I would call Hades and pretty much anything people call an “action roguelike” a roguelite, but I have a hard time calling something not a roguelike for using graphics, even being pretty strict about the definition. Like, there are a number of originally-ASCII roguelikes that have tilesets. Those don’t functionally change the game in any way than other than directly dropping the tiles in. Does that mean that Nethack-family games or Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup aren’t roguelikes?

My red lines are:

• Gotta be turn-based. Maybe I’d accept a purely forced-turn version of a turn-based roguelike, like Mangband.

• At least some element of procedurally-generated maps and loot that alters how one needs to play the game from run to run. I’d definitely call many games that still have many handcrafted maps – Tales of Mag’eyal 2 or Caves of Qud, say – roguelikes.

• At least the option for permadeath, and that that be the primary mode of play. Some Caves of Qud was originally permadeath-only, but added a mode that avoids it.

• Grid-based. Hex grid is fine, like Hoplite.

Those are Berlin Interpretation elements. In addition:

• Top-down view (or functionally-equivalent, like equivalent, like isometric). I wouldn’t call a first-person grid-based game – and there were a lot of 1980s and 1990s RPGs that used that structure – a roguelike.

• Only direct control of one character at a time. I wouldn’t rule out Nethack for indirectly-controlled pets or Caves of Qud for letting one switch which character the player’s “mind” is controlling.

I don’t think that I’d make it a hard requirement, but all good roguelikes that I’ve played involve a lot of analysis and trying to find synergies among character abilities or item or monster or map characteristics, often in nonobvious ways. That’s a big part of the game.

A 401k isn’t mandatory. If you’ve got an issue with having a 401k, you don’t need to do so. I suspect, however, that you’ll be hard-pressed to find a route that will provide long-term returns as solid as regularly dropping funds into an index fund in a 401k.

My brother or sister, invest in index funds, not the stock market.

I mean, while I get what you’re saying and don’t disagree, I’d phrase it as “hold an index fund rather than stock in individual companies”. ETFs themselves are traded on the stock market.

I don’t think that the problem is 2FA itself so much as poor UX on existing systems.

Let’s say that I have a little USB keychain dongle in my pocket with an “approve” button and a tiny screen. When I sign in, at the time that I plug my password in, I plug the dongle in. It shows the information for whom I am approving authentication. I push the “approve” button.

It’s got a trusted display (unlike a smartcard, so that a point-of-sale system can’t claim that I’m approving something other than what I am).

It can store multiple keys, and I basically use it for any credentials that I don’t mind carrying with myself.

I then keep another, “higher security” dongle at home with more-sensitive keys.

Does that add some overhead relative to just entering my password? Yeah. But is it a big deal? No. And it makes it a lot harder for someone to swipe credentials.

I agree that using phone-linked SMS 2FA authentication is problematic (for a number of reasons, not just because it locks you to a phone, but because there are also privacy implications there).

If a nuclear missile is launched at the United States the President has just 6 minutes to come to terms with that and decide to launch a counter attack or not.

US nuclear deterrence in 2024 doesn’t rely on launch-on-warning, but on the expectation that no hostile power has the ability to locate and destroy the US ballistic missile submarine fleet prior to them performing their counterlaunches.

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

In nuclear strategy, a retaliatory strike or second-strike capability is a country’s assured ability to respond to a nuclear attack with powerful nuclear retaliation against the attacker. To have such an ability (and to convince an opponent of its viability) is considered vital in nuclear deterrence, as otherwise the other side might attempt to try to win a nuclear war in one massive first strike against its opponent’s own nuclear forces.

Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are the traditional, but very expensive, method of providing a second strike capability, though they need to be supported by a reliable method of identifying who the attacker is.

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

Launch on warning (LOW), or fire on warning, is a strategy of nuclear weapon retaliation where a retaliatory strike is launched upon warning of enemy nuclear attack and while its missiles are still in the air, before detonation occurs.

In 1997, a US official stated that the US had the technical capability for launch on warning but did not intend to use a launch on warning posture and that the position had not changed in the 1997 presidential decision directive on nuclear weapon doctrine.

This non-reliance on launch-on-warning is also true of the French and British nuclear deterrents – the British don’t even maintain a nuclear arsenal other than on subs, so they haven’t even bothered with maintaining the option to do so, and the French only use tactical ALCMs in addition to the strategic sub-launched weapons; those weapons probably would be poorly-suited for such a role.

The Brits rather famously have the “letter of last resort”.

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

The letters of last resort are four identically worded handwritten letters from the prime minister of the United Kingdom to the commanding officers of the four British ballistic missile submarines and stored on board of each. They contain orders on what action to take if an enemy nuclear strike has both destroyed the British government and has also killed or otherwise incapacitated both the prime minister and their designated “second person” of responsibility, typically a high-ranking member of the Cabinet such as the deputy prime minister or the first secretary of state. If the orders are carried out, the action taken could be the last official act of His Majesty’s Government.

If the letters are not used during the term of the prime minister who wrote them, they are destroyed unopened after that person leaves office, so that their content remains unknown to anyone except the issuer.

Process

A new prime minister writes a set of letters immediately after taking office and being told by the Chief of the Defence Staff “precisely what damage a Trident missile could cause”. The documents are then delivered to the submarines in sealed envelopes, and the previous prime minister’s letters are destroyed without being opened.

In the event of the deaths of both the prime minister and the designated alternative decision-maker as a result of a nuclear strike, the commander(s) of any nuclear submarine(s) on patrol at the time would use a series of checks to ascertain whether the letters of last resort must be opened.

According to Peter Hennessy’s book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, the process by which a Vanguard-class submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes, amongst other checks, establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting.

In 1983, the procedure for Polaris submarines was to open the envelopes if there was an evident nuclear attack, or if all UK naval broadcasts had ceased for four hours.

Options

While the contents of these letters are secret, according to the December 2008 BBC Radio 4 documentary The Human Button, there were four known options given to the prime minister to include in the letters. The prime minister might instruct the submarine commander to:

• retaliate with nuclear weapons;

• not retaliate;

• use their own judgement; or,

• place the submarine under an allied country’s command, if possible. The documentary mentions Australia and the United States.

The Guardian reported in 2016 that the options are said to include: “Put yourself under the command of the United States, if it is still there”, “Go to Australia”, “Retaliate”, or “Use your own judgement”. The actual option chosen remains known only to the writer of the letter.

for some reason

It’s called price discrimination.

If there are multiple groups of potential purchasers who have different levels of willingness to pay, if you can identify some characteristic of people willing to pay more, then you can create a version of the product that targets that characteristic and thus the group.

Price discrimination (“differential pricing”,[1][2] “equity pricing”, “preferential pricing”,[3] “dual pricing”,[4] “tiered pricing”,[5] and “surveillance pricing”[6]) is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of.[7][8][2] Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy.[2] Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers’ willingness to pay[8][2][4] and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.[9]

• “Product versioning”[8][16] or simply “versioning” (or “second-degree” price differentiation) — offering a product line[13] by creating slightly differentiated products for the purpose of price differentiation,[8][16] i.e. a vertical product line.[17] Another name given to versioning is “menu pricing”.[14][18]

In this case, you’re going to have something like a group of “value customers” who care a lot about how much they need to spend on the game. And then you’re going to have “premium customers” who aren’t too fussed about what they pay, but want the very fanciest experience.

If you had just one version, sold the game at the “value customer” price, then you’d lose out on what the “premium customer” would pay. If you sold it at the “premium customer” price, then you’d have a bunch of “value customers” for whom the game would no longer be a worthwhile purchase, who wouldn’t buy the game, and you’d lose the sales to them. But by selling it at multiple prices, you can optimize for both groups.

EDIT: l’d also add, on the technical rather than economic side, that I’ve messed around with having a custom HRTF model myself, as Linux (and maybe elsewhere, dunno) games that use OpenAL let you specify a custom HRTF model in the config file. My own impression was that any impact on audio experience was pretty minimal. Might be different if someone had really weirdly-shaped ears or something, dunno.

I remember being outdoors feeling like a relief in the original Half-Life.

In Far Cry, I definitely preferred being outside. Same with Metro.

I think in most FPS games I’ve played, the player doesn’t have the developer ambush them with stuff outside. Maybe that’s a factor.

Top Gun

kagis

Apparently this is at least his second election doing this.

I’m a little suspicious that the goal is to promote his business more than running for office.

He apparently bought a furniture store and converted the whole thing into a massive gun store with a bunch of amenities with "the largest showroom and indoor shooting range in the Midwest. "

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2018/08/27/top-guns-gun-store-indoor-range/

EDIT: As I vaguely remember, when US legislation went through restricting unsolicited telemarketing and such, there was an exception for political campaigns.

checks

https://www.donotcall.gov/

The National Do Not Call Registry gives you a choice about whether to receive telemarketing calls

• You can register your home or mobile phone for free.

• After you register, other types of organizations may still call you, such as charities, political groups, debt collectors and surveys. To learn more, read our FAQs.

Yeah. Thinking that might be the angle.

I don’t think that you can patent game mechanics in the US, have read about that before, but it sounds like this lawsuit is in Japan, and their IP system may not work the same way.

EDIT: Sorry, I’m wrong. It’s that game rules aren’t covered by copyright, that’s what I was remembering.

!buildapc@lemmy.ca for a link that will work for anyone, regardless of their home instance.

Apparently the EULA blocked them from lawsuits, as people have tried suing them before.

This guy tried suing them six years back over his $4500.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/star-citizen-court-documents-reveal-the-messy-reality-of-crowdfunding-a-dollar200-million-game/

Ken Lord was one of those fans, and an early backer of Star Citizen. He’s got a Golden Ticket, a mark on his account that singles him out as an early member of the community. Between April 2013 and April 2018, Ken pledged $4,495 to the project. The game still isn’t out, and Lord wants his money back. RSI wouldn’t refund it, so Lord took the developer to small-claims court in California.

On June 13, 2018, a judge ruled in favor of Star Citizen. According to Lord—and the LA county court records—the judge dismissed the case without prejudice, saying an arbitration clause buried in the Star Citizen end-user license agreement prevented Lord, or anyone, from taking RSI to court for a refund on a game that some backers think may never come out.

I suppose a class action lawyer might be able to find some jurisdiction in which they were taking money and running afoul of consumer protection laws.

Thing is, I think that a class action lawyer is going to want to go after someone with money, and when CIG runs out of funds, I don’t expect that they’re going to be a very interesting target.

https://gamerant.com/star-citizen-development-history-kickstarter-budget-delays-fans-disappointed/

In October 2012, Star Citizen was officially revealed, alongside a Kickstarter campaign that would be opened a week later. The Kickstarter page discussed the game in pretty extensive detail, boasting a long list of features that the game would allegedly have by launch.

Star Citizen was going to have a “persistent universe,” a vast multiplayer environment that allowed players to trade, fight, and talk amongst each other, acting as a simulation of a real sci-fi galaxy. Alongside this, a singleplayer campaign named “Squadron 42” would also be released, featuring co-op. Upon release, Star Citizen was going to have no pay-to-win mechanics, and no ongoing subscription model. Simply put, if people pledged money once, then they were done, and would receive the full game at launch, slated for November 2014.

Twelve years ago, the game had a release date set to be two years in the future.

Today, it also seems to have a release date of two years in the future.

https://www.33rdsquare.com/demystifying-aaa-games-the-past-present-and-future-of-blockbuster-gaming/

Lengthy development cycles – Given their complexity, AAA games take 2-5 years to develop. This allows time for extensive testing and polish.

Two years is at the lower end of what it’d take a studio to do an AAA game from scratch.

I tend to manually strip out anything random hash-looking from URLs. Not so much because I’m worried about identity being exposed, but because it just encourages data-mining and figuring out what causes people to post links places.

There’s some open-source app I recall on Android in F-Droid that will do this for a set of known sites, “Link Cleaner” or something.

kagis

“Leon – URL Cleaner”. I assume that this is an allusion to the movie.

https://github.com/svenjacobs/leon

I also strip off the extension that the Wikipedia app adds to indicate that Wikipedia links are from the app.

I also strip off “m.” leading URLs, like “m.wikipedia.org”, since that, by convention, forces desktop users to see a mobile version of a site, which is not normally what they want, whereas a non-.m link will still show the mobile site to mobile users.

US:

https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/privacy-full

Last updated on March 28, 2024

Canada:

https://www.paypal.com/ca/legalhub/privacy-full

Last updated on July 24, 2023

So I’d guess not.

But you might just want to keep an eye on that, because just because they haven’t changed it today doesn’t mean that they won’t later. Like, if their people are thinking that this is a good idea to make money in the US, they might also think that it’d be useful in Canada. Don’t know if Canada has any restrictions on such a change.

goes to find a table of Category 5 storms

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml

This has the number of hurricane strikes on the US in each strength category, binned by decade.

Not for vegetarians or Muslims!

I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You

I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.

But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.

Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.

I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.

But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.

If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.

I did like Sim City a fair bit.

• Just set up your browser to delete cookies on exit. If you want, just have it delete them from specifically that site. The entire debate over whether-or-not a site sets a cookie seems to me to be pretty pointless. If a site can set cookies, then some bad actor will. The dialogs that sites put up talking about it are pointless. No solution other than having your browser not retain them regardless of what a site wants to do is going to be a reliable solution. Not policies, not laws.

  I have my browser delete all cookies on exit. I have a very short whitelist of sites that I permit to keep cookies and track me. Every one of those is one that I need to log in to use anyway – so I could be tracked with or without a cookie – and the only thing the cookie does is buys me not needing to log in every time, doesn’t have privacy implications.

• Paying doesn’t buy you anything unless they offer a no-log, no-data-mining policy. If you log in to use the site, then they can track you anyway via the credentials you use.

• They’re not imposing it on you. They’re offering you a service that costs them money. They give you news, you give them money or data. If you don’t want to do that deal, there’s a whole Internet out there. Don’t go to that particular site. There are lots of websites out there, many of which offer the same deal. Getting upset that somewhere on the Internet, someone is offering a deal that you don’t want seems pointless.

  If you want to have some kind of tax-funded news site, go advocate for that. Yelling at them isn’t going to get you there.

  If you want to just view news done by volunteers, something like WikiNews, then go visit those sites instead. Maybe contribute work as well. I don’t think that volunteer news is going to realistically compete with commercial news, but hey, there was also a point when people thought the same thing about volunteer-run encyclopedias, so maybe it’ll get there.

I’ll also add that I’m going to be generous to the EU and assume that the goal of their “cookie warning” law, which is why many European websites show these, was to raise awareness of cookies and privacy implications by having warnings plastered all over, so that it starts people thinking about privacy. Because if the goal was actually to let people avoid cookies, then it is costly, disruptive and wildly ineffectual compared to just setting a setting in the browser, makes actually having the browser delete cookies more-annoying, and duplicates a browser-side standard, P3P, that already accomplished something similar, and was just all around a really bad law.

Can be monitored with NUT over USB or Ethernet

NUT has a hardware compatibility list.

https://networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html

Oddly-enough, it doesn’t on lemmy.today’s Web UI, but it looks fine on beehaw.org’s Web UI. Not sure if there’s some sort of problem with propagating updates, or if it just takes a while, but I reckon that you’ve done the right thing if it looks fine now on the instance hosting the community.

Thanks!