Sinuousity

More anti consumer garbage forced by a monopolistic juggernaut which the governments of the world refuse to do more than mildly scold. It's worse than chatgpt and pops up almost everywhere you click. Something about heads in asses

Sure, everything except the direct connection between Bigo specifically and ByteDance. Like I said originally, there were numerous apps that I found platforming this behavior, and TikTok's parent company was responsible for most of them. This was several years ago (~5) and I'm going off memory here, so I do apologize for the inconsistency

Fair question I should clarify: ByteDance was using a number of LLCs at the time to (my understanding) find the best / most addictive TikTok-style app. I believe TikTok was around at the time but it was called something different. Looking into this briefly again, it seems Bigo isn't directly connected to ByteDance, but the exact style/format of app is apparently being abused by multiple companies across countries now.

We'll simply make a live service game, that way we can ~~keep improving it forever~~ shit on anyone who might have had any faith in it after it's an inevitable failure like almost all other live service games

A few years ago I conducted an internal months long investigation into Bigo Live and about a dozen remarkably similar apps. They were cookie cutter template apps with slight tweaks to test market trends and engagement, all produced by one single corporate entity: ByteDance. While sharing my findings with the team did result in new child endangerment policies being enacted internally, it is absolutely disgusting to see these apps are still at large, getting worse, and the massive tech company I worked for did essentially nothing to help externally.

EDIT: I should note the content I encountered was not abuse, but very apparent and out in the open grooming, in apps where a user's location would often be shown publicly

This doesn't sound like a ~~great~~ company. Anyone who at this point believes an 'AI' agent can outright replace human labor is not paying attention. 100% just another AI scam

Lawyers: "Generating music using a machine learning model trained using real artists' music (without permission) does not violate those artists copyright!"

Therefore

Big Data: "Generating a black box replication of your identity trained on your private personal information and activity (without permission) does not violate your privacy!"

I feel like doubling the workload is better than quadrupling the size of the project inheriting a bevy of features and tools you likely won't touch at all. Sure it's stripped out later (ideally), but I like less bloat and that includes during dev when I might have to dig through 3rd party code with its own conventions and standards packed into a 'source available' library with potentially dogshit or absent documentation.

Also yes, it's good practice

Boss fights definitely, your sentiment reminds me of Warframe. Don't miss farming bosses. However, there are a lot of ways randomized loot can be implemented, and I wouldn't call all of them dark patterns

I'm not a big guy but it still surprises me every time I see how small Rogan is

If you look at extra content surrounding the original, it becomes pretty clear that BGE2 is what they always wanted BGE to be in terms of scope and theme, but after so long in development now, I can't help but wonder if the restrictions on scope were what made the original truly great.

I hope they manage to pull it together into a cohesive product eventually-- and I will be playing it when they do-- but I would be truly surprised if the sequel is as impactful or memorable as the OG

I can't answer that, but absolutely it is