You’re correct on the two thoughts you listed. Wishlisting also makes the game more visible before release. For example, highly wishlisted games appear in the “Popular Upcoming” section, along with some other spots. This increased visibility before launch then feeds into the two points you made. I believe games that are highly wishlisted before launch are also more likely to appear on the frontpage right after launch.

I’m from the US as well, and I can verify that very few average people use those types of messengers primarily. It is almost exclusively iMessage and SMS/MMS/RCS texts as the main form of messaging. I will admit that quite a few people will use the messaging features that are built into social media apps (like messaging in Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, etc). At least to me, it seems like those are moreso used for sending memes or messaging people you don’t interact with regularly and are still secondary to the other forms of messaging.

I watched a video a while back about this, but the details are fuzzy. I think it was the one I linked below if you want to look more into it. In essence, there aren’t a ton of cases where kids are actually being forced to work. However, there are strong incentives for kids to work on Roblox projects that the developers themselves push. The devs want a constant stream of content and money coming in, but they don’t want to pay adult workers at adult wages, so they offer Robux to players who make games. It is difficult for people to convert Robux to actual cash, and the money they receive is often significantly less than they would if they put the effort into any other form of work, so many of these kids are essentially making content for the developers for free or significantly less than they should earn. If there was no payout for content creators and the kids were doing that development just because they had passion for the game, it might be a different situation, but there are quite a few kids that believe they can make serious money doing this and don’t understand that the developers are exploiting them and paying very little. Adults can probably do more research and better understand the situation they are getting into, but kids often don’t have the same critical thinking skills as adults and will accept the lie being pushed by the developers and community that they can get rich by contributing to the game they love.

Video: https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ

Follow-up: https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY

I’m sure most people knew it was Russia from the start, but I saw a comment earlier today that apparently Russia was saying that it was a Ukrainian defense missile that fell out of the air. They are likely just confirming that it was indeed Russia.

I’m not sure why these comments are so negative so far. If I’m understanding the article correctly, it is an optional setting to automatically open the app as soon as it is done installing. The Play Store isn’t just installing and opening apps on its own.

To add onto this for anyone interested, the reason it and many businesses are incorporated in Delaware specifically is because it has a very pro-business legal and judicial system. Many businesses benefit from choosing that state over others and can find loopholes that allow them to save money (though there have been efforts to eliminate those loopholes in much of the country).

Phil Edwards recently released a video on this, which is how I found out about it: https://youtu.be/b4q99EuZF_Q

And this is the article that inspired the video: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/corporation-trust-center

I had an issue where a client reported a crash on login. The exception and stack trace reported were very generic and lent no clues to the cause. I tried debugging but could not reproduce. I eventually figured out that the crash only happened for release (non-debug) builds that were obfuscated. I couldn’t find the troublesome code, so I figured out which release introduced the issue, then which commit, then went change by change until I was able to find the cause. It turned out to be a log message in a location that was completely unrelated to login. That exact log message was fine a few lines up. Other code worked fine in that location. For some unknown reason, having that log message in that specific location caused a crash in a completely different area of code.

What’s going on with Nike and their uniforms? The MLB ones are pretty bad where you can basically see through the pants, and now this.

I would say it’s a bit more nuanced than that. I have installed quite a few games on my Deck that have had serious issues that require their own unique fixes in order to work. I had a few games that had shader issues with flashing neon textures that required specific Proton versions to work, a few games that could never get past the main menu due to infinite loading that required reinstalls and using specific Proton versions, and one that required adding some additional commands on the startup in order to avoid crashes. I’ve also run into a few games where the Deck has quirks, such as one I played where the keyboard would cover the game’s text input and the keyboard would appear immediately after closing, which meant you could hardly read what you were entering text for. They do work eventually, so you are technically correct, but they require effort to fix that some people will not feel comfortable doing.

Maybe I’m not doing the best at explaining myself, but my intent was for my comment to say much the same as yours (which I totally agree with). I was just trying to say that I didn’t hear many people who thought Ukraine could actually win a war against Russia through fighting. There was definitely hope that Russia would have a regime change due to the pressure and that would put an end to the war, but that outcome seems more like Russia just ending fighting rather than Ukraine winning. I suppose my comment was moreso just arguing semantics on the word “win” in terms of this conflict, which is ultimately a bit pointless.

Maybe I’m wrong here, but I think most people never thought Ukraine would win the war outright. Personally, I’ve never heard anyone say that they thought Ukraine would push Russia out entirely and the war would end. Even if Ukraine did secure all of its land, Russia would almost certainly continue fighting along the border to prevent it from joining any alliance like NATO. It seemed the best anyone hoped for is that there would be enough pressure applied to Russia that something changed within where they gave up on the war.

The ‘completely out of service’ part is a quote from a relevant person (not the author), and it seems publications frequently try to use quotes in their titles, which could explain the phrasing. Based on the article, it could also be an intentional choice. It sounds like the hospital is still functioning in regards to some staff and patients are inside the hospital (and possibly can’t leave), but it is completely out of service in the sense that the staff can’t actually take care of the patients or accept new ones.

On one hand, I agree that the story could and should contain more info about the positives of the club to really show people what it’s like. I’ve read similar articles about other school districts that have the club, and they often give few details about the actual club, which is frustrating. On the other hand, I understand why the author chose to focus on what they did. If this club was established and everyone was cool with it, it likely wouldn’t receive an article in a national publication because that’s not very noteworthy. The news story in this case isn’t about the club being formed; it’s about the backlash to the club being formed, and that’s what they’re going to focus on. I’m not saying it should be that way (I like having a more complete picture of what’s going on), but focusing on one aspect of a story and ignoring others is often how it appears to be when reading news.

Your comment about the jet program reminded me of something I read once about the US military trying to conceal a top secret jet (I think it was the SR-71) from spy satellites. The thing I read said that the planes heated up the runway where they sat, which would show up on thermal images of the runways. Iirc, they would go out and heat the runways further to make it seem like there were more planes or to change the shape of the heat signature.

This is based entirely off of memory, and I can’t find the right search terms to look for more info, so take it with a grain of salt.

When I first got my Deck, I was playing a lot on it. I then kinda transitioned back into PC gaming for a while and that continued into the beginning of 2023. However, I started gaming a lot more on the Deck in the past few months. I’ve mostly been working through some of the indie or older games that are in my backlog. Right now, I only really play on PC when I am playing my primary multiplayer games that don’t run (or run poorly) on the Deck.