array.

I bought Tekken 7 to play on the steam deck because of this. I didn’t realise I needed to buy the ultimate edition (or whatever it’s called) and now half the players were hidden behind DLCs, so I feel I paid for half a game. I’m staying away from Tekken for the foreseeable.

Yeah, true. Charging a tax on downloaded copyrighted material can be kinda okay if you don’t actively chase it. It’s not right to charge people a penalty for doing something but then prevent them from doing it. You can’t have it both ways, if it’s not right you can chase it, but don’t make me pay for doing something I’m not allowed to do! That would be like having to preemptively pay traffic fines before you actually drive over the speed limit, just in case.

This is one of the rare things where the Spanish left and right agree, for different reasons.

Simplifying a lot:

• The left generally supports culture, actors, theatre, writers, Spanish made movies. They see piracy as a threat to the earnings of those people.
• The right has historically cut any sorts of subsidies to the “culture creators”, but they see piracy as a threat to the publishing, TV (…) industries.

They both support SGAE, which translates cleanly to the General Society of Authors and Editors, who protects their interests by charging fees to everyone who dares look at copyrighted work.

• You own a bar and you play TV, Radio, or Spotify? You have to pay SGAE.
• You buy a computer, part of the money goes to SGAE.
• You buy a blank CD, DVD, Hard Drive, you pay SGAE (because they know you will put copyrighted material there, and if you don’t, well, fuck you)

It’s a fucked up system and I don’t know if things have changed in the past few years as I don’t live in Spain anymore. But it honestly feels like a prosecution of the population who is so evil and trying to destroy Spanish Culture.

I don’t think it’s bad, in fact I wonder the same. These are my colleagues because it’s the same path I took - I now work developing self-driving cars (I slowly transitioned from aerospace to manufacturing automation to robotics) and it’s the most rewarding job I’ve ever had, and it feels very much like engineering. I don’t care if I’m not a “manufacturing engineer” anymore; I really like my job and I like my title to reflect somewhat accurately what I do, but that’s the extent I care about it.

No, that’s precisely the opposite of my point. If you drive an Uber, you’re an Uber driver. People are “CEO” or “Judge” despite nobody having a CEO or Judge degree. Your profession is what you do, not what you happened to study in your teens to get there.

I don’t think what you study in your degree is the defining factor. Obviously this is country-specific but I feel you job title isn’t always linked 1:1 to your title.

I studied Industrial Engineering, which in Spain exists as a degree but not as a job position. Position wise, I’ve been a mechanical design engineer, a manufacturing engineer, an automation engineer, robotics engineer, and these days I’m mostly a software engineer. I’m definitely specialised in engineering, regardless of the tools I’m applying to solve the task at hand.

Hmmm. But all the people around me working in software studied multiple years in an Engineering field. In my case, I studied a 5-year industrial engineering and two masters afterwards; I feel very comfortable wearing the “software engineer” or more accurately “robotics engineer” badge.

If they’re getting money through micro transactions they can charge absolutely precisely £0. I can’t be bothered paying for a game that isn’t complete.

I’ve tried many things, one thing that worked for me being calisthenics - following the programs on r/bodyweightfitness on Spez’s Lemmy.

The reason it worked for me is because working from home, there were zero logistics, I could finish working (from my bedroom), and take my t-shirt and jeans off and start working out in literally 30 seconds. The programs also had enough variety in terms of different exercises to keep me entertained.

Now I work out with my partner (who is also on the spectrum, to make things more complicated). What has been working for us is doing some activities we like; on Mondays he has flamenco class so I go swimming, which I love - him going to his class is a good enough cue to kick my brain into “let’s do things” mode. Then we added Yoga on Wednesdays (the hard, “sweaty” type with lots of bodyweight type exercises to keep myself motivated). We both like it, and we take turns choosing a video to follow, so there’s incentive and novelty to do things. Once that’s fully embedded in a routine, we’ll add something else, let’s say gym on Thursdays. My strategy is to go for the maximum variety we can so I don’t get bored, and add things gradually so it becomes a de facto part of my routine and my brain doesn’t get to question the fact that Mondays are swimming pool day.

It’s been working well for a couple of months, and I suspect it will work well until there’s a major life change that derails all of this, but then I’m hoping I can re-plan the strategy.

Also to add about the specifics of swimming for ADHD: it might sound boring but no matter your level, if you push yourself hard you can leave yourself absolutely knackered in 40 minutes. I can get in a really good workout by the time boredom kicks in. Plus I count the laps I’m doing, I try to keep a mental count of what the percentage of my goal for the day that is… And that keeps my mind busy enough that I can’t think about other things that maybe would sound more exciting.

He pointed out that one of WBD’s latest big games, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, was a disappointment for the company.

[…]

“Rather than just launching a one-and-done console game, how do we develop a game around, for example, a Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live-service where people can live and work and build and play in that world in an ongoing basis?” he said.

How do you say “whoooosh” in corporate?

I know I’m saying something obvious here, but using this doesn’t mean it needs to be the only source of cooling. You can combine this with air conditioning, but in your example, you can use it to cool the room down from 88 instead of 105. The first 17 degrees are “free”.

Oh I had never thought of this or come across this concept! That’s a really elegant concept. Of course, in a transaction you’re putting in more effort than the money. The time it takes you to go through the purchase, the research, the cost of opportunity of that money… meaning those have to be covered in the cost of the transaction, and therefore the goods must be cheaper than the perceived value by those amounts.

You’ve sent me down a rabbit hole and I thank you for that. Now I’m off to read about economics 🤓

But then also many people don’t have credit cards - they’re frowned upon in many countries with a more debt-averse culture.

Whatever the solution is, it seems like it would end up being something country-specific and not something that scales well across the internet. Probably credit cards work for the US, but then we’d need to find something that works for the remaining 95% of the world population.

As of 2022, 54 countries had implemented special taxes on sugary drinks and/or sugar in general: https://www.obesityevidencehub.org.au/collections/prevention/countries-that-have-implemented-taxes-on-sugar-sweetened-beverages-ssbs

In many cases that covers sweets, snacks, etc. as well. Food is usually quite heavily regulated (in the sense that there’s lots of regulation, not that it’s actually strict or as much as it should be), even if it’s not immediately obvious to us as consumers. E.g. there are ingredients that get banned because of being addictive or having certain harmful effects.

Porn is age gated worldwide, and in some cases censored. I’d class that as regulated pretty much all over the world, regardless of how hard/easy it is to circumvent the regulations (e.g. for a 17-year-old to access a porn website).

I think that actually covers all of the items in the list!

Assuming you’re including debit cards here (as most people do when they say “credit card”): you can get one under 18. In fact a few countries are already going fully cashless, with nobody (including kids) being able to pay with cash. If I open the Revolut app, I get right away on the home screen a banner for “Revolut <18”.

I’m not sure what could be a better solution though.