This is untrue. Threads accounts are reserved for the matching Instagram user, but those users have to actually choose for that account to be opened. If all Instagram accounts were auto-converted to Threads accounts there’d be over 1 billion Threads accounts. The 100 million Threads users are all people who have specifically opted to have a Threads account.
In fairness, I think we might already be the rest who don’t matter. Threads has just passed 100 million users in like three days. The entire fediverse, in about ten years (it’s tough to pin down an exact start date because “When did it become the fediverse?”), has accrued around 12 million users, of which less than 4 million are active. There’s any number of things Meta might want, but I don’t think greater access to 4 million geeks is at the top of their list.
I do think the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns have some merit. Meta isn’t threatened by the fediverse now, but maybe they do want to kill it before it becomes a problem. In the short term, though, we’re not overtaking Threads. Personally, I think another plausible theory is that Threads is using ActivityPub to demonstrate that they’re not running a monopoly or gatekeeping control of social media (which the EU’s new Digital Markets Act now regulates) by pointing to the fediverse–which will soon also include direct competitors Tumblr–and saying “See, we’re all on equal footing! We don’t control social media! Look over there at those 4 million geeks and whatever number of Tumblr users.”
It comes from Fortune, they can’t conceive of something that’s not a business.
Hard to tell. It’s been in decline since January though, so some of it is just Twitter being a place people want to be less and less.
Here’s the graph, as posted by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:
Does EarthBound count? It’s sort of a sci-fi fantasy story which mostly takes place in a contemporary western setting (most of the game occurs in Eagleland, America filtered via Japan). There’s ancient evils, pay phones, psychic powers, a cafe, a bunch of zombies and a multi-level mall. Not all of the game is urban, with suburban, rural, swamp and alien areas, but there’s several cities to explore.
It’s such a shame we don’t get many modern indie interpretations of these single-screen racers. There’s a clone on Wii U and Switch (and probably other platforms) called Rock 'N Racing Off Road DX which I played to completion even though it was buggier, uglier and less fun than Super Off Road just because I’ve already played SOR so much. The game crashed immediately after the final race and I promptly deleted it.
The last one I know that was really great was Konami’s super underrated Driift Mania for the original Wii. Great handling, fun tracks and colorful visuals made it one of my favorite WiiWare games, which sadly today means you can’t legally get it anywhere. The craziest feature was the 8-way multiplayer using four Wii Remotes and four Classic Controllers, so each player is tethered to another by the Classic Controller cable. Worth tracking down if you want to play a “modern” (14 years old, pff) single-screen racer.
We can definitely debate the merits of the term scammer, but at this point it’s definitely undeniable that Molyneux is a liar. The Project Milo demonstration at E3 2009 is just a series of deliberate falsehoods, from the actor hired to behave as if she’s interacting with Milo improvisationally, to claims that Milo can identify subtle changes in human users’ moods by analyzing their facial expressions to the repeated claim that “this technology works now” even though the entire thing is pre-recorded.
If he wasn’t stating things like “This is true technology that science-fiction hasn’t even written about, and this works today, now,” you could pass it off as him just being enthusiastic about what they can achieve. But he openly and repeatedly stated that they had already achieved all of this, which he knew was not true. Again, we can say E3 or any other PR presentations are all lies on some scale–there’s kind of a line you have to ride in marketing where you present things in the best possible light–but Molyneux consistently steps way over that line by making obviously, verifiably false claims.
It’s easy to say there’s no malice behind it, but the fact is he’s a businessman selling a product, and it benefits him personally if people buy his product. He’s not some innocent childlike imp creature whose motives are always selfless, he’s a human being who likes money and is sometimes willing to say things that aren’t true to secure more of it. Is that “malice”? I don’t know. It’s at least “avarice”.
Based on the article, they’re not sure if this is the same game he’s had in development since 2019, Legacy, which is some kind of business sim where you have to buy your land as NFTs then create more NFTs to sell to other players.
I think this is something which makes kbin pretty interesting. It supports threads and microblogs, so it can serve both purposes. I have a Mastodon that I post to once every few years, but I think I might post or at least reply more to people if I could just click between threads and blogs on the fly.
But yeah, for that and all of the other reasons, Threads is out. No interest whatsoever.
Years ago, I tried to max out everybody’s stats by New Game+ing over and over to collect the 10 or so Tabs you find across the entire game to increase stats by one point at a time. I was not successful. I think I made it through three or four NG+ cycles, though.
@MilkToastGhost As long as we’re YSKing, just want to let you know that the word “spaz”/“spastic” has a complicated history. While its meaning has drifted heavily in the US, in the UK especially it remains closely associated with the disability cerebral palsy, and is considered highly offensive to many. The relative innocuousness of the US version has led to it being used in pop culture (e.g. songs by Beyonce and Lizzo, and also Mario Party 8 for Wii), which in turn has resulted in recalls and edits when they were released in the UK to some offense.
I’m not the word police, you can say whatever you want, but it’s handy to know when you’re speaking to a global audience how your words might be interpreted.
Step 1: Commit crimes.
I know I’m super boring, but I personally never liked see-through cases. I’m not techy enough for any of the hardware to mean anything to me, so it just looks like robot guts. Occasionally I’ve had to take controllers apart for cleaning or replacing membranes, but while it was fun seeing the insides, I wouldn’t want it all day.
Notably, the NES port of Joust was programmed by future Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. The game was developed in two months, for release in September 1983, but was ultimately shelved. With his Joust seemingly not happening, Iwata developed Balloon Fight instead, which saw release in 1985. Eventually, his Joust was also released, in 1987. For what it’s worth, I love them both.
Looks more like 17 minutes after launch.
SNES
Mega Drive/Genesis
Game Boy
Game Boy Color
Game Boy Advance
Of course it’s subjective. The terminology of the left-right political divide originally referred to 18th-century France. In the 21st century, we’re usually not defining the political center of a nation by how it compares to the French Parliament of 250 years ago. The center moves over time and space, and the left and right are relative to that center.
I do think this comment thread is confusing people, though, as noted in an above edit. For clarity, nobody is saying neoliberalism is a center-left movement.
This isn’t a hill I’m willing to die on at all, but it does mildly annoy me that The Open Source Definition is used by proponents to mean the same thing as “open-source”. For anyone not familiar, The Open Source Definition is a document used to determine whether code should be certified by the Open Source Initiate as “OSI Certified”. Proponents argue that anything which does not meet the OSI’s definition is not open-source, while I think there’s room in the language and the mind for disagreement on whether “open-source” and “eligible for OSI certification” are synonyms.
The OSI was originally founded with the goal of registering a trademark for “Open Source”, but this was unsuccessful as the term is too broad and descriptive. Failing that, the OSI decided to instead register the trademark “OSI Certified”, which can be applied to works which meet their Open Source Definition. Ultimately, what this means is that nobody owns the phrase “open-source” and it’s an organic part of language which is not strictly defined by the specific terms of any certifying documents.
Over the years, there have been plenty of non-commercially licensed software with source available for use: a popular example is video, computer and arcade game emulators. The MAME emulator was for years released under its own non-commercial copyleft license before eventually being relicensed under BSD (which meets OSI’s Open Source Definition), and popular SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis emulators Snes9x and Genesis Plus GX both continue to be released under similarly “open but non-commercial” licenses.
I’ll happily agree that none of those are eligible to bear the “OSI Certified” trademark and that they don’t meet OSI’s Open Source Definition. But when people start saying they’re “not open-source” it rubs me the wrong way, because we’re just talking, not trying to achieve trademark certification. Not to mention that the whole nature of software licensing is to note what restrictions there are on the use of the code, e.g. most open-source, copyleft licenses deny you the right to use their code without attribution. However, we basically all agree that that’s fine and you can still call a license open-source if it includes that restriction. It’s a shades of gray situation that people are treating as black and white just because a definition exists which they can refer back to, with the assumption that all people must subscribe to those specific terms.
There’s entirely valid counter-arguments, of course. It’s useful to have strict definitions of nebulous concepts like open-source because it could cause confusion, and you have to draw the line somewhere or else the term becomes completely meaningless. e.g. You risk people referring to things like source code leaks as “open-source”. There are frequently cases of people ignoring non-commercial license terms and selling those softwares (Snes9x and Genesis Plus GX are often bundled with commercial retro emulation hardware), which you could argue stems from confusion about whether or not commercial use is allowed. But the same devices often violate the licenses of OSD-compliant software as well, so it seems more likely they just don’t care about open-source software licensing terms.
So anyway, Genesis Plus GX is open-source but I’m not willing to fight you about it.
All left-right political terminology is inherently subjective, so you can argue neoliberalism is promoted by center-left parties as long as you’re defining the center as being to the right of that. Since this post seems to be about the United States, that center is already pretty far to the right as measured from, say, Denmark (picked a name out of a hat). I think the bigger argument here is about US-defaultism rather than whether or not it’s OK for Americans to describe things in terms that relate to their political climate.
EDIT: I think the comment I’m replying to is confusing people. Replying solely to the words “center-left” makes it seem like the OP described neoliberalism as center-left, which people are objecting to. However, the OP only used the phrase center-left once, to say that American center-right and center-left parties have enacted neoliberal policy. As a statement of fact, the Democrats have enacted neoliberal policy. By American standards, the Democrats are regarded as center-left. This does not mean the OP was saying “neoliberalism is a center-left ideology.” There is an argument to be made here that the Democrats are not a center-left party, but I think the issue is getting confused here because people are reacting as if the thing being described as “center-left” is neoliberalism, when it’s actually the Democratic Party.
Definitely. Meta is studiously only sharing the number of accounts registered. We have no idea how many of those are active. If we go with the old 1-9-90 rule, only about 10 million of those 100 million will become active users. Although, the rule obviously isn’t a universal constant. On the fediverse, for example, it’s closer to ⅓ of registered users that are active.