Unreal Engine royalties only start after you make $1 million from a project. Even then, it’s 5%, and waived for sales done on the Epic Store (whose 13% cut is almost a third of what Steam takes). If you are a small indie dev, you won’t be paying Epic a dime unless you start rolling in some serious dough, and even when you do, 5% of your revenue for using one of the most powerful 3D game engines is pretty fair

Countries have the right to expel foreign diplomats and embassies as long as they don’t arrest them or go through their stuff when they leave. The newly couped Niger junta requested the French ambassador leave and revoked his visa, but the French are still refusing to leave, claiming that because they don’t recognize the legitimacy of the new junta, they don’t have to follow the junta’s orders to leave. Regardless of your opinion of the new junta, in how does a former colonial power be in the right when they are blatantly ignoring the legal rights and sovereignty of their independent former colony’s government that is doing things by the book? They stopped sending the ambassador food and are confining him to his embassy until he leaves, especially given the current junta that is extremely gentle treatment

What’s even more mind boggling is that despite Starlink being so critical to Ukrainian communications, neither the Ukrainian government nor the US entered into a contract with a clause obligating Starlink to maintain service. Musk can just legally turn off Starlink for them with no legal repercussions because they never negotiated something against that into a contract with him. Even if they had to pay a premium rate for Starlink, for a service that critical to the Ukrainian Armed Forces it’s worth it

If there’s one place I’d expect to have trouble hiring, it’s the Pentagon’s IT team. They regularly deal with the most sensitive information about the US military, and need to have clearance to see all of it. That gives them an incredibly slim hiring pool, so it’s no surprise their IT team sucks

The FOSS crowd is incredibly cringey and annoying

Even the premium Peacock plan gave ads for Peacock content

For decades, the Republican party has had the Baptist/Evangelical vote in the bag without having to actually do anything thanks to abortion. Republican politicians could rile up their base attacking abortion and be excused for not doing anything about it by their constituents as abortion was a constitutional right, and because abortion was a constitutional right that couldn’t be taken away, those who cared about it could still be in good conscience when they vote for a Republican. The dog caught its tail when Roe was overturned, and now that abortion can be outlawed on every level of government, Republican inaction on abortion will see their support among Baptists/Evangelicals tank. Overturning Roe is the most self damaging thing the Republican party has ever done, and now they are forced to choose between catering to religious fanatics or normal people

A decent portion of Japanese sword fighting techniques revolve around how to not break your sword in half while using it. That’s not a concern with Damascus steel swords

It’s Starbucks so yeah. They’re pretty paranoid about unions after a few locations unionized

I’ve been enjoying Lemmy.blahaj.zone, though it’s more niche given that it’s an instance for trans people

Moreso an apple with controversial but not strictly CSAM material based in a country where it’s content is legal. Actually, not even an apple; Lemmy and the fediverse aren’t an entity. It’s an open standard for anyone to use; you don’t see the Modern Language Association being blamed for plagiarized essays written in MLA format, or the WHATWG being blamed because illegal sites are written in HTML, so it’s not a fair comparison to say that Lemmy/the fediverse are responsible for what people do with their open standard either

100k a day for operating in a country of 5 million people. The question isn’t “how much does this affect their global earnings?”, it’s “is it worth paying 100k a day to run personalized ads in a country with a population of Minnesota?”

The best thing to happen from the exodus regardless of it’s size is that there is now an active, popular, and viable Reddit alternative with better mobile support than Reddit. Reddit will likely never die, but users who get sick of their BS now or in the future have legitimate options with enough active users to keep them busy