paultimate14

@paultimate14@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PlayStation Store Dynamic Pricing Is Real⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s also known as Price Discrimination, and depending on the details and jurisdiction sometimes it IS illegal.

  Laws need to be updated to keep up with tech, and ENFORCED.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Phone do you guys use?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sony Xperia 1 IV. Their naming scheme is terrible.

  Main reason is because I wanted a future-proof, flagship phone with a headphone jack and micro SD card slot. Both have proven very useful, and I am still kind of in shock that most manufacturers have dropped them.

  Stock android. Still using the NoVa launcher because I haven’t had the free time to try out others, plus my pi-hole seems to block the ads they have been introducing for now.

  The Xperia has a weirdly narrow screen. I like it in a vacuum better than todays phablets, but I think the occasional webpage scales weirdly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Human experimentation, one way or the other.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I honestly am starting to think the anti-vaxx crowd has been astroturfed by pharmaceutical corporations in order to convince the general public that anyone who questions Big Pharma is some loomy who thinks vaccines cause autism wants to drink raw milk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jensen Huang says gamers are 'completely wrong' about DLSS 5 — Nvidia CEO responds to DLSS 5 backlash⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s why in rooting for a small mom and pop competitor to the space, like checks notes … Intel.

  We’re fucked aren’t we?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Streaming didnt exist in 1970⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What about 1870 then?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨18-26 year olds, How do you plan to dodge the draft?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The US government has been investing billions into AI, drones, and other autonomous and remote weapons systems.

  Sending a bunch of young men to the opposite side of the world would be not just unpopular, it incredibly expensive. Food, clothing, equipment, healthcare costs. I highly doubt the end goal is to actually annex Iran, so they’re much better off trying to find a local group to support in taking over the country and establishing a US-friendly puppet state. There’s no need to have Americans in guerilla warfare for that.

  The only way I see them doing that is if they WANT to kill off a chunk of the male population in that age group. Which… Maybe? I could certainly see Trump and Hegseth trying to send “undesirables” overseas to die, but they’ve also made moves like banning trans people from military service. Unless they reverse policies, it looks like Trump will prefer to cozy up to the military rather than use it as a tool for getting rid of people.

  Maybe Trump will just do what Netenyahu tells him to. But I think this is more about trying to manufacture a reason to cancel mid-term elections like they outlined in 2025 than anything else. With the added benefit of funneling more government money into the military-industrial complex.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Make sure you know what your kid is getting themselves into⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I was a good boy who didn’t do drugs until adulthood, and I have medical marijuana now. The feedback I’ve gotten from pretty much everyone who did drugs in the 90’s and 00’s vs today is the same as your experience. The “weed nerds” have spent decades in their labs and the state-by-state legalization has greatly accelerated their progress.

  Even my pharmacist warned me when I first got my medical card “if this is your first time using medical marijuana it’s a lot stronger than what is usually on the street, so watch out”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Make sure you know what your kid is getting themselves into⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that article is just typical fear mongering BS. It keeps the eyes of parents glued to the screen and consuming ads. Doesn’t even say what “spice” is. Articles like this are basically broiler-llate and come out every few months. Notice how they manage to blame social media, and how they don’t mention any adults using it at all.

  I found the wikipedia article on these things more useful and less biased. Spice seems to mostly refer to a designer drug that is similar to THC, but is not THC. And while it is often used to lace marijuana or mixed with weed vapes, it isn’t just weed.

  It’s like hearing about people adding PCP or LSD to weed and freaking out about how dangerous weed is. Like… Yeah you shouldn’t buy drugs from some random guy on Snapchat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨the two party system is just one big party⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  DOGE would not have happened under Biden or Harris. Millions of people are dying because of cuts to US AID.

  Venezuela would not have happened. Like, how crazy is it that you lost a handful of the most egregious things Trump has done recently and yet somehow invading another country and kidnapping their leader a couple months ago doesn’t make the cut? I don’t mean that as a criticism of you, just how much insane shit Trump has done.

  Cuts to Education have been and will be devastating for years. Shutting down tons of science and information-gathering agencies. Economic data is going to be non-existent or useless for the foreseeable future. All the lovely anti-trust action Lina Khan was starting to do under Biden has been erased. All the work Jessica Rosenworcel was doing to restore Net Neutrality under Biden has been erased. The Republican party is about to pass a bill that will disenfranchise both trans people and women. The EPA has been gutted. Trump has given and cut off funds to states, both for regular projects and disaster relief funds, based on how they voted for him, while Biden (and no other president I am aware of) has done anything like that before.

  So-called “communists” have a tendency to become EnLiGhTeNeD cEnTrIsTs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Make a note⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You need to wait ~45 minutes, then loudly complain “these edibles ain’t shit!”

  That’s the activation phrase. The THC in your metabolism needs to hear that to start working.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨29 years since our homecoming queen was taken from us⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My wife and I just started watching this a couple months ago. We’re partway through Season 3.

  Over the weekend we saw Nine Inch Nails live. To our complete shock, once the band left the stage and the lights came on the house music that played while everyone left was… The mysterious and sad piano theme from Twin Peaks.

  A bit of research later revealed that David Lynch directed a NIN music video, and he has featured their songs in movies. And perhaps more notable… NIN appeared on the show in season 3, just two episodes ahead of where we were. It was a wild coincidence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wandering Bard > Bad Dragon

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Game preservation only works if people care" As GOG doubles down on its commitment to saving old games, it's asking players "who give a s**t" to support its crusade⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What incredible hyperbole. It is superisleading to describe that as going “All-In on AI”. It’s a change to the disclosure rules Valve requires for publishers, not that Valve is using AI themselves like GOG is.

  I would prefer if they required disclosure of the use of any AI tools involved, but at this point AI has been so thoroughly shoved into every piece of software you can really just assume that some AI somewhere touched anything made after 2022. Generative AI is the bigger problem and this move focuses the attention on that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video games are losing the "attention war" to gambling, porn, and crypto, according to industry report⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s being mean to gas station sandwiches, but otherwise I agree

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Video games are losing the "attention war" to gambling, porn, and crypto, according to industry report⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For a the past few years, I had wondered why videogames, movies, and TV shows nowadays feel so… Bland. Meaningless. Soulless. Corporate. Like, I know they ARE corporate, but these industries have all been dominated by gigantic corporations for my entire life. What changed recently? Am I just getting old and curmudgeonly and preferring content that was made back when I was younger?

  Then I was watching DoorMonster talk about some show (I could be wrong, but I think it was the video about how Arcane had a great Season 1 that was largely ruined by Season 2) where they kept joking about not accusing them of using AI to write things.

  Then it clicked. The Writer’s Strike from May-September 2023. On paper, the Writer’s Guild secured restrictions on the use of AI. And I can’t point to anything specific and say “that was clearly written by AI”. But I can say that for the past few years everything put out by pretty much every company has felt very… “Meh”. Nothing new has grabbed me and said “wow I need to watch/play that”. Could be a coincidence, but I also have to wonder whether AI tools involved in writing and visuals have cost us something intangible that I can still feel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elder Scrolls 6 Is Powered By New Version Of Creation Engine⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This may be unpopular, but I think this is great news.

  Skyrim became one of the best-sellign games of all time in part BECAUSE of how great it is to see your character get ragdolled into the lithosphere by a giant, or to watch the chaos of spawning thousands of wheels of cheese on top of the throat of the world and watching them roll down.

  An Elder Scrolls game that was built around having realistic physics, or being restricted to more cinematic movement and knteractions, would lose a key essence of what made the earlier games great.

  I don’t want engaging combat in Elder Scrolls. If I want combat that I have to pay attention to, I’ll go play a Souls game or a fighting game or one of the thousands of games that have tried to be “Skyrim with better combat” that have languished in obscurity because they miss the point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Find what you like and stick with it⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times

  • Bruce Lee

  If you make the same meal repeatedly you get really good at it.

  I eat egg cups almost every day for breakfast. Line muffin tins with sliced ham, crack an egg into each one, add seasonings and toppings, back. Let them cool, store in the fridge, microwave for 30 seconds and add a splash of sauce to eat.

  Protein smoothie for lunch. I’ve got it down to the point where I optimize what order the ingredients should go into the blender in so that they blend smoothly. Orange juice, protein powder, banana (optional), peanut butter, ice, peanut oil (optional).

  I also love various kinds of meal prep for dinner. Doing things in bulk and in advance is usually more efficient for both time and money. And such deliberation usually leads to better nutrition too.

  I also enjoy experiencing new flavors. I love seeing new restaurants pop up nearby, immigrants bringing flavors from their homeland I’ve never tasted before. But that’s an expensive (and often unhealthy) treat for special occasions.

  Eating to live vs living to eat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A problem is that a lot of the companies that make consumer hardware cannot survive in the meantime.

  The flash manufacturers are expecting shortages through 2030. GPU’s have been a shit show for years now, and RAM and SSD’s are following. Now HDD’s are following SSD’s.

  It’s getting too expensive for anyone to build a PC or small home server. So what’s going to happen to the other companies? It’s going to be hard to stay in business making ATX desktop cases and power supplies. Demand for consumer CPU’s will fall and lead to AMD and Intel shifting their capacity to enterprise on that front too. Motherboards will follow as well. Some of that is more flexible than others, but even if the AI bubble pops it’s going to take years for the markets to recover.

  Think of the housing market. Real estate developers in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and a lot of the rest of the world have spent decades focusing on building large single-family luxury homes at high profit margins. To the point where they would rather keep building large homes and leave them empty over building apartment buildings or duplexes or smaller homes. I see a similar trend in the consumer PC space, and it’s going to take government regulation to stop it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The article is behind a paywall. Do they have any statistics or evidence backing that sentiment or is it just vibes?

  You can find articles and reddit posts claiming this same exact thing going back years, and yet personally when I go through the store and look through reviews it’s really hard for me to come across hate speech, especially if you don’t specifically look at reviews that have been downvoted to hell. It’s never going to be perfect, but I encounter less hate speech on Steam than most other platforms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They also have guidelines for “user generated content” which includes reviews, and you can report people for violating those guidelines.

  Sure Valve does not pay for moderators to check things proactively. I quite like that they don’t have AI or some other half-assed attempt at “moderation” like other platforms have. I hate the way that the whole Internet has moved to censor “fuck” and made up the word “unalive” because the automated systems of platforms I don’t even use have decided they are the arbitora of what language is allowed.

  I think the responsibility to monitor reviews should lie with whoever controls the Steam page: I would assume the publisher most of the time? The publisher and developer should be looking at reviews anyways. Add in the ability for users to vote reviews as helpful or unhelpful and I think it’s one of the better systems left on the internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘This shouldn’t be normal’: developers speak out about bigotry on Steam, the world’s biggest PC gaming storefront⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are guidelines on Steam that ban such content, and you can report people for violating them.

  So no, Steam does not do “nothing” as you claim. A very basic Internet search can confirm that.

  Even better, users can rate reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Which is great for a wider variety of reasons, but is also good for reviews that get into a grey area or use dog whistles to hide their true intentions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Games you fell out of love with.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  BioShock 1 and Infinite both have the same problem.

  On your first time through, the story pulls you through the game. There setting and characters are so mysterious and interesting you’re compelled to figure out what the hell happened and get to the bottom of it. You might notice, on your first run, that the games are really easy and the gun play isn’t particularly good. The actual gameplay gets repetitive, basically moving from big room to big room shooting things.

  The special powers are fun the first couple times you use them but are mostly situational and the kind of thing other games just use items for (land mines, grenades, etc), just re-skinned.

  Then at the end there’s a big reveal. Some plot twist that re-contextualizes the whole game and leaves you thinking about the game for an entire week.

  Then you replay them and realize… The big twist at the end? There’s almost zero foreshadowing and it would be impossible to have predicted either of them on your first playthrough.

  There are plenty of factions that have different political ideologies, but they are nothing more than a setting. The most obvious is how they spent the first half of Infinite pretty clearly establishing that Comstock and his associates were violently oppressing the working class in Colombia and that Daisy Fitzroy’s rebellion was both personally and ideologically justified. Then all of a sudden Booker is there enemy because… He thinks they were too violent in their pursuit to overthrow that oppression or something? It really felt like the devs just needed to throw more enemies at you in the back half of the game so they made a flimsy excuse to do that.

  The BioShock games give the illusion of talking about politics and ideology, but really the only message is just “extremism bad”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I have a rasberry pi 5 collecting dust, what are some neat useful things i can do with it?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I always like to think: what happens if some random hacker (either a bored teenager or hostile state) was able to control this thing?

  Operating locks? Hell no. Controlling my thermostat/furnace? Hell no.

  Monitoring locks? Like, having a sensor that indicates that a door or window is locked or unlocked and can notify you when it changes? Well, personally I still don’t do that because broadcasting to the internet that my window is unlocked seems dangerous, but I could also understand how that could be helpful, especially for people with OCD.

  Controlling my window-mounted AC units? Mild inconvenience at worse. I could go without them in the summer and just be a bit uncomfortable (and some years I do to save money). They aren’t powerful enough to be dangerously cold. I could always unplug them or kick them off my wi-fi if I had to. Worst-case scenario is that someone runs up my electric bill if in away from home for a bit. The ability to change the settings, set automation, and monitor room temperatures remotely is convenient enough to be worth the risk.

  Lights? No problem at all, especially because I still have dumb lights in some fixtures that I just don’t use often. So the worst-case scenario is that someone turns them on/off when I don’t want, and the solution is just… Unscrew the bulb, unplug the fixture, or flip the switch to cut the power. Or turn on a dumb light. LED’s are so efficient that I probably wouldn’t notice a difference on my electric bill if all of my lights were on vs off for a full billing period. In exchange, I’m able to use light turning on as a much gentler alarm in the morning, or turn everything off from bed when I’m ready to sleep, or if I’m out at a friend’s house it’s nice to have lights on before I go home.

  Each piece of automation is its own evaluation. What could go wrong, and how much damage would that cause? What information do I care about potentially being leaked? How much efficiency and convenience am I getting in return?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨meal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There is some evidence that it depends on the yerpenes, which vary by strain.

  Humulene (also found in stuff like ginger and hops) might be an appetite suppressant.

  I hope weed gets re-scheduled or legalized in the US so it gets easier to actually research this stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨meal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Humulene, terpene found in some weed strains (and also other plants like hops and ginger), has some evidence of being an appetite suppressant.

  When I first went through the process of getting my medical card, I was required to have a consultation with the pharmacist and she recommended strains with that if I have a problem with the munchies. Personally, I really like to get high and eat so I’ve mostly avoided those strains, so I cannot attest to the effectiveness of this myself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the definitive way to play certain games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I swear every time I start looking into a romhack that claims to just be a mostly vanilla QoL update they always add in a bunch of random stuff to “fix” the difficulty.

  Like, yes I am aware the games are incredibly easy. They’re for children. I originally played most of them as children. Just let me get high and stomp all through FRLG with a perfect-IV Feraligatr and the Gen 4 physical-special split. If I wanted to do Nuzzlockes I would… Do Nuzzlockes. If I wanted a game with difficult gym leaders and level caps, I would go play one of the thousands of romhacks that have that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's up with "Plex Servers"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m really trying to avoid using for-profit 3rd parties. CURRENTLY I could sign up as a free user and probably be fine. But Tailscale could wake up any day and decide to start charging, or put restrictions on the free tier that would force me to a paid tier.

  Part of the reason I bought a Blu-Ray drive, some big HDD’s, and started collecting discs in the first place was to take back control from tech companies. It’s why I chose Jellyfin over Plex. Going with Tailscale would defeat the principal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's up with "Plex Servers"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I would probably be this guy if I ever got around to doing the research into how to make my Jellyfin available over the internet safely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Go Back and Play Morrowind and Tell Me That's the Game You Want to Play Again' — Former Bethesda Veteran Delivers His Verdict on Potential The Elder Scrolls Remasters - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The article was updated in 2023 with the most recent data.

  Almost all of the sales of videogames are front-loaded. Most at launch (or at the launch of a re-release), and then it falls off hard over a couple of years. Morrowind came out in 2002. It’s incredible that Bethesda even released any sales data still by 2010. The units sold since then would be immaterial to the conversation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Go Back and Play Morrowind and Tell Me That's the Game You Want to Play Again' — Former Bethesda Veteran Delivers His Verdict on Potential The Elder Scrolls Remasters - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Morrowind only sold ~4 million units. I think you’re overestimating how big the fan base is. The fan base is loyal, opinionated, and vocal, but small.