Mastodawn

Airlines continue to be the source of the darkest, darkest patterns. Time of day dynamic pricing. Browser tracking based dynamic pricing. Demand based dynamic pricing. Session timeouts. Arbitrary multi-day delays for *no technical reason* on points transfers. Inability to cancel despite overriding distance-selling laws. Seat choice fees. Baggage fees. Extras at checkout.

Every millisecond of interaction designed to screw you out of getting a discount, and make you pay more than you expected.

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John Ripley 19h ago

From my brief encounters with somewhat modern video game build systems (a colleague was working with some folks in the industry), my experience is that yes, the engineers responsible for their build systems have less than zero idea what they are doing. Multi-hour builds where none of the dependencies work, and everything is lashed together as a stream of hacks, like a polymer chain.

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John Ripley 20h ago

Either that the other dumbest thing I can think of is the texture generation in the build doesn't have a fixed seed, so every time they build the game, every texture has little off-by-one bits shotgunned through every file.

I dunno, just (RE: the thread about FF7R patch https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/116683867908400268) 71GB for a _PATCH_ seems like someone really has no idea whatsoever what they are doing. That is malpractice.

Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (@[email protected])

Haven't played FF7R in a while, played last night, finally got out of the mines into a new area which I was looking forward to exploring tonight, It needs an update before I can play, is how Steam works apparently, fine OK whatever, I'll check out the patch notes while it's updating Looks like they added a cheat code menu, OK fine, that should only be a couple of SEVENTY ONE AND A HALF GIGABYTES SEVENTY ONE AND A HALF GIGABYTES

Retro Social

John Ripley 20h ago

Strongly suspect that most video games patches are "entire file" style, and the most common tools put a stupid UUID or timestamp in all the file headers. So every time you have a game patch, you download the entire game.

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John Ripley 1d ago

Reminded of the time I installed a security camera on the outside of a shop, shortly followed by installing the same security camera again outside the shop, this time with flush bolt heads on the outside of the exterior wall, and the hex nuts on the inside of the wall.

John Ripley 1d ago

I see folks have figured out there's tasty, expensive amount of components inside a Flock camera.

John Ripley 1d ago

One of the most infuriating things in politics, is that on a background of The World Going to Shit, and Fascists Everywhere, there are politicians who are running just because they have a career ladder to climb. Or because they're bored billionaires. Taking up all oxygen in the room just for their next promotion.

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John Ripley 1d ago

Oh, infinite sighs, I'm 100% aligned with the SF Pissed off League [where they have an endorsement]. Not always for the same reasons. But we have such a turd pile of bad choices this cycle, and what can you do but at least vote strategically (which is their whole shtick).

John Ripley 1d ago

Let's see, single vote, non-transferable voting choice between these candidates:

a) An effective but also anti-speech, pro-genocide candidate

b) A "progressive"... when it polls well, and stabby when not

c) "Computer, generate a progressive platform for a US city" candidate with no chance of winning

John Ripley 1d ago

I see the SF Pissed off League voter guide continues its long track record of being protest-vote driven. (As usual it _mostly_ aligns with me, but I still massively distrust them)

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