NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 95%
The closest I can find is
Which is only the "lite" version (which really has no reason to be used in firefox) and was likely based on an improper scan. Which happens constantly and is usually an email and a few days of waiting rather than immediately going to the press.
If you can find something about Mozilla actually being anti-adblock or disabling manifest v2 that would be incredibly useful. But maybe be aware of what is going on before vaguely making major claims?
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 100%
- You would be amazed what people flush down their toilets
- You do realize there are other people in that flooded area too, right? Those "missing" folk? Hopefully all of them show up at a Waffle House two counties over. The reality is... many of them are still there in that horrific soup.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 93%
I mean, drowning is kind of the least of your worries in those situations.
NEVER walk through even suburban flood waters unless it is life or death. Because you know those things called "sewers"? Yeah, they are under there. And if the water has reached the point where it is even a foot off the ground? Then those sewers are entirely(-ish) full and that "water" contains significant amounts of poo, medical waste, chemicals, and so forth. Let alone corpses of animals... and people.
So that is basically liquid hepatitis and Erastil knows what else.
It is also why you NEVER buy a car that has been in a flood area and houses really should be basically demolished at that point (but aren't because Capitalism).
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 100%
Exactly. It is the same logic as "This game is great if you play it with friends".
Different people have different tastes. EYE Divine Cybermancy is still one of my favorite games of all time.
But also? Guess what game I will point out is objectively bad and has massive amounts of jank and UX issues?
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 100%
I mean, Walz outright called him out on it.
The only reason trump allowed vance to be his VP (aside from all the ties to right wing tech billionairres...) is that he has committed to not having a spine. pence had a spine for all of one day and did his job and obeyed the will of the people. vance obeys the will of trump and knows he will be fired (if not given some Novichok) should he turn from that.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 16%
Ah, my mistake. I was not aware that lobbyists and special interest groups did not exist in the EU, that only the most qualified of consultants were hired, and that all laws were perfect.
Again, there is a way to set this up to win and there is a way to set this up for knee jerk reactions and "I trust 420JustBlazeItGaming_XXX because they are advocating on my behalf. I should use their offer code for tv dinners". This is very much the latter.
But it is also being done in a way that, should this get enough traction in the demographics that actually matter, it can lead to a lot of bad legislation that will have global implications.
Instead we see remarks like
The industry has already ruined it for everyone. This is the best plan we’ve got to fix it.
That make it clear this is not about actually making beneficial pro-consumer legislature. It is about hurting developers for making "bad" games. And... I can't imagine any other Movements that might be taking advantage of this. If only we had more Ethics In Games Journalism, am I right?
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 100%
According to UESP, Oblivion had
- Orrery: A few spells and a player house with a fetch quest attached
- Wizard's Tower: a mage player house with a few spells and a fetch quest
- Thieves Den: A few spells and items and a very small dungeon
- Mehrunes' Razor: Decent sized dungeon to get a dagger
- Vile Lair: A few spells, a player house, and a fetch quest
- Spell Tomes: Literally just spells
- Fighter's Stronghold: A short dungeon and, you got it, another player house
Then we have Knights of the Nine (really mediocre) and Shivering Isle (arguably the best DLC Bethesda ever made)
Oh. And...
MOTHA FUGGING HORSE ARMOR!!!!!
People tend to be more favorable to Fallout 3's DLC than I am (most are incredibly tiny dungeons but with a new tileset). I suspect in large part because Operation Anchorage channeled how amazing storming the memorial was in the base game and... I genuinely don't know why people are so obsessed with flipping The Pitt. And Broken Steel itself was one of the worse examples of "We'll finish the game later" of the era... and I played ALL the Blizzard games.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 12%
I agree. Hence this initiative. Nothing will change without action, is this is the action that EU citizens can feasibly take. I’ve written my legislators, and that’s about all I can do in the US, other than spread the word on social media.
Relying on favorable interpretations of "reasonably functional" is just begging lobbyists and lawyers to ruin it for everyone.
Pushing for legislature with specifics that are actually good is how we get precedent.
"Stop Killing Games" is the former and most of "the movement" is twitch streamers telling their audiences what they want to hear.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 11%
Hoping things will turn out great is for idiots.
So rather than advocate for some vagueries that are primed to be corrupted... maybe actually start with those specific actionable laws to establish precedent that can be worked on.
Because a judge who has no idea what a vidya game is: "Oh, my grandson plays that gotchinson impact game. He is a good kid so clearly this is a different problem and this case is trash". Or, more likely "Minecraft?!?! THAT IS THE GAME WHERE YOU HAVE UNCENSORED SEX WITH PROSTITUTES AND THEN MURDER THEM!!!". Because the vast majority of court cases don't have proper experts involved but still lead to precedent that can cause problems down the line. Hence why there is a lot of pressure to settle when "tech" ends up in court.
Also: If your only argument is that I am not taking the "Stop Killing Games" movement seriously enough? You don't have one. Which... is par for the course.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 14%
Lobbyists and special interest groups are why we have an industry subsidized by legalized gambling for children and other ways of fucking us over.
And vagueries that will be interpreted by courts that likely have no knowledge of what a vidya game even is will resolve that?
People complain about it but there are a lot of reasons you do not want courts to actually rule on basically anything "tech" outside of special situations. Imagine if you were trying to convince your grandparent who still has a landline how cryptocurrency works and that their decision would actually become a law.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 77%
The thing is? Ignoring the apparent void that black skin creates on all cameras (oy), it doesn't take much time. It takes computing power.
As poops and giggles a few friends and I took the public (rumble...) traffic camera feeds that a nearby county has online. Set up a simple python script to scrape those and then configured an off the shelf tool to track a buddy's general car (green hatchback) and told him to just drive around for an hour.
We were able to map his route with about 70% accuracy with about two hours of scripting and reading documentation. And there are companies that provide MUCH better products for the people who have access to the direct feeds and all the cameras we don't have access to.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 18%
Accursed Farms themselves have said variations of "We'll figure out the specifics later"
Without "the specifics"? You are not proposing legislature or even "an initiative". You are just writing the kind of MoveOn petition where Obama will have to do Hot Ones if you totally get ten million signatures.
And... that really matters for reasons we have already seen. You and I think Jack Thompson was a hack and a moron. But we semi-regularly see people talking about how loot boxes and gacha games need to be outlawed without even considering the underlying skinner box/operant conditioning aspects.
But hey? How about "stop corrupting gamers"? Gambling is bad and it ruins lives. So let's get some legislature. Oh noes, now there can be no kissing or depiction of blood in any game because sex ruins lives and so does murder!
THAT is the difference between a child screaming into the void and actually trying to enact positive change. The former is vague "gimme what I want and figure it out for me". The latter is "We want X, Y, and Z because of reasons A, B, and C.".
Because
Leaving a game in a reasonably functional state without intervention from the game’s publisher is pretty specific,
Yes. Nothing more specific than "a reasonably functional state without intervention".
As for what actually would be specifics?
- Instanced multiplayer games with less than 128 players per server require either a dedicated server to be released or for support for listen servers": This is "reasonable" because... that is literally how these games are running. Under the hood, a CoD lobby is not much different than a UT server was back in the day. But, as you scale up the number of players you start sharding (see: Planetside) which begins to become something that would be nice but also might not "exist" outside of "run the entire backend". And the obvious loophole is that we are suddenly going to get a bunch of 130 player Overwatch games.
- "Games where N% of the game simulation happens on the customer's computer must have an offline mode": This is stuff like Dark Souls and Arkham Suicide Squad and The Crew (the game EVERYBODY totally loved...) and whatever. Ironically, games like Splinter Cell Conviction would be broken by this (because that is the DRM it used) but... fuck them? And the obvious loophole is "Well, we simulate N+1% because we stream this texture or some shit?"
But once you get beyond that? You start getting into messes of things like MMOs where there are a lot of very valid reasons for not wanting the entire server infrastructure to be running on a single player's computer. And the reality ends up being you have things like all the WoW and Everquest private servers that literally charge players money to play a pirated version.
Specifics are good. Vagueries are just how you get dicked over by lobbyists and special interest groups.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 87%
Yeah...
Basically every Oblivion DLC that was not Shivering Isles (and MAYBE Heroes of The Nine or whatever) was god awful. And Fallout 3 (aside from the last two hours of the story DLC) was only really tolerated because it was mostly sold as a season pass. Operation Anchorage was a cool novelty that made stealth trivial and the rest... existed.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 100%
I mean, you definitely want to wear a mask and some goggles at a protest. If only for the purpose of pepper spray. I totally don't have a thin gaiter, goggles ,and a beanie and have definitely not heard great things about mountain biking helmets (the ones with faceguards) and totally am not considering grabbing one next time I do an REI run.
But also be aware that, with protests, you are almost always up against the groups who have access to all those "traffic" cameras and the like. And computer vision makes it fairly trivial to identify when a bunch of unmasked people walked into a dark alley and came out with their faces fully covered by tracking them back from the 4th street protest. It isn't Enemy Of The State levels of asking Baby Busey and Jamie Kennedy to generate a 3d model from a single shot of Big Willy Style ogling some ta-tas, but most of the ways surveillance is used during that sequence are shockingly realistic and feasible.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 35%
Rhetorical question (because we clearly can infer the answer) but... have you ever seen a black person?
A bit of melanin does not make you into some giant void that breaks all cameras. Black folk aren't doing long exposure shots for selfies or group photos. Believe it or not but RDCWorld doesn't need to use nightvision cameras to film a skit.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 42%
Yeah but this is (basically) reddit and clearly it isn't racism and is just a problem of multi megapixel cameras not being sufficient to properly handle the needs of phrenology.
There is definitely some truth to needing to tweak how feature points (?) are computed and the like. But yeah, training data goes a long way and this is why there was a really big push to get better training data sets out there... until we all realized those would predominantly be used by corporations and that people don't really want to be the next Lenna because they let some kid take a picture of them for extra credit during an undergrad course.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 33%
No. I have worked with phone camera sensors quite a bit (see above regarding evaluating facial recognition software...).
Yes, the computation is a Thing. A bigger Thing is just accessing the databases to match the faces. That is why this gets offloaded to a server farm somewhere.
But the actual computer vision and source image? You can get more than enough contours and features from dark skin no matter how much you desperately try to talk about how "difficult" black skin is without dropping an n-word. You just have to put a bit of effort in to actually check for those rather than do what a bunch of white grad students did twenty years ago (or just do what a bunch of multicultural grad students did five or six years ago but...).
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 14%
Because it isn't really even an initiative. It is a random non-law pushed by a youtuber that people have latched onto because it is a way to say "lazy devs are ruining gaming".
If you are talking to chat about why you are their best friend? Yeah. It is awesome. And "Let our representatives figure out what the law should actually be. We just don't want Them to take our gherms!"
If you are someone who actually is looking at the feasability of this for the industry? You start to see a LOT of major issues. Which actually do matter in countries that care a lot more about workers' rights (so a lot of Europe, where this actually matters).
And if you are a normy who doesn't watch the Right streams? You say "Wait... we want to trust the government with nebulous demands to legislate our passion? Are you fucking stupid? Do Jack Thompson and Tipper Gore mean nothing to you?!?!?"
I am very much for consumer protections. But we need actual legislature and thought outside of kneejerk slogans and vaguery. Because fuck the publishers. But the devs? They are humans too. Humans being told they have to work 7 day weeks up until the next advertising campaign for a game that is like ten years delayed at this point.
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 40%
For low contrast greyscale sequrity cameras? Sure.
For any modern even SD color camera in a decently lit scenario? Bullshit. It is just that most of this tech is usually trained/debugged on the developers and their friends and families and... yeah.
I always love to tell the story of, maybe a decade and a half ago, evaluating various facial recognition software. White people never had any problems. Even the various AAPI folk in the group would be hit or miss (except for one project out of Taiwan that was ridiculously accurate). And we weren't able to find a single package that consistently identified even the same black person.
And even professional shills like MKBHD will talk around this problem during his review ads (the apple vision video being particularly funny).
NuXCOM_90Percent Now • 80%
Apple already demonstrated that you can still get pretty darn close from eyes and hair. Combine that with a bit of logic (There is a 40% chance this is Sally Smith but she also lives three streets over and works on that street) and you still have very good odds.
Well... unless you are black, brown, or asian. Since the facial recognition tech is heavily geared toward white people because tech bros.
So for the past couple of years (... coming on a decade?) I've liked the 8bitdo controllers a lot. Build consistency is a bit of a shitshow but you can tell almost instantly if you have one of the bad ones (and it is usually a matter of just loosening one screw unless the PCB itself is cracked). And the Ultimate Pro Whatever The Hell With Charging Dock is really nice and I love that I never have to worry about my controller needing new batteries when I am on my PC. In theory I can just plug it in but that gets into a mess with games that auto-detect what is connected and so forth. The charging dock that doubles as a receiver is delightful. But when I switched to linux for fulltime gaming a while back... things got messier. 8bitdo has no linux support whatsoever. Mostly that is "fine" because the controller is a controller and I can use a phone app when I want to change what the rear buttons do. But I can't update firmwares. Which, again, is "fine" except I finally wanted to get back into Crosscode and have learned that shitshow of an html5 engine ONLY supports xinput on PC and apparently the functionality to tell the 8bitdo to present as an xinput might only be in a beta firmware? So all the joys of debugging but with very non-technical resources on google. Not the end of the world (was mostly planning to moonlight to my xbox anyway) but kind of the straw that broke the camel's back as it were. Because Crosscode is a mess of a game technically that even the devs acknowledge was a mistake (AMAZING experience though) but what happens the next time I run up into a corner case? Not ready to throw this in the bin and rage purchase a new gamepad but very much ready to start browsing what my options are. Especially as (some) third parties are actually pretty good these days. So what gamepads do you folk use?
So I finally broke down and made a very poor purchasing decision and ordered an e-ink writer to be a notepad/e-reader hybrid. Partially so that it is less of a hassle to read books I got from kickstarters and the like while still using the kindle app for the disturbing amounts of money I throw at Amazon. Historically? I loved goodreads because theoretically I would get good recommendations based on what I liked. In practice, that has never happened but it is still nice to see if I read something in the past. And once I have multiple ebook ecosystems, it will be nice to actually check that rather than spend the first 100 pages wondering if this is familiar. So any good recommendations? I suspect what I SHOULD do (and will likely start doing more as a self betterment thing) is just put a note in my personal nextcloud every time I finish a book with a quick summary and some thoughts. But having the big database is also really nice. Thanks
So I've been grabbing a few shows I want to watch reruns of while playing Balatro that don't have good blu ray releases. My piracy is fairly limited these days so I don't bother with private trackers (do have a VPN though). In the past, I never really had an issue with grabbing a few one offs off the popular, maybe honeypot, sites like rarbg and 1337x. But over the past month or so, I've noticed I have gotten a lot of shitty files. Skips here and there or garbled colors for a scene or two. At first I though it was just a bad file since re-downloading the torrent had the exact same problem. But, on a whim, I did a recheck and had to download like 40% of a torrent. And then 20% the next time. Which made me assume my NAS was fucked or I was dealing with a lot of packet lsos (... I AM dealing with a lot of packet loss from my ISP). But when I redownloaded a "known bad" torrent I had the exact same corrupted file. So am I just REALLY unlucky? Or is there an epidemic of shitty/malicious seeds on the public trackers these days?
So... Gundam 00. It has always felt like the black sheep of the "main" shows. Everyone makes fun of it for being a "ripoff" of Wing (to the point there are even meme pictures in the official gunpla stores in Japan) and it felt largely forgotten relative to the never ending love affair with the UC and the pushes to make SEED a thing while avoiding the acknowledgement that the vast majority of "main" Gundam shows are retelling 0079+Zeta. So I put off the watch for a while. Because I love Wing (like most Americans, it was my first Gundam) but I also fully acknowledge that is batshit insane and mostly a retelling of 0079, Zeta, and CCA. And... I know Japan has very strict anti-drug laws but I am pretty sure they were on the same stuff that made Wing seem like a good idea. But whereas Wing's pacing felt like complete insanity to the point you would FEEL like nothing happened and then realized three wars started and ended over the course of two episodes, 00 seemed obsessed with ending every climactic cliffhanger/battle before the first commercial break. It works amazingly well on a binge watch to make you watch "one more episode" but I REALLY wonder how people tolerated that when it aired on TV. "Oh cool. The battle we have all been waiting for is about to happen. And... it is over before we see Ibushi squirt some dashi into a pan in a suggestive manner". But, for all its flaws? I think season 1 is up there with Iron Blooded Orphans in terms of being a genuinely good "real" Gundam show (War in the Pocket is still GOAT but that was very clearly a side story, similar to Rogue One in the Star Wars franchise). We have a roster of pilots with clear flaws and mysterious pasts that pretty much exist to explore the idea of whether you can ever truly achieve peace through violence. And... it is insanely bleak. It is clear from the start that Saji's plotline is going to be there to make us useless in the rain and... it somehow ends worse than anyone can possibly imagine on every single front of that. And the climactic battle is simultaneously more pointless and more brutal than basically anything short of IBO. And then... we have Season 2. Which is mostly a rush to explain all those mysterious backstories as well as the overall mythos. I assume this was intended (right down to not even having the namesake gunpla model until the end of Season 1) but it really undermines almost all the "vibes" of the first season. And I kept expecting Ian to quote Rodney Dangerfield and scream "We're all gonna get laid!" with how so much of season 2 felt like a collection mission for every Gundam meister's girlfriend. And while 00 definitely cheated by having two "end of show so everybody dies" sequences... it ends on way too hopeful of a note. Don't get me wrong, I like a Gundam that doesn't leave me staring at my TV's burn-in prevention screen while I drink whiskey. But after how ridiculously bleak Season 1 was... 2 just felt like a copout. Also let's ignore that the Gundams were literal reality warpers. And that it is clear someone watched Beerfest and had an epiphany on how to keep such a fan favorite character around. But, for all of Season 2's MANY MANY MANY flaws, I still frigging loved it. Because usually, the overall story is secondary to the emotional beats of a Gundam. Yes, we are all super eager to know what the latest Char clone is planning but what we really care about is what it will mean for the Pilot. And, don't get me wrong, I was very invested in all of the pilots (even frigging Tieria). But I kept watching because I needed to know what Ribbons or the Feddies or A-Law would do next. Also, let's not overlook the sheer ballsiness of ending the show with "And we are doing a movie!". So yeah. Gundam 00. More or less abandoned by Bandai. Mocked by Eastern audiences for being a ripoff of the Gundam that was explicitly targeted at the Sailor Moon demographic (seriously...). Mocked by Western audiences because Eastern audiences mock it and we are all weebs to one level or another. Season 1 is some of the best that "mainline" Gundam has ever been. Season 2 is... good by Gundam standards. And two parting notes: 1. Anyone who disparages this had better speak to their (non-existent) God about their crimes against cute and adorable Haro units doing repairs on the White Base equivalent Could have done with a lot less large breasted women in skintight outfits bouncing around and more cute Haro units being cute. 2. While I still take issue at just treating it as a blatant Wing ripoff, I do have to say: in a franchise where you have a child soldier who would be fine with being executed because it means he can rest and someone with blatant split personality issues... Heero is still the craziest Gundam pilot ever. And Relena is somehow even crazier than that. The number of times Allejulah went full Hallelujah and my response was still "Still not crazier than Heero"...
Looking for a solution to manage and access the directory on my NAS that is full of ebooks. Optimally I want to be able to web reader them but also automagically send it to the email that sends it to my kindle. And e-book wise, the majority of mine are epub/mobi that I got from various kickstarters or humble bundles. But I also have some RPG books (so PDF with a LOT of pictures) and manga (PDF or CBR). Did some research and checked the various reference lists. Mostly narrowed it down to * Weird-ass Calibre running in Kasm and accessed through a god awful web UI: This is actually what I used for the past year or two because there was a solution that was fairly plug and play with unraid. I... would rather never do this again * "Calibre Web" https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web. This seems to be what I actually want (an actual web interface to Calibre!) but it looks like the lead dev lost their shit with obnoxious demands from users. And while I appreciate they are still supporting it, "I am going to ignore the issues unless I feel like it" seems like a good way to get a bunch of unacknowledged CVEs... * Kavita https://www.kavitareader.com. Only found out about this today but it looks clean and efficient (plex-like). REALLY not a fan of the subscription model already being there but I also don't want any of those features. Thoughts? There anything better I am missing because none of these look all that great?
So over the years (decade?) I've used Ventoy a lot. For those not aware, it is basically a live USB that you can add other ISOs to to boot into those. Usually overkill but incredibly useful for those days when you need diagnostics, a simple terminal, and then to install something what you actually want. But... it feels like I run into corner cases and issues with ventoy more often than not. Proxmox or Fedora or whatever decide to do something even slightly different and then I need to upgrade ventoy and blah blah blah. Also... I am not the most comfortable with downloading anything from Sourceforge these days. Let alone something that is going to have a LOT of power over whatever machines I provision. So I suspect the real answer is to either set up a way to network boot (although, not all machines support that) or buy like five cheap USB drives and put them on a keychain and not over-complicate things. But if I DID want to over-complicate them.. is there anything better than Ventoy these days? Thanks
So for the past few years (?) I have been using wireguard to vpn into (effectively) my firewall and a dynamic dns setup to access that remotely. But with the shitshow that is google domains and the like, this seems like a good opportunity to look into a few of the alternatives. I am not entirely opposed to just going in and changing the dns server once I figure out what I am going to do on that front, but wireguard has always been a bit of a mess to set up for less "tech savvy" people who need access to the home network. Every so often I see some cloud based solutions get suggested. Which is sketchy but I already have a few alerts set up to be able to remotely shut my network down if wireguard is acting up when it shouldn't be and shutting down a VM is a lot less of a "do I really need to do this?" than shutting off the entire network. But most of those solutions seem built around selling seats which means they want you to add individual devices rather than just setting up a tunnel. So is wireguard still the gold standard? Or is there a more user friendly solution that will let me compromise a bit but also have a setup that doesn't require me to be physically on site to fix the inevitable hiccups because it takes hours of reading articles to understand the setup? Thanks
Framework as in the laptop company, just for clarity. https://frame.work/. For those unaware, the idea is that these are laptops built with a high degree of modularity so that you can replace far more than a single stick of SODIMM with the goal of even upgrading your CPU and mainboard a few years down the line. Also, Framework is partially owned by Linus Sebastien (Linus Tech Tips) so their marketing is "off the chain" as it were. Over the past few years I have tried to convince myself to get one a few times. But... the pricing never made sense. As a quick exercise: * A DIY (so no Windows key) 13th gen intel starts at 850 USD https://frame.work/products/laptop-diy-13-gen-intel?q=processor * The associated mainboard+cpu is 450 USD https://frame.work/products/mainboard-13th-gen-intel-core?v=FRANGJCP04 * A Dell Inspiron 16 inch (since the samsung with the same specs was on a ridiculous sale and I am trying to prove a point) is 900 USD (on sale for 600) with a windows key https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-inspiron-16-0-2-in-1-touch-laptop-13th-gen-intel-evo-i5-8gb-memory-512gb-ssd-platinum-silver/6539908.p?skuId=6539908 * `850+450=1300`. So you really aren't even saving that much unless you actively refuse to shop a sale at Best Buy or pretend you are still a student when they ask. And that assumes you ONLY want to upgrade your mobo+cpu and nothing else. But I still like the fundamental concept (of the marketing...) of upgradable laptops. But then I finally watched the Tested teardown video with Norm (the heart and soul of Tested and has been since the Whiskey days) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drxOpMsr6sM and... the general takeaways were that there is a LOT of cool tech involved in the modularity but that the vast majority of people would never mess around with it after assembling their laptop for the first time. Also, Adam Savage has stickers. Combine that with all of their modular ports being 20 dollar USB-C dongles with single ports and... this feels a lot more like the kind of bullshit Apple does than anything else. Why use the USB C dongle/hub that works with all your other devices when you can buy a 20 dollar HDMI port instead? Same with stuff like the (honestly insanely cool) modular keyboard layout. Basically, the keyboard, touchpad, etc are all panels that can be popped off and swapped around. So if you want stupid LEDs, you can have them. If you want an offset keyboard, you can do it. If you want a 10key numpad, you can do that too. It is a genuinely awesome idea but... it is a lot of engineering for something that people will use maybe twice in their ownership of the laptop (once to configure, one to replace when they spill their drink). Same with things like being able to swap out the back module to have a GPU when you want it. You do that once. Which... makes it feel like people are paying a premium for easier assembly at a factory. And as for the upgradable hardware? Storage and ram are on point and they should be praised. But you are basically buying whole new modules for the CPU/mobo and the GPU and so forth. Which... is kind of necessary because it is so rare to find an actual mobile sized GPU in a consumer available format. But it continues to just feel like you are buying proprietary parts from a company (Framework want other companies to make parts but I have not looked through the terms and licensing). But also? A friend pointed out: How many sticks of DDR3 ram do you still have? Because I know that I have a big bin of computer parts "just in case" that I will never use but also can't be bothered to throw away because maybe I will. And that is what these modular parts become. You COULD recycle your old mainboad+cpu... or you can keep it in case you want to do a project that you never will and that would be perfectly fine with a raspberry pi or a cheap nuc anyway. Contrast that with wiping your laptop and giving it to a nephew or dropping it off in an e-waste bin (and many stores offer incentives to do that). All of which combines to... this feels a lot like the kind of "poison pill" compliance that Apple is doing on the right to repair side. They make a big deal about how they allow people to repair their shit now (that various governments threatened action...). But they tightly control the parts and rent out the hardware AND price it to strongly discourage hobbyists to the point that it mostly feels like they are just squeezing out the third party shops even more. I'm torn because I do think the stated ethos is awesome. I... also have had no issues replacing my storage or upgrading my ram in my last few laptops but I tend to not get "flagship" models so there is that. But it is increasingly feeling like Framework is just building up IP to sell to manufacturers while having a net negative on the amount of e-waste in the laptop space.
So I was watching a few youtubes and remembered how the vast majority (of like the ten) nes games me and my sister had were hard as all hell. I loved to play Little Nemo and Street Fighter 2010 but I am pretty sure I never made it past the third level of either. Let alone infamously hard games like The Lion King. Which got me thinking. Basically every game for the past 20 years has been designed around instant gratification and being accessible. We outright had to make a new concept "hard but fair" to account for games like Dark Souls that are designed to be difficult but beatable as opposed to putting you in a death spiral if you hesitate too long on a hard jump (hello Ninja Gaiden). So do the younger folk even have a concept of a "favorite game" where you likely never experienced more than fifteen minutes worth of content?
So finally got around to watching a recent movie that I won't name since I am not sure if it was part of the marketing, but the premise was that there was an all powerful AI that was going to take over the world and it used a mixture of predictive reasoning, control of technology, and limited human agents who were given a heads up on what was coming. It was... mostly disappointing and felt like a much tamer version of Linda Nagata's The Red (apologies as that is TECHNICALLY a spoiler, but the twist is revealed like a hundred pages into the first book that came out a decade ago). And an even weaker version still of Person of Interest. Because if we are in the world where an AI has access to every camera on the planet and can hack communications in real time and so forth: We aren't going to have vague predictions of what someone might do. We are going to have Finch and Root at full power literally dodging bullets (and now I am sad again) and basically being untouchable. Or the soldiers of The Red who largely have what amounts to x-ray vision so long as they trust their AI overlord and shoot where told and so forth. Or just the reality of how existential threats can be both detected and manufactured as the situation calls for utilizing existing resources/Nations. Any suggestions for near future (although, I wouldn't be opposed to a far future space opera take on this) stories that explore this? I don't necessarily need a Frankenstein Complex "we must stop it because it is a form of life that is not us", but I would definitely prefer an understanding of just how incredibly plausible this all is (again, I cannot gush enough about Linda Nagata's The Red). Rather than vague hand waving to demonstrate the unique power of the human soul ::: spoiler spoiler Or the large number of thetans within it :::