I wouldn't consider gachas to be "actual games" (sue me), but yeah, they do tend to have way more complex gameplay and graphics than the timewaster freemium games of yore. Genshin Impact is essentially a single-player MMO, it has an open world and lots of characters and different weapons etc etc.
The "general phone audience" is some 5 billion people. If even 10% of them want to play games, on what is in the current year likely to be their primary if not only computer, that's already a market segment of 500 million. It wouldn't honestly surprise me if the number is closer to 15 or 20%, mobile gaming is extremely popular.
I think a lot of HN users, living in our own PC-oriented bubble, may not have realised the world has completely passed PCs by and that smartphones are the personal computers of the current generation. While PS5 and Switch each have about 100-150 million in sales, there are an estimated 3 billion mobile game players. Are a majority of those "mobile game players" playing Flappy Bird, sure. But again, even 10% of that number being interested in "real games" would outnumber PS5 and Switch players combined. Fortnite and PUBG each have hundreds of millions of active users, most are on console but around 20% appear to be on mobile from a quick search. Genshin Impact also has tens of of millions MAU, a non-neglible percentage of which are mobile players. There are hundreds of millions of people for whom being able to play 3D games on their phone matters.
Zionism is the support of the Israeli colonial project. Jewish people have a right to self-determination regardless of Israel's existence; Israel's existence does not determine the right of self-determination for all jews. As such, the two things are not the same.
Zionism, then, is just support for a specific state (Israel), and support or lack or support for a state given its actions (colonial oppression) is not bigotry. Disliking a genocidal ethnostate does not influence in any way how you feel about the Jewish people as an ethnic and religious group. As such, anti-zionism and anti-semitism are not the same.
I mean, yes, you could attempt to take over the largest entertainment market in the world, already dominated by a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations, in the hope that your "mega success" game is so world-shattering that EA, Ubisoft, etc have a Scrooge-ian change of heart and start following your pro-consumer, pro-conservation ideology.
Now, if you want to actually do something that has a chance of having any effect at all, you go for the legislature. Unlike America's entirely feckless regulatory bodies, the EU does occasionally dislodge itself from the corps' backsides to provide a quick, timid reprimand. It's not very much but it's much better than nothing at all.
Although, I have to wonder, do you believe this should apply to every market? Should asbestos be made legal in buildings on the account you could build houses without it? Should we remove all kind of sanitary requirements for food processing, on the account of the fact that some food companies might not let their plants wallow in filth?
The best part of stumbling upon niche subjects is learning about their mythology. The name Clifford W. Ashley meant nothing to me five minutes ago, but now I'm in awe at the fact his work from over 80 years ago is still the authoritative source on the subject.
California isn't "very left-wing". It's liberal, centre-left if you're being kind. The democrats are a centre-right party with some mildly-leftist pockets of members.
I am pointing out that HN is not very representative of the US political spectrum, and opinions about what's going on in the US will be filtered based on that. You're largely just hearing from one set of partisans here.
By US standards, California is very left-wing. International standards are not super relevant. (I'm also a bit skeptical of the cliche that the Democrats are a right-wing party internationally. For example, Obama endorsed Trudeau in Canada. But again, not super relevant.)
Democrats are (or were) considered "right wing" on some stuff and really "left wing" on other stuff. It's really futile trying to compare the political parties with different incentives internationally and putting a single left/right wing label on them.
Democrats were also just a big tent party for a long time, with more 'real right wing' members than 'real left wing' members, maybe that's the reason for the platitude.
This is a good analogy, but you made it backwards. The "Clergy" fears the "Printing Press", as it acts as a tool of decentralized information spreading. But LLMs are not decentralized and thus are not the "Printing Press". LLMs are what the "Clergy" (say, for example, all the AI companies led by billionaires in cahoots with the west's most powerful government) uses to suppress the real "Printing Press" (the decentralized, open internet, where everybody can host and be reached).
The bots are called "crawlers" and "spiders", which to me evokes the image of tiny little things moving rapidly and mechanically from one place to another, leaving no niche unexplored. Spiders exploring a vast web.
Objectively, "I give you one (1) URL and you traverse the link to it so you can get some metadata" still counts as crawling, but I think that's not how most people conceptualize the term.
It'd be like telling someone "I spent part of the last year travelling." and when they ask you where you went, you tell them you commuted to-and-fro your workplace five times a week. That's technically travelling, although the other person would naturally expect you to talk about a vacation or a work trip or something to that effect.
> Objectively, "I give you one (1) URL and you traverse the link to it so you can get some metadata" still counts as crawling, but I think that's not how most people conceptualize the term.
It’s definitely not crawling as robots.txt defines the term.
:
> WWW Robots (also called wanderers or spiders) are programs that traverse many pages in the World Wide Web by recursively retrieving linked pages.
You will see that reflected in lots of software that respects robots.txt. For instance, if you fetch a URL with wget, then it won’t look at robots.txt. But if you mirror a site with wget, then it will fetch the initial URL, then it will find the links in that page, then before fetching subsequent pages it will fetch and check robots.txt.
I would also recommend TIS-100's "sequel", Shenzhen I/O. TIS-100 is a bit 'dry', with the puzzles being entirely abstract. In SI/O, you roleplay as a developer emigrating to China for work, so all the puzzles are framed as real products you are developing for your company. One of the earlier puzzles, for example, is programming the equipment for a lasertag place.
I second the Shenzhen I/O recommendation, because apart from only assembly programming, the game also has other constraints in the form of having to spacially arange various chips on a limited "enclosure" for the product you're building and connect them. It also rewards optimization both in terms of assembly and chip usage efficiency. Is a wonderful game, really.
I will reveal that I have played far more of Shenzhen solitaire than Shenzhen I/O itself. Zachtronics made a stand-alone version of the game[1], but there's also a fanmade version here:
Which I find more enjoyable, both because it's online so it's easier to reach from anywhere, and also because I feel like the version of the solitaire inside the game is a bit... heavy feeling. Like there's some sort of input delay? Anyhow, I must have around 3000 completed games of solitaire across my devices.
