> In 2024 alone, I spent $1,400 on "micro" transactions.
>
> $10 here for a skin. $5 there for a bundle. $20 for currency.
If you spend money for ingame currency, you are by definition not a free to play player. If you pay money for in game progress in the form of useless currency – that just evaporates away so you have to pay even more – you have already given up. A proper game would never let you do that. You have given in to the pay to win / pay to play garbage.
I know, we shouldn't blame the victims of these scummy dynamics and good for OP to come to the realization. But it's just really hard for me not to blame the people who play all that trash and fill the pockets of these disgusting gambling companies.
Yea, from the outside looking in it seems so obvious and it’s easy to blame them for overspending. But it’s different when you’re the one who is addicted. Breaking the addiction requires that moment of realization when you finally add up all the real costs and realize how big they are. The only good thing that can be said about Free–to–play games is that adding up the monetary costs is super easy.
The easy way to get tickets is via local hackspaces that are somewhat (not necessarily formally) associated to the CCC. There is a ticket contingent for people active in and around the wider chaos community that gets distributed via the hackspaces. They all handle things slightly differently, but the way to get tickets is usually to show up at a hackspace once in a while (or knowing someone who is active there) and getting tickets from there in the presale phase.
The other guaranteed way for tickets is to volunteer enough as an angel at the Congress the year before to get an angel voucher. But you obviously need a ticket for a Congress in the first place do to that.
HN is a pretty simple, efficient monolithic web application. Some updates might need a restart. It's OK for some web requests to fail during that time. HN isn't life critical with sixtuple nine uptime requirements.
Tbh like 99% of web apps aren’t critical - most of them are for buying something or providing infrastructure to make it easier to buy something anyway.
It’s fine if your online shop is down for a few minutes (of course the business won’t see it like that but it’s true)
A sales site being down might lose you a sale. But the simplicity might save you so muh more than that loses you. And often the complexion of high availability infrastructure results in more downtime than it prevents.
For stuff like HN, I like the peek behind the scenes it provides. It's all just software written by some humans and way too often people take themselves and their shitty software way too serious.
A lot of people feel the need to add restrictions for the sake of restrictions. A whole lot of "security" products work the same way, too. They either do that to pretend to others that they are doing something or to pretend to themselves that they are somehow more important because they exert control.
I suspect this could be more a case of an open ticket about apparent redirect link spam getting fixed by a junior who thought this solution was simple and clever. The junior was even smart enough to write the fix as a nightly cron job, avoiding having to integrate it in an existing large codebase.
They definitely do. Before this comment CT logs – aside from DNS queries – were the only way to know about https://onion.basilikum.monster and you have to send the hostname in the SNI, otherwise you get another certificate back.
Of course I get some bot traffic including the OpenAI bot – although I just trust the user agent there, I have not confirmed that the origin IP address of the requests actually belongs to OpenAI.
That's just the internet. I like the bots, especially the wp-admin or .env ones. It's fun watching them doing their thing like little ants.
The idea of censoring AI models to be "safe" needs to die. They are tools and such the exact same usage can fundamentally be used for both good and bad. There is no way to differentiate between usage of an AI model for security research or malicious attacks, fictional story telling or advice for a real crime, creative usage in parodies or cat fishing scams.
If you spend money for ingame currency, you are by definition not a free to play player. If you pay money for in game progress in the form of useless currency – that just evaporates away so you have to pay even more – you have already given up. A proper game would never let you do that. You have given in to the pay to win / pay to play garbage.
I know, we shouldn't blame the victims of these scummy dynamics and good for OP to come to the realization. But it's just really hard for me not to blame the people who play all that trash and fill the pockets of these disgusting gambling companies.
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