Patents are (at their core) a good thing. It protects little Jimmy Inventor from putting hours and his blood, sweat and tears into coming up with a novel invention, only for some big corpo to see it, steal the idea and bully Jimmy out of the market.

Jimmy has legal recourse to sue the big corpo if he has a patent, whereas without one he has nothing.

Just because the system’s been gamed (especially in the US) doesn’t mean it’s impossible to reform, and is currently still better than nothing.

This is useful for updates so you’re not bottlenecked as much (if you don’t have automatic background updates set up).

All it takes is some standardized markup like schema.org

Which is the problem AI is solving here - getting every supermarket chain to agree on this (when it’s actually against their interests to do so, since it increases price transparency) would be an impossible task, but AI can get around this requirement with minimal extra effort.

I’m hardly an AI evangelist, but this is actually one of the rare situations where it’s a good fit.

The amount of people bootlicking a corporation’s decision to cut costs rather than just moderate effectively is pretty astonishing for Lemmy,

Plenty of people got value out of the comment section - if nothing else, they were invaluable in knowing when to skip past the recap/opening theme/filler content in long-running shows like One Piece.

Most of it is pretty inane, but there was some useful stuff in there, and I always found it fun to see what other people thought of particularly crazy episodes.

It’s funny how when this was released, people were massively up in arms since it was ‘only cosmetic’ - then we saw what these companies would do with PvP games and P2W microtransactions, so people had to turn around and beg for them to return to being purely cosmetic additions…

Too bad, you get a battlepass instead!

Arkham Knight is decent except for the batmobile sections - as others have already mentioned.

I’d still argue it’s better than Origins though. From memory, memorising all the different toolbelt skills isn’t really necessary - you can definitely get through the game by just abusing jumps, cloak and counters - some special enemies might need a specific ability to make vulnerable, but the game normally warns you the first time you fight them, so I don’t think it ever feels too overwhelming - it just feels like a lot if you run through it very quickly.

This is why I absolutely refuse to install Valorant (and now LoL) - I could somewhat understand if an anticheat refused to boot up the game in question if something triggered it, but it going massively outside of its scope and wantonly disabling or killing other processes is just nuts to me.

Have to disagree with you on echoes - I loved the game, but IMO it was much easier than Prime 1 - the most difficult boss was the probably the boost guardian midway through rather than any of the endgame bosses. The ammo system made the standard power beam too centralising which was boring, and the dark world damage just served to slow the player down, since the light fields regenerated your health.

No one’s suggested it yet, so I’ll say Fire Emblem: Three Houses - lots of gameplay hours, especially if you want to go through each of the four storylines, albeit can be a bit repetitive getting to that point.

Here’s another example where trying to chase the live-service money train has just ended up with a subpar product that people abandon or avoid almost instantly.

Unfortunately I suspect the wrong lessons will be taken away from this as well - e.g. the console/PC gaming market is too fickle, etc.

Good luck getting any reform done within America’s FPTP by going 3rd-party.

Politics is a battle of inches, and you need to walk before you can run, or else 3rd-parties are doomed to irrelevance forever.

Ultimately this won’t change unless young Democrats actually take over the party and shift the overton window back to the left.

This generally, and specifically electoral reform is the only way to get the USA out of its two-party hellhole.

It’s still a marathon, but a significantly less annoying one that doesn’t have large sticky mud sections randomly throughout (the metaphor breaks down a bit here…)

I used One Pace to catch up recently and it’s very good - downside is a lot of the earlier arcs aren’t complete yet, but the OG anime isn’t quite as bad with those so it’s typically ok to just watch the real one for those arcs.

Ok but who actually doesn’t know what a magazine is

Kbin devs, apparently.

While I don’t think using RNG is a good mechanic (and in Overwatch, most ‘random’ things aren’t actually very random - bullet spread is actually based on a set pattern, and the only randomness is the rotation of that pattern.

However there are interesting ways you could dress up ‘randomness’ as an actual game mechanic that’s reproducible - causing allies to have a slight bullet magnetism (not full on aimbot, but a bit like a ‘lite’ version of S76’s ult) could be an interesting idea to play around with.

Another option could be to force things to bounce, and otherwise orient themselves onto a specific target - though I guess this might be more along the lines of someone controlling magnetism than ‘luck’ per se.

I played him a bit yesterday, and I actually really like the changes. For such a small difference, the inclusion of the trap and the heal/damage reduction being on a resource allows you to be a bit more strategic in his general play, and reduces a lot of the brainlessness that comes in the gap between hook coming off cooldown.

There isn’t quite the dopamine hit of insta-deleting someone once they’re hooked, but you can still do it (even if it’s much harder) and by pulling people into pig-pen it’s largely still possible.

Android Debug Bridge - it’s a tool you can use to access parts of Android you don’t normally have access to directly on the phone.

Well Google has recently been forcing through its awful Web Environment Integrity proposal so…

Bobby Kotick is likely on the way out at least (probably via golden parachute).