CerebralHawks

Who couldn’t access PC gaming before? Best Buy has always had a few “gamer PCs” on the shelf, with a lot of LED lighting and flashy parts for people who don’t know any better. My brother in law is a car guy, does gaming on an Xbox. Got a little extra cash, so he bought one of these. Wondered why he wasn’t getting good performance. He had his HDMI cord plugged into the motherboard — he wasn’t using the 5060 it came with at all! I moved the cable down and his performance shot up. He said he’s since replaced it with a 5080. He gets 120FPS in Cyberpunk at 1440p with high settings and ray tracing on high.

He reached out to a friend of mine who does custom PC building and my friend helped him upgrade a few things. He’s got 64GB of RAM, which he definitely doesn’t need, but it’s nice he’s future proofing. I think his CPU is a 9800XD or XP or something like that. It’s AMD. Nothing at all wrong with his setup. I’m just saying, a gearhead can get into PC gaming pretty easily with a prebuilt rig. Valve isn’t inventing shit with the Steam cube thing. They might be making PC gaming a little more accessible to console gamers, but I think the limitations, the tweaking, will put people off.

No because most prebuilt computers are sold by companies like Dell, HP, and Lenovo. Their bread and butter is corporate machines. They sell just enough enthusiast PCs to justify doing so, and they’re typically either sold for more than they’d cost to build, or right about the same, subsidized by cheaper, mass produced parts that “may or may not” be as good as the parts you buy a la carte from Amazon (e.g. Corsair et al).

And of course it can run GOG and pirated games, but Valve doesn’t make any money from GOG sales (or your pirated games) so they aren’t going to care about that.

Sounds like they’re going after imported pasta.

I actually support this. There’s no reason pasta can’t be made anywhere. It’s a very basic thing to make, if you have the right tool. Even before the tools, people were making them at home, and in quantities you need at home, that’s fine. But there’s no great reason why American companies can’t combine flour and egg and make some pasta.

I don’t think I’ve ever imported pasta from Italy. Why would I? It’s the same thing. And I’ve never been rich. Let the people who are willing to pay for pasta imported from Italy pay a little more. They won’t mind. Anyone who does mind can just buy American made pasta. It’s the same thing.

They’ll kiss and make up, like he did with Elon, who publicly stated that Trump was in the Epstein files (I think he was guessing but it’s a good guess, though maybe he did know — I mean more so than we all knew).

I’m a draft writer, so legibility and consistency. Every letter should be the same height and roughly the same width (except capital i). Everything is capitalised including the c in McWhatever/MacWhatever.

What I write has to be read by others of varying backgrounds and educations, so I make it at least as neat as the typed text on the page. It has to be that legible.

Want a fun time? Write out the sentence “What fictional character writes like this?” or something to that effect, take a picture, and post it to social media and see what people say. My wife had me do it and she posted it to her socials, and everyone said I write like the nerdy character in whatever show they liked. Trekkers would say I write like Data, or Spock, for example. Logically.

Don’t say AC to gamers without first spelling it out (or it being obvious which one you mean).

Depending on the age/skill level, it’s most likely either gonna be Animal Crossing or Assassin’s Creed, but the Armoured Core guys hate being left out, and IIRC there were a couple others.

Yeah, fuck Apple! Let’s give all our personal data to Google and let them sell it to the highest bidder, and charge us iPhone 17 Pro prices for iPhone 11 performance at the same time! /s

Sure would be nice if there were a third option, because right now, you’re choosing between privacy and freedom to install cracked apps and more easily steal media. Because let’s face it, that’s what people want to sideload for. Both stores offer emulators now. That excuse is straight out. It’s basically down to whether you can install a torrent client or not. Or porn apps, but you can use those through the web. (You can also torrent through the web, via a seedbox, but it’s not as straightforward and it’s not free.)

Remember, Google took away a lot of the things that made Android different from iOS. They took your headphone jack. They took your memory card reader. They even took your buttons to make the bottom of Android phones look more like the bottom of iPhones. They’re coming for sideloading next. They made a concession and said they wouldn’t take it, after all, but they said the same about ad blocking in Chrome. They backed down, they backed down… but ultimately, they did it. And since sideloading is about ad blockers and their threat to Google’s profits as an advertising company, the same will happen with sideloading. They’ll back down once or twice, but ultimately, that is the direction they are going to go.

As someone who uses both… I just wish Apple could make a keyboard. I have a 2019 Android phone and a 2024 iPhone. If I’m gonna be spending time typing online, I will boot up the Android phone, hotspot it off my iPhone (it’s WiFi only, I don’t have a SIM card in it), and type on that. Because Gboard on Android is that much better. Web browsing too, you can’t beat Firefox with uBlock Origin.

I know… there are open source (/Linux) phones out there, and I’m excited for them, but they won’t come to the US because to do so, they’d have to get approved by the carriers, and the carriers won’t do it. They’ll need to put spyware and adware on them. Apple doesn’t let them do it for now (that was their original deal with AT&T, and everyone else who wanted to carry iPhone has had to honour it), but Android phones get it so bad. They get a splash screen at boot. They’re forced to install apps and games. They get ads from the carrier in the notifications. It’s terrible. So I imagine some Linux phone maker trying to break into the US market will be subject to the same. And who knows, maybe iPhones will at some point, too. But we aren’t there yet.

That’s what they should rename Ring to

This Steam Machine is going to be a blowout success.

Haha. No it’s not. At $500 it might do alright. North of that it will fall flat. People into PC gaming will build something better. This is an attempt to get into console gaming. If it costs more than a PS5 or XSX, being able to run Steam games won’t save it.

I suspect it will be moderately successful but less so than the Steam Deck.

Look both ways before crossing…? Not sure what you mean

Edit: If you see something, no the fuck you didn’t; snitches get stitches and wind up in ditches having shat their britches, or something like that.

That was always a dumb statement. Microsoft had two places to go from there. Either iterate and keep the name like Mac OS X was doing (10, 10.1, 10.2 and so on) or go to 11… like macOS also did (after a while).

They were never gonna release a version of Windows called Windows 10 and never update it or improve upon it (as they see it).

Honestly it’s the smartest thing Trump could do. He knows his base won’t care. He can ask why the push wasn’t as strong under Biden. And it’ll hurt the Democrats who were involved more than it will hurt him.

Who does he think will affect him if there’s (more) concrete proof he’s a nonce? He already tried to overthrow the government and the people still voted for him and/or refused to vote against him.

As a Mac user with an Xbox, this thing looks like a breath of fresh air! My Xbox (Series X) is still running well, so I continue to use it, but I kinda want this Steam cube thing, if the price is right. I don’t want to buy any more products from Microsoft, and while I tolerate Xbox, I do not like Windows. (I tolerate it at work because I have to, but I’d prefer not to have to mess with it.) I could hang with Linux if I wanted to go down that road, but it looks like this will be a suitable alternative for gaming… if the price is right.

I get that the touch pads are meant for mouse emulation. But, it’s a PC! Why wouldn’t I just pair my trackball to it?

For any gaming I’d prefer a mouse for, the gamepad is better. But for some games, the trackball is superior to both. Games like Diablo. I’m not into most of the games that would benefit. Someone named a bunch and yeah, I don’t play those games. But for those games, I have a Logitech trackball I love, the MX570 or whatever. The trackball everyone uses. Not very original, I know, but hey, the thing’s good! It’s why I haven’t bought the Apple Magic Trackpad for my Mac. If I had a mouse, I would have. But the trackball bridges the divide. So yeah, as a trackpad guy (you can’t beat the one on the MacBook) I get it… but not for gaming. Like trying to play Cyberpunk on my MacBook is an exercise in futility. First, there’s no traffic or pedestrians because it’s a base M2 with no GPU (something like a 12th generation Core i5 on the Intel side?) but it runs! At like 720p. But when I look with the trackpad, I randomly shoot because the stupid game doesn’t know how to use a trackpad right. And you shouldn’t use a trackpad for a shooter. But for something that’s 2D or 2.5D or isometric or whatever? Probably the best thing you can use.

Because LLMs were trained on the writings of more intelligent people who use more than the big five (guessing) punctuation marks.

Because you ask AIs questions as if they have the authority and the knowledge to answer you properly, they speak like people who have authority (over the English language) and knowledge. Thus, they use em dashes where appropriate because that’s how more intelligent people who are better versed in the language actually type.

Not that em dashes alone make someone a genius, but they are an easy way to distinguish yourself from the masses, especially on something like Reddit where everyone is autistic with Aspergers and is an INTJ. That is to say, some of them actually are, and the rest are putting on a front. And AI can’t tell the difference. So sometimes AI rings false.

Seriously?

He hates the same people they do. He was able to blame brown people for the economy and the gays for other stuff.

Like I’ve always said, the greatest trick the upper class ever pulled was convincing the middle class that the lower class is the problem. Trump went after single moms getting $6 a day to feed their families while building a billion dollar ballroom and eating like a king, and the people praised him for it, because the people who were suffering, he had convinced them, were the enemy. Or at the very least, the problem.

I was actually kinda thinking how interesting it would be to have to take a body of the opposite sex. That’s actually how I play Cyberpunk — a game in which you play a mercenary who gets possessed by Johnny Silverhand, a rock star turned terrorist whose mind was stored on a chip that you steal from the company that did it to him. And he’s played by Keanu Reeves. (For the two people who don’t know.) So you can be a guy, or you can be a girl. For the guy, they got this new guy, he’s a good voice actor, but he sounds New York and the character is in California, so there’s a bit of a disconnect there. But he does sound like a street tough, so it works. The girl is played by Cherami Leigh, a relatively well known voice actor, at least in anime. So as a nerd, I mean, I’m drawn to Cyberpunk because Keanu Reeves was Neo, because Idris Elba was Roland (Deschain from The Dark Tower; also Luther from the BBC series of the same name)… and because Cherami Leigh was Asuna in Sword Art Online. It’s a total geek fest. Or I could play this guy who’s… pretty much just done this. Nah, I’m playing Asuna but bad.

Anyway, a finer point of the game people don’t get is, it’s presented as Johnny is taking over V via the chip. But — and the game slaps you across the face with this multiple times — V was killed in the prologue. Johnny is on the chip (in her head), Johnny is the reason you’re alive. It’s Johnny’s body now, but the remnants of V are clinging to existence, and slowly fading. The whole point of the chip is that the person whose mind is on it gets the body. That’s why it exists. To allow Saboru Arasaka — the patriarch of the company — to try to live forever. They were just gonna put it in some younger person’s head and let him take over that body, but it didn’t play out that way. Whole lotta details, ins and outs, it’s weird… point is, the way the game seems meant to be played, it’s about an older guy taking over a younger lady’s body. (Or a guy if that weirds you out, that is an option, but IMO it’s the lesser option.) And the game makes frequent reference to it. In one ending, a guy says “but you’re a chick,” and you play it off. It doesn’t really matter to him, he’s just reacting based on what he sees. (It’s not a spoiler without context.) There’s also the time when Johnny says “you remind me of me when I was younger, minus the charisma — and the impressive cock.” The line technically works if you chose to play a guy (it’s more of an insult, implying Johnny’s new equipment is smaller), but it works better if you pick the girl.

Anyway, that’s my take — I mean, that I kinda had that in mind based on my current favourite game.

Brain transplants are purely science fiction for now, but while it might be called a brain transplant, it’s more of a body transplant. Assuming you’re taking a useless body with a useful brain and a useful body with a useless brain, and swapping, the person, being in the brain, is getting a new body. The owner of the brain-dead body wouldn’t get a new brain. Their family would get the useless brain and useless body to bury.

If that sounds grim, it’s because it is, and the potential for abuse would be so great. Imagine a random wealthy, 79-year-old pederast dictator who would demand that some family give up their ten-year-old child to receive his brain. Maybe they get compensated for their child, maybe they just get to keep living. Is that something medical science should allow? Would there be any condition in which it’s ethically or morally okay? And what if, with healthy body replacements, a brain can only live 150 years? After the second or third transplant, what would be the ethics or morality of taking a good mind (say, one that might cure cancer) and giving that brain 10 more years of life, versus giving a 10-year-old only 10 more years before that body just drops dead at 20 (maybe to be a recipient of another brain with a dying body, but to make things fun, let’s say a body can only get a new brain once: remove the second brain, and a third one cannot be successfully transplanted in)?

I’ve considered it, but I’m not aware of any blogging platforms that respect my privacy and align with my values. It’s all corpo-slop that I’ve seen.

People already accuse me of being AI because LLMs were trained on my posts (and those of others, of course), so anyone with good grammar and use of more than the five basic punctuation marks gets accused… when really, the LLMs are doing it because we taught them, with posts and whatnot they’ve scraped going back 30 years. So I know a blog will be scraped, too. But at least I can put a face to it, or at least an avatar. Because a blog is largely about the blogger and who the blogger is, matters. Whereas on Lemmy or services like it, it’s mostly about the content. No one cares who you or I are; it’s our opinions that matter.

So… what platform are you looking at? Because I’m interested in software and privacy. Linux less so, though I’m rooting for it on platforms that run Windows.