Now playable: Flatout 3

Aww yiss, I have been waiting for this. It’s finally playable first time since relase.

I really do wonder why they ended up in this. It can’ be that hard to make even a hacky DIY system to do it automatically. The navigation system just had to have some digital or even analog output, then it would be just the problem of interpreting the signal with some script and writing it into a file.

When Wilby recommended the company use standard software to process ping data and plot the sub’s telemetry automatically, the response was that the company wanted to develop an in-house system, but didn’t have enough time.

Investors want it, because they want to ride the wave towards profit. It doesn’t matter if it’s good, sustainable or not. That is what matters.

How secure something is an spectrum. Sure self hosted matrix is a lot safer than sending your messages through meta servers for example. It’s about what is the threat levels of what one is doing. Total tinfoiling like writing your own quantum proof multi encryption ciphers and sending that over an tamper proof usb stick with self destruct mechanism by a carrier pridgeon is not necessary or practical for average people who just want privacy, but for critical government applications and especially the military it might be. That is what we are talking about here.

be that as it may, my point still stands. Nobody is realistically getting into that market.

What makes you think that consolidation of markets isn’t how the free market operates as it matures? As if the X86 market was any way competitive and healthy before when there are literally two companies sharing critical patents with each other and gatekeeping the competition out.

I would never risk any third party messaging service in military or critical state matters. It’s just common sense, even for a layman. Everything is compromised, Telegram is, Whatsapp is, Signal is, all of them are.

A truly free market have a high likelihood of self-correcting once one group gets too influential.

It never will. You libertarian types say that it will, but it never has and never will. First there are no mythical pure free market and also when you have a lot more capital, resources and bulk. They can comparatively throw endless amounts of money towards a problem and RnD. They can afford to fuck up and have a money buffer, they might just generally stagnate and be ok. When your potential challengers can only usually have one chance and, when they fail they will get bought out and usually by the same monopoly that they were trying to challenge and thus enforcing that monopoly with whatever innovation that the up with, or they just take the patent just so that nobody else gets it. And what has alphabet for example doing. it’s been shopping smaller tech and IT companies all around the world and it integrating them into itself.

Or the alternative: lower the barrier for others to compete.

how will you lower the capital cost that would be required to challenge google/alphabet? Servers, battalions of code monkeys and engineers and RnD don’t just drop from the sky for free you know. That is the biggest problem of challenging any monopoly, it’s just too damn expensive to try when it reaches a certain point. There comes a point when you can’t just anymore get into the market with two shovels and some elbow grease and you need massive loans for fleets of excavators and trained crews to run them just to be competitive. There is also the problem that at some point nobody will fund your venture to dethrone the market leader, because A) it’s expensive as fuck B) there is 1% chance that you will succeed and the investment will provide 100x return and 99% chance that failure awaits and the money will be lost. No sane bank or financier takes that bet and nobody does that kinda things for charity.

Government is most effective as a police to shut down bad behavior, it’s really ineffective at actually providing services

Again, your government just sucks. You draw the incorrect conclusion that therefore every government must suck as badly as yours.

Google is basically a government in itself regarding it’s resources, GDP, personnel and the power that it wields, and they can do it just fine. Actually they are doing it so well and smoothly, that nobody notices being fucked by them. Your government just sucks in general, we know this. Instead of demanding less government, singing praises of private companies and people as fixes to everything, and then watching everybody getting railed by private interests twice as badly as before, you should instead demand better government.

Following any “let’s chop up google” replace it with another platform is just a game of fools whack-a-mole. No matter how small you would chop up google the same monopoly would still form under a different name, maybe in a little different configuration. We have been in this moment before in the past. You can’t kill monopolies, no matter the field because free markets internal logic will create monopolies no matter what you do and then it seizes to be a free market and you get all the anti-consumer, anti-competition, gatekeeping, general parasitic behavior that you got before. it’s not that google is run by bad people or is inherently evil now. it’s current tricks are what is required by the market and it’s investors because they want every single cent out of it’s customers. It’s that maximizing profit no matter the cost that is combined with cornering market on several sectors that is the real problem and creates that anti-user behaviors. You wouldn’t have that with a government institution.

With monopolies it’s either suffer or make them work for you. That is what a nationalization would be, since even a sham democratic control and following of social goals would be improvement on private interests doing the same and worse. If you are worried about governments spying on you, then don’t be. They already pay google to do that for them already. the real problem really is that companies like google and Microsoft are so big and influential that global politics would enter into play if US did anything to their pseudo independence from the state, no matter how benign their intentions.

Not on it’s own, I recall. it carries it’s weight inside google’s ecosystem, but outside it, it wouldn’t make economic sense to keep that many servers streaming video all over the world with just add youtube internal add revenue and premium subscriptions. The data harvesting is a big part of it.

Yes, but it still would be only a momentary stop AND it would create worse service, because many google products are uncompetitive in themselves and can only exist because google steals everybody’s data through these platforms and sells it to advertisers. Like how much does google pay for youtube servers to keep running and how much would it cost for the users for the same thing and it to not be part of google. Every google alternative would either have to be worse service or be subscription based. I know I’m a devils advocate here, but still.

The real sane option would be nationalization of google under some international body, not breaking it up, or leaving it, and just waiting the market just centralizing itself around some other company that will repeat what google has become and done.

Just imagine how much worse it would have been for sony with Concord in the EU if this law were reality. Flop a game, a live service game no less and then they would have to leave it in a playable state for like a couple hundred people that ever played it in the EU. I don’t know how this law would work in this case. Would they be mandated to give out the server code that people could run their own servers?

It’s really ambiguous how it would or how it would be revised work for games that are multiplayer only.

it should have been a fp2

Really looks like this game was designed by incompetent suits and marketing teams with the primary goal of turning those millions into more money. The game looked good and didn’t seem to play (totally) awfully either. It just doesn’t stand out or make anybody want to play it, like at all. It really is a another one of those AAA unfinished style over substance tech demos that masquerade as a game that got released into really saturated market at a really bad time, where the competition is usually also free.

Also something, something big capital overtaking creative process is one of the great disasters of our time.

And that’s basically nothing since generational performance improvements have long since gotten into diminishing returns territory.

They primarily want it shut down because it has enabled citizen journalism that they can’t control and that is a threat to status quo. Not because people can sell drugs, do money laundering, organize terrorism or share cp on there, that’s just the excuse for it. Like it has been for every outreach against privacy and freedom of information.

Ukraine and palestine have probably been the main motivator for this push against telegram. Like Russians can share it’s view of the war to almost a billion eye pairs. Western media and adjacent political power and institutions have awoken to the fact and find it untenable when they can’t enforce media and information blockade on people. It’s not even about the western population since telegram is much more popular in the third world that it’s in the west.

Because almost nobody uses Matrix compared to Telegram. And it’s not even about if some people can slip through the fingers of western intel services, it’s about controlling the narrative and putting the clamps on information and telegram is almost as much of a news site as it’s a live chat. Telegram is just popular enough that it pokes holes into narratives and harms the mainstream media bubble.

They are already cooperating with law enforcement and 5 eyes. There is no reason to arrest them. Pavel was arrested because they want a backdoor in Telegram to spy and sensor. But I guess it’s the good kind of spying and censorship :)