At no point in the link you provided is any such claim made (that it is one of the most popular choices among players.) Would you like to play again?

AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

It said your choice was "unusual", not "poor". I would wager that AI has a better idea what actual choices most players make playing that particular online game than you do by basing your belief on the idea that your choice is the usual one.

The problem isn't the tools; it is the people. When AI is better human critical thinking and deductive reasoning capabilities will decline further, not magically return to a higher measure.

This, exactly. People are assuming that correlation equals causation here. IQ and critical thinking skills, as well as reading comprehension ability, have been on the decline for quite some time. AI is actually much better at getting things right than the average person who uses google to feed their confirmation bias and find echo chambers in which they can bask. I'm not going to post a bunch of links, because anyone can use the prompt "studies showing IQ and critical thinking in decline" in your "favorite" agentic AI. A hammer, the internet, and AI are three tools equally capable of constructive and destructive uses, and this study just shows that the same trend that started with technology in the hands of the incompetent is merely continuing as expected.

This will help push FOSS gaming and community driven self-hosting of gameservers back towards mainstream. And that's a good thing.

I don't know what AI system(s) you are using, or how long it has been since you tried, but Claude is extremely impressive and while it isn't perfect it is far more effective than google searching. I recently used it to troubleshoot a guitar problem I had with dead notes when fretting on the first fret and it was quite competent. I was able to interact with it and gain a solid understanding of what was causing the issue, including the physics behind it. Then it helped me find a great repair shop to replace the nut, after explaining the process in detail, including a temporary work around involving shimming the nut. As far as programming goes people need to read this before they keep spouting the old "AI can't work" lie.

Colorado is one of the states to enact a law requiring OS level age verification, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

I was into climbing and moutaineering in my teens. I clearly remember when climbing an 8k mountain actually meant something and doing it proved you were an experienced hardcore expedition climber. Everest today is such a joke and farce that I'd be embarrassed to brag of even attempt a summit. They should just install a Via Ferratta, stairs and bridges all the way to the summit and be done with it. That would actually make sense, given the state of things we've reached. They have actual traffic effing jams at the summit and the rainbow flank is littered with the dead bodies of dimwitts taken out by Darwin. It's called "rainbow flank" because of all the colored jackets of the dead.

Just build a staircase, ask an obscene fee to pay for it and void all insurance for anyone who goes above 5500 meters. Problem solved.

We do have something, it's called a healthy diet of real food.

People, you are always feeling hungry because you're eating food without nutrition. That's right, empty calories and your body is deficient and this is expressed as hunger.

People are overweight largely due to two main factors, poor food choices and over-eating, which are both based in self-indulgence. The reality is if one eats whole foods in reasonable amounts, weight gain never becomes and issue and people do not feel hungry all the time.

I'm a senior citizen and I'm a vegitarian and I eat only organic whole foods i prepare from scrtch, as in cooking. I never buy factory products, I buy whole foods from organic local farms. I have the same waistline as I did in my twenties and my doc says I have the metobolic health indicators of a thirty year old. I am not the only one either, my gym has a senior's club and we all have similiar stories.

People you have been programmed by classist corprations to buy crap instead of food so rich people can get meedlessly richer by selling cheap worthless crap to 'consumers'.

GIGO

I'm part of that 5%+. The thing about gaming on Linux is that I have no time or mood for fussing around with compatibility issues. Steams Proton layer handles quite a few games without trouble. I used to be a GoG only person but since their requirements for Linux versions are very specific and cause trouble on newer versions of Linux I finally installed Steam on Linux a few weeks back. Sure it's quite a performance hog and it keeps you in the dark about wether it's taking so long to launch because it's running some background update thingie and you have to use top to see what's going on, but other than that, the games listed as playable on protondb launch with a simple click. Which is good.

Guess I'm a steam customer now. After, what, 25 years? I remember when Half-Life 2 came out and they tied it to steam to push the first big digital game distribution platform. Guess that was/is a huge success. Provide good value, get my money. I don't mind.

For all I care they deserve it. If they can't or won't run the servers anymore they should at least release the server as freeware and allow for hobbyists to continue hosting the game. This used to be common practice with multiplayer games and we should enforce this practice by law, especially with people paid solid money for their game copies.

The problem is that the people who could afford this and would do it are exactly the people the rest of society is better off without.

LibreOffice was considered somewhat outdated and the OnlyOffice codebase more modern with less cruft. While LibreOffice still is considered as a viable alterternative to commercial solutions, FOSS OnlyOffice / Euro-Office is now officially preferred.