I would love a true post-post apocalypse 3D Fallout. Like set in Shady Sands in it’s heyday.

Relatively normal modern day problems in the city, wasteland problems outside. Feel like there’s some space to explore some new things there, but Todd seems to be intent on keeping the Fallout setting in “post and a half-pocalypse”.

Least it’s not “nuke it all again” Avellone.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Dying Light, and Hades. $10 a piece on Steam.

I put a ton of hours into Bloodstained RotN when it was on gamepass, but never beat it. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a game I end up replaying every few years, so I really enjoyed its spiritual succesor back then (around when it first released), and they’ve only added more content (three new playable characters, a few game modes) to it over time.

For Dying Light, I love the Dead Rising series, but the moment to moment moving around is nothing to write home about. Dying Light has a focus on movement, and got a lot of good reviews, so I figured I’d give it a try.

For Hades, I’ve always loved Supergiant Games since their first game, Bastion, and I never picked up Hades because it was never priced low enough when I had money to burn. Now that Hades 2 is in early access, I watched some gameplay of that and the first shot up on my list to buy. I’ve been craving an isometric real time combat game too.

Man, I don’t even run my desktops without a UPS. Maybe I’m jaded from too much tech support, but I feel like not having a UPS is like not using a condom for a random hookup: it’s fine until it dramatically and seriously isn’t.

Almost every desk at my workplace has its own lead-acid battery. That’s well over 1000. We haven’t had any fires or explosions.

There must be a way to stop this feeling.

Been there. I’ll keep it short. The way is to get professional help. Therapy and/or medication.

Since you have no job, first step is to get on whatever low/no income insurance is available to you locally.

Same, but surely you realize that ads have only gotten worse in the intervening time. I also don’t truly believe that we’ll ever reach critical mass on adblocker users. You’re asking people who don’t care, who don’t use the internet the same way we do, to suddenly care enough to take manual action outside of their knowledgebase amd comfort zone.

The only way the adblocker user numbers get pumped up to critical mass for a change is if a popular default browser makes adblocking an opt-out default.

As well as predatory/not, there’s also a trend with attention grabbing/not.

There was a period of time where Google AdWords ruled the online ad space, and most ads were pure text in a box with a border making the border between content and ads visually distinct.

Kind of like having small portions of the newspaper classified section cut out and slapped around the webpage.

I still disliked them, but they were fairly easy to look past, and you didn’t have to worry about the ad itself carrying a malware payload (just whatever they linked to).

Companies found that those style ads get less clickthrough than flashier ones, and that there’s no quantifiable incentive to not make their ads as obnoxious as possible. So they optimized for the wrong metric: clickthrough vs sales by ad.

More recently, companies have stepped up their tracking game so they can target sales by ad more effectively, but old habits die hard, and predatory ads that just want you to click have no incentive to care and “de-escalate” the obnoxiousness.

… not really though.

The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own. They uncapped that restriction, openly, and they admitted to it.

This is an incredibly open and shut case.

It’s stupid as hell, and that law needs to die, but there was no corporations doing people dirty here. This could have ended so, so much worse for IA.

Like many people, I have aspirations of making games. One thing I’m planning on is some sort of charter or agreement (which I could hopefully automate somehow) that 5 years after the last update that the code would go open source. Some sort of attribution, no commercial use license or something.

I miss the “Tales from…” subs. Tales from tech support was regular reading material for me for many years, and in general just having a place to commiserate with others in the same field as you is wonderful. The other ones also helped me be more concious of what I could do to keep myself from being a nuisance to other professionals like my doctor and pharmacist.

More niche, I miss the gunpla sub a lot. We have subs for model making and tabletop miniatures, but the gunpla community was very well run.

In general, I think the lack of moderation tools has made it difficult for communities to do regular “event” posts and the like which used to really help keep subs alive, guide discussions, and gave good examples of the type of content that fit. Like it’s a lot easier to start a new conversation at a party where everyone is talking than to be the first person to speak up in a silent room.

A big benefit of the fediverse is that it’s still so small that it’s pretty easy to just block the assholes without a constant sea of new ones coming in to take their place.

Whoever the asshole you’re replying to is, I already have them blocked.

Did the lemmynsfw instance die or something?

I’ve tried to do this a few times, and unfortunately it feels like you really have to go all in on managing your own content library.

Like many, I had stopped pirating shit when netflix etc were “good”.

None of the streaming services want you to use them outside of their official sites/apps, so you end up being limited to like 720p when running them through kodi etc.

No worries, microplastics are equal opportunity! You can find microplastics at any of your local ovaries today!

Also, now introducing kids microplastics! Don’t want to wait for your microplastics? Simply be born in the current era and we’ll send you kids microplastics absolutely free! That’s a $60 value, absolutely free! Other companies might trick you into buying fast by making that a limited time offer, but we know you’ll love microplastics so much that this is a forever offer!

Microplastics- we’re already inside you!

Similar to your #2, but less serious, I once wrote a script to power down virtual machines for a data center move. It was a nice piece of work too, grouping them in batches, sending shutdown commands to the guest OS, falling back to forcing a power off through the hypervisor after a configurable timeout…

I don’t recall the specifics of the problem or the virtual infrastructure I was working with, but in short I didn’t have sanity checks on what was being shut down. Ended up force shutting off the hypervisor/virtual infrastructure management system.

Added an extra few hours the move with that.

The software you’re probably thinking of is f.lux

Blockchain also has some useful applications. Most (but not all) of them are also possible with technology and such that existed when bitcoin was first created, at far lower cost for a minor tradeoff in accuracy. On top of that, almost none of them are related to speculative markets.

It’s a way to do distributed transaction logs in a non-refutable and independantly verifiable way. That’s useful and important, but it was a solution in search of a problem. Even for the highest security, most at risk transactions, the existing international fincancial systems are “good enough” to ensure reliability of transaction logs.

In the end, blockchain and now AI are just falling victim to con men trying to milk as much money as they can from things before people build a working understanding of them. They’ll just keep moving onto the next big thing as it comes.

Do like Netflix and start putting hardware in every datacenter and at backbone split point you possibly can.

For-profit vs. Non-profit is an entirely different distinction under US law, with specific legal definitions for each. This is entirely separate under US law from publicly traded vs. privately owned, which has separate specific legal definitions.

Valve is a for-profit privately owned company. That is what allows it to not maximize shareholder value, and is the unstated distinction that allows your quote to be true.

For-profit publicly traded companies do have a legal responsibility for such.

As long as you are using official Microsoft install media downloaded from Microsoft (or verify the hash to ensure what you downloaded matches the official Microsoft isos) then you should be fine.

MAS is just a PowerShell script you run after install. It’s open source, and PowerShell scripts aren’t compiled, so you can examine it yourself to see what it’s doing. It tricks Microsoft servers into issuing your hardware an official “free upgrade” license key. The one I’m familiar with as reliable is MASgrave.

That’s not an 100% guarantee that it couldn’t be doing anything shady, but it would be incredibly hard for it to hide anything if it was.

Just like the “tesla hyperloop” or whatever they’re calling it, it’s not about innovation. It’s about keeping his brands in the public eye as a form of marketing. Even if on a logical level we all know it’s horseshit, it still keeps himself and Tesla salient.

He can afford to burn an incomprehensible amount of money on stunts for outcomes most people would consider inconsequential.

I’m not saying it’s 4D chess, it definitely isn’t. He’s not particularly intelligent in that way. That said, I do think there are some very simple reasons for him to do this that go beyond his absolutely insane delusional ego.

He has enough money that he can continue funding whatever he wants regardless of public opinion. He literally exists at a level where any press is good press as it keeps him fresh in peoples’ minds.