BananaTrifleViolin
@BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
- Comment on Rumor: GTA Roleplay Server FiveM Victim Of Hostile Takeover - And One Of Rockstar's Own Is Involved 3 days ago:
Out of interest, when GTAVI comes out will it matter?
Will the next game need a new from-scratch RP mod? Or will some of the open source components of FiveM be reusable?
FiveM have an advantage being owned by Rockstar but if it all has to be done again from scratch, FiveM may be irrelevant? Interested members of the community will make their own thing like they did before. Or is that wishful thinking?
- Comment on Are mods usually confusing as hell or am I just an idiot? 2 weeks ago:
Genuinely not had a problem with mods, and I’ve been PC gaming for decades. Of course sometimes mods don’t work but thats life. Just be patient, you’ll get it done.
Decent mods have a readme file - follow the steps strictly - no skipping thinking you know better - and they should work.
Also look on YouTube or search online for guides - people often provide step by step guides to mod games purely out of a love for gaming.
Keep going - mods can be great, and its one of the many benefits of PC gaming.
- Comment on Psst, the Americans are asleep, post some eggs 2 weeks ago:
Stop showing off your immense wealth.
- Comment on What’s gone wrong with James Bond? No star, no script, no plan 3 weeks ago:
Paywalled, archived version: archive.is/M7hHZ
- Comment on Elon Reeve Musk 3 weeks ago:
Its probably just winXP running in a VM.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
So this isn’t shrinkflation, this is a small size pizza that they’re trying to claim is still as tasty as a full pizza?
Like, if you wanted a full pizza it should be pretty obvious it’s a small 4.5" pizza from the box?
- Comment on Putting the die in diet 3 weeks ago:
Sponsored by a wine maker. A bottle of wine a day - jeeze.
- Comment on Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit 3 weeks ago:
Amazon are getting bad about refunds and replacements plus have a major problem with counterfeit goods due yo how they mix 3rd party and Amazon sourced goods in their warehouses.
They can’t refund your house if it burns down because Amazon sold you fake electronics.
EBay is find for the smaller cheap Chinese tat that you can find on amazon, and PayPal provides consumer protection. Go to other retailers for electronics - any site or shop that does not use third party sellers.
- Comment on Amazon Artificially Discounting Items $0.01 Below the Free Shipping Limit 3 weeks ago:
Yeah band anything of value I would not get from Amazon due to the risk of counterfeits. Amazon pools its stock for an item with that provided by 3rd party sellers in its warehouse - either can be delivered to a customer based on which is closed not who youre buying from.
So you can easily receive dodgy goods from 3rd party sellers that may he counterfeit or refurbished rather than new.
Get your expensive items from other retailers that dont have 3rd party sellers. Get your cheap random Chinese manufactured crap from EBay or Aliexpress. Get your digital content from other stores like ebooks.com where you can legally remove the DRM and keep your content forever.
Fuck Amazon.
- Comment on Review into Axel Rudakubana will criticise Prevent for rejecting his case three times 3 weeks ago:
Yeah of the focus is on Prevent then its scapegoating. Prevent is there to tackle people being radicalised - its not there to detect and police all violent people in society.
The real failings are in police, mental health services and social services - all of which have had resources slashed due to austerity.
Blaming Prevent is a distraction - counter terrorism is not the route this very violent and sick individual should have been caught before committing an atrocity.
I work in the NHS and the real question for me is how a very sick and dangerous child could have been allowed to walk away by child mental health services whose excuse has been that he “failed to engage”. A child does not have autonomy to decide to engage or not - it is the mental health services and social services that failed to follow him up.
A child that was too dangerous to even be allowed on site at a specialist school - he was managed from home for staff and pupil safety - should have had heavy mental health and social service input. Prevent would be able to offer nothing.
The whole story is an indictment of the failure of the state over the last 15 years since the ideological nonsense of austerity has ravaged the UK public sector and services.
- Comment on Multiverse 3 weeks ago:
Infinite doesn’t mean everything. Infinite can include a repeating pattern, even a huge repeating pattern which seems random at first. Not everything you could possibly imagine would necessarily have to exist in the multiverse.
And even if infinite and perfectly random, some things may just not be feasible and just not exist.
- Comment on Would not adding a stamp and return address on a letter give you free postage 4 weeks ago:
Yeah but they’re saying it will still just go to the “to” address anyway and they have to pay postage.to get it The post office won’t send it to the return address.
- Comment on 'Terrorism has changed', says Starmer on Southport attacks 4 weeks ago:
This was a tragedy and missed opportunity, but this was not “terrorism” in the sense being used. This was a seriously dangerous, violent and mentally ill person.
The focus on how Prevent failed is a real problem because the Prevent strategy is there to stop people being radicalised, not to police society for violent individuals.
The focus here should really be on the mental health system & social services, and how an extremely dangerous person who was excluded from school for violence, went to a special school and could only be dealt with as a home schooled student for staff and student safety, and for whom their family raised concerns. This guy was not radicalised, he was not a “terrorist”, he was someone who was clearly flagged as very dangerous as a child and failed to act.
There have been dangerous people before, and there are laws and structures to detain extremely dangerous people for public safety. That’s where everything failed - yet again Social Services, Police, Health and Education. It’s a pattern seen over and over again with public agencies not working together, often because they’re under resourced and stretched as it is.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 publishing director thinks GTA 6 might have the "clout" to normalise a $100 price tag 4 weeks ago:
“publishing director”. So Marketing.
As for game prices, in fairness to the industry prices have actually come down since 2000.
AAA Games on consoles in 2000 were around $50; that is $92 now due to inflation. Games went up to around $60 on consoles in 2006, that is around $93 now due to inflation. By 2019 they were still $60 but inflation eroded the value, and that is equivalent to $73 today. When they went up to $70 in 2020, that would be equivalent to $84 now.
So a nominal price of $100 is not as unreasonable as it sounds. It’s higher than games were in 2000 but in the future if static would erode back to equivalent to $90 in probably 3-4 years.
But the problem is people do not think in terms of inflationary value, and instead in terms of nominal value. And the bigger problem is most peoples earnings are squeezed by inflation and we have not been having pay rises to account for the inflation, so games are more expensive as proportion of income.
- Comment on Hulu quizzing about the ads played 4 weeks ago:
I would immediately cancel any service that does that.
I actively avoid advertising. I’ve cancelled Amazon prime now it has advertising.
I got Sky’s Internet TV here in the UK - a supposedly premium service yet the first VOD demand show I streamed I found it had adverts and you had to pay more to be able to fast forward through them. I immediately cancelled.
These companies are greedy as fuck, and driven by the stupidity of always trying to be “growing” to grow their share prices. That just means always trying to save money and take more money from their customers. Enshittification is a result of the stupidity of the stock markets.
- Comment on Marvel Snap is banned, just like TikTok 4 weeks ago:
The law bans the distribution of the app and applies fines to the app store companies of $5,000 per user who is able to access the app to download it.
So yes, TikToks position is theatrics - current users could continue to access the app but that would mean a slow inevitable decline as no one new could join and the user base would inevitably decline over time. Its not in TikToks interests to allow that and it would take pressure off politicians to do anything. So they’re within their rights to muddy the water and block access with a message blaming it on the politicians.
- Comment on How is the current AI bubble when compared to the .com bubble in the early 2000's? 5 weeks ago:
I think you’re missing the stock market part of the dot-com bubble which is very similar to AI, and the core part of the collapse.
The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble on the stock market with companies getting hugely over valued despite not being profitable on the hope they would make bank. Companies were getting huge amounts in venture capital investment, and floating on the markets to huge valuations all based on expected future earnings.
Then companies started collapsing and not being protiable and eventually the stock market in the Internet companies collapsed. But the Internet didn’t collapse; lots of startups and companies disappeared but companies with solid business models surived, grew and prospered. Amazon, Google, Ebay etc survived the bubble and dominated their areas.
The AI bubble is very similar in that companies with AI focus are getting over valued despite not being profitable. The drive int he market is the same - people want to get in at the ground floor and are not being discerning in what they invest in. Very similar to the docotm era, people don’t yet see exactly how money will be made with AI or which companies will be the ones to triumph. It’s all gambling on things people don’t really understand. The AI bubble will also pop, but again AI as a technology isn’t going anywhere - it is investors who will be harmed and a lot of companies will collapse leaving behind ones that have viable business models.
The dot com bubble burst in March 2000 due to multiple factors - a Microsoft anti trust case loss, the AOL-Time Warner merger being increasingly questioned, and rising interest rates putting pressure on the debt-driven growth of dot-cons.
Looking at AI, it’s clear there is speculative valuations going on with lots of AI companies. And established tech companies are all throwing money at AI. Meta - which has been in trouble for a while as it needs to keep growing due to the stock market but Facebook and Instagram have peaked and face more competition - first tried to pivot to VR (that’s gone very quiet suddenly!) and suddenly has pivoted to AI. Nvidia has been wildly over valued based on its chips being used in AI and other companies stockpiling them for future AI work. Companies are making expensive moves to stake a claim on future AI market share but at the moment there hasn’t been any profitability coming from these tools.
AI will survive, but a lot of companies are very obviously going to get burnt. This feeling was also prevenalt during the dot com era - the difficulty was actually picking the winners not that people didn’t know there was a speculative market bubble during the dot com era. People knew it was going to burst just as we know the AI bubble will burst.
- Comment on Anon buys a TV without researching 1 month ago:
It really doesn’t sound too good to replace? It sounds like you got free junk, and haven’t actually bought a TV yet?
- Comment on I need a flicker free LED lightbulb running in the 3000 K range. 1 month ago:
Lots of good advice but one question - have you tried LED bulbs before and had flickering problems?
Just worth checking a standard LED from your local super market before you go down the route of expensive brands or.online purchases.
The reason I say this is that there are a lot of shoddy cheap and counterfeit electronics sold on Amazon for example. A supermarket bought bulb meanwhile actually has some quality control and standards plus you have somewhere you can go back to to return them.
All my LEDs are from my local supermarket, own brand (Tesco, I’m in the UK, but Philips are also available for me) and I’ve had no issues. I’d also buy from local retailers where you can get good returns policies.
Amazon meanwhile has a policy of mixing stock that it purchases with stock from small sellers that they place in their warehouses and sending any to a customer. So a “sold by amazon” item may actually be a counterfeit item supplied by a 3rd party. Basically do not buy anything of value or branded from Amazon.
Personally the only time I had a flickering LED bulb was a dimmer-switch lamp; it was designed for LEDs but didn’t work with the bulb I bought but turned out I’d accidentally bought a non dimmable bulb. Otherwise I’ve not had a single bulb flicker in my house including all ceiling lights and numerous lamps. All my bulbs are supermarket own brand.
- Comment on If you have diarrhea and you hold it in will your body retain some of the water? 1 month ago:
Your colon is very good at extracting water; if you can hold it in then yes in theory it could remove some of the water. However in reality when you have diarrhoea your colon is inflamed and irritated during and you can’t really stop it happening. You’d have to overcome the cramping and the body trying to push the contents outwards.
The most likely outcome of trying to hold it in is it gets worse and you get an explosive and even less controlled expulsion.
- Comment on Anon's in trouble 1 month ago:
The biggest problem is he’s engineering in Imperial instead of SI units.
- Comment on What makes a video game triple A (AAA)? 1 month ago:
It is just a buzz word in the industry and doesn’t have a tight definition. It’s basically any big budget full priced game from a big publisher. They’re just communicating that they’ve made a big budget game with an expectations of hopefully big sales and profit.
It does imply the game should be popular and high quality, but those are not a given. Plenty of AAA games end up being trash and flopping yet they’re still AAA games.
It’s similar to the Blockbuster concept in the film industry.
- Comment on Study finds young people more likely to spend Christmas alone 1 month ago:
This probably reflects increasing immigration - there will be plenty of people who don’t celebrate christmas so it’s just a bank holiday, or who are alone in the UK without family with them.
For example in 1981, 96% of the population was white british. In 2011 that was down to 87% and in 2021 it’s down to 83%.
It’s not surprising that 10% of young people might spend Christmas alone if nearly 20% of the population is not white (which is largely Christian or secular with some Christian traditions). While some of the non white population may be Christian, it’s not surprising that christmas may not be an important day to Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs.
Also European white migrants who might be christian may celebrate christmas on a different day.
So there is a danger of over interpreting statistics like these. Saying more young people are spending Christmas alone over 50 years is kind of meaningless as it’s a totally different group of young people today than 50 years ago.
- Comment on Why did people in the 90s/early 00s say that the internet "couldn't be taken down"? 2 months ago:
This opinion remains largely correct - the Internet as a network is very difficult to take down.
However things have happened that have undermined the Internet in favour of commercial priorities.
Net Neutrality was a major principle of the Internet but that is under attack, particularly in the US, where infrastructure providers want to maximise profit by linking their income to each Gb used rather than just paid as a utility. Their costs are largely fixed in infrastructure but they push the lie that they need to be paid for how busy that infrastructure is. A network router doesn’t care whether it’s transferring 1gb or 10gb, it only matters if you hit capacity and the network needs to be expanded. The Internet providers instead want profit profit profit so are pushing for a way to maximise it.
The other major issue has been consolidation and that’s thanks to monopolies being allowed to form and dictate how the Internet works. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple - they’ve all used their services to try to manipulate customers into their walled gardens and prevent competition.
So the Internet as many people think of it is very vulnerable - big centralised services can have outages that affect everyone because people don’t have much choice.
But the reality is the underlying protocols and infrastructure remains robust. Google might have an outage, but the Web itself is still functional. Email protocols and file transfer protocols still work. The problem is people who are sitting in Googles walled garden of services are locked out of everything. And with Googles huge monopoly on search and advertising it means lots of other major services are out too.
So the Internet itself is fine. It’s the services and monopolies built on it thay are the problem.
- Comment on I bought an HP Laptop with 8gb of Ram...and was suppose to be 256gb SSD. I downloaded one game and its all the way down to 80. Is there any free software to download to help? 2 months ago:
The hard drive may be 256gb but a big chunk of that is taken up by Windows and also there will be a hidden recovery partition. So 170gb sounds about right.
If you download a big game, then it’s not a big deal if you’re using that game. 90gb is still plenty.
There may be programs HP have installed that you can remove in add/remove software to make a bit more space.
256gb isn’t much but it’s enough unless you want multiple big games installed or have a big library of data such as movies or pictures.
Also it may be possible to upgrade the hard drive - depends on the model and how accessible the hard drive is. If you can access the hard drive to replace it then you could get a 1tb drive for example. There are guides online but basically you’d need to copy the existing drive to the new drive (would need a USB adaptor to mount the new drive first) and then swap the drives round. It very much depends on the laptop though.
Another option is an external hard drive connected via USB - it’s not good for gaming or running big programmes but it is fine for storing movies and pictures.
- Comment on How likely will "Cloud Storage" eventually replace Local Storage? 2 months ago:
I would say it is unlikely - storage is so cheap that some form of local storage is likely to stay.
A terminal device still needs some form of storage to run the software to access the cloud. That might end up being some small storage on a chip but the difference is not between none and something, but some and more.
I also think there are enough people who want storage they own and control that it’ll persist as a concept. Also having devices that work when networks are down is a benefit in itself - attempts to make devices dumb terminals get exposed as a productivity nightmare when networks do go out.
I think big business will certainly try hard to lock people in to their ecosystems. Remote storage, remote computing/graphics processing are all ways they will try. But conversely there are vibrant communities pushing independent & private alternatives that I don’t see dying - whether thats Linux on PCs, or Graphene OS to take control of your android device etc.
- Comment on Do you want the murderer of the UnitHealthcare CEO prosecuted? 2 months ago:
Yes of course he needs to be prosecuted.
I get that people hate insurance companies but at the end of the day this was a brutal and cold blooded murder.
As unhappy as we may be at the state of the world, the last thing anyone should want is for things to be determined by who has the gun and is willing to shoot.
Having said that though, maybe things are getting beyond the point of no return. Democracy in the US seems to be a joke, and the billionaire class have unfettered power. I worry we’re on trajectory towards violent revolution.
The ambivelence and even open celebration of a shocking violent murder is a warning sign of how bad things are right now. Across the democratic world countries are devided and in flux because the political class is not listening to voters and in hoc to the billionaires.
Trump in the US will be a mess. But France and Germany are also in political flux. What we are lacking globally at the moment is an outlet for this mess or a solution. People seem to be divided and unable to coalesce around a solution to the problems. I worry that means more chaos and ultimately violemce to come.
- Comment on When did browsers start being able to remember your previous session. 2 months ago:
- Comment on Meal prep 2 months ago:
There is literally a kettle on the left lower side of the image (likely deliberately as it seems awkward having it in front of the air fryer like that)
- Comment on 8 yr old me after my parents did my woodworking assignment 2 months ago:
He sounds very Trumpian.