Do the humane thing and just abort them in the womb with an adblocker.

If you are using some app where that isn’t possible, stop using it.

I’ve hated him since before Trump’s first election, correctly realizing he is a fradulent try hard con man megalomaniac, and have had to endure a decade of people mocking me ‘oh yeah like you are smarter than the richest man on earth yeah right fuck off’.

Yep. I am smarter than him. So were half the people hurling those insults at me, actually.

Elon is actually quite stupid at everything other than conning people.

Much like Trump.

A whole lot of poorly configured or cheaply made electroninc appliances or chargers … yeah I can often literally hear when you’ve plugged something in wrong, it makes a high pitched whine, because it is overamping.

Also, if you’re near high tension power lines?

You have to be pretty darn close to be in danger from actual electromagnetic effects.

But… that hum? The buzz?

Turns out that that is actually what causes a lot of long term health problems in people sensitive to it.

Literally the sound, not the EM field, makes you agitated, stressed, on edge, and if that is just your baseline for 20 years, that constant stress accumulates and basically ages you faster, and can cause mental health problems.

Well I’m glad you have/had a supportive family instead of a dysfunctional awful one like me.

I’ve been forced through an ever evolving series of mental health diagnoses by my family until after 20 years of the wrong meds for misdiagnosis… yeah turns out I am autistic and have ptsd/cptsd from my insanely narcissistic and manipulative and mentally unstable family.

Turns out once I get the fuck away from them, I can actually manage fairly well on my own. Oh and theres the whole got two bachelors degrees simultaneously and am very good at a multitude of tech/programming/db admin/data analysis type stuff, and I was making more money than my entire immediate family combined until their most recent attempt to declare me insane for disagreeing with their (objectively wrong) econonomic and political opinions (my degreees are in econ and poli sci, none of them have any degrees).

… Anyway, there’s much more to an autism diagnosis than just the heightened hearing/seeing/touch sensations, but that is a fairly significant component of it.

There are some decent, long form, like 200+ question tests you can take online from actual medically endorsed autism awareness organizations… if you think you may actually have it, take one of those and then take your results to a psychologist.

Hehe sounds about right.

Yeah… a whole lot of gamers… seem to… think they know how game design works, think they know how to solve technical problems…

And well now in the last decade we see the buckets of slop games on steam made by such idiots, confirming that indeed, 95% of them have no clue about anything.

I was an early beta tester for Project Reality, which has now become its own studio, Squad is literally Project Reality just rebuilt in UE 4 to higher quality, because EA wouldn’t liscense out Frostbite to them.

But thats all a tangent to hopefully lend some creedence to when I say: solving network lag and having good netcode is actually extremely complicated and difficult, even still today.

We still see AAA studios fucking up the basics of a lot of netcode stuff in mmo/rpg typr games, where they just make way, way too much shit clientside authoritative, and then have to spend a year or two redesigning the entire game.

This, in turn, is why third party kernel anti cheats have taken off so much, because game devs just fucking give up at making a reasonably secure networked game.

Meanwhile Valve figured this shit out literal decades ago, with highly efficient netcode, and a mostly server side AC solution.

It isn’t possible to stop 100% of cheaters.

It is possible to stop 99.9% of them by designing your game and netcode well.

But that is apparently too hard, so basically the entite industry has outsourced it and/or solved it with massively inefficient and privacy/security compromising AC.

Trump Steaks in -> Trump Bullshit out

Thanks lol.

Unfortunately, I was crippled by an assault and now live off of SSDI, so if the shit eating splatters enough shit my way, I get to die homeless and starving in a wheelchair.

God Bless America.

Someone playing Quake, a game that only came out a few years later, with that kind of machine you’re talking about would dominate. Not because of skill, but simply that his comp has the speed that can allow him to act and react much faster than his opponents.

Exactly.

In that sense, ‘pay to win’ has always been a thing lol.

You sound probably a bit older than me, but I can’t tell you how many times in the 90s and early 00s that I legitimately lost games due to having a garbage tier ping to basically everywhere, and a shitty eMachine, and everyone else just acted like none of that mattered and I was just whining.

Then, surprise, me and the online boys all jump into a server where they all have pings of 80, I have a ping of 200, and then they’re all mad that I cant hit anybody because enemies are rubber banding around like fucking DBZ characters for me.

… Then I do a LAN party with local friends and utterly dominate, routinely.

-.-

I mean, that is a pretty reasonable way to do a mirror, or a very glossy reflective floor (just throw a transparency/alpha layer over it and render it on top of the floor texture) back before… shaders as we know them today really got invented, and model poly count/texture res is not very high… and you specifically only do this kind of mirroring in enclosed, indoor areas that don’t have huge vistas.

Like, I don’t think Deus Ex is on ‘the build engine’, but it certainly ultimately derives from it, and it does this.

Then you get to HL2, and while, to my knowledge, HL2 doesn’t literally have ‘mirrors’ in it, you can basically do that by making a render target camera, the kind that displays in the game as a TV screen of some kind… well you could just point that camera right out of where the mirror is, and have the render quality/resolution be lower than the quality/resolution of the rest of the world.

(ofc this wouldn’t work in hl2 just per se, because gordon isn’t actually rendered as a player model, but you could futz around in gmod not long after hl2 and do this, i know this because i did it)

I am reasonably confident most modern games with mirrors … basically do that, just with an actual game settings slider to determine fidelity instead of all those settings that used to be baked into the map as it was with custom hl2/gmod/sourcemod maps.

Water, window and world space reflections can/could also be set to just… render the whole world again in a lower quality… but prior to that, it was more common to bake a static ‘reflect map’ into your compiled map, as realtime duplicating the whole world can often be waaay too demanding.

And of course now we have shifted over to the Real Time Ray Tracing paradigm, that is absurdly high fidelity but absurdly highly demanding, and that has neccessitated the development of frame upcaling and frame gen tech to balance out the performance losses from this absurdly inefficient lighting paradigm.

I used to be able to do this as well until I got into my 30s and my vision naturally degraded.

Was quite good at FPS games, paintballing… the first time I went to a rifle range for an introductory shooting class, the instructor suggested i look into a shooting scholarship due to my exceptional fine motor control and visual acuity… I had very fast reaction times in martial arts (Karate), but being naturally timid and having a skinny twink build kind of cancelled that out.

The reality is most people think you are delusional, and if your family/friends are authoritarian, they’ll try to get you mentally evaluated as seeing hallucinations.

Its less Superman and more Xmen being persecuted for being different.

I too have significantly more sensitive hearing than seemingly just most people, and can hear and often get annoyed by high pitched but low decibel sounds, very often caused by electronics, off balance high speed fans, etc.

Got gaslit about it by my family as well.

You may wanna look into an autism diagnosis, autists often have this kind of thing going on.

You’d think it would be called super hearing, but instead its often everyone without heigtened senses calling you delusional.

Same thing happened to me when I described seeing the entoptic blue field phenomenon to my family, but not knowing the fancy name for it because I was 11. Family got very concerned I was hallucinating, the reality is I am just more attentive to reality than they are.

I can’t say I’ve seen or heard of him doing that, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

I know Aiden showed up with Trump and gave him a CyberTruck with an American Flag style wrap.

Curiously, this was not long after Aiden literally shot the shit out of his own CyberTruck with an AR15 at close range, and was dismayed to find that it was in fact not bullet proof.

I can’t prove it, but it would not surprise me at all if this was the same actual CyberTruck after some repairs and a wrap applied.

All these fucking idiots spent at least 4 years scouring the globe to find the world’s best shit sandwich chefs, to source premium, wagyu quality bullshit from the finest international suppliers…

And now they don’t enjoy eating the sandwich.

Gulp it down fuckos, yum yum yum, you wanted this.

I’ll also throw Aiden Ross into this group. Actual sub room temp IQ idiot zoomer streamer, MAGA cultist/propigandist, who rose to fame by quite literally sniffing Andrew Tate’s farts …

(I am not joking, he did a video with Tate where at one point Tate gets up from his chair and leaves the shot, Aiden sneakily gets up and huffs the seat of the chair)

… yeah this dumb fuck had a stream in the last 24 hrs where he said he has taken an 8 figure loss on presumably his stocks and crypto from this Trump crash.

That is at least 10 million dollars, bare minimum.

In the last minutes of the stream, Musk made a hardcore difficulty character he named Kekius Maximus, a 4chan-esque meme name he’s used as his display name on X. But Kekius Maximus was not long for the world. Musk died to one of the game’s tutorial bosses due to a bad connection, which subsequently concluded the stream, ending another sad, weird data point in the Elon Musk fake gamer saga.

The guy who claimed he was a top tier Quake player… who in actuality, was only scoring well in online matches, because he played on the T1 high speed, stupid expensive business line at his Zip2 business in the 90s… and performed terribly at LANs…

Well here he is 30 years later, now dying to a tutorial boss, partially due to the shitty connection of his own ISP.

Amazing.

For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?

Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.

Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.

Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.

Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.

You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.

Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.

Anyway woo random trivia.

Ok so… FOSS Dev submits a software (music creation tool) to Steam, to be ‘sold’ for $0, ie, available freely.

On the splash welcome screen to the software, there is a link to his patreon for donations.

Steam’s automated vetting/verification process identifies the keyword ‘patreon’, but misreads a u as a v, or that reversed, in the url, and sends out an automated response saying ‘direct links to request donations are not allowed, please remove’.

FOSS Dev somehow thinks this is a real person talking to him, writes up a response (with valid objections, that Godot and Krita and others feature donation links)…

… He does not recieve a response, but changes the link in his software to point to another webpage with a different url, where that webpage then points to his patreon, and uploads this new build to the automated first pass vetting system…

… and is surprised when this immediately passes vetting and is accepted.

Ok. Mhm. Yep.

…

Does FOSS Dev… did it occur to him that a platform like Steam that recieves, what, thousands of these kinds of applications a month, tens of thousands?, and is extremely well known for having a shockingly small employee headcount… might be using automated systems?

Might have a detailed flow chart for producing what are basically detailed error messages?

Has this person never heard of how call centers for large firms just give their phone support staff a script generated by such systems?

Has this person never used an automated support chat bot that only actually kicks you over to a real person if you specifically request it and/or exhaust its pre built in help options?

I am sorry but this dude is having an emotional breakdown from an automated bot response he doesn’t realize is an automated bot response.

He at no point ever shows the response from Steam to his pointing out that other FOSS software has donation links. There apparently… wasn’t one? … Because actual lengthy responses get assigned to a ticket cue for an actual human to read and reply to at some point, later?

I am absolutely baffled as to how anyone with any familiarity with ‘Steam Support’ could possibly think they are talking to an actual human being in this scenario.

This is like feeling personally betrayed by a nonexistant YouTube video reviewer support person when you upload a video with copyrighted music and are told it won’t be elligible publishing.

…

Now as to the actual Steam policies, the actual issues here… yes, in general, Steam is not geared toward FOSS releases with optional donations, yes it is bullshit that there are older software/games that got grandfathered in, no argument with any of that.

But he already solved the problem, on his end.

He already changed the url to not include a direct donation link by bouncing it to patreon via some other link.

The entire tech support adventure he had with trying to get donation DLCs was completely unneccessary… he already had an accepted build with a donation method accepted.

The entire tax adventure he had is also… he just says he has a very weird and uncommon legal setup with his sole proprietorship, and is frustrated that that makes the process complicated as well.

I get that this is frustrating, but again… if Steam said no to a donation only DLC… and he already has a build, accepted, with a working donation link that entirely circumvents the process, meaning he would not even be getting any payouts from Steam at all, and Steam will not be generating any revenue, whatsoever, because that software is listed as available in Steam for free, so there is no Steam cut…

Then this person is complaining about having to deal will some bs paperwork to be able to have his free software published on Steam, for no cost to him, at a cost to Valve, and he benefits massively by increasing the number of potential eyeballs on his software.

This is analagous to complaining that you have to fill out paperwork to recieve like free food benefits or reduced cost housing or a low cost bus fare.

…

In conclusion, yes, Steam is not the best option for FOSS releases.

Yep. Its a commercial storefront, primarily.

Alternatives exist, that are specifically supportive of FOSS projects with flexible donation/payment models.

I don’t know why you’d go to the hardware store and be angry that they don’t sell fresh fruit.

Should there maybe be some kind of push to try to convince Valve to offer some kind of option like that?

Well… maybe?

If Steam actually did basically what itch.io does, then uh, itch.io stops existing in … what, 2 years?

Yes hello, who is this?

Oh ok, yes.

Ah well you see, our salesman lied to you, Mr. Customer, he just says insane nonsense that bears no relation to reality in order to get you to give us money. That’s his job. Anyway, when Mr. Salesman gave you a delivery date, he didn’t tell us over here in product assembly about that until about 2 weeks ago, and it’ll take us about 8 weeks to actually make your order quantity.

What’s that? No, no problems here on the assembly line, we actually churned out 15% more widgets last quarter than the quarter before that, and we’re on track for current quarter production numbers to also grow by 15%.

Yep, yep, sorry about that, and that’s a good point, Mr. Salesman may have just added a 0 to those growth figures we reported to him when he was talking with you.

Of course! Thanks for doing business with us! I’ll hand you back over to Mr. Salesman now.

…

Ahem.

Fuck sales.

This is what I would actually say, and this is why I apparently have ‘poor interpersonal skills’.

I regularly encounter, and have for the last at least 5 years have encountered, many, many people, who use the term … whatever stupid number of D Chess move phrase… to genuienly, earnestly describe something they think actually is an extremely intelligent strategy.

… Especially when it comes to large scale economic/political/business strategy.

Yes, a lot of people also use the term sarcastically as well.

… Which is why I asked you to clarify what you mean.

You then replied with further explanation.

You could have just said you were joking at that point, but you did not.

… Now that I have taken your explanation at face value, now you just say you are joking.

Thanks for wasting my time with a schrodingers shit post.

I mean… I may be wrong about this, but I think its just a gigantic pile of cash.

Its a revenue budget surplus, not like a … state version of a soverign wealth fund.

Can’t be legally ‘invested’ in anything. It’s just locked in as giant pile of cash, with no interest rate, no ability to invest it in one thing or another. Only either do nothing, or spend it on government costs.

You are basically saying ‘spend all the money now, because prices will be much higher later’.

But uh… if they just… you know…didn’t wipe out a progressive income tax source of funds… that is you know, ongoing, a flow, not a static total…

The state would yes, still have to cope with rising general costs… but this would be augmented by that flow of rising amounts of tax revenue.

If your scenario is agnostic massive inflation, that the dollar goes down in value generally, then it would be much better to keep the flow going, as that will be balanced on both the spending and revenue side by whatever the inflation is.

The inflation would increase both state budget costs and state budget revenues from taxes, as both incomes and sales prices would rise, thus so would income and sales tax revenue.

And then in that scenario, yes, still use the static pool of reserve cash to shore up irregularities in that flow, maybe to help subsizide at a state level some of the rising consumer price burden, or maybe sure, spend it all at once to try to build some kind of massive infrastructure project that generally supports economic activity, or start giving it out as small business grants, or start a state backed entity to provide some kind of locally sourceable vital staple consumer good.

But you can do all that without massively destabilzing your state budget flows by cutting out the income tax revenues.

It is not a 5D move to stop inhaling a third of the oxygen you normally breathe before you use your reserve of calories from eating breakfast to fuel you to go run a mile.

You could… just use those deposited breakfast calories to run a mile… and keep breathing normally the whole time. That’ll probably result in a better mile time.

Yeah, asterisk to indicate multiplication is much, much more common amongst coders.

… And script kiddie DOGE interns.