If you think preventing predatory practices through legislation is a “nanny state” then I think you fail to understand the purpose of a government in a society with profit-driven companies

I mean, in the US before the reversal of the Chevron doctorine, the easy solution would be to pass legislation banning “dark patterns” then assign a regulatory agency to design guidance and enforce the law

Gambling is heavily regulated in most countries, often including requiring the odds of winning being clearly listed and regulating the profit margin that The House can take (usually limited to less than 10%)

Many casinos and developers of addictive games will hire psychologists and other experts on human condition to help them find ways to make the game more addictive and make it easier to seperate players from their money. These “dark patterns” both make gaming worse and make it more dangerous for anyone unfortunate enough to develop an addiction.

In short, I welcome regulation on the worst aspects of the game industry to keep the worst aspects from become too financially successful to not implement (see the $60 AA and AAA games that launched with lootboxes and predatory micro-transactions like this one about 10 years ago before some countries announced they were investigating regulating such practices)

By my memory of what I read headscale is a reverse engineered backend using the official tailscale client, so more opportunities for breakage or the weird issues that come from a reverse engineered server with a stock closed source client. I also could be horribly misinformed and/or misremembering

This guy clearly didn’t watch mythbusters in the mid 2000s

Oh yeah I fully expect it at some point in the future. Right now their business model appears to be “get the nerds hooked on using it on their personal stuff to see how awesome it is to then sell enterprise licenses” and they’re in the “establish growth” phase so I think there’s a few years before enshitification begins.

There is a competitor called Netbird that does similar and is fully open source and self-hostable. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks good on (virtual) paper

I think it was initially 5 before they upped it to 100. They said they initially assumed they’d have tons of people using the subnet routing to share more than the limited number of devices, but found that wasn’t the case so they upped the free accounts

That’s honestly kinda funny but also very useful!

Or just install Tailscale which makes it even easier and is free for like 3 computers.

Free for 100 devices! You can legit install it on every device virtual and physical device in your home and maybe run out of devices for the free plan. Right now I use it to secure the connection between my VPS proxy and my Minecraft server, as duct tape fixing some network fuckery, and as my primary means of connecting to services inside and outside of my LAN

I’m guilty of 8am yardwork, but mostly mowing in the hottest part of summer at the coolest part of the day. I’m also guilty of 8pm yardwork when it’s just the only time I can find to get it done. I only mow once every 2-4 weeks depending on how much my grass has grown, so I figure that balances it out somewhat

The Sims 2 had wonderful keyboard shortcuts for toggling walls and jumping between floors via Home and End and Page up and Page Down respectively and this was carried through to The Sims 4

If it’s a game like an MMO (which several on that list are) they’d have to publish the server software in order to avoid fully killing the game. And to publish the server software that was only ever expected to run in their own datacenters they’d then have to publish documentation, dependencies, etc. and this is all assuming that it can be contained in a single installer for a single machine without relying on additional services they host, and assuming it has reasonable system requirements for average users to self host.

That’s also assuming playing an MMO alone/with only 1-2 people doesn’t suck. Play some 2009scape single player without adventure bots. It feels lonely as all heck

Plus there’s all of the legal and PR hurdles to ensure you’re not exposing yourself to undue risk.

Basically a million reasons for a company to not spend a thousand work hours ensuring their crappy MMO (I’ve tried out a couple of the listed MMOs, they were unsuccessful for a reason) can continue to be played after they’ve divested from it

Looks like some of those are games that were cancelled, some were online multiplayer games that had the servers shutdown, some were simply removed from the Microsoft Store and some were single player games with always online DRM for which they shut the servers down. So it’s not all super scummy nonsense

Try to take a couple of minutes to look up at the sky every day. Whether it’s pretty clouds or a cool plane or the moon and the stars. Seems too many people end up missing what’s right over their heads

I feel this. I recently hit 10 years on my steam account and kinda came to the realization that “I’ve spent thousands of hours in some of these games and what do I have to show for it?” So I’ve been cutting back on my time gaming, and trying other things.

It sucks though because video games are one of the cheapest hobbies. Spend about $500-1000 on a decent gaming computer every 3-10 years then $20-40 here and there on games as they tickle your fancy

But I’ve developed a joy for fitness which is cool. I started biking and on March I struggled to make it around the (very hilly) 1/4 mile block but now I’m biking 8 miles a day.

Anyways I’m looking at the finances and barring some unscheduled catastrophe, I should be good to start a more expensive hobby actually making stuff next year…I hope

I feel like some nudity and sex scenes when it’s appropriate are better than not. Really ruins my sense of immersion when there’s a naked person with a random potted plant conveniently blocking your view of their bits. Either commit to them being naked or don’t have them naked at all is my take

Witcher 3 it is more explicit if you buy the services on offer in the brothel. But it’s still far less than one romp in Wicked Whims, which of course is all mods so no motion capture there

Bankruptcy is an expensive and not-fun process. Basically, similar to what happens on death all creditors are carefully listed out and prioritized, assets beyond the bare minimum to live are liquidated to pay creditors what they can and of course the bankruptcy lawyers fees don’t help with the mountains of debt and costs. Certain debts cannot be discharged through bankruptcy so basically you trash your finances, mental health and credit for a shot at maybe being able to fix your finances with less debt payments

Sounds like the kind of commute where an ebike would be life changing in time savings

Locally it’s not uncommon to find a vehicle abandoned on a Saturday or Sunday morning after being involved in a single-vehicle accident, usually because the driver was drunk and snuck off to sober up before collecting their vehicle and figuring out their consequences. Drinking culture and driving culture are a very deadly combination of course