Nibodhika
@Nibodhika@lemmy.world
- Comment on (Rant) Don't buy Rockstar games. 2 days ago:
Yes, things like original email and Nickname are some of those questions because after they change the public might have no way of figuring it out. Notice the support tech asked for those informations and when provided with it he said that he couldn’t verify ownership, this means OP reported wrong information for the identifying questions.
I’m not saying the service is great, asking him to access an email he claims to have lost access is dumb, but everything after that the tech support person did his best, and I don’t think he should have disabled 2FA, since it could be a social engineering attack.
- Comment on Hypothetically, if you have memory problems and need to write down events, is there a system which you can verify that its not tampered with? (Like a digital checksum, but for a journal) 3 days ago:
It all depends on your threat model, what is your fear? I personally would be very comfortable noting stuff down on a notebook, or even having a random text file on my PC, neither of those is likely to get compromised/tampered. Let’s assume you have someone living with you that you can’t trust, and you don’t want them to either be able to alter or read your entries, notebook and text files are not enough, but you can encrypt the notebook using any multitude of ways (including inventing your own language and symbols) and you can password encrypt the file in your PC. They could still destroy entries or the entire thing, if that is more of your concern then having backups might be more important. If you’re worried about altering past entries you can use something similar to a Blockchain, where the hash of your previous message is used in the new one so it’s obvious if someone erased a message, in the notebook you can do something like starting each message with the 5th to last word from the previous one or in some other way reference it.
At the end of the day it all depends on what is it you’re afraid could happen to your entries, so we’ll need more information on that.
- Comment on (Rant) Don't buy Rockstar games. 3 days ago:
The thing is, and I think you’re missing this, he got those wrong. After being asked for email and Nickname he provides them and the support person says “I’m unable to verify that you own the account”, that means he answered wrong, yes those might be bad questions because some random person might know them, but he didn’t.
- Comment on If I stood on a precision scale and farted, would I get lighter or heavier? 2 weeks ago:
Are you sure? It’s made mostly of Nitrogen, Hydrogen and Methane, all of which would be lighter than air because they’re at a higher temperature than the air outside.
- Comment on What are some good "frugal" movie viewing setups? (Recommendations) 2 weeks ago:
I have a TV, a projector and a VR headset, which essentially are your options, so let me run through each of them giving you pros/cons for each.
VR headset was a cool solution that someone mentioned here. It is an interesting approach, and the cheapest way to feel at the movie theater by yourself, it also allows you to play VR games which can be very immersive and it’s an experience. However it’s the worst visual quality of the 3 and you can’t bring anyone over for movie night.
Projectors can be really bad, but since you have a good budget a little research should get you a relatively decent projector with at least 1080p native resolution. If you’re looking for screen size, or have limited space for a TV, this is the way. However, even great projectors will struggle with daylight, your room needs to be as dark as possible, which might mean blackout curtains completely closed if watching during daytime. Also audio can be relatively bad, especially because some projectors are somewhat loud, but you should be able to get a quiet decent one for that budget, but you might want to consider speakers or a sound bar.
TVs are cheap and give you the best visual quality per price. They’re a pain in the ass to move (but not as much as you might think), but they don’t have any of the drawbacks of any of the other forms, but they’re also not great, however for 1k you can get an excellent TV and a very good sound bar that will allow you to view content in 4K HDR during daytime.
- Comment on What are some good "frugal" movie viewing setups? (Recommendations) 2 weeks ago:
You can wear glasses under the VR headset.
- Comment on If there's a sort of "apocalyptic" event but there are still surviving communities, will people be able to make eyeglasses again, or are people with vision issues gonna be fucked? 2 weeks ago:
Yes, it’s not magic, it’s just the shape of the glass that makes the focus point of images be slightly closer or further apart.
- Comment on If I stood on a precision scale and farted, would I get lighter or heavier? 2 weeks ago:
No, scales don’t measure mass but weight, it is completely possible to lose weight and have the scale show a larger number because of buoyancy. For example, grab a helium balloon capable of holding up a 1kg mass mid-air and the scale would show 1kg less than when you release it. This is very simple to understand, how much would the scale show for a 1kg object tied to that balloon? 0 of course, the object is not even touching the scale, and a slightly heavier object would only be making that slight weight difference of pressure on the sensors, not the remaining 1kg.
So conservation of mass has nothing to do with the question here. It’s all to do with whether farts are denser than air while inside your body.
- Comment on Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content 4 weeks ago:
Steam remembers my card, so I don’t have to input it there everytime. I get that you wouldn’t want to put your card info somewhere shady, but Steam is not that. Also, most banks nowadays have virtual cards you can use for that sort of thing, some even have one use cards that self destroy after a single purchase. So the safety that PayPal used to offer is not that important anymore.
- Comment on Whatever happened to the blockchain/smart contract 'revolution' we were told about? 4 weeks ago:
It’s not though, in the current system everything must go through those shitty companies, so they can dictate anything, and if Steam disobeys they essentially block them from receiving money, and it’s impossible to jump ships because creating a competition is essentially impossible, no one will be able to handle the Volume of Valve’s transactions and it needs to be all done by one entity. Ñ
In the system I’m describing once you’re in the crypto space no one can dictate anything. The same people could try to act as gatekeepers, but it’s almost impossible because anyone with Ethereum can sell them to you, so if an exchange threatens to not buy Ethereum from Valve they can simply go to any other exchange, hell, they themselves could sell Ethereum to users who would then use the Ethereum to buy games returning the Ethereum to Valve to be sold again, and if not anyone with enough capital can start an exchange selling Ethereum to users and buying it from Valve, even with small initial capital you would likely grow very quickly doing this. And the best part is that Valve can sell their Ethereum to different exchanges in any ratio they want to, so it’s essentially impossible for one of them to dictate anything because 1 big exchange can be replaced by 10 smaller ones in a heartbeat without any disruption to the system.
- Comment on Whatever happened to the blockchain/smart contract 'revolution' we were told about? 4 weeks ago:
So? Just use another exchange, that’s the same as saying paper money is bad because pawn shops might ban specific users.
- Comment on Whatever happened to the blockchain/smart contract 'revolution' we were told about? 4 weeks ago:
You’re thinking on a very narrow definition of a contract, here’s a simple contract example that’s currently being censored and wouldn’t be censorable on Blockchain: Buy NSFW games.
A simple contract could sell you NFTs for game keys that could be redeemed on Steam/Itch/GoG or even the own dev site. So there’s no middleman who could oppose this transaction and say which sort of games can or can’t be sold. This whole thing would be completely automated, secure for every part and non-censorable.
You’re hearing contracts and thinking on paper legal documents, whereas smart contracts usually refer to programs acting on tokens, the code that acts on those tokens is the contract, in the example above the generation and transfer of the tokens would be the contract.
- Comment on Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content 4 weeks ago:
Ah, if that’s the case then MC statement is kind of pointless, so it’s not them putting the pressure, but you still have to go through the people putting the pressure to get to them. I thought that if you put your card number on steam it had some more direct form of charging than going through stripe.
- Comment on Whatever happened to the blockchain/smart contract 'revolution' we were told about? 4 weeks ago:
Why less certainty? It’s more certain and less censorable than any other digital payment method.
- Comment on Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content 4 weeks ago:
If this is true then I honestly hope Steam and Itch go “ok, then, PayPal and Stripe are banned from the store as payment forms until we can figure out a way of limiting content you can pay with them”. Honestly I don’t think enough people use either of those payments forms, and even if they do currently they almost assuredly have a card they can use instead, and are more likely to switch payment methods than to stop buying games.
- Comment on RPGs that are optionally pacifist? 5 weeks ago:
There are lots of games where combat is not even an option, like Life is Strange, Before your eyes (do play this one with a camera and a box of tissues nearby), or Firewatch. But games where you’re expected to fight but can find ways around it the first example that comes to mind is Metal Gear Solid 3, you can beat that game without killing anyone, there’s even an achievement for that and one of the bosses will be particularly easy if you go this route.
- Comment on RPGs that are optionally pacifist? 5 weeks ago:
Spec Ops has no “pacifist option”
I mean, the whole point of the game is that you could have not killed anyone, you could have stopped playing, you choose to keep playing, you choose to kill all those NPCs, the game never forced you, turning off the game was always an option.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
If you look at most popular streamers today you will notice that they have years of doing it, and the reason is that it’s difficult to gain followers, and even if you to viral for some random reason it’s difficult to maintain the followers engaged. And without followers ads or sponsors are not going to give you too much money, and trying to charge your followers is more likely to lose you followers than earn you money.
In short, take a “normal” job that’s okay with you doing that as a side gig, and with time you might earn enough on your streaming that you might be able to quit your job. Good luck, it’s a hard market to get into.
- Comment on Is Mexican food uniquely good with alcohol or have I just been conditioned? 1 month ago:
Sorry I don’t live in Germany, so I don’t know the chain, but are you sure it’s a chain and not some random restaurant? When I was in Germany I remember seeing lots of random restaurants selling Pizza + Kebab, with no apparent name, just the sign saying what they sold.
- Comment on Is Mexican food uniquely good with alcohol or have I just been conditioned? 1 month ago:
What chain? Doner Kebab is the name of the food, it’s served in several places, it’s like saying Hot Dog chain should make it to Europe.
- Comment on Scifi question about time travel: 1 month ago:
First of all this is not a paradox, unless you’re not explaining something, there are two yous past and future, if past self turns off the machine before seeing the numbers nothing happened, if he turns it off afterwards the information has already been transferred so nothing happens either.
I have a feeling you might have recently watched Primer and are thinking of a similar working tome machine, where the machine needs to be powered on from past until future. But if this situation happened in Primer it wouldn’t be a problem either because you’re not in the box after you leave it. It’s a bit weird, but if you imagine time as horizontal lines, the box allows you to travel diagonally, so you only exist inside the box in that timeline at the moment of exiting, before that you were in a different timeline, so if you exit the box, wait a while and turn it off you’re only preventing yourself from using the box again. In fact that’s one of the big reveals of the movie, except it’s said in passing by mentioning that the boxes are multi-use.
- Comment on How does AI use so much power? 1 month ago:
Your answer is intuitively correct, but unfortunately has a couple of flaws
Supercomputers once required large power plants to operate
They didn’t, not that much anyways, a Cray-1 used 115kW to produce 160 MFLOPS of calculations. And while 150kW is a LOT, it’s not in the “needs its own power plant to operate” category, since even a small coal power plant (the least efficient electricity generation method) would produce a couple of orders of magnitude more than that.
and now we carry around computing devices in out pockets that are more powerful than those supercomputers.
Indeed, our phones are in the Teraflops range for just a couple of watts.
There’s plenty of room to further shrink the computers,
Unfortunately there isn’t, we’ve reached the end of Moore’s law, processors can’t get any smaller because they require to block electrons from passing on given conditions, and if we built transistors smaller than the current ones electrons would be able to quantum leap across them making them useless.
There might be a revolution in computing by using light instead of electricity (which would completely and utterly revolutionize computers as we know them), but until that happens computers are as small as they’re going to get, or more specifically they’re as space efficient as they’re going to get, i.e. to have more processing power you will need more space.
- Comment on Bethesda is allegedly working on ‘multiple Fallout games’, including Fallout 3 Remastered, teases report 1 month ago:
I never said they were good, and you didn’t complain about them being bad, you complained about killing the franchise, and whether a franchise is dead or alive IS measured by popularity.
- Comment on Bethesda is allegedly working on ‘multiple Fallout games’, including Fallout 3 Remastered, teases report 1 month ago:
Oh yeah, they absolutely killed Fallout, the first game released by Bethesda (Fallout 3) was such a franchise killer that only sold 20 times more than the original game, and their latest game fiasco only doubled that. And let’s not talk about that fiasco of a TV show, that couldn’t even make it to most watched on Amazon, had to settle for the 2nd most watched show on Amazon, with only 4 times more viewers than Fallout 4 sold copies… In short, yeah, the new direction is such a fiasco that only managed to bring 165 new customers for every 1 that the original had.
Sources:
- Comment on What are your favourite single-player games without much fluff, grinding or difficulty spikes? 2 months ago:
Good luck, and let me know how it goes, it should be just that really, just don’t touch the controller until you’re through
- Comment on What are your favourite single-player games without much fluff, grinding or difficulty spikes? 2 months ago:
That’s weird, that’s the solution, does your controller has some drift that could cause it to still be firing some thrusters?
- Comment on What are your favourite single-player games without much fluff, grinding or difficulty spikes? 2 months ago:
Obvious spoiler ahead is obvious: Just let go of the controller when you enter that area, you’ll float peacefully (albeit very close to them) until the exit portal.
- Comment on Why do people especially men care if someone forgives a cheating partner 2 months ago:
No, you’re not, you cheated that’s the most fundamental thing not to do, that’s like saying “I’m a great cook, I would argue better than the majority of cooks, I only put rat poison in my food once!”, would you eat in the same restaurant where a cook intentionally put rat poison in your food once already?
- Comment on Hesitating getting a Switch 2 (1st game console in 15 years)... 2 months ago:
Honestly, I’m absolutely happy with my Steam Deck, I think it ticks most of your boxes (it even runs Linux, so it’s essentially a portable Linux computer designed for gaming), so I think it’s the better option that you’re looking gor. To your points specifically:
it’s really geared towards family/party gaming
There are plenty of party games on Steam.
it’s Nintendo, so you get the whole usual games (Mario Kart, Zelda, etc.)
This is the only reason to get a switch, if you want a Nintendo console and Nintendo games this is the way. Everyone who gets a switch understand this is the reason they’re getting it. If this is as strong a point to you that it makes you overlook everything else, then get the switch.
like most consoles, it’s plug and play and can be enjoyed in the living room (I kind of gave up trying to set up a proper gaming experience with my Linux PCs, given that I don’t have the hardware for it)
Steam Deck also has a Dock that you can plug to your TV, you’ll need controllers but even so it should be much cheaper in the long run since games are extremely affordable compared to Nintendo.
the battery life is not great to say the least (2.5 hours takes me back of the Game Gear in early 90s!)
Haven’t seen many benchmarks of the switch to be honest, but that does sound bad, the Deck only gets that bad battery life if you’re playing Cyberpunk or something, for more casual games it can get upwards of 6h. Plus you can get power banks that fast large it while playing, which I assume is also possible on the switch although the switch 1 used to have some issues with power banks.
the screen seems to be pretty bad too (at least it’s a step back from the OLED one of the Switch)
All but the cheapest Deck models now use a 90Hz OLED panel
the joycons are still not using a Hall effect sensor, meaning they might still be prone to drifting
While the Deck’s default sticks are not hall effect, they are easily replaceable and Valve sells hall effect replacements on ifixit, so if you ever get drift in your sticks it’s fixable.
most of the games will not be sold as proper cartridges but as download codes
If you’re going down this rote Steam sells download codes for much cheaper
the whole thing (console, additional gamepads, games) is quite pricey
The Deck is about the same price, but like I said you’ll end up saving in games since you start with your whole Steam Library and can get more games much cheaper.
it’s Nintendo, famous for their anti-everything (anti-homebrew, anti-emulation, anti-piracy)
The Deck is by far the most open console you can get, you can even replace the entire OS if you want to, but StramOS is great and you shouldn’t need to.
- Comment on What are your favourite single-player games without much fluff, grinding or difficulty spikes? 2 months ago:
Both are good games, but they’re very different from each other. Also neither is made by Bethesda.