One of the things I loved about Reddit was the super niche experts dropping into the comment section. I'm so glad Lemmy has this too.

You misunderstand what a learning curve means. The x-axis is the desired level of productivity/proficiency, and the y-axis is necessary knowledge/skill. A steep learning curve means you need a lot of knowledge/skill to even be slightly productive/proficient, making the learning process daunting for new users. A gentle learning curve means you get rewarded throughout the learning process with frequent productivity/proficiency gains. A "cliff" means there will be a long period of learning with little to show for it until the end.

I think that one's pretty well explained (albeit not explicitly) by the presence of the Nazgul and the eye of Sauron, which were either destroyed or otherwise occupied when the eagles made their rescue. People pretend Mordor had no airborne defenses for the bit, but it doesn't really make sense

"Introductions and a bit of smalltalk" - I would shit myself if an interviewer started asking about smalltalk... /s

Is it possible the first response is simply due to the date being after the AI's training data cutoff?

USB flash drive

There's nothing stopping game companies from selling through multiple storefronts, or even direct to customer with Steam's cut removed.

The fact is, players are happy to pay a premium so that the games live in their steam library, are downloaded via Steam's delivery network, and integrate with steam features.

Steam is not anti-competitive, it's just good.

Out of curiosity, why? If it's a knee-jerk reaction to change that's completely understandable, but I can't see anything to dislike about the feature itself

It exists so that you know where a character will appear when you press a key on the keyboard.

It blinks because it's hard to find a line on a page of lines.

I realise what sub we're on, but this is pushing it...

Lenovo ThinkPads

I bought an old model in 2013 and it lived in my backpack through 7 years of school and university. It was dropped hard enough to permanently bend the heatsink, the disk drive cover snapped off, and it regularly overheated from throwing it in my bag without turning it off. It ran windows, dozens of Linux distros (up to 3 at once) and now it's a hackintosh for when I need a Mac. I'm confident I could buy spare parts and repair it myself if anything important broke.

That bit about the pay sounds highly illegal

"If you're on the fence about the sequel, though, I've gotta say that it's really the performance updates you're going to want to watch for, because woof does this game run badly."

Yikes