Yeah, that’s what happens when the LLM they use to summarize these articles strips all nuance and comedy.

For what it’s worth, I played the NES release of DQ1, and then a translation of the japan-only SNES release of DQ2 recently (I actually beat DQ2 last week) and I found DQ2 to be a much better game than DQ1 overall. DQ1 was… interesting, but it was very much a game that did not respect the player’s time in the least, to the point of expecting the player to fight literally hundreds of battles in order to grind up enough money and experience to afford the gear. The most charitable thing I can say about it is that the battle system was so rudimentary and so grindy that the gameplay felt more like it was focused on resource management–there was a tension in deciding whether you could afford to take another fight, or if you needed to return to town and spend money sleeping at an inn to heal (setting your grind back at least 1-2 fights with how piddly gold and XP drops were), optimizing efficiency in spending your MP to heal vs. the risk of dying to the next monster, etc.

DQ2 meanwhile was a much more robust and much less grindy game–the simple addition of multiple party members and multiple enemies in a single battle meant that your gold and XP gains were multiplied over the first game. While it still demanded grinding, it was much more reasonable about it, and it felt much more like a “modern” JRPG like you’re used to seeing.

Really? Fusion stops holding your hand around the time you get to sector 4, but it’s strictly linear until you’re literally about to go fight the final boss–the game explicitly blocks you from backtracking to areas that aren’t immediately plot-relevant.

Copyright is the only thing protecting us from getting absolutely fucked even harder by the rich than we already are, yes.

Do you want corps just stealing every new idea and product, cloning it, and muscling out the original inventor without paying them a dime? Because abolishing copyright entirely would be an excellent way to do that.

I’m pretty sure he was agreeing with you…?

The problem is that as far as I’m aware there’s literally zero evidence of this doomsday scenario you’re describing ever happening, despite publicity rights being a thing for over 50 years. Companies have zero interest in monetizing publicity rights to this extent because of the near-certain public backlash, and even if they did, courts have zero interest in enforcing publicity rights against random individuals to avoid inviting a flood of frivolous lawsuits. They’re almost exclusively used by individuals to defend against businesses using their likeness without permission.

Holy fuck how do you not see the difference between “random nobody does an impression for free while hanging out with their pals” and “multi billion startup backed and funded by one of the richest companies on earth uses an impression as a key selling point for their new flagship product that they are charging access for and intend to profit from”

There’s something primal about making something with your own hands that you just can’t get with IT. Sure, you can deploy and maintain an app, but you can’t reach out and touch it, smell it, or move it. You can’t look at the fruits of your labor and see it as a complete work instead of a reminder that you need to fix this bug, and you have that feature request to triage, oh and you need to update this library to address that zero day vulnerability…

Plus, your brain is a muscle, too. When you’ve spent decades primarily thinking with your brain in one specific way, that muscle starts to get fatigued. Changing your routine becomes very alluring, and it lets you exercise new muscles, and challenge yourself to think in new ways.

The guy apparently rescaled the models to make them similar in size, which, idk if I’d call that altering

I still think it’s kind of a BS claim though

Yeah, as someone in a tech job whose primary function is “parsing and interpreting logs” sometimes even the repeated flood of seemingly useless logs can be helpful. If nothing else, they explain why there aren’t any useful logs and that can guide how I respond to the problem.

You know it’s coming. Why would a streaming company want a consumer buying one month, binging a single show they’re interested in, then immediately cancelling the subscription after, when you could guarantee a 6- or 12-month revenue stream for them?

A moment of silence in honor the sacrifice of Kent Shocknek, taken from this world too early while trying to jump his car o7

I mean, even a cursory search on Google shows that smart TVs can gather a hell of a lot more data than just that, up to and including analyzing the actual video being displayed to figure out what you’re watching

Smart TVs will collect your personal info and viewing habits and send it to the manufacturer of they’re given half a chance

Some scummy brands will even configure their TVs to automatically and silently connect to open wifi networks to phone home