‘Eventually’? I sometimes get notified about people with AirTags sitting near me on the same train.

There’s almost zero chance they don’t find these in an hour or less, and the precise tracking feature allows you to find exactly where they are.

Considering the tags alone cost about $30 each this would just be an enormous waste of money.

Just don’t accidentally send 👉👌 instead

You realise Blender is open source, right? If they pull shenanigans the community can simply fork the project.

If you want to express agreement, it’s usually 👆or ➕

If there was an action and you want to confirm you’ve done it, ✅ (or 👍 but that’s ambiguous between ‘I’ve seen this’ vs ‘I’ve done this’)

‘You can’t fire me, I quit!’ but the bad version

The solution to this is to not reply to them.

They will either give you the information you need (and potentially learn their lesson for next time), or they’ll get tired of waiting and ask someone else.

Seems like they’ve been around for longer than I thought, but I rarely hear them get mentioned and the barebones site doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Product placement has never been illegal in the UK, and we don’t have Walmart anyway, so the functionality would be useless outside the US.

“People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron.

“If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.”

(George Mallory, mountaineer)

Do you say the same for Epic Games Store exclusives?

Yes, actually. If they funded a game, like with Alan Wake 2, then whether or not they make it an EGS exclusive is their prerogative.

there is no pro-consumer reason that the GOG fixes could not have been given to everyone that already owned the game on Steam as a free update

I disagree. GOG invested time and resources into patching the game. Tacking the word ‘pro-consumer’ in there means nothing. They’re a business. They shouldn’t be expected to give away their work for free to customers of a competing platform.

I don’t care if 2% or whatever goes to GOG for their fixes

That much is clear. You seem to want something for nothing. Pirate the GOG version if you’re so desperate to play without paying for the work that went into fixing it, but don’t frame it as some kind of pro-consumer protest.

It’s as much as anyone outside of GOG can know, based on interviews like this one.

The exact contents of the deals is not public information and no doubt differs for each game, but the overall process has been reported on.

Oh, well that’s the easier part to understand.

Before they even start on any technical work, the GOG legal team contacts the owners of the game they want to sell (e.g. SEGA, in the case of Alpha Protocol) and they negotiate a deal to update and distribute the game.

Things get complicated when a game has joint owners, or when it’s not clear who owns a game, but otherwise it’s as simple as that.

If you’re interested in a specific example, here’s an interview with their technical producer on how they updated and rereleased Alpha Protocol in 2024.

Lots of insights!

What does being ‘conventionally attractive’ have to do with it? Some people just enjoy experiencing viral trends in person, even if there’s a long queue.

Why would GOG give the work they did to a competing storefront?

If you value the work, support the people who did it.

I doubt that will happen for a year or two at least. The designer might have left, but it’ll take a long time to undo the damage.

“As a precaution, we have voluntarily removed the product from sale while we carry out independent testing … We will update customers as soon as we are in a position to do so.”

Sounds like they’re just waiting to confirm if there’s actually a problem, rather than issuing a full-scale product recall based on a single test result reported by a random member of the public.

Written in 2020 but still an interesting read. I wonder what the author thinks of games that have released in the intervening years, like Manor Lords, Going Medieval, and Farthest Frontier?

OpenOffice isn’t as well known now because it was replaced, for all intents and purposes, by LibreOffice in ~2010.