That's not how these licenses work. The demand with The Crew in particular is that a single player game has to be playable offline. With that, the customer's dependency on a service being provided ends after buying the game. And therefore, the expiring license has no effect on the copies already sold. This is how things have always been, before publishers started introducing superfluous online services to erode ownership. Nothing magically changed that makes it suddenly impossible to sell a complete game.

The difference to multiplayer games is only slight, because they can also be self-sufficient if the server part of the code is distributed with the game. Which, incidentally, also used to be common practice.

I don't think it's the licensing that changed, just the distribution. The old, physically sold games probably had a limited license as well, but it just meant that the publisher had to stop selling the game, not that anything changed about the copies already sold. The ability to retroactively remove features from games already sold, or even brick them, is what's new about this.

One of the (many) things the grandparent commenter fails to understand about cases like The Crew is that Ubisoft actively locked players out of the single-player portion of the game and, in some cases, even automatically uninstalled the game from the disk. This is in stark contrast to other games with expiring licenses. There's a reason the shitstorm didn't start with Forza, for instance. Microsoft had to stop selling Horizon 3 when their car and music licenses expired, but since I bought it when it was still being sold, I can still install and play it today.

I switched to Sony cards a couple of years back, after a few too many bad experiences with dead (expensive line) SanDisk cards. I looked around on pro photographer forums for brands with a good reputation w.r.t. durability, and Sony was a name that was pretty frequently mentioned, while the cards also cost a lot less than some other "premium" brands that were suggested.

The long-term feedback is still outstanding, but at 0/4 dead after two years they already clearly outperformed SanDisk in my personal experience.

I'm not saying you're completely wrong, but this is the exact same stuff they used to say about offshoring, and look at how well that went. It stuck in a few places to some degree, and maybe some even managed to eke out some savings without everything going to shit. But on average, and for most companies, it just made them lose their best employees and know-how, and ultimately ended up costing them a lot more money, too.

Millions of gallons don't last very long.

The US has a daily crude oil consumption of around 850 million gallons per day. The strategic reserve is around 17 billion gallons, lasting about three weeks. More than a third of that was authorised to be released last week.

> Abstraction may be coming for us all.

No. LLM programming is not a layer of abstraction, it's a layer of imprecision. The reason NLP hasn't taken off in 50 years of trying isn't just because it was too difficult to implement well, it's also simply the wrong tool for the job. As with all previous attempts, LLM coding is not abstracting, it's compromising. In many cases, the compromise is worth it. But it isn't where code actually needs to work, not just happen to work.

I think War and Peace starts right at the first digit. I just need to figure out the encoding.

The actual risk is secondary. People have many reasons for not wanting to travel to the US. For minorities, safety concerns are surely real. But for many, it's about principles. You don't voluntarily visit a country and support its economy, when its government is being openly hostile towards your country, and waging an iciotic trade war against it. Much of Europe is boycotting US brands for this reason, and the unwillingness to travel comes from the same place.

In the last year, the US government has almost completely burned down al the goodwill and soft power it built with its former allies over the last century. This is a consequence of that, much more than concrete safety issues.

It's in the article. A considerable number of their prize winners don't want to come if the ceremony is in the US. The oranizers are changing locations because they want people to attend.

You're trolling, right?

> But amateur level will cut it less and less.

That's an optimistic outlook. Here's another one: the software inustry will continue its rapid decline in output quality with ever greater speed, reaching new lows never before thought possible. Nobody wants to pay for quality or reliability anymore because everybody else is getting away with selling garbage as well.

Almost sure this is based on a LoC productivity metric. Few other reasons come to mind for not specifying what 'best' means. The heaviest users of LLMs also being the ones who produce the most verbose code isn't exactly a surprising result.

This is from PowerToys, which I don't think has much, if anything, to do with the Windows team. It's open-source, too, so it might even come from an independent contributor.

But my thought was: if this will be customisable enough to somewhat serve as a task bar replacement, maybe I could use this to finally get rid of the stupidly-stuck-to-the-bottom W11 task bar. I've used Explorer Patcher before to fix it, but since it's my work computer, that wasn't appreciated by the security guys (it patches system DLLs), whereas installing PowerToys is fine.

Whether you think it's worth it or not, AAA games are ridiculously cheap these days (without going into micropayments, which are another issue IMO).

I started gaming in the 90s. Many today have no idea how eye-wateringly expensive games used to be.

I think this is one of the problems with the industry economics. How are GBP 60 going to recoup investment in a game that 500 people worked on for 2 years, especially when a majority thinks even that is still too expensive and won't get it until it's at least 50% off? Games used to be 2-3 times as expensive, but the teams were also 10-20 times smaller.

I really liked The Crew. I also really enjoyed Watch Dogs, although I only played the first. And the Anno games are great.

I guess we're not going as far back as Beyond Good & Evil, Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six, XIII, and Rayman.

For me it's EA where I can't remember when they last made a game I didn't think was a complete waste of time. Must have been the early 00s.

I'm not so sure that's true anymore. Several pieces by economists recently were about how consumer spending is not relevant for the U.S. economy anymore. That's why despite cost of living being up, employment being down, debt being up, the stock market is still way up. It seems to me there are two almost completely separate economies.

Also, billionaires *already* have nothing to spend their money on. It doesn't look like it's making them question what they're doing or still always wanting to make more money.