Given how big my library is and the fact that I rarely buy full-price, its hard to pick a single item.

If I had to pick one worst, it would probably be Company of Heroes 3. I was really hopeful for the game, and got it bundled with my CPU when building a new PC, but its just not very good. The campaign, the main part I was interested in, is slow and samey and uninteresting. The multiplayer is even worse, being riddled with microtransactions, lootboxes, and other such stuff in ways that significantly impact gameplay, in a supposedly competitive PvP game. Even if we assume the game was equivalent to $20, I only put in four hours, and didn’t enjoy any of it.

In terms of best, the most technically correct would probably be Counter Strike GO/2. I’ve spent about $100 on it, between initial price, battle passes, and skins on the market, but selling those skins has earned me about $140 in revenue, so at 2000 hours, thats negative 2 cents an hour.

Excluding revenue made, its going to be Minecraft by a country mile. I’ve easily put in 10,000 hours since when I started playing mid-beta, so pessimisticly, it’d be around a quarter cent per hour. Honourable, more reasonable mentions would go to Gmod, where it works out to about 1 cent per hour when including time in the editor, and Dota and War Thunder, which are free, but I’ve spent thousands of hours in each and so bought about 2 cents per hour of microtransactions.

I do have an old mini-pc with an AMD A10 in it. Do you think that might work? If so, what sort of software (particularly OS) should I be running on it, since even with its current Kubuntu install, it really struggles to run YouTube?

Unfortunately I don’t have enough money to buy a PC decent enough for a home server - or really the space for that matter.

I couldn’t find any that meet even the top priorities, nonetheless other stuff.

Unfortunately, its really hardware-intensive. It uses ray-tracing, so it struggles to run even on my 5th-gen Ryzen, RTX3050 system. If you have a large enough group and can run it, its pretty fun, though.

I’m open to pretty much anything genre-wise, although I editted the post to narrow down the criteria a bit more.

All AI work is public domain, but also, its thought that Spotify themselves likely create some of that AI content - although I’m not familiar enough with Spotify to confirm that myself.

$1049 USD for the base model, and even more ludicrous, $1500 CAD.

Ouch. Not unexpected in the current market - not even really overpriced relative to the competition, but still… ouch.

Is YouTube actually at this point? I know a couple channels I follow have started using AI more widely, at least in thumbnails, specifically because it gets more clicks.

Unironically have already been doing this. Marks lost from typos are much less than those from AI false positives.

and is stronger than ever

Arguing semantics here, but this is a bit of a stretch. Iran has suffered very significant damage. A more accurate assessment would be that it withstood the US’s onslaught without having their military or their government broken, and have exposed the US military as being too inept to properly wage war.

The takeaway is similar in the context of the war, but its the US that has fallen rather than Iran having risen, which has much more significant global implications.

Honestly, my immediately reaction is that all three of these genres are basically live-service MMOs. Getting and maintaining a large enough playerbase would not be an easy feat. The different gameplay loops may make things more difficult, but extraction shooters and survival games have a lot of overlap, although I can’t picture how a 5v5 shooter would benefit from being built on top of this.

I would also warn that large-scale projects like these tend to be exponentially more difficult, without significantly increased odds of success. If this is a long-term passion project, no reason not to pursue it, but if you’re hoping to turn it into a buisness, you’re probably better off looking into something with a lower playercount required.

Lemmy’s core developers are Tankies (radical supporters of the CCP and anyone else claiming to carry on second world ideology, such as Putin) as are many of those running older instances. This includes older instances such as Lemmygrad and lemmy.ml, which makes them very entrenched. Still, they seem to be a very vocal minority, since larger instances like Lemmy.world lean away from that, and PieFed (an alternative but still intercompatible Lemmy alternative) is popular in part from those wishing to move away from Lemmy’s tankie developers.

For reference, I’m coming from older engines like Source or Quake engine, where levels are unique files separate from other entities, unlike modern engines where level geometry is treated the same as any other entity.

I’m assuming this is for a fairly tight, enclosed space, but am mostly concerned with the static level geometry rather than than props or other repeated details. So if I’m understanding right, that would mean generally the geometry is broken into a number of peices, such as each room being a single model.

Most people aren’t super involved with AI, and basically use it passively. In the same vien, up until fairly recently, social media was generally seen as a good thing because people enjoyed it and it wasn’t common knowledge (not that evidence didn’t exist) all the negative impacts it had. Thats not to say social media, or generative AI shouldn’t exist, but the topic is more complex, and most people don’t engage with that complexity and simply do whats easiest or what marketing tells them to do.

surely they wouldnt have invested trillons on it if it was garbage

Investors throw money at stupid stuff all the time. Tech in particular tends to be volitile and speculative. I mean, right before AI, it was NFTs, and before that, “the metaverse”, and befors that blockchain. All of these were said to be gigantic new technologies that would revolutionize every industry and every aspect of life, and each had billions (trillions?) of dollars invested in them. Each of them lasted about a year before their value collapsed and they were realized to be overpriced dead-ends and empty marketing.

Just because some companies sells USB butplugs it doesn’t mean USB standard is necessarily a pain in the ass overall.

No, but it does mean that the USB standard allows for being a pain in the ass, compatibility-wise, which kind-of defeats the point.

On the other hand, I have a USB-C charged laptop, but it only accepts one specific spec of 45w, and one specific spec for 60w. This means that 90% of usb-c chargers don’t work for it, including chargers that support 45w or 60w charging. This means that even if you buy a charger with the right wattage, its effectively random whether it will work or not.

Unfortunately, given the current economy, its not suprising. With how much prices have risen, the old pricing competed with and often beat out even used desktops.

This kind of “I am immune to snakebite because of my religion” thing has a history of getting people killed.

Was this a case of overreliance on faith? Seems to me more likely that its just that the idea that a snake could bite him and it will hurt that is too complex for him to understand.

I’ve been slowly transitioning everything to Linux. I’ve been using Kubuntu so far, but have been encountering enough issues that I might have to go back and redo it with a new distro at some point.