It seems they updated the headline to “Trump, Vance shout at Zelenskyy in heated Oval Office meeting”.

I hope readers put some pressure on them, CBC is always on their high horse talking about journalism integrity, but quite often they forget to follow their rules.

They have another segment on “world leaders’ response”, but there is no “world” there, safe from Trudeau’s and Russian ex-president’s twitter, it was just American legislative voices being boosted, mostly Republicans.

Adding to what other people already said

• For used stuff, https://www.kijiji.ca/
• DDR3 and SSD are still available around. (But I find it difficult to get Timetec and Patriot cheap outside Amazon - might be worth checking pcpartpicker)
• Old cables parts: check for small repair shops in your region, give them a call, they might have a box with cables.

And compare the prices with AliExpress. Occasionally, I find better prices here in Canada, but for cables, screws, filters, sadly importing is way cheaper. I think people buy in bulk from China and sell for 4X~10x more online here.

I don’t know if you have tools and spare parts, but power cables are easy to fix if you follow the pin order and cable requirements.

Also, on FB market, or kijiji, post what you are looking for. People might have, but did not know there was interest.

I’m not sure if it is because of where I am living now, but +25 years ago there would be a whole neighbourhood of no brand tech stores, it was effortless to find old tech or next-generation consoles.

Canada is frail with local resellers, from the ones I had good experience with, Mike’s closed, Canada Computers had data leak and price gouging in the recent history. All my interactions with Memory Express were awful, online or in person. I should have stopped after 3 times, but someone always says “they are better now”, shame on me. I have yet to try vuugo, pc-canada and shoprbc…

There are also some small niche stores, but they sell custom-made stuff, cables with different colours, or parachute chord sleeves. But then you will pay the price of your full cart on a single cable.

There was demo available back in 2020~2021, did they add anything new, or is it different stuff?

Not sure if it is a scam, like people are claiming (on the post, and steam reviews). I feel like it is more like a lack of experience and knowledge in the game business than any intentional wrongdoing.

There are definitely problems with the game, and the pace of updates and fixes has been lacking since it first appeared on Steam.

After watching the dev Stream in 2023, it seems like he loves what he is doing and probably will see this through, but he really struggles with basic concepts of game making - that might have changed since then.

During a programming session, he was asking everything to an AI chatbot and copying the result into the code, then suffering for a while back and fort with the bot because the code did not work as he intended, while the chat was sending the documentation page of the engine and other help that would have solved his issues.

Yes, they released it as a DLC. Escape from Pork Belly.

Nowadays, I think it means “agreeable”. “I agree with this”.

It is a term that changed a lot in such a short time. I remember it was a way to call a drug addict, like crackhead/basehead. Then it changed to call people talking nonsense, like they were on crack.

I imagine, at some point, someone agreed with the crackhead talk and read some comment of the nonsense being called “based”.

I agree, and I am glad we are on the same page.

I just think it is important to highlight missing key-points, that people often misunderstand and can misconstrue, like the devs and lawyers from the now class action from the post. So it is important to clarify to prevent further misinformation.

• Steam does not care how much you sell keys for different platforms(e.g. GOG, Epic), just Steam Keys (i.e. keys for the Steam platform).
• And when you sell Steam Keys in different stores, you need to give Steam Store Customers comparable, but not necessarily at the same time or same price.

If you check the historical low on “is there any deal”, often stores have games with historical low lower than Steam’s historical low. From what I saw, the prices are usually around 10%~12% lower.

Technically, you can sell Steam Keys for less. But if you sell Steam Keys somewhere else for cheaper, you need to plan giving Steam Customers the same opportunity at some point.

Steam Key Rules and Guidelines https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

I bought Steam Keys for cheaper in different stores, like Humble Bundle. I also got Steam Keys for free from devs/publisher (events, giveaway, press).

And If you don’t mind Steam Keys, you can buy games from GOG or Epic and the price is not always the same as Steam.

You can compare prices in “is there any deal”, they only allow authorized vendors. https://isthereanydeal.com/game/shadows-of-doubt/info/ You can see how the base price of Steam Keys are very similar, but the discount changes from vendors.

Borg is arguing in bad faith, don’t give him more attention.

A good part of what the said about Apple is not even true, and nothing he said has anything to do with Steam vs Apple Store.

From the first line, recently Apple released an OS update that broke some software from the Apple Store, like MS Office. They made people call the support from the app developers, Apple did not help anyone with that.

Borg went on an unhinged rant about how bad they are at deploying software to specific hardware, and how little they know about the industry. Completely unrelated to what you are asking.

It is not worth spending time, please don’t feed the troll.

If you want to talk seriously about the industry, there are better places to do it.

I imagine that the discussion we are having would be more beneficial to c/main

However the banhammer is a tool that can make any comment look like a nail,

That is why methods are important, if your only tool is a hammer, the screws will look like nails. And people waiting for a solution will be expecting a “thunk”.

In real life, people do not get arrested for reposting fake news. Well, maybe if you call a war “war” in some countries. Correcting myself, in real life, people should not get arrested for reposting fake news.

Many people share them because they do not know better, are afraid, for many reasons. I have so many examples in my family. Usually, speaking with them with compassion and understanding, while using a common language works.

But there are people that benefit from it, instigators, bad actors. How long do you think it should be allowed to fester before you get to a point of no return?

From my experience, the places doing it properly without installing a censorship state, are the ones with well-defined and transparent process. They are doing proper investigations, working with the community, taking proper action against bad actors. Canada is not far from achieving it, it needs work, and I wish it was faster.

You cannot expect that an online community that depends on volunteer work would have the same level of scrutiny. I don’t even know if it would be possible to create some sort of committee to oversee lemmy.ca like is common in some forums and other open-source communities.

Do these users, or the users that might post a misinformed take within the power-users’ posts deserve bans? Do we analyze every comment, post and news-source and remove those that meet the criteria for MDM? …

Yeah, those are the questions that need to be discussed! And plans made over it.

I have facts, experience and opinion - for one, I am averse to mass scanning, even more without proper methods, but I have been proven wrong many times, if people think is the right way to go, I might as well understand it better and help where I can.

Back, to the community from OPs post

I imagine you are old enough in lemmy.ca to remember Geopolitics, trying to be more neutral, but the mod there would pin all his posts to hide people’s post, or just delete them. The account was also accumulating bans across instances until they were banned fully in this instance. Endless war does not try to be neutral, and the mod accumulated an even longer rep sheet, and in less than 2 months.

I understand a human can read their posts, analyze their actions, and understand they are acting in bad faith intentionally, dishonestly arguing and ill temper when talking to people. I don’t think an AI can classify this kind of thing consistently yet. But in quantitative analyze, there are enough bans and content removed to warranty at least an investigation and a warning.

…Over the past couple years, they have become far more careful to avoid…

Wow, that user was banned in so many communities and had a lot of content removed over time, including in ml.

They post many memes, but their reaction to people’s comments are not the most amicable, they take everything as direct offence, that could surely be improved.

I feel like you are arguing with me about OP points. I am not sure if it is a Lemmy error, but my comment you replied to first

I do not understand people here defending misinformation/intolerance as a merit of discussion. The dichotomy of naive or complicity.

People spreading misinformation and intolerance are not here for healthy arguments, you just need to check their history to see their dishonesty and ill temper.

In the meanwhile, accounts like the one OP highlighted are just creating trouble for mods of other instances to solve.

I don’t feel like you are here defending that person’s acts or being complicit, neither trying to defend misinformation/intolerant with malicious intent, or being disingenuous with semantics. So, for the healthy discussion, I continue.

You don’t need to go too far in that person’s history to see the examples of their dishonesty and ill temper, if that is the hill you chose to defend. You might need some special privilege to see their removed content in other instances.

From your message, sorry if I am mistaken your words the first time, but I imagine now that by that you were not saying intolerance, but misinformation, as in:

who is the arbiter of “misinformation”

In that case,

Canada might be a little behind on misinformation laws, it was always behind when the subject involves technology. But they define very well their types (MDM they call), qualify damages and campaign to raise awareness and minimize its effects. https://www.cyber.gc.ca/en/guidance/how-identify-misinformation-disinformation-and-malinformation-itsap00300 https://www.canada.ca/en/campaign/online-disinformation.html

“Misinformation” is serious, causes harm, and should not be used interchangeably with “agreement”.

Just because OP is complaining about misinformation, it does not make it any less severe than intolerance, when used for the same goal - to cause harm.

Even before technology, we had laws and procedures about harmful discourse, be them intolerance or misinformation, it just makes things different.

That is why I was suggesting a discussion of well-defined and transparent methods to deal with them, that should be constantly reviewed and improved.

Edit: bold line

2024 is not a great year for VR, and I hope Valve pushes some more updates to imporve steam vr next year.

I imagine Metro Awekening is a contender for 2024. Name brand, and many reviews. I think others to qualify, for the same reasons, would be Metal Hellsinger, Maestro and Arizona Sunshine Remake.

I feel like I mostly played old games this year, at least it helped me to pick Labor of Love: Cassette Beasts.

Cassette Beasts is made with Godot, devs are still releasing content, and they just added support for steam workshop.

There were so many good games for this category that it was hard to choose. e.g. I learned from Lemmy about Shattered Pixel Dungeon, that is open source and has been receiving updates for almost 10 years.

My other picks are: Shadows of Doubt, Tactical Breach Wizards, All Quiet in the Trenches, and Tiny Glade.

I also liked Star Fetchers : Escape from Pork Belly, but they released it as DLC rather than its own game.

I was thinking about Keep Driving, and Dice Gambit for the soundtrack, that was also when I thought about Cassette Beasts. But they are not from 2024. I will probably vote for the abbot rapping in Esperanto from Metaphor.

The problem is, who is the arbiter of that?

Intolerance is well-defined in many languages, and, so people do not confuse I am talking about milk intolerance, the hate crime is defined in many law codes across the globe, including Canada. There is no need for philosophical discussion of what is “intolerance”.

There is no need for a linguistic expert to realize someone’s discourse is ill intentioned, when the semantics of “the victim deserves to suffer” is the same as the call to action.

For countries that depend on common law, the account in question was already punished in other instances, creating precedent.

The modus operandi of these kinds of accounts are also well-know and documented. And popularity contests should not be a tool to define what is right in an online platform where there is no real accountability. How many upvotes do you think a single worker in a troll farm can generate in a couple of minutes?

We should not depend on admin humour for results (philosophies, as you suggest), but I agree that we should help when/where we can, their volunteer work is invaluable for the health of the instance.

I think that the discussions worth having in these kinds of posts are about methods, checks and balance to prevent bad decisions from people in power, and that people will be fairly treated.

Methods are many, and there are many examples out there.

• would twitter like community notes solve some of these problems or create more? Would lemmy repo accept such PR?
• the problem of twitter x Brazil: is it worth locking those accounts while an investigation is pending? One of them was instigating machete attacks in school/nursery. When would this lock be ok, or not ok?
• how long should people complain/report before a something (an investigation, a lock, or a conclusion) happens. - The account we both mentioned not in this thread (but in this post) went on it for 2 months before being banned - they did not leave on their own. …

I do not understand people here defending misinformation/intolerance as a merit of discussion. The dichotomy of naive or complicity.

People spreading misinformation and intolerance are not here for healthy arguments, you just need to check their history to see their dishonesty and ill temper.

In the meanwhile, accounts like the one OP highlighted are just creating trouble for mods of other instances to solve.

If you check the history of lemmy.ca, you will see that this intolerant propaganda/misinformation is cyclical. One user disappears and another comes in. Sadly, it usually takes a few months before something happens to them.

The mod of the community you shared, created an account and on the same day started to post propaganda and tiptoeing around the instance rules. Before, it was another user posting the same content from the same sources, with the same tactics, until they went a bit too far and were banned.

They always do the same thing, create an account, create a community with a “normal” name, like geopolitics, and start spreading stuff. I would not be surprised if it is an agency doing this kind of stuff: I cannot imagine someone being so evil to do it willingly, might be either coerced or depending on the money.

I do not mind when the propaganda is benign, like bots posting random video game or Canadian news, but I draw the line on intolerance.

Another of those intolerant people tactics (tiptoeing) is that they do not demand for people to get killed in their comments. They construct it as a consequence of the victims’ actions, they deserve to die. For me, that is just as bad, if not worse, because they know the things they are doing are wrong, and they are trying hard to no get caught.

I hope the instance comes with a better and swift way to deal with these kinds of problems.

A friend suggested me Sailfish OS, sadly it only supports Xperia, and Sony does not make phones that attend the frequency where I live.

My next “phone” will be a pocket computer with a data chip. For the last 20 years, I only received phone calls from solicitors/scammers.

If you don’t mind old hardware, get it refurbished from Amazon. You can get pixel 7 for 400 CAD, sometimes less. Amazon quality control is better than ebay, so was the support.

My biggest problem is with the camera of all mobiles, the photo looks good because there is a lot of processing in the background, and it becomes very apparent how the hardware is bad when you take pictures with an aftermarket OS.

Those metrics are bollocks.

For Denuvo, you don’t need their data. Plenty of games let you play a week before release, then add Denuvo, wait a few months, then remove. During Denuvo days, there is a flood of poor reviews associated with performance.

For the 20%, they just invented a number, there is no real base for that, at least not a solid one. I wonder if Denuvo takes in account the number of games returned because of them.

A long time ago, a game distributor was a guest lecturer to a class I was taking, and I learned a bunch there. For piracy, it seems that their company navigate the seven seas to count downloads and estimate black market sales, multiply by the game price, and assume that was lost revenue caused by piracy. It was very weird, as some games piracy numbers were 100 times bigger than the amount sold and sounded like they were losing billions of dollars in revenue per game because of that. I asked if they really think they would sell that number of games if there was no piracy, if the people pirating games would buy/could afford the full price they took in account - they went from a well-formed teacher to straight red face mouth foaming dogma discourse. There is a lot of money in DRM, and it seems they want to keep that way with doctrine and/or bribery.

For the class, we (students) had to do a market research, and of our small reach (local game forums, malls and where people buy pirated CDs - this was a long time ago), we did not meet a single person self identified as pirate, who would buy a game they want to play if the pirated version was not available, either free from web or street vendors, they would just play something else they could find and afford. That did not bode well with the guest lecturer, but a lot of our findings about piracy narrowed it down to availability, price and convenience - well, there was a minor percentage of people that would always and only pirate for the most diverse reasons even if they could afford the game.

Thanks for sharing that! It was a great read and BC Greens seems like a solid party.

I remember taking one of those tests on how I would vote in some scenarios, and it recommended me to the Green Party at the end. At the time, I did not care much because there were some problems with “Green” parties around the world receiving money from Oil and Russia to promote questionable rules and favour war.

Later I learned that Russia was also financing other parties, sometimes both oppositions in the same country. And I just saw that the federal Green party acted promptly on the removal of those bad actors from their rooster, contrary to other parties.

I will keep my eyes on the Greens, and figure out who is the representative in my riding.