by available i meant available. it’s on a per channel/group basis and not on individual messages but essentially you can’t join or view their messages even if you have their id and even if someone forwards it to you it displays a “this message is nor available on clients downloaded from google play” error message or something similar. if you joined a channel prior and it get blocked from your client you stay in but can’t view its messages.

telegram has different visibility based on which client you are using and your phone number’s region. I’ve seen it firsthand how some channels are not available on telegram downloaded from app store vs direct apk download. unless if you mean in spirit they’re basically the same which i agree but everyone that has used telegram at all knows that telegram values being accessible more than free speech and privacy.

is your country a member state in WTO? are your copyright laws compatible with that of the US? does your country recognise foreign copyright claims from the countries that your pirated media comes from?

your worst risk as someone who just pirates safe media for personal consumption is getting a letter from your isp and that only happens if there are laws against it on the books and your isp feels threatened. if your country simply doesn’t enforce its copyright laws it’s unlikely you’ll be chosen to be punished to set an example (they’ll most certainly target notorious distributors) and your chance of getting sued by a media company amongst thousands of potential defendants in what i assume is a third world country is almost non existent.

not a game dev and we don’t have a console/pc game industry here, but i’m friends with a mobile game developer in a third world game studio (targeting a local audience rather than an overseas audience which means ad revenue is going to be higher rather than micro transactions), and the best way i can summarize it is to compare it to a monkey experimenting to see where its own excrement could stick to.

their productivity is measured in games they can make per month, they have to monitor and see what shit could grab attention anywhere and replicate it as fast as they can. no creativity whatsoever and the gameplay must be preferably loopable so that it shows better in ads/you can automatically generate a crap ton of levels for more ad spots. on the slim chance that your game might have a whiff of story, working on anything besides a very basic premise (which serves its utility by being converted into direction for producing art assets) is time wasted on not working on the next game.

the result is what you expect, word games tile matching games and those basic infinite games where there’s a ball jumping on platforms and its jumps are synced to a basic loop that can be made (and has been made) in FL studio in 5 minutes but is somehow broken into levels (for the aforementioned ad spots). if someone is bold enough they try their hand on making another supercell clone (which almost instantly fails because somehow clash of clans is still king after 12 years).

every two weeks they meet and see which 2 or 3 games are ok enough that they can polish, insert ads and micro transactions into and push onto the market. they change their name on marketplaces every couple of months so each studio name doesn’t have more than 5 or 6 game on it. if a game gets successful enough (some idiot kids actually come back to it everyday) they assign one of the devs to it to milk it dry, basically pump out “content” and micro transaction and ads, until the audience leaves and they get back to making more games.

and this business model is barely profitable. the mobile gaming market has been already calcified by gambling companies that have made better and more addictive products which have hooked audiences onto themselves and won’t let go. there was a golden window to grab a captive audience when smartphones were still relatively new, and that window has passed since at least the pandemic, and making money in a market where your audience is not willing to spend money on transactions is hard.

too many and i’ve just been awake for two hours.

i’ve never interpreted that as little snow but “snow like”. like لواشک isn’t a small version of lavash it’s similar to lavash.

hey no worries i’ll be interested to hear what you have to say if you think about it more. my point wasn’t just apple bashing i just don’t think adoption of this specific product will not be good, regardless of who its custodian is.

also just a point if you can spend 3500$ on this you are either financially irresponsible or absolutely rich, both in the US context where more than 50% 60% of people are living paycheck to paycheck, and in the global context where the percentage of people that can afford this with ease is basically a rounding error.

i’m probably not gonna see one in the wild since income levels here does not allow discretionary spending of 3500 dollars, but don’t needlessly antagonize people. just tell 'em it looks cheap and move on it will do more damage than recognizing it’s an expensive gadget :)

it won’t get less bulky compared to phones. the headset will still need lenses, a display which itself needs to be a certain distance away from your eyes, a board for processing, a separate battery pack, audio, wifi, straps, space for some airflow so it doesn’t overheat and damage the display etc etc. small form factors have come a long way and it can probably get thinner, but i don’t think apple vision pro is that far off from the physical limit of how much smaller it can get.

apple may get into the ad business after getting such a platform or something like google paying apple to enable this eye tracking “feature” for their youtube app. i think i overstated the ad part and in general the post make it seem like i’m way more concerned than i am, but the main point is ultimately it’s a much more controlled environment compared to any other medium, which is controlled solely by a corporation which cares for nothing except money, whether it is alphabet or apple it doesn’t matter. data collection is also another aspect of it that is worth thinking about.

i think the original description of the metaverse in science fiction is kinda in line with what you are describing. a one to one replica of the real world, and you can teleport to anywhere in the world and interact with it. a world controlled by google would be horrifying though.

i mean it’s easily circumventable, “and now you don’t have to worry about losing progress on your favorite game or losing battery, because when you are not using the headset it goes to sleep mode” or whatever, but you are right if the ads are too annoying people are probably not going to use it, or will they? this is the thing i already think the way ads currently are is very intrusive but there’s a large segment of people who are fine with it. and subtle ads are way worse imagine if they constantly put ads in your peripheral vision. it’s cartoonishly evil which is why it probably won’t happen but even giving that power to them is dangerous.

i’m still in uni so i can’t really comment about how’s the job market reacting or is going to react to generative AI, what i can tell you is it has never been easier to half ass a degree. any code, report or essay written has almost certainly came from a LLM model, and none of it makes sense or barely works. the only people not using AI are the ones not having access to it.

i feel like it was always like this and everyone slacked as much as they could but i just can’t believe it, it’s shocking. lack of fundamental and basic knowledge has made working with anyone on anything such a pain in the ass. group assignments are dead. almost everyone else’s work comes from a chatgpt prompt that didn’t describe their part of the assignment correctly, as a result not only it’s buggy as hell but when you actually decide to debug it you realize it doesn’t even do what its supposed to do and now you have to spend two full days implementing every single part of the assignment yourself because “we’ve done our part”.

everyone’s excuse is “oh well university doesn’t teach anything useful why should i bother when i’m learning <insert js framework>?” and then you look at their project and it’s just another boilerplate react calculator app in which you guessed it most of the code is generated by AI. i’m not saying everything in college is useful and you are a sinner for using somebody else’s code, indeed be my guest and dodge classes and copy paste stuff when you don’t feel like doing it, but at least give a damn on the degree you are putting your time into and don’t dump your work on somebody else.

i hope no one carries this kind of sentiment towards their work into the job market. if most members of a team are using AI as their primary tool to generate code, i don’t know how anyone can trust anyone else in that team, which means more and longer code reviews and meetings and thus slower production. with this, bootcamps getting more scammy and most companies giving up on junior devs, i really don’t think software industry is going towards a good direction.

getting multiplayer working on a pirated copy really depends on how the game handles multiplayer itself. in general you can divide them into these categories based on how you pirate them:

the easiest ones would be games that allow community or self-hosted servers. getting multiplayer working on them is essentially just cracking the game itself and turning off a few validation checks. if you wanna play with your friend it can be as simple as checking a tick box when creating a new game, although some games have a separate server binary and you probably need a static ip and other complications that arise when you wanna host a server. these games usually have communities that host servers for everyone and some of them can be as active as the original game’s server or even more. this would also probably disable any anti-cheat that the game might have so they may force the players connecting to have a separate anti cheat. some examples that i’ve played would be older valve games and minecraft. most game these days don’t use this model though.

a little harder would be games that only work over LAN. these also don’t need anything special done to them and if you genuinely get people on the same network you can actually play together, however in this day and age gathering people around on the same place can be quite hard, and also if your group is large enough your router may not be able to handle it, not to mention you can’t play with strangers online. that’s why you need an extra layer of software to simulate people being on the same LAN. the ones i have worked with are Hamachi and GameRanger. these tend to be very finicky about the exact version everyone is using so make sure to have the exact version with the exact patch number. these tend to be much older games, mostly strategy games since that was the most popular genre at the time, although early fps games are also LAN based. the games in the previous category also usually have LAN support. some examples i remember would be borderlands 2, age of empires 2 and stronghold crusader.

the biggest category today would be peer-to-peer (p2p) games which use p2p connections as the main way to communicate. in these games one of the clients usually acts out as the host while others connect to it over the internet. some of them might not even have a host and everyone connects to everyone else… and it’s all a giant mess that you really shouldn’t care about. what you should care about is that these games are way much trickier since game clients need to find each other, be aware of each other and send stuff to each other at all times, therefore most of these games usually use third party APIs do all the syncing. this makes it harder to play them online since they also use these APIs to check if the game is genuine or not. wouldn’t it be nice if we could take a free game that uses one of these APIs, send our requests as if we were playing that game so the validations checks wouldn’t happen? since most games on PC release on steam we can use the steam API (steamworks) to play them. these games need to be patched in order to pass off the game’s requests as if it came from another app. these patches are usually called steam-fix or online-fix patches, and most of them use the Space Wars game which is an example game that valve uses in their documentation to explain how their API works, and developers can use it in order to test out their game to see if it’s compatible with steamworks or not (some patches might use a different game like cube racer or TOXIKK but these are rare). that’s why it works since it’s all exposed and it has a legitimate use so valve is unlikely to nuke it. most modern games that can’t afford dedicated servers (usually indies but sometimes big games) use this method instead. i’ve played too many games this way but the most recent example was lethal company.

last but not least is games that use dedicated servers. unfortunately you can’t play most of these since the server is closed source and no one can host their own server except for the game developers. however some games have had their source leaked, or someone has gone through and painstakingly recreated the game and emulated the server of these games. they are called “private servers” and you can usually find people hosting these, or even host one yourself since most of them tend to be open source. most of them don’t work with the ordinary cracked version of the game but rather have their own special clients. be careful with these since you are trusting the host to actually be secure and most of them are not and you might get your data leaked. most of these private servers tend to be for MMOs since recreating a game demands a very dedicated player base over a long period of time. the most famous example are WOW private servers, specifically Warmane servers which have their own ecosystem.

there are also some oddities here and there that don’t neatly fit in these categories. you can’t play most emulated games online, but some emulators have networking functionality and with modified ROMs you can to play multiplayer, some emulators are purpose built to just play one game really well (like slippi for super smash bros melee), some games originally didn’t have online play at all but someone patched it in etc etc.

TL;DR: there are some general ways that you can get multiplayer on a game working, but it depends on the game. if the game can’t have a steamworks patch or it can’t work with LAN, then you need game specific ways of making it work. if there’s a way, someone has posted about it online so don’t be afraid to look for it. i’m sorry about the length of this comment hope it helps.