microsoft surface pen is my touchstone for this. the only way i could get new batteries was online and the pen lasted for so long if i bought a pack of 4 batteries i’d have lost the other two but the time they ran or so id need to but a whole new pack.

you make an interesting point and it reminds me of a counter point: that modern wars might have higher death tolls than historical wars, but modern wars - with modern weapons - end up costing less life overall compared to the populations of the time.

for tribal conflict of humans past, victory could mean wiping out the other tribe - 50% death toll or higher. as weapons advanced and more efficient and more destructive tactics emerged, wars can be more violent and more deadly but shorter and with fewer deaths compared to the overall population. wars became efficient.

all this is to say that if we didn’t have modern weapons there would be more killing - not less. “victory” would necessitate more deaths.

i personally see them as different tools of the same end goal - wealth generation in a checked and sustainable manner. capitalist environments inspire innovation, but require boundaries set (regulators) and a political environment which is alert and aware of exploitation and can make the calls about what is or is not acceptable.

software engineer in a medium-large public tech company, i agree. i can’t even imagine the amount of stress the legal team must be under to constantly be discovering what management and engineering have messed up this time…and discover the problem is 6 months old and if a regulator catches wind of it it’ll be painful.

and don’t forget that this is “we’ll work with you” - i.e. you’d better build your own analytics into your game to prove your case otherwise unity can go “well assume 10% are bad installs - now pay for 90%”

as someone who was reasonably deep with unity, the alternatives really are quite thin - Godot is a big contender or otherwise it’s time to pick up some Rust game development

depends on your platform and your level of experience. Both unreal and godot have steep learning curves depending on where you come from. GDevelop is very accessible but also caps out quite fast. Great for making prototypes and getting simple games out there but depending on your level of ambition you will probably outgrow it sooner or later.

This is absolutely mad vendor lock in. I’m doing the maths and if you create the next flappy bird and it goes viral and gets 50 million downloads in a month, you’d owe unity $10 million dollars before you’d even received your first monetization cheque (you did launch with a full monetization plan, right? right? oh.)

edit: i forgot they had moneitzation limits too, so no - this situation wouldn’t quite happen until they earned $200,000 in revenue. Though the potential to go viral and find yourself underwater because of the massive unity bill in comparison to your income is still a possibility

i’m thrilled to see that the donations are letting this be somewhat self sustaining. obviously a lot of unpaid volunteering going into this so not quite a self sustaining non profit, but it’s got all the promising signs

but….why? of all the things to care about with that dying husk of a platform, what could suddenly make biometric information such an interest to them?

in my interpretation of how portals work - by joining space together - moving through a portal doesn’t involve infinite speed because you haven’t moved - the portals have just changed the space you occupy.

a bit like the inertialess/ Alcubierre drive where you travel faster than light without breaking any laws because you’re not moving at all in your space, it’s just that the space you occupy changes.

in the reasoning the people hurling towards the portal only appear to do so, once they pass through the portal they’ll be as immobile as they were before entering it.

the minute physics video is fun though. love their stuff.

my brother came up with a great analogy - say you’re falling and there’s a portal below you also falling, just slightly slower than you. when you eventually fall through it - do you come out falling slowly or quickly?

it would have the be quickly. even though you and portal are moving slowly relatively to each other, your individual momentum is conserved, the movement of the portal is irrelevant.

“i upgraded the engine and one of the wheels stopped working”

gonna go with a - the people aren’t moving when they go in, so they won’t be moving when they come out

there’s a lot of reddit posts (yes. i know, the heresy) and youtube videos on this. tldr: get good lawyers and financial advisors before you tell anyone, and let them help you work it out.

my MIL watches a pastor chris from the loveworld megachurch. over the years i’ve listened in on tirades about covid and depopulation eugenics, it’s all very wild and very “we are always under attack” and positively crazy.

😂

yeah, SEO hits recipe sites hard and requires them to demonstrate expertise by telling you about their family history before giving a brownie recipe

i don’t use twitter anyway, so my plan is to enjoy this virtual boxing match between musk and zuckerberg until they actually follow through on their real punchup.

“turns out the ukranians actually liked chernobyl, so much so that they’re probably planning on doing it again!”