azertyfun

There's probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.

The "traditional" AAA pipeline is "make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS". Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).

That's not to say there aren't good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I'd say we're nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won't want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.

Wait until you learn about debhelper.

If you use a debian-based system, unless you have actively looked at the DH source, the one thing that built virtually every package on your system, you do not get to say anything about "bloat" or "KISS".

DH is a monstrous pile of perl scripts, only partially documented, with a core design that revolves around a spaghetti of complex defaults, unique syntax, and enough surprising side effects and crazy heuristics to spook even the most grizzled greybeards. The number of times I've had to look at the DH perl source to understand a (badly/un)documented behavior while packaging something is not insignificant.

But when we replaced a bazillion bash scripts with a (admittedly opinionated but also stable and well documented) daemon suddenly the greybeards acted like Debian was going to collapse under the weight of its own complexity.

The fact that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup. This kind of thing regularly happens as well where I live despite noncompetes basically not being enforceable.

Acquiring companies is easy, but it extremely rarely goes well. The incentives and skills required to buy something and give a sales pitch to a private equity firm simply do not overlap with the incentives and skills required to vertically integrate that thing without completely destroying it.

In many ways these corporate ghouls are like serial hobbyists. Buying all kinds of expensive toys and tools they don't understand then breaking them and/or giving up.

You're just getting old. Things have perhaps gotten a little faster in general, but Gen Z didn't invent slang. Also "skibbidy rizz" is Gen Alpha more than Z. And slang very rarely is attributable to a single personality. Apparently Kai Cenat popularized "rizz", but it had existed for a long time before and has way outgrown him. The vast majority of people who unironically say "rizz" don't even know who he is.
The linguistic phenomenon isn't even linked to the internet particularly. It's just a contraction of "charisma", hardly an unusual way for slang to emerge pre-internet and not comparable to 1337 5p34k which never made it out of terminally online subcultures.

Before the internet, radio, TV, and the press were effective tools for massively spreading slang. Boomers had no issues making "cool" cool, as well as a bunch of other slang words that unlike "cool" aren't cool anymore.

Your generation had "WMDs" but I'm sure boomers had similar things with Vietnam, and their parents with WWII. Hell, in 1918 or so the entire world learned the phrase "Spanish flu" like we did "COVID". The more things change the more they stay the same.

And how can we forget "OK" whose origins are mysterious but generally people agree it comes from a short lived 19th century linguistic fad that gave "Oll Korrect" (what's for sure is that "okay" came after "OK"). Now "OK" is quite possibly the most universal word in existence. Sure back then it probably took a few years to spread within the anglosphere, but OTOH there was also much more dialectic variability in language across regions so it's not like there was less going on, it was just more fragmented.

People have always been going crazy with language and each generation appropriates their mother tongue in their unique way. The idea that language is even remotely static or "used to be less crazy" is entirely false, yet every generation perpetuates this idea when confronted with new slang they don't understand.

The only thing I would disagree on is that lingo is a recent phenomenon. That's just recency bias.

The Catholic Church used Latin at mass from its inception to the mid-20th century, and the oldest Greek versions of the Bible already use some words we simply have never seen anywhere else.

Philosophers have always been a notorious PITA with using existing words or close derivatives of existing words with different meanings, sometimes the lingo is specific to a single author.

And let's not even get into judicial lingo and its very ancient and storied use of disenfranchising the less fortunate who did not speak it and could not afford a lawyer to speak it for them - that is when the court system wasn't in Latin.

Corporate lingo takes more room in our lives as large corporations take up more and more of the economic and political landscape (with some interesting evolutions in form thanks to the influence of Globish). That's it.

Congrats. So you think that since you can do it (as a clearly very tech-literate person) the government shouldn't do anything? Do you think it's because they all researched the issues with these companies and decided to actively support them, or is it because their apathy should be considered an encouragement to continue?

You are so haughty you've circled back around to being libertarian. This is genuinely a terrible but unfortunately common take that is honestly entirely indistinguishable from the kind of shit you'd hear coming from a FAANG lobby group.

Then you're knowingly engaging in the consumption of abusive products? Do you not see how you have literally no leverage whatsoever as a consumer?

Do you not consume a single Google/Meta/Microsoft product or do you not care about their abhorrent business practices?

You are conflating Consumers with Citizens, a classic pitfall of modern neoliberal democracies.

Just because people willingly Consume a Product does not mean they think The Product is good or even that it should exist at all. Neoliberalism is unable to acknowledge that, because Everything is a Market and the Market is Infallible.

In reality, the game theory is such that individuals may not have the means to get out of the local minimum they found themselves stuck in. Prisoner's dilemma and all that. That's what representative democracy is supposed to solve, when it isn't captured by ideology and corporate interests.

Those ones are still under litigation AFAIK. Last I heard about it they lost their latest court case but it will be years before it reaches the top EU courts or an amendment is made to the GDPR.

I have uBlock Origin but didn't bother configuring any additional filters. My desktop has consent-o-matic as well I think (which unlike a filter actually auto-rejects the tracking stuff).

However on a new profile (no extensions) I didn't get the prompt, and neither did I on chromium. Just checked on windows as well, still not prompt. So it seems to just not prompt on desktop for some reason... I wonder if that means the tracking is disabled or they just auto-consent.

Unrelated to the article itself but I initially clicked on mobile and was presented with this clearly GDPR-violating prompt:

Where's the button to reject tracking? It doesn't exist.

For reference this is the correct prompt on admiral's own website:

First time I see GDPR violation this brazen. While writing this comment I finally figured out how to reject consent (clicking on "Purposes" and manually deselecting each purpose).

I double checked with remote debugging, the button is not just hidden in CSS; it's missing entirely:

For some reason I don't get a consent prompt at all from my desktop even on a brand new firefox profile – perhaps because of my user-agent?

Anyways I felt motivated today so I've sent an email to their Data Protection Officer and set a reminder for next month in case they ghost me.