Well, seeing that Insurgency: Sandstorm was on a sale, I just picked it up for him (and myself). Seems to have a lot in the map making scene, and that's a really important factor for him.

It also helps that the prior Insurgency game has the most hours on his profile, by far. Gave me a good hint that he should enjoy this one.

Thanks so much!

EDIT: My dad just got back to me, and loves the gift. Apparently that's where most of his online buddies went and still are. Nailed it!

I used to subscribe to YouTube premium as of just a few days ago. Even without the ads. There was something very seriously wrong with the suggestion algorithm.

I was getting cartel violence videos, and dead animal videos. Never watched one before in my life. Yet. YouTube seems to think that I should want to watch this crock of shit. This started coming up about 6 months ago. Until now I've been reporting each video as they come up. But that doesn't seem to help at all.

At this point I think YouTube is a danger to society - if it's recommending cartel violence videos to me unsolicited, what are they suggesting to my nieces?

I have completely nuked it from my life. Almost all of the YouTubers I like are on Nebula or Floatplane so it doesn't feel like I'm missing much.

No kidding, my Pixel graveyard is too damn big... I wish other phones had nearly the AI/Assistant features that Pixels had because I definitely don't want to switch to the Apple ecosystem and found the OnePlus experience flawed, while the Samsung experience feels bloated.

I'd go with a Fairphone, but for some reason it's impossible to get "officially" here in the U.S.

I don't get it either. My brother-in-law is like this. And he refused to take his kids to see Buzz Lightyear because of its "political" nature. I was a dumbfounded when I heard that. To think that representation is just some nebulous political aim.

At this rate, we should just consider any media with a kiss in it "political media."

And I even grew up with this dude in the early 2000s. He didn't seem like this before.

I try to forget about the guy, but it's kind of hard because he won't let me see the nieces because I'm too "liberal".

Forever GM's unite! (But like, once we get the schedule finalized /s)

Yeah, this is probably the best D&D game in existence now. It definitely has some pretty fun mechanics and a lot of depth that other D&D vidya games just lack.

Dang it!

I have a business trip to Portland next week and I was looking forward to cooler temperatures than here in Tucson, but alas, it'll only be 5-10 degrees cooler.

Gee thanks climate change!

It looks like they decided to bring it back in time for the next release! - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3200#issuecomment-1600505757

They specifically mentioned the feedback in the ticket and it goes to show how collective action can work.

Despite how others felt that I was trying to start a "brigade" - I was only trying to raise awareness by being collectively vocal. I never asked folks to abuse devs or "force" them to do something. I asked them to make their concerns known and let the devs choose. It's just that when I posted there were far less comments, and if I were the developer I wouldn't know that this issue is important to a lot of people - at least just looking at the github issues anyways.

Yeah, and this would work fine for new features. But for removing existing features that alter the entire ecosystem regardless if you upgrade or not? This isn't at all the same, and casting it as such isn't honest.

I feel like folks keep making this a technical merit discussion when that's not at all what it is. A better technical solution is required, I agree. I'm not even disagreeing that captcha can be bypassed - but so can a lock, or a door, or any security feature really given a sufficiently intelligent threat.

But so far the captcha has already made some difference in what instances have spam account problems and those that don't. To argue that it isn't perfect is a logical fallacy that's making my head hurt. Shall we get rid of door locks because they can be picked? Should we get rid of garage doors entirely with the new hacking devices available - obviously the security isn't perfect so why have it at all?

Since when did perfect become the enemy of good? We had a good solution... And now we're throwing it out of a better one, fine! But leave the good one in place until then.

Personally, I find it reasonably amusing that defending an open source, arguably collectivist project requires appeals to individualism.

"You can build it" "Just defederate" "It's the instance owner's responsibility" "You can do X for your instance, its in your control"

Like, which is it? Is this a collective undertaking by a community of multiple stakeholders or is this the Dev's individual project and they don't have to listen to anyone?

I disagree, once your open source project "sprouts wings" you enter an unspoken power battle. If enough of the community disagrees with something the chance of a successful fork grows. Once a project is forked away, you no longer have any control at all.

Also, even if I don't upgrade to v0.18, I have to live in a fediverse that have other instances that WILL, and they might pose a problem with increased spam.

Sure, so implement them in v.0.18 rather than leaving that essential feature for a future release - that's all I personally want.

I don't care about the technical implementation of the Captcha, but given the current threat landscape of low effort bot attacks, removing the feature in the meantime just makes the fediverse worse off.

Sure, that might work for me, but it doesn't scale well for many other larger instances.

I'm not saying to not improve, quite the contrary, improvement is important. I'm saying don't take away the ONE thing that's preventing the spam issue from getting worse.

To be clear, I am a developer in real life. I'm not just talking out of my ass. There are way to roll out a new implementation without leaving everyone exposed.