I bet this is a falling out with Hasbro execs on royalties. BG3 royalties were a cash cow this year for Hasbro, pushing Wizards (as a division) to be quite profitable, while almost all other divisions in their company lost money.

So now the agreement is over, and Larian is like: we will own the IP on our next project instead of paying $90M to Hasbro... And fair enough -- they've shown they can kick ass. Hasbro is probably gambling that it's the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer. So they'll kick tires on selling BG4 to another studio.

BG3 will go down in history as the legendary game before enshittification. Larian will make a few great games that don't sell as well -- before selling out to a whale that dumps money on the owner's front lawn (see also BioWare). The devs who made BG3 will found indie studios and make cool shit for a decade or two. So the wheel turns.

I remember it and was there, on the KDE side of it. Summarized half-remembered version.

Corel WordPerfect had been ported to linux late in the 90s and they got this notion that people only bought Windows to use MS Office. So if they made their own OS, people would buy it just to use WordPerfect. They had grand plans to take KDE and linux and package it as a consumer grade OS. The closest other competitor doing that at the time was Caldera, and they were seeing some success, so why not eh?

They hired two people to "fix" KDE. But the people they hired had no idea how open source worked -- how to interact with a community that functioned more like a meritocracy than a managed hierarchy. They showed up on the mailing list and tried to make demands -- work on this, fix these bugs, adhere to our standards for this other thing, etc. When KDE didn't jump to their whimsy, they sort of got annoyed and just decided to maintain a patchset or something.

The distro flopped hard. And it started with their management. They could have instead hired a half dozen KDE developers that were already contributing, started feature or bug bounty programs (like Google Summer of Code, which was great but came later), and possibly have pulled something amazing together.

Clearly a cat-fisher. ;)

Okay, jokes aside, advice for the 40+ dudes making dating profiles, assuming they want an actual relationship and not just a hookup.

(1) if all of your photos are selfies, you are unintersting, and probably anti-social. Don't just scroll through your photos on your phone and crop out your head four times from four selfies. If that's all you have on your phone, you need to work on the rest of your life.

(2) Get someone to hold your camera if you're doing profile shots. Find good backdrops. Choose one good full face profile shot, one good full body profile shot. Wear something nice in at least one of them. Or at least get a tripod so it looks like someone held the camera ;)

(3) Get a few pictures of you doing something. Even if it's fishing, and someone else took the photo -- it means to the viewer that you can be social, outdoorsy, etc. A picture of you hitting a ball at beer league baseball will do wonders. Show that you aren't boring and have varied interests.

(4) Get at least one picture of you in a group doing something social where people look like they're laughing and having a good time. Halloween party in costume with a red arrow pointing at you, or poker night table shot where you're making a face at the camera and everyone is laughing. Whatever. Show that you aren't dull, and that other people find you pleasant to be around.

Done.

When you're online dating, you're the product. Be a used car salesman selling yourself, the used car. Convince people that they'll have a great time if they make this choice.

Source: I've had a career where I've had to move a lot -- playing professional bachelor. I have entered the online dating scene after each move. The websites and apps change, but the strategy is largely the same.

The composition is bothering me. Like, it's asymmetrical and there's probably an angle down the centreline of the coliseum that would work better and...

Yes. Best thing we can do is be ready (from a tech perspective) and welcoming (from a human perspective). They'll come or they won't.

Compared to summer, Lemmy now has thousands more users, hundreds of active communities (no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects), actual made-on-lemmy content in a bunch of places, and a bunch of apps that mostly have the bugs worked out. It's probably fair more appealing now to join than it was in summer.

We still have roadblocks: general confusion about federation (the email analogy seems to be working best), difficulty properly explaining how to sign up, a harder time finding communities, and it's impossible to migrate between instances without starting fresh.

Wow, you're the most entitled user of free software I've met in a while. Just buy a windows license next time.

Tron: Legacy soundtrack comes preloaded

I don't think any scientist, no matter how reasoned, could adequately answer this question -- because it'll boil down to semantics over the definition of "free will", then devolve into solipsism. A better headline would be something like: "Renowned biologist argues his belief in lack of free will."

When I was part of the KDE marketing working group, we always talked about 5% being the magic number. If we hit that, then the avalanche of ported and supported third party software starts. It's a weird chicken and egg thing. Looks like we're close!

Largely, this is likely a good thing. Don't let perfect be the enemy of better (than the status quo).

You have python. You import antigravity. The princess flies off into space. You monkey patch the princess so she has wings.