The point is that with open source you can effectively leech off of Google for now, while still retaining the flexibility to nope out and do your own thing at any point you decide.

Considering just how severely behind they are already (as I mentioned in my other comment, they’re often 3–5 years behind other browsers in implementing new web standards or operating system features), I see anything they can do to reduce how much they need to maintain independently as a good thing. In an ideal world where they had all the funding and development power they could want I might say sticking with the completely independent Firefox would be great. But that just isn’t where they’re at today.

They wouldn’t be at the mercy of anything. That’s…how open source works. If it changes in a way that breaks things for you, don’t pull that change. At that point, if the change is drastic enough to require it, you can turn that soft fork into a hard fork and hope that Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc. join you; something that would significantly hamper Google’s ability to maintain their dominance of the browser engine market. That’s a choice that they simply don’t have today when being based on Firefox and Gecko means using an inferior browser platform.

Honestly I’ve been saying for some time that Mozilla’s resources would be much better spent making Firefox a soft fork of Chromium. Primarily: use the Blink browser engine and V8 JS engine, with only the changes to those that they deem absolutely necessary, and maintain a privacy-forward Chromium-based browser. Maybe try and enlist the help of Brave, Vivaldi, and other browsers that are currently Chromium but which prefer more privacy than Google offers.

It’s not zero effort, and especially as Google continues to develop Chromium with assumptions like the removal of Manifest V2 it might take some effort to maintain, but it cannot possibly be as much effort as maintaining an entire browser.

Okay but they often don’t give users what they want

You should see the state of Firefox on iPad OS. I started using it earlier this year after they finally rolled out support for multiple windows—a feature Safari added in 2019 and Chrome had only a few months later.

Nice that they finally have this feature, but the browser itself is nearly unusable. It stutters constantly and freezes, locks up, or force reloads with some regularity. In a way that Chrome and Edge (and I assume Safari, though I have never really used that) never do.

Or on desktop OSes, a website I frequented around 2016–2018 used the column-span CSS property, which Firefox didn’t get around to implementing until December 2019.

It’s been very clear for some time that, whether it’s because they stretch themselves too thin or some other reason, Mozilla has been failing to continue to deliver an excellent product for their users.

I actually deliberately avoided mentioning the Troubles because I wanted to bring up cases where everyone today could fairly uniformly agree that we were discussing freedom fighters more than terrorists. Too many today would still say that the Provisional IRA were the bad guys (or at the very least that they were “as bad as” the other side). But the point I wanted to make was how given enough time, even terroristic actions can end up being viewed on the whole as coming from the “good guys”, if their cause is viewed as just.

I could also have mentioned American revolutionaries.

Ttrpg.network seems to work well. As does the Star Trek one, even despite serious problems with some of their communities’ moderators that the admins have failed to take action on.

I think it’s a format that can make sense especially if there’s a broad range of specific communities around a central topic. Like ttrpg.network can have communities dedicated to each RPG, one for memes, for art, for broader conversation about the hobby, etc. It means you know if you want something RPG-related, that’s the instance to look for.

In a way, you could even say all the various country instances, including my own home insurance, are doing the same thing. What is a country instance if not “entire instance devoted to one area”?

I just want to briefly make one point because I think most of the important points have been very well covered by others already.

What’s terrorism and what’s freedom fighters is determined by history. By the same standards that Hamas are being called terrorists, you could easily make an argument that 1910s Irish republicans, black South Africans under apartheid, and British suffragettes (not to be confused with suffragists) could easily be considered terrorists. Innocent civilians were killed by all these groups, but looking back on it today we almost universally say they were in the right, because they were fighting for their groups to receive rights denied to them by the ruling class. Their methods weren’t always as perfectly clean as we might ideally want, but the primary target was always someone oppressing them in some way. And right now and for the last half century+, Israel have been oppressing the Palestinian people.

2 hours a day is pretty crazy, depending on the intensity. I’m a dedicated amateur athlete and would have been under 10 hours a week training for a marathon, and woulda been barely over that even when doing my most intense triathlon training.

But a light run/walk most days with a harder gym session or run 3 or 4 times a week is a very different question.

If your goal is to get generally healthy, exercise is brilliant. Don’t be afraid to walk on your runs at first to allow you to recover and keep running.

If your goal is to lose weight, diet control is the most important thing. Exercise can actually make things worse if you aren’t careful, because your body will instinctively want to eat more. You’ll probably need to make sure that you don’t eat more kilojoules after starting exercise than you already eat now. But also as the other reply said, cut your carbs, add more protein (necessary to help your body repair itself after the damage that exercise causes) and veggies. Lots of leafy greens especially.

And what carbs you are eating would be better as whole meal and/or multigrain, rather than white bread/rice and plain pasta.

Punishment is about virtue signalling

Ooh careful. Don’t use that phrase. You might trigger the fascists!

If you’re a fan of tieflings (based on your username), I’m curious, have you read Erin M. Evans’ Brimstone Angels series? The main characters are tieflings, and it’s where the quotes at the beginning of the race entry for tieflings and dragonborn in the 5e Player’s Handbook came from. Highly recommend.

But I don’t think you need to go from the time when arcades were entirely irrelevant, but merely where they were no longer the main driving force. That’s at most the late '90s with gen 5 consoles and many big popular or influential game franchises like Quake, Pokemon, Age of Empires, Fallout, Diablo, and Grand Theft Auto (that’s '96 and '97 alone).

And you need to go up until at least the time when few of the largest games were available without cancerous monetisation strategies, not merely when a few games had started doing it. So you definitely need to go up to at least the launch of the 7th generation consoles in 2007.

To bring it back to the original point of the conversation, that’s not to say that it isn’t worth preserving games that did have those strategies of course. It just doesn’t detract from the sense of a period when the majority of gamers’ experience was much better.

We’ve been complaining since the 90s. I wasn’t joking earlier, “Ubisoft greedy” today is a carbon copy of “Capcom greedy” in 1997

And EA greedy in 2007. Doesn’t mean that what they were doing then was as bad as what is being done today.

But an arcade game is a physical object. The preservation needs of arcade games are very different to games distributed on cartridge or disk, which is why I suggested that a digital library would be focusing on home game consoles, especially those released at a time when home gaming was the main way gaming got experienced (i.e., after arcades were the most popular way).

[24 years is] too short of a blip to consider a golden age

Assuming that “too short” and reference to a “golden age” was meant in refutation to my claim of the 3rd–6th console generations, which lasted from 1983 until 2007. If that’s the claim, I find it absolutely absurd. When we discuss the golden age of TV we’re talking barely one decade, from the mid-to-late oughts to the late 10s.

If you meant something else by that bit, I’m sorry, please disregard the above paragraph. But I don’t know quite what you do mean.

I think your best option would be to find some data on biases of the different models (e.g. if a particular model is known to frequently used a specific word, or to hallucinate when asked a specific task) and test the model against that.

I don’t think we’re talking about arcade games at this point though. We’re talking to a large extent about 3rd–6th generation home gaming consoles. For Nintendo, that’s the NES to GameCube. Sony entered with the PlayStation in the 5th gen, and Xbox came out in 6th.

I think a lot of people would see this (and to a slightly lesser extent the 7th gen) as the high point where games came out in a completed state and you paid once and the just enjoyed the game.

Fwiw the sequel is supposedly going to have Denuvo in it, which is pretty blatantly an executive meddling decision.

But personally, the phrase “the devs should” never bothers me. It’s pretty transparently referring not to individual developers but to the priorities and decisions of the “developer”: the company in charge of development, as distinct from, say, the publisher or the platform.

This is incredible!

I wonder if that usage data can be blocked by your firewall without impeding other functionality.

I honestly find their “historical accuracy” claims kinda comical. Yeah it’s better than most games for sure, but it still only pays lip service to accuracy in a lot of aspects for the sake of the game’s story. Henry has a completely fantastical rise from blacksmith’s apprentice to de facto military commander.

No, I did really enjoy it. I just don’t spend an enormous amount of time gaming, and the time I do spend is most often in completely different genres that I can play with friends while chatting on Discord, like RTS (Age of Empires mostly) and survival crafters (like Raft and DST).

No it’s not. It’s pretty explicitly not, by the guy who is most famous for talking about piracy as a service problem:

Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.