Point of order; being strongly pro-Taiwan/anti CPC is as Reddit as it gets, whereas Lemmy, which was founded by Leftists booted off of Reddit (I mean it’s lemmy.ml for Marxist-Leninist, etc.) is not traditionally a place that’s going to focus on mainstream western perspectives of China.
Not even wading into the actual debate here, just figured I should note that
While I’m sure their casualties are undercounted (as are everyone’s), I find it very easy to believe that the real numbers are still low; dropping guided munitions on children doesn’t expose your troops to much risk
Here’s my source. It’s the latter case, they use digital sales figures from the companies that provide them.
You raise a good point: if Larian aren’t sharing sales figures then it’s not possible to definitively compare them. I don’t think the 22M figure is very credible (as the other commenter said it doesn’t match up with the data we do have regarding player count/copies sold, and came completions) but even 5-7M copies sold sounds like it would place BG3 on the list. There’s enough bleakness in the gaming scene as it is, so I’m glad to hear it might not be quite as bleak as I thought.
I genuinely wonder how much it matters though. From online discussions you’ll see that Baldur’s Gate 3 is beloved by fans and held up as a benchmark for community engagement and listening to player feedback. It won GotY, had a launch far beyond anything the devs expected, and got incredible rave reviews.
But if you look at the top 20 best-selling games of the year, Starfield is #10 despite a lukewarm reception, numerous issues, and being accessible via Xbox Gamepass, while BG3 isn’t even on the list.
I think it really brings into perspective just how small a minority the people who post online about these things are, regardless of platform. Maybe the Gamers don’t know jack about your job, or maybe all their criticisms are 100% right. If it sells millions of copies either way, who cares?
The occasional salty dev, I guess
Check out the “Leviathan” album by Mastodon. A good number of bangers on there, one after another
So I recently listened to an episode of the Data over Dogma podcast specifically regarding angels and demons. It’s hosted by Dan Beecher (an atheist podcaster) and Dr. Dan McClellan (a Bible scholar), and they discuss how angels and demons are actually depicted/described in the Bible, compared to the extra-biblical descriptions of both that we’ve gotten over the millennia. It’s about an hour but should serve as a nice little primer on the subject, with some recommendations for further study.
Yeah where are those descriptions coming from? Also mentions “the strike workers’ strike” and repeats “politics” twice
Honestly micro lithography and chip design in and of themselves have been moving towards only a few big players in the space. TSMC is more advanced than any other manufacturer, and NVIDIA’s chip designs at the top end just have no competition for raw performance and capability, even aside from their software/AI work. Don’t get me wrong, all the major chip manufacturers have their respective anticompetitive bullshit, but traditional silicon is such a hard space to even keep up in, never mind break into.
I mean I straight-up didn’t say any of that, nor is it reasonable to infer that I take those positions from what I did say. I’m not even talking about the article; I’m talking about your initial critique of OPs comment. Now if you think that their comment is wrong or misleading then ok, sure, but that’s not what you said (or at least it didn’t seem to be).
This seems like it would be better suited as a top-level response to the post rather than as a response to something that I never said. There are enough libs on the internet that excuse or ignore fascism/imperialism such that you don’t need to invent new ones to argue with.
That’s a false dichotomy, but honestly even if you granted it I don’t think it affects the validity of the original statement. People dying for one thing when they think they’re dying for another is sad, even if it happens everywhere all the time. I also don’t really get the contention, that saying “a particular aspect of Russian nationalism is bad” is not notable, when this is literally a post about a particular aspect of Russian nationalism?
How does the existence of military propaganda in the US make the observation that there’s military propaganda in Russia a weird comment?
It’s essentially the lemmy version of Apollo for Reddit, which was an iOS only app (different devs though)
But even if you grant the two premises there, that TikTok’s data collection is beyond that of other apps, and that said data is given to the PRC to access, this draft agreement’s solution to those problems is “let us access that collected data instead of them”. It implements measures that would affect future changes to TOS and policies, but I don’t see anything about scaling back what’s collected now. From what I can tell, this is just trying to replace who’s steering the ship. If the solution that “stops the Chinese government from spying on US citizens” just changes the government that’s doing the spying, I don’t see how that helps said US citizens in any way. The CPC isn’t the one who can put me on a no-fly list on a whim.
That’s my fundamental issue with this, as well as the relevant proposed legislation; it’s not a good-faith attempt to protect US citizens.
This is missing some pretty important context, in that CPC policy is generally more restrictive around social media and youth usage. This is a country that has legal limits on the amount of time minors can play video games (and I know that’s not unique to China). If you’re making the point, in good faith, that China has identified some specific evil in regards to TikTok, it’s not enough to merely show that they have restrictions on it; you would also need to show how this differs from the way they treat Weibo, bilibili, etc.
So these two provisions caught my eye; under the draft agreement, executive branch agencies (the article gives the example of the DOJ or DOD) would have the ability to (among other things)
Examine TikTok’s U.S. facilities, records, equipment and servers with minimal or no notice,
In some circumstances, require ByteDance to temporarily stop TikTok from functioning in the United States.
In the case of the former, would that include user data? Given the general US gov approach to digital privacy I assume so, and granting yourself the power to do the things you’re afraid China is doing seems appropriately ironic for us.
As far as the latter, I wonder how broadly “some circumstances” is defined. If the language is broad enough, that would open the door to de facto censorship if a certain trend or info around a certain event is spreading on the site right as the government magically decides it needs to pause TikTok due to, “uh, terrorism or something, don’t worry about it.”
I’m also curious how durable this agreement would be. How hard would it be for the next administration to decide to pitch a fit and renegotiate or throw out the deal pending a new, even harsher agreement?
It would seem to me that this is pretty nakedly an assertion of power over an entity based outside the US, and not an agreement meant to protect US citizens in any meaningful way. I think any defense of this agreement as a way to protect privacy or mental health or whatever won’t be able to honestly reconcile with the fact that these exact same concerns exist with domestic social media companies
Honestly, when it first entered early access it basically was. Surfaces were murderous until they fixed them
My gut feeling is sometime around the original release date? If memory serves, DOS2 got it like the day after launch
Thanks for the correction! I still hear that usage fairly often and wasn’t up with the discourse around it. Like the other reply I’m also more partial to “folks” personally (as well as “y’all”), but I think I still use “guys” out of habit on occasion
I’ve noticed that “gay” is used as a more general term for members of the LGBTQ+ community, similar to how “guys” has a pretty common gender-neutral usage
EDIT: tweaked the wording a bit
I don’t see there being a sale at all. ByteDance isn’t gonna sell the world’s hottest social media platform simply because a foreign country demands it, and even if it were a lucrative enough offer to be tempting, the CPC wouldn’t allow it anyway. If something like this happened in the other direction, I think 1/4 of the US Senate would go into cardiac arrest on the spot, and there’s exactly a 0% chance it would be allowed to happen