I heard a joke once: Man turns on computer. Goes to edit settings. Needs a patch to fix a system deficiency. Can’t find any other solution. Windows says, “The fix is simple. Only a system administrator can make these changes. Go call one. That should take care of it.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But Windows… I am the system administrator.” Good joke. Everybody laugh. Upgrade to enterprise for $199.99. Curtains.

(Original reference)

Not to mention those companies have divided priorities. Valve’s main income is Steam, they have a vested interest in keeping their product dominant. Microsoft and Epic simply don’t, because their stores are only side projects that incentivise their main income sources. But that’s not to say I want to substitute Steam with some other corpo giant’s latest money grab either.

The bigger question is why more consumer-friendly stores like GOG that sell DRM-free games can’t compete with Steam. High profile games have no incentive to release DRM-free versions of their titles on GOG because the bigger store where they make more money encourages DRM. And these locked-in publisher relationships built on DRM allows Valve to outcompete more consumer-friendly stores through sales and user experience.

Valve gets a lot of clout in the Linux sphere because their adoption of open-source platforms is better than their competitors, and we have the mindset of “a rising tide lifts all ships”, but this is also what we were saying about Google and Android 15 years ago and we can see how that is shaping up. Something something “you either die a hero…”

Basically, Valve is too big to compete with at this point, because any competing product needs to be more perfect out the gate for people to even consider using it. Which is hard to do when you are not as entrenched and don’t have the kind of money Valve has.

Or maybe we can all just, like, stop trying to take over countries?

The less colorful tufted titmouse common around here is actually my favorite variety. But honestly I just love birds.

Honestly one of my favorite birds, though. They’re just adorable.

You’re right, they just exchange it in circles to make themselves even richer.

I’m not a linguistics expert and this is just me offering an unsolicited layman’s opinion, but perhaps the nuance comes from whether or not one might still conceive of the words being related despite the acknowledged difference in definition?

For example, “bat” (the animal) and “bat” (the implement) are homonyms that are used to describe two clearly different things. But maybe one might think of “scale” being connected between its various uses when it is not. “Scale” (the measuring tool) uses plates which are similar to the flat plates of fish scales. Or that to “scale” a distance is like measuring a “scale” of height. Something like that.

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I think if you surgically remove a rib, yeah

FWIW I initially just took this in the context of the source material, Game of Thrones.

Cersei Lannister (pictured) comes from a noble house whose sigil is a lion. They use a lot of lion metaphors. One of the quotes from her father Tywin (in the show at least) is “The lion does not concern himself with the opinions of the sheep.”

Cersei as a character, though, is a bit of a hot mess who makes it her business to concern herself with everyone.

My 90’s childhood trauma resurfaced here.

I pressed + a few times to keep making the horse bigger, which made me happy, and wondered “How far can I go with this?”

So I pressed it a few more times, with diminishing results, and then I started feeling anxious for some reason. I realized I was thinking “Wait, this is a setup. How long until it turns into a horrifying face and screams at me?”

Too many old gimmicky sites/flash games that cause users to focus more intently/rush on through before throwing in a jump scare. Always hated that stuff.

Based on the other comments though, I’m relieved it seems to be an innocuous site that just helps a horse achieve its dream of becoming as big as it can possibly be.

That just sounds like a reframing of “the party are the capitalist class” though.

If the party either controls the corporations or has the ability to seize control if their priorities aren’t met, where does one group begin and the other end?

Agreed. It will require careful redistribution of labor and resources to ensure stability with a declining population.

But nations typically want to hoard their resources, and the value of labor is measured only in overall utility to the billionaire class, so I don’t believe it will be a graceful decline for the majority of the world in practice.

How do I un-read something?

Even young people who grew up with technology.

There is now a middle sweet spot of computer literacy that spans Gen X and Millennials. When you go younger than that, you start running into people who never owned a normal computer growing up and only ever used smartphones/tablets.

By making devices simple enough for grandma to use, we inadvertently fostered a new generation of people who are as computer literate as grandma.

Rupert Murdoch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Murdoch