I’m sure it makes the bean counters happier to have another asset valued at X amount, but in practice the software will just be locked in some vault where it won’t do anyone any good.

Its an instance where the number on the screen doesn’t actually correspond to any useful economic activity.

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You might like ADACA. Its got two campaigns, one inspired by Half Life 1/2 and early Halo and the other inspired by STALKER.

Its one of the few games that I would consider to actually be Half-Life 2 -like in the same way that so many indie shooters now are Quake, DOOM, or Build-engine -like.

The only unfortunate thing about it is that its from the era where 3D indie games had no textures (think SUPERHOT almost, but not as extreme), but you can eventually get used to that and look past it.

Man I really wish there was a version of TF2 with all the cosmetics and weapon unlocks disabled.

How about Deus Ex: Transcended?

I think that was the patch I ended up using my first playthrough (I’m away from my computer at the moment or else I’d check), but I might want to use something else my second time.

How does this compare to other community patches in your opinion?

In Fallout 3 you can kill the entire BoS faction (minus the essential NPCs, that go unconscious), wait a day, and they’ll be your best pal again.

In Starfield there is the exact same morality system, with lawmen who will attack you if you are evil and some random faction that will attack you because “we hate goody two shoes”, but you are shoehorned into being Jesus at the end of the game with the same issue of the ‘good’ faction having to mandatorily become non hostile to make the final quest work.

The way people feel about Starfield is the way I feel about every Bethesda game since Morrowind.

Option 3.5: Palliative care or euthanasia.

Did any of those countries become particularly high quality places to live after the fascist regimes fell (compared to peer countries that didn’t go through a fascist phase)?

If the answer is “no, Italy and Germany and so on are not particularly notable compared to their neighbors”, then it sounds to me like accelerationism is bunk, and what you get after fascism is more-or-less what you would have had anyway if all that suffering had been avoided.

We like to believe that every dark cloud has a silver lining, that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, that everything is happening according to some plan or pattern that’ll all make it work out in the end, etc, etc. Sometimes that’s true, but often times its not. Sometimes bad things happen that didn’t need to happen, for no good reason, and people get hurt and die and nothing good comes of it. That’s life. Sometimes its ugly and there’s no point to what happens.

Thanks for the cannibalism tips.

For awhile now I’ve been thinking about how nice it would be to have a something like a modern version of the Poqet PC.

The Poqet PC had a much nicer keyboard than the laptop in the article, and between the simplicity of its software and a very aggressive power management strategy (it actually paused the CPU between keystrokes) it could last for weeks to months on two AA batteries.

Imagine a modern device with the same design sensibilities. Instead of an LCD screen you could use e-ink. For both power efficiency, and because the e-ink wouldn’t be well suited to full motion video, the user interface could be text/keyboard based (though you could still have it display static images). Instead of the 8088 CPU you could use something like an ARM Cortex M0+, which would give you roughly the same amount of power as a 486 for less than 1/100th the wattage of the 8088. Instead of the AAs you could use sodium ion or lithium titanate cells for their wide temperature range and high cycle life (and although these chemistries have a lower energy density than lithium ion, they’d probably still give you more capacity than the AAs, especially if you used prismatic cells). With such a miniscule power consumption you could keep a device like that charged with a solar panel built into the case.

Such a device would have very little computing power compared to even a smartphone, but it could still be useful for a lot of things. Besides things like text editors or spreadsheets, you could replicate the functionality of the Wiki Reader and the Cybiko (imagine something like the Cybiko with LoRaWAN). You could maybe even keep a copy of Open Street Map on there, though I don’t know how computationally expensive parsing its data format and displaying a map segment is.

The monsters in REPO are worse somehow.

Not sure if its because its relatively easier to stun/kill/hide from them or if its because their mechanics are lacking in some way compared to lethal company’s, but I feel as if they don’t have the same sauce.

It is from 2018, but how do you imagine that this was written by AI given that LLMs barely existed at the time and weren’t accessible by the general public?

Yeah, I’m not an expert in construction but I don’t really know what this buys you vs using, for example, insulating concrete forms.

There is a religion called Jainism that actually tries to avoid harming even tiny organisms and plants. As such they avoid eating things like root vegetables that require the entire plant to be killed in order to harvest them.

Interestingly they are not necessarily against drinking milk, as milking an animal is viewed similarly to harvesting a fruit. Though its my understanding that they may still object to industrial milk production.

It might be less the quality of the research and more this:

(This comic is a bit outdated nowadays, but you get the idea).

Except the headlines say “scientists report discovery of miraculous new battery technology using A!”.

Also i think people don’t realize how long it takes to commercialize battery technology. I think they put them in the same mental category as computers and other electronics, where a company announces something and then its out that same year. The first lithium ion batteries were made in a lab in the 1970s. A person in 2000 could have said “I’ve been hearing about lithium ion batteries for decades now and they’ve never amounted to anything”, and they would be right, but its not because its a bunk technology or the researchers were quacks.

With electric cars you might not even need a special charger so much as a special charging cycle. Its already the norm for cars to tell the charger what voltage and current they want, and its already the norm for cars to carefully control their battery’s temperature during charging.

That’s not to say you’d necessarily be able to do this with just a software update, but its not too far off from the current paradigm.

I’ve seen videos of people running Damn Small Linux with a GUI on Pentium 1s.

None of them are very recent, so I don’t know how well ‘modern’ DSL would fare on a P1, but there are a few recent videos of people browsing the web using Dillo on Pentium 3s.

In addition to what groet said, I’ll add that this is a little bit like asking “what’s the difference between a public library and Amazon?”.

Yes, there are other public libraries you could go to if the one you subscribe to didn’t have something you wanted or ‘went bad’ somehow, but the most important difference is you don’t have an antagonistic relationship with your public library. Your public library doesn’t have a financial incentive to try to trap you or screw you over.

An antivirus is mostly just a blacklist of known malware. Sometimes heuristics are used such as ‘this piece of software isn’t installed on many PCs, and it appears to be doing shady stuff like, monitoring keystrokes or listening to your microphone’. But unless your antivirus is actually sentient there’s no way for it to really distinguish between a chat application that listens to your microphone so you can talk to your friends / monitor your keystrokes to know when you’ve hit the push-to-talk key, and a piece of actual malware that intends to spy on you and blackmail you.

What you have with a package manager is a whitelist of programs that have been selected by your distro maintainers. Is it completely impossible for someone to sneak malware into a distro’s repository? No, but its a lot easier to maintain a list of known good software than it is to maintain a list of known bad software. And in that situation your antivirus isn’t going to help you anyway, since the people maintaining its malware list aren’t going to magically know that something is malware before the distro maintainers do.

So, generally, just using your package manager instead of running random shit you find online is going to be a lot better than any antivirus. With things like Wayland and Flatseal becoming more common we’re heading towards a situation where fine-grained per-package permissions will become the standard way distros do things, making antivirus even more unnecessary.

We should have done that a long time ago, as the security model of ‘any program you run can do anything you can by default’, then blacklist the ones that inevitability abuse that privilege, is completely backwards.