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 haven’t used it often, but the few times I have asked it very specific programming questions, it has usually been pretty good. For example, I am not very good with regex, but I can usually ask Copilot to create regex that does something like verifying a string matches a certain pattern, and it performs pretty well. I don’t use regex enough to spend a lot of time learning it, and I could easily find a few examples online that can be combined to make my answer, but Copilot is much quicker and easier for me. That said, I don’t think I would trust it past answering questions about how to implement a small code snippet.

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.

Eh, their business practices regarding selling games are fairly consumer friendly, but overall they have quite a few issues themselves that aren’t great. I wouldn’t hold them up as a great company but rather a better company than the competition, which is a fairly low bar.

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.

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 do you use the servers for, if you don’t mind me asking? I’ve been considering setting something basic up for some additional file storage or local media streaming and am always curious what others use their setups for.

I used to work IT for a while and we had one guy who would pick up all our old hardware from clients. A lot of it was still functioning well, but the clients got new tech and wanted us to just wipe the drives and get rid of it. The guy would sort through it, keep some of the stuff that was functioning either for himself or to sell and would strip the rest for materials.

As the other commenter said, I figured I would post it in both communities to get more responses from people who may not be a part of both. I’m not sure if that is what I should be doing (still fairly new to Lemmy), but I thought I’d give it a try.

That’s quite a deal. I bought some Pokemon cards from garage sales when I was younger and would get a few rare cards every once in a while.

Congrats on the increase in investment. I’m starting to look into buying a house in the near future, and some of the price increases are crazy. I saw one house that said it was purchased for something like $180k 5 years ago and was pending now for like $320k

That’s an interesting way to get something worth so much. Is the painting tied to the religion in any way, or did the church just give out random paintings it happened to own?

That’s awesome! The guitars look really nice in your picture. Is there anything special specifically with those guitars that make the value so high, or are they just rare and collectible?

Haha, I feel that

That’s really cool. I never knew anyone made them as stone blocks. Do they still hold that value, or have they gone down after they started getting produced again?

I hope you and your wife are doing better now! I collected Pops for a while (mostly just characters that I liked) and got a few expensive ones, but nowhere near that price tag.

Funnily enough, I felt the opposite. 2016 seemed more grounded and serious to me while still having some laughs and eye rolls, while Eternal had a lot more arcadey stuff where it felt like the devs either didn’t know how to integrate it more seamlessly into the universe or were just doing whatever they thought would be cool rather than what would serve a good story. I think I would have been alright with either version of Doom, but I feel like there is a disconnect between the two newest entries that is just a bit harder to look over.

When I worked IT, I went to a local fire station and said I was there to update their computers. The person I talked to didn’t seem to know that this was scheduled, but they led me to their office with the computers and showed me how to log on. I’m pretty sure they just assumed I was telling the truth because I spoke confidently and was wearing a polo, but I could have literally been anyone.