cerebralhawks
@cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Does more expensive phones have better reception? 9 hours ago:
Yes and no. It’s not about the price of the phone, it’s about the capability of the modem and the material between the modem and the sky.
About ten years ago, I went to visit family in another state, and I blew my brother’s mind with the speeds my iPhone was getting. He thought it was an iPhone thing. I said nah, much as I’d like to brag about having the more powerful, more private phone — I just had a newer modem. I think he had a Galaxy S3, which was a few years older than the 6s I had. I told him if he had the latest Samsung, he’d likely see comparable speeds.
Apple is getting into making their own modems, and the jury is still out on whether that’s a good thing. I think the 17 series still use Qualcomm for 5G but they use Apple silicon for WiFi and Bluetooth. Maybe LTE as well, not sure about that. The Apple modem will almost certainly sip less power, but I’m not sure if it will be “better”. Probably not.
I’ve been all over the smartphone debate and I’ve argued on both sides (for Android and for iPhones). I’ve never heard anyone seriously defend one having better network connectivity. iPhones are almost always universally faster. Right now the Galaxy S25 is faster than the iPhone 16 series, but the iPhones lose less power to thermal throttling, which is to say the iPhones are better for gaming since they lose less power, but if you’re not a gamer, the Samsung will be faster. Camera is subjective. iPhone almost always has the best video recording, but their photos are oversharpened. Samsung oversoftens, and Pixels hallucinate details they can’t see, with AI. (Zoom in on something far away with text, take a picture, then zoom in on the text and look at the AI-generated text that looks like it’s from Animal Crossing. So what other details is it hallucinating?) But network connectivity? We don’t get into that. Because it really boils down to “it’s all the same but each generation improves upon the last a little.”
- Comment on [Whitelight] You Don't Hate Remasters Enough 9 hours ago:
I’m gonna go on record and defend the Deus Ex remaster. There’s no way to play it on modern hardware. The only game console that can run it is the PS2, and not even then. The PS2 version was a whole other game because DX1 was too powerful for consoles. So it was basically DX1 dumbed down. Maps were smaller, everything was reduced… it was like a “de-make”.
You can run it on Windows PCs with some tweaking, but if you don’t have a computer with spyware, you can jump through bigger hoops. Linux has Proton. On my Macs I can do it with Whisky. It’s really not hard, but I did need a third party tool called Deus Exe because the original DeusEx.exe was a complete no-go. I think it was made for Windows 98? Anyway, once I got Deus Exe up and running, I was even able to run Shifter, which was a mod for DX1 that tightened a few things up and added “legendary” versions of each weapon to various places around the world. I actually ran a mod of the mod, one I made myself that had more hacks to the game, like you could update your cyber link to rifle range, i.e. to use computers from across the room. Like V can do in Cyberpunk. Except DX1 wasn’t made for that so it was kinda game breaking. But fun. I mean the game was never hard.
Anyway, they’re bringing DX1 to Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. And PC, of course. Hopefully Mac — the developer, Aspyr, has done Mac ports, but they were doing Mac ports of Xbox 360 games when Macs and Xbox 360s used the same PowerPC architecture, so that’s kinda cheating. That said, anybody porting to Switch is a stone’s throw away from porting to Mac since they’re both ARM64, and that’s part of why we even have Cyberpunk on the Mac now.
- Comment on 10 hours ago:
Stephen King is really bad with numbers. Apparently in the book they had to constantly walk at 4-5MPH, but they dropped it to 3 for the book. But sometimes King will just pull numbers straight out of his ass and his editor just lets it fly.
Similar case, in IT, he constantly described Ben as fat, as wider than he was tall, etc., basically fat shaming the kid, but his actual weight was just a bit over average. It’s just in 1958 when the book took place, there really weren’t fat kids, and the “fat kid” was the one who didn’t look starved. Not like now where everyone’s thick and fat really means fat. It’s a matter of perspective, but the fact of the matter is, we might even consider Ben to be normal or underweight compared with the 11 year old boys (what he was) of today. King just liked to fat-shame. (But he also gave Ben a huge member in the train scene. Like shockingly big. So he didn’t do the boy entirely dirty!)
- Comment on Microsoft doing shady Microsoft stuff again 3 days ago:
Love seeing love for Linux, but my Macs have never once complained about me using Firefox. Safari is there if I want an objectively worse Internet that does a couple things Firefox does via paid extensions but are free in Firefox. But if I use Firefox, macOS does not care.
I think the lesson is, as long as you’re not choosing Windows, you are choosing well. If you have to use Windows at work, that’s fine. So do I. But you don’t have to use it at home too.
- Comment on Yes, That Great-Looking 'Star Trek: Voyager' Game Will Let You Spare Tuvix 3 days ago:
Yes but more like Fallout Shelter (which is like FTL but from the side).
I get why you went to FTL, because it’s in space and you’re on a ship. Maybe Fallout Shelter was inspired by FTL?
But nah, this is more like Fallout Shelter in space, maybe with some elements of FTL because rather than having a base where characters are added and must go out for resources, the base moves and can’t really get new characters (or maybe it can, Neelix, Seven, and Kes came from the Delta Quadrant, so ostensibly they could get more) but still sends people out on missions.
- Comment on Yes, That Great-Looking 'Star Trek: Voyager' Game Will Let You Spare Tuvix 3 days ago:
Because the point was the moral question.
- Comment on Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown looks like a field day for micro managers in its first gameplay trailer 3 days ago:
I’m kind of amazed that someone thought something based on Voyager would even sell. I loved Voyager when it was new — don’t get me wrong — but coming hot off the ending of The Next Generation, and its first few seasons coinciding with Deep Space Nine right after things got good on DS9? It wasn’t very popular at the time. Then we got ENT to dump on, then STD. And I like most/all Trek, but I’ve found generally people dumped on the new thing. I’m glad Voyager is getting love. We got Prodigy which is kind of a sequel to Voyager, in much the same way Picard was to TNG. (Now do DS9, you cowards!)
Not sure this game is it… it just looks like Fallout Shelter, reskinned with some extra bells and whistles. Which might not be such a bad thing, people liked Fallout Shelter. I got overwhelmed by it and gave up on it. I might play it on my computer if it comes to macOS, but I don’t see myself booting up the Xbox for a game like this. (I see they are porting it to PC, but Macs run a whole other hardware architecture, one that phones and Nintendo Switch run. Mac ports are more likely when a game is coming to one of those; for example, any game that runs on either Switch should run on all M-series Macs. It’s just a question of whether they want to support the platform.)
- Comment on Do all American stores have greeters? 4 days ago:
No; in fact, most don’t. Walmart is generally the exception, not the rule. And as much as people (myself included) like to shit on Walmart, if you actually look at the greeters, they’re people who generally would not work out in any other position. So why are they there? If they weren’t, they probably would not have a job.
There’s another concept at play, though. In stores that do not have a greeter who stands at the door, a lot of places that pride themselves on customer service and community will have front-end staff call out to new customers to greet them. This practice is far more popular. Heck, we used to have an ice creamery that would have the entire staff sing if you put a dollar (or more) in their tip jar. Cold Stone Creamery, there might be a few of them around, but they used to be everywhere. Like Subway, Quiznos, and more. You might still know where one or two are, but you used to know where a lot more of them were.
Anyway, it’s weird that an American visiting abroad would be upset that she was not greeted upon entering the store.
- Comment on Looking for a PC FPS with deep gunplay, where NPC enemies are humans 1 week ago:
Now I just gotta find a GOG backup of UT’99. I don’t know if GOG lost the rights to that and Deus Ex, but both are gone from my library. (I still have Unreal 1, and Deus Ex 2 and Human Revolution, though.) Shouldn’t be hard to find an archived copy out there though.
- Comment on The new iPhone is an emblem of our miserable minimalist era 1 week ago:
So phones should only be okay if they come with spyware? Or the problem is any device with access to information wherever you go? Who benefits from people not having access to information?
- Comment on Looking for a PC FPS with deep gunplay, where NPC enemies are humans 1 week ago:
Unreal Tournament used to be my go-to… 25 years ago. I had the bots set up just right, so if I got a good look at one, I knew what I was up against. Some were harder than others. You could customise each bot, so you really had some pretty fine control over the gameplay.
As best I can tell, the modern iteration of Unreal Tournament is called “Fortnite,” which is nice because it’s free to play, and it’s fucking gorgeous, but all the paid content, the gestures and memes, it just wears me out. I just wanna shoot. It works best when one of my little nephews is online and they wanna team up, I let them do the memes and stuff and I circle around and flank their enemies. I’m in my 40s, pair me up with a grade school kid who can play decently and we win every time. It’s funny.
As much as people dump on the game, it has the gunplay I like and it’s pretty to look at, but I wish there was just regular old Unreal Tournament still. I’m sure I could get the GOG version of UT’99 running on my Mac with Whisky; it’s obviously not gonna run on my Switch or Xbox, where I can play Fortnite (Epic doesn’t make it for the Mac anymore).
Otherwise, and when it’s just me, it’s Cyberpunk. I have it on both my Xbox and my Macs. Yes, it actually runs on a computer that’s like 7.75"x7.75"x1" (and the M4 Mac is smaller, and more capable with ray tracing). No dedicated GPU
- Comment on Xbox consoles are getting a price bump. Again. 1 week ago:
Yeah, but Xbox fans keep saying it’s coming despite reasonable arguments like that and I’m starting to wonder if they’re right? But also I’ll believe it when I see it. They’re also selling it for like 30% more than before so they’re no longer selling it at a loss which is why I suggested it. But they probably won’t.
- Comment on what's your take on employers banning the use of languages other than English between coworkers at the workplace? 1 week ago:
I’m American in the middle of the country and I’m liable to greet you in any of like half a dozen languages. I’m the weird guy at work.
I only speak English fluently but I’ve picked up a lot.
I also prefer English to American English but not in all contexts. Like, have you seen how the English write maneuver? I could never. (I can spell it, but I can’t wrap my mind around that spelling.) (My iPhone changes everything to American English though.)
I believe awareness and immersion in multiple cultures, even if it’s just one you favor, it will make a person that much more interesting.
- Comment on Xbox consoles are getting a price bump. Again. 1 week ago:
Maybe they could try to soften the blow by allowing gamers to install Steam games on them (like they’re doing for the handheld and the Xbox app on PC). That’s been the rumor for a long time. A semi-jailbroken Xbox Series X that could run PC games (within reason, I mean within its capability) would be worth the higher price.
You’re still gonna pay more for a PC, and that PC is running spyware (Windows). I suppose the Xbox is as well though (since it runs a form of Windows).
- Comment on A Kentucky church is urging its members to remove books from the Shelby Public Library by checking them out and never returning them 1 week ago:
Religion is true to the fool, false to the wise man, and useful to the politician.
There are a LOT of good churches out there, run by good people. Not all churches are good though, and the ones that are bad… tend to be really bad.
- Comment on GTA V was released on this day, 12 years ago 1 week ago:
I don’t know if they released any gameplay, but IIRC some leaked (from an early build).
- Comment on GTA V was released on this day, 12 years ago 1 week ago:
Coming up on 14 years for Skyrim.
They’ve both been propped up by pay-to-win bullshit online games that have diluted the formula. I remember when GTA V was new (ish) and while the controls took some getting used to, and some of the minigames were bullshit (Rockstar games have wonky controls), the game was fun as hell. Zero interest in the online stuff. It never appealed to me. I did try Elder Scrolls Online, and also Fallout 76. This online shit makes them money, it’s a surprise they’re even bothering with a GTA VI. The next GTA Online is really what they should be focused on (though I’ll always root for the single player games). After the last couple Fallouts and Starfield, I don’t even have any hope for Elder Scrolls VI. GTA VI at least looks like it might actually be good. But screw paying $100 for it.
- Comment on Is there a word for when a bad person who got exposed for things deliberately finds "questionable" things about the person who exposed him? 1 week ago:
“Whataboutism.” Firefox flags the word as misspelled, but it’s just a new word and if you search it, you’ll find a lot of articles. It’s a controversial debate tactic in which you attempt to shift the focus from something you want to protect (or yourself) to something the other person wants to protect (or themselves).
A good example of this is when we say “Trump is in the Epstein files” and people on the right say “well so is Bill Clinton.” Except the left really doesn’t want to protect Slick Willy (or any child predator, for that matter) so it’s not a good whataboutism. Normally you would point to something good he’s done, but I can’t come up with any examples.
- Comment on Borderlands 4 boss tells players "please get a refund from Steam if you aren't happy" as Randy Pitchford continues his very public crashout over the FPS's performance woes 1 week ago:
Right because Cyberpunk looks amazing in 2025 and it ran like shit five years ago at launch.
But 4K gaming is more demanding than people realise and gaming companies shouldn’t be getting so much flak for it.
- Comment on Borderlands 4 boss tells players "please get a refund from Steam if you aren't happy" as Randy Pitchford continues his very public crashout over the FPS's performance woes 1 week ago:
I don’t get it. Borderlands 1 ran at like 720p (less?) on native hardware (Xbox 360) and it looked great, mostly because of the cel-shaded graphics. Cel-shaded was code (maybe still is) for low-res and it covers it up well. So I feel like anyone trying to push 4K Borderlands (Gearbox, or players) is in the wrong here and that may be part of the problem. Now if Borderlands 4 can’t run at 1080p or 1440p on good hardware… that’s Gearbox’s problem to fix. Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as Animal Crossing at 8K — apparently that has been accomplished with a very powerful computer and an emulator. (AC for Switch is not performance locked to hardware, it’ll scale up to whatever you can run it on.) But it just begs the question “fucking WHY?”.
I feel like the discourse around Borderlands 4 should be “is it fun” followed at a great distance by “is the story compelling enough to draw me in?” I did not have plot expectations for the first one, and it exceeded them.
Disclaimer: played and beat BL1 and all its DLC. Dabbled in 2 and 3. Have not played BL4 yet. Looking forward to a Siren play on my Series X at some point, but not now.
- Comment on how do school shooters know how to use guns? 1 week ago:
They’re not hard to use, they’re hard to use well. And really, not that hard. I’m a pretty good shot, and I’d say I spent much less time learning to shoot than I did, say, computer-related skills which took way more practice, and study.
It’s a blessing that most mass shooters are not skilled shooters. The shooters that are skilled tend to favour the rifle. They make each shot count, and typically only fire once. But, that’s more of an assassination. People using handguns tend to miss a lot — I think they’re really going for terror/fear and not a high casualty count.
The “problem” with being a good shooter is, you have certain safety tenets drilled into your head. Know where each shot is going to go, because you’re responsible for the bullet once it’s fired, and you can’t get it back; don’t point at anything you don’t intend to destroy/don’t have the right to destroy/don’t have the legal right to destroy; shoot to kill, never to warn or maim; don’t shoot if you can’t be sure you will hit your target; etc. Specifically because I think it begs the question, about warning shots: they’re dumb. The idea of shooting up to warn people. That bullet will eventually come down, at terminal velocity, and if it hits someone, it will do serious damage. If it hits the head just right, that warning shot absolutely can kill a bystander.
- Comment on Do you think conservative feel the same need to burn it all down as everyone else felt when trump won again? 1 week ago:
I think they’re mad. Charlie Kirk was their man, and he was so young, who knows what he could have been. Like, Trump is what, pushing 80? Plus he’s a felon, everyone knows he’s in the Epstein files… he is on his way out, in more ways than one. Kirk is a little cleaner. So all their hopes and dreams of keeping the coloured man down, keeping the “alphabet mafia” as Kirk called the LGBTQ+ community, down, were pinned on this guy, or at least a lot of those hopes, so yeah, they’re pretty pissed.
Thing is, they weren’t gonna let up on people of colour or people of different sexual identities/orientations anyway. And all signs show they were ramping up the violence against minorities. So yeah, they’re mad, but when they say things like “now it’s war” it’s hard to know what they mean since they were waging war before.
It’s like an abusive situation and a lot of these people are probably domestic abusers and come from that mindset. Like they were already going to do damage, but now that you’ve struck back? Oh, now you’re really in trouble. But you were never not in trouble because the problem isn’t you, it’s them. They were always gonna be that way. We have to figure out how to get our country out from under this bullshit.
- Comment on Why do conservatives define being fascist solely as "being violent?" 2 weeks ago:
They don’t. They play the victim a lot more ways than that.
For example: you don’t go to church. They think “Christian values are under attack.” You argue for civil rights. “The right of the White Man is under attack.” Shit like that. And they will call you a fascist, a socialist, a communist, everything but what you are, which is a nonconformist, for not doing exactly what they want you to do.
A conservative, by the simplest definition, is one who opposes change for the sake of change. The ideal of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” The problem is, while the system may not be broken for them (WASP), it needs work for people of colour, the LGBTQ+, Palestinians, and more. But they don’t want a world that works for the rest of us. They just want to maintain the status quo. A lot of them have much more complicated feelings and opinions than that, but that’s basically conservatism in a nutshell. Not extreme. Unfortunately very few conservatives are basic conservatives anymore.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
I like how they don’t even mention Half-Life 3 or Elder Scrolls VI. Does there come a time when we just give up hope?
While Half-Life 3 was never officially canceled, I think it’s safe to say that there was a point where Valve decided they would make more money working off the backs of others than developing their own games in-house, and so Half-Life and Portal sequels were axed.
Elder Scrolls VI was announced when Starfield was, and Starfield was released in a very “early access” state and many bugs, even those widely reported, were never fixed. Oh, but they made sure you couldn’t get the 72,000 credits under that first city by falling through a door they never walled off and walking under the city to where the merchant chests were. And yet, the merchant chests are, AFAIK, still accessible in Skyrim, if you know where to look. And they made it so you couldn’t steal with the invisibility power, even if you beat the game ten times over, did all 240 temple puzzles, so you had the invisibility power at level 10. Some NPCs see you no matter what. And Elder Scrolls VI was first teased seven years ago. More time has passed between the game’s announcement and now, than the time there was between The Elder Scrolls V (Skyrim) and the Elder Scrolls VI announcement. It has been nearly 14 years since Skyrim released. And they’ve half-assed every game since, though half may be generous, especially for the MMOs and mobile games.
- Comment on Nintendo’s Switch Mario Galaxy collection will retail for $70 2 weeks ago:
Romm
Looks awesome. Every platform you say? reads more Ah shit, looks like they’re gonna make me learn Docker… Someday
They also say game progress sync is coming. My iPhone does that in Delta. It’s awesome. I can show someone a game I’m playing. Doesn’t matter what. I save with a save state. Give it a minute. Uninstall the app. It’s gone. All the games, gone. Reinstall the app. Empty library. Go into Settings. Connect my Google Drive. Wait a minute. Games sync. Open same game, load the state. Right where I left off. That shit is awesome. And it being Apple, I can AirDrop the game to another iPhone user, and they can add it right to their own library. Sadly, it’s iOS only — the emulator itself runs on a Mac, but it doesn’t run very well. Mac actually has a great emulator too, but it doesn’t sync with anything. If only I could get it to sync with my MacBook.
Something that syncs across all the platforms would be, like, the Holy Grail. (Actually you can kinda rig it with SyncThing, as like a proof of concept, I linked two Macs running the Switch emulator and they were able to play the same Animal Crossing island. Not at the same time, of course, but when one saves, it syncs, and the other can open it… due to the way Switches save, this is not very reliable at all!)
- Comment on Borderlands 4 Launches To Mostly Negative Steam Reviews Over Performance Issues And Crashing 2 weeks ago:
But but but IGN gave it an 8/10 and said it was the best game in the franchise! Did they lie, are they out of touch, or are they working with publishers to try to smooth over the transition into more expensive games?
- Comment on Is a gooner the same thing as a wanker? 2 weeks ago:
As an older guy who struggles with slang… I’ve seen it used by guys and gals alike, but sometimes it seems to be the girl equivalent of wanker.
Worth noting that wanker is predominantly a British phrase that refers to a masturbatory act but generally refers to a person who lacks certain social graces. Like a jerk. I like saying aho in Japanese — same thing. But wanker has a class all its own, along with most British slang. You get it or you don’t.
My current understanding of the term gooner is that it means “porn addict” of any sex, gender, identification, or orientation. And while gooning does seem to refer to the masturbatory act, it seems to specify while porn is being watched or otherwise consumed.
- Comment on Thoughts on the humble bundle this month? 2 weeks ago:
The sound of silence here is deafening. “Too much,” everyone afraid to answer you is shouting and it’s hurting my ears.
- Comment on Snapchat allows drug dealers to operate openly on platform, finds Danish study 2 weeks ago:
Wait until they learn what the platform was designed for
- Comment on How popular/important do you have to be for your death by homicide to be labeled as an "assassination"? What if the homicide is for a private matter that's separate from their importance? 2 weeks ago:
Murder is killing with malice. Assassination is killing for political capital. There can be crossover but it isn’t necessary.
Take a head of state — not strictly a current one, not wishing here. Just as an example. He’s giving a speech, it’s an assassination. You caught him in bed with your wife and shot them both — that’s murder.