Adalast

Here here.

They are paranoid about foreign actors having personal data, not domestic ones. That said, the whole TikTok thing is as much about stifling international competition as it is about data privacy and who is getting/using said data. Meta, Alphabet, and their ilk all harvest much more data than TikTok, and sell it to data brokers. There is absolutely nothing stopping the Chinese government from just buying the data they would obtain from the mandatory data sharing forced upon Chinese companies.

TikTok took market share from Meta and Alphabet, Suckerberg and whoever is the head letter at Alphabet called up the Congressmen they bought and started making a fuss, so their boys on the hill found excuses to ban it.

I am not sayinf some of the excuses do not have kernels of merit, but they are largely overshadowed by the anticompetitive effect that it has.

Just to expand and answer your larger question, the US government does not respect the privacy of the citizens. The anti-data-brokerage legislation we did manage to get through only occurred AFTER the harvested data was used against those in office, and even then it was made an opt-out legislation which requires us to contact each brokerage firm individually and request, in writing, that our data be purged and we not be tracked. That exempts all new firms from the restrictions and relies on the individual to A. Know how to find the firms and B. Be able to manage contacting each one of them. What this has done is invented an entirely new service industry for removing OUR information from these brokerage firms. So we have to pay for privacy, yet again, making it something really reserved for the rich.

If you look at the other laws, things like license law and such, you will find that the US government has quite truly conspired to make sure that corporations have carte blanch to do whatever they want with those who use their services.

What you said is patently wrong.

As someone who works with USD daily digging through the bowels of the code and working with the format at a root level, it is 100% something that gaming should (and is) adopting. The Godot team would be frankly stupid not to put full native USD support as a high priority. The ability to store rigs, transform animation, and easily encapsulated asset variations alone makes the format godly. It is also very clean in how it manages asset linking and scenegraphs which makes traversal a breeze to encode. Also, it makes an DCC agnostic format which allows game developers to engage with freelance artists and not care what they use. Houdini, Blender, Maya, C4D, and any future DCC are going to be able to export to it. Hell, Houdini (my preferred DCC) has an entire context dedicated exclusively to working with, rendering, and exporting USD format.

If I wasn't shit with UI Dev I would offer as this sounds like a great app, but alas.

Let's be accurate here, private slavery companies.

It was published, hence the first word being "Post-publication". I think the issue for the retraction is that if 4 or the reviewers were lying about their identies then the voracity of their assessments is strongly in question. As shitty as the modern peer review process is, its essence is vital for the progress of modern science.

This is the central myth of "free speech" under the 1st Amendment.

The 1st Amendment only protects individuals exercising speech and expression from laws being passed or used to silence said speech or expression and from agents of the government abridging the rights. That is a lot, but it is also all. Private citizens are allowed to abridge each other's speech as much as we like. Private companies can censor whatever they want. This is why the guy wrote a letter to Steam, because literally ANY larger action would have crossed the line.

Honestly, I had it all with line breaks, but it didn't take. I will fix.

Factorio: 2344

Path of Exile: 2736

Rimworld: 2191

Kerbal Space Program: 1071

I have a bunch of honorable mentions in the several hundred hours ranges that are only not 1k+ because I have severe ADHD and something else became a hyperfocus before they hit that point:

Backpack Hero

Ark

The Last Spell

Timberborn

Factory Town

Dyson Sphere Program

Loop Hero

Brotato

Satisfactory

Path of Achra

Against the Storm

Desynced

Honestly, that is a good list of the internal struggles, though everything she had said to which you were replying were external pressures. I agree wholeheartedly with your list, but I feel we need to also represent the externalities we face as well.

I can only speak for myself and from a neurodivergent US perspective. I see a society which still applies enormous pressure on men to be the "provider" in a system which as made being a sole provider nearly impossible. A society which ties our worth and value as a human being to what we can provide, primarily, for employers, then secondarily to loved ones. We are expected to sacrifice our health, both mental and physical, to work in often abusive or untenable positions from which we see no escape becacusr to escape is to fail our family. We are told continuously that our only purpose in existence is to sacrifice, and if we try to take some space for ourselves when WE need it, we are selfish, inconvenient, or heartless and abusive.

To expand on HowManyNimons point about making friends and finding a partner, we are still expected, on the whole, to be the instigators of romantic relationships. To place ourselves in the position of being vulnerable, then rejected, sometimes with damaging savagery, repeatedly for a good chunk of our adolescent and post-adolescent years. As to the friendship relationships, as we get older and our focus is mandated by society to be focused on ever increasing sacrifice, we see the potential pools of friendships shrink. We are so stressed from work, money, and family that the idea of having to put in extra effort for finding and developing new friendships just feels Sisyphean. We end up in a negative feedback loop of social isolation which leads to even further mental dysfunction.

Again, this is my self assessment and social observation. I suffer all of this, and more, daily. My family is very worried about me because it has gotten so bad for me that it is like I have forgotten what happiness and contentment feel like.

This. I was so pissed when I saw the EULA for KSP2. I love KSP more than probably any game that has ever been released, due in no small part to the vibrant modding community. The fact that they decided to abuse the very people who made KSP great is disgusting and short slighted.