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 have two that flip for my favorite depending on my mood at any given time: “There Will Be Blood” and “Blade Runner 2049”. They are both kinda slow and require attention to really appreciate, so probably my favorite movie to turn my brain off and have fun is “Mad Max: Fury Road”.

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’ve used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google’s (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.

It was obfuscated only in the release build. The issue is that they have a system to send certain logs to an API so they can refer to them if a user has an issue that needs further investigation. Unfortunately, their target audience is not very tech literate and have a hard time explaining how they got into a situation where they experienced a bug, so the remote logging was a way to allow us to try to retrace the user’s steps. Some of the logs that get sent to the API have JSON values converted from class data, will refer directly to class names, etc, and those logs had the obfuscated names.

I have a somewhat related real world story. I had a client that was convinced that tons of people were going to decompile their application and sell their own version of the program, so they insisted that they needed their code obfuscated to protect company secrets and make it harder to reverse engineer. I tried explaining to them that obfuscation wasn’t that big of a deterrent to someone attempting to steal code through reverse engineering and that it would likely cause some issues with debugging, but they were certain they needed it. Sure enough, they then had a real user run into an issue and were surprised to find that their custom logging system was close to useless because the application was outputting random obfuscated letters instead of function and variable names. We did have mapping files, but it took a lot of time to map each log message to make it readable enough to try to understand the user’s issue.

I have a Funko Pop of the “This is Fine” dog on my desk at work because there are times where I’m really feeling that way.

I worked on a project that had a few spots where we compare a saved timestamp to the current time. During testing, the client would randomly change their device time a few days forward or backward and complain that things weren’t working as expected. I had to explain to them multiple times that they were basically time traveling, and the program was actually handling it fairly well all things considered.

Lol thanks, idk if I had watches on my mind or if autocorrect changed it to pocket watch

I have some football cards at my parents house that are in the same boat. Maybe take a look through them to try to estimate prices and protect the expensive ones. IDK about Marvel cards, but I know there are apps for some other trading cards where you can just scan a picture of the card and get an estimated price based on recent sales.

That’s cool. I wish I had kept some of my old Gameboy games, either to play or to sell. A lot of the games I had have jumped in price in recent years.

I’ve never heard of it, but it looks cool. I’ll need to take a look into it.

That’s a cool set! I am currently trying to sell a few retired sets (mostly Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Bionicle) and some surprise me in value. A few are about the price they originally cost, while others have tripled in value.

All cool collections! I have a few Funkos worth around $100 but probably wouldn’t sell them unless I needed to. Besides the LEGO Bilbo I mentioned in the description, I bought the Rivendell set towards the end of last year. I would like some of the old LotR or Hobbit sets, but they get pretty pricey.

That’s really cool. Such a non-descript item that still holds some value all these years later.

I’ve seen that before! I got a Halo 3 Master Chief Funko bobblehead from my local Blockbuster when they were closing. He is sitting on my desk next to my gaming PC right now with my Atlas and P-Body Funko Pops from Portal 2. My Master Chief has gone up in price, but not nearly as expensive as yours seems to be.

That’s a nice looking pocket knife. I wouldn’t have guessed $200, but it does look like a quality item.

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.