That sounds not much different from the tech bros back then. The vast majority of them were always posers. Anyone with any talent has made their money by now and dropped out of the rat race, the rest of them are either in middle management or drunk themselves to death.

Sure, but what will you eat for the rest of the month?

Right. They probably wouldn’t have been able to pull this off for as long as they have been if it was just hemorrhaging money.

Correct, as an added bonus, they get to report X million monthly active users on top of that to their investors (that’s why they make you come back every week for a new game). Likely at relatively little cost to them since they don’t have to pay full price for those games.

It’s probably still expensive as hell but when you have a competitor as big as Steam in the market, you gotta be able to afford some ammunition, and the Unreal Engine likely still brings in tons of cashflow.

Most of the free games are crap but they have on occasion given away absolute bangers (double- or even triple-A titles, although of course usually older titles or ones that didn’t sell well). I recently got The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice for free (a game I wouldn’t otherwise have bought or even known about), and I ended up having a very solid ~55 hours of fun with it. I still do all my buying either on Steam or GOG because I don’t trust Epic and I hate their godforsaken launcher so I refuse to pay for anything that’ll be tethered to it, but getting a free game of that caliber certainly made up for the pain of installing it.

Nah, pretty sure this isn’t about the data. They just want to encourage people to go through the effort of setting up an account and downloading their launcher in the hopes that they can then later entice you to buy something else while you’re there. Every time you run one of those free games they get to show you another offer, and since you’re already signed up, the hurdle to buying something is far lower than it otherwise would have been.

FYI, Black Mesa is currently on sale for $4.99, absolute steal at that price.

Yes, Black Mesa costs money but it’s absolutely worth it, they put a LOT of effort into restoring the original as faithful as possible but with more modern graphics (Source engine based). I played the original Half-Life when it came out and Black Mesa definitely gave me the same amount of awe and wonder. One of the best fan remakes of any game I’ve ever seen.

Also, I see that it’s currently on sale for only $5 (75% off), at that price it’s a steal and absolutely worth it.

No. The concept of money is millenia old and likely too useful to discard. What MIGHT change is how that money is implemented. Wouldn’t be the first time either.

Ever heard of a rematch?

For LLMs, the already mentioned LM Studio does a good job as far as beginner friendliness goes.

For text-to-image, I like Fooocus, which is a custom Stable Diffusion setup with automatic prompt enhancement, which can comfortably compete with Midjourney.

Here’s a setup guide for first time users. There’s also an online version to try it out.

Oh, my bad.

Various probiotic supplements will include that, just read the label.

Or literally just do a search on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLS4LSJP

In general, specialized disciplines (like law, medicine, science, etc.) tend to also use specialized words. I don’t think English is unique in that regard, other languages do this as well.

I’ve been alive long enough to tell you this has been going on since long before Lemmy and it also never stops. Newspapers were a thing before social media existed, and they also tended to draw a much more sordid and depressing picture of the world by focusing most of their reporting on negative things instead of positive ones.

I believe this is basically an evolutionary trait in humans – we tend to give far more attention to negative stimuli than positive ones because it used to be necessary for our survival. Those people who missed the sabretooth tiger sneaking up on them while they were having fun simply did not make it long enough. However, in the modern era, this has become somewhat of a problem because it can be exploited to sell newspapers and clicks, and while paying attention to all that negative input probably won’t kill you, it’ll at least make you extremely depressed.

The only remedy I have is to make it a habit to pay more attention to positive things in life – at least enough to create a solid counterweight to all the negative stuff. Either turn off the computer from time to time and go outside to chill, or do other things that relax you like listening to music or making art. Or you could take a page out of Mr. Roger’s book and “look for the helpers” when consuming doom and gloom stories on the web – i.e. make it a habit to look for the good in the bad to avoid losing hope.

HTH

It works for me. I used to be a paying customer of Bartender until I upgraded to Sonoma and was asked to pay yet again.

Hidden Bar may be somewhat minimalistic but it does the part I really need well enough. The extra features were nice but not really necessary.

I’m more concerned that it requires Accessibility and Screen Recording privileges to do the same job that Hidden Bar does without any of those.

Not that I don’t trust the author here, since the source code is open after all – I simply do not have the time to audit it myself. And even if I did, I’d have to turn off auto update in order to prevent a similar switcharoo sneaking by without my knowledge.

Right. It’s still fundamentally the same old engine, just massively beefed up. There are still many limitations that more modern engines (like the one used in the 2014 remake) don’t have.

Which BTW is another reason the title is stupid, because the remake is also just called DOOM and it was the first thing I thought of when reading it. Yes, that engine might be 10 years old by now but it’s still fairly state-of-the-art and continues to be used in other AAA games (like Wolfenstein Youngblood).

In the sense that Doom more or less invented the genre (unless you count the original Wolfenstein, I guess).

Still kind of an awful headline. While GZDoom technically IS based on “Doom tech” because it’s derived from the OG Doom source code that was released to the public, it’s still vastly more powerful than the original engine, with GPU support, beefed up lighting effects, and many of the limitations of the original engine either vastly increased or removed entirely.

Have you tried buying some multivitamins at the store just to rule out that THAT was the issue?