Maybe it has something to do with also needing international support in order to defend itself from its neighbor… talk all the shit you want about the US’s stance on Israel, but shifting that to Taiwan is on par with claiming Ukraine deserved to get invaded.

Which I now realize is probably your next line. Anyway, oh well

I did not but I’ll give you an upvote anyway

The key to having fun with the gonarch fight (and other huge chunks of Xen too, like the Gargantua chase and Nihilanth) is to discover that the jump pack is broken and if you hold your crouch key, it tricks the game into thinking you never touched the ground. So you never lose momentum and can infinitely slide around at a thousand miles an hour, boosting your speed every time the jump pack recharges a bar. If you’ve never learned Source airstafing, the wide open first stage of the gonarch fight is a great place to start.

I do agree the gonarch was changed to be a ridiculous sponge though. Its regular health bar is set a bit too high anyway, but on top of that it’s actually invulnerable through the whole sequence between the first and last stages of the fight. Which would be fine, except they didn’t do anything to communicate that to the player! It still bleeds, it still makes pain noises, and the only way to figure it out is to waste a bunch of time dumping ammo into it. Very silly oversight.

the current climate for GPUs is terrible with no relief in sight.

Not only no relief: it’s gonna get so much worse. Between the buying power of the dollar spiraling into the depths of hell and the tariff war heating up, this might be the last opportunity for a lot of people to buy cards for the foreseeable future. It’ll be years at the very least.

I was online when the 9070 listings first went live and had to fight not to impulse buy, which I was proud of at first. Then they instantly sold out and the more I think about it, the more I’m starting to regret it lol.

That’s just my perspective, though. Maybe with Americans no longer buying cards they’ll drop the prices internationally to try to boost sales… but the cynic in me knows they’ll boost prices even further to try to make up the difference.

Ain’t no way that’s a real person, who tf could possibly type that out and click post without a moment of introspection

You were acting like computers mimicking a conversation is something that wasn’t possible until genAI. That makes the fact that it’s been since at least 2008 relevant.

Animation is not a shifted goalpost, I was demonstrating an example of what AI is actually capable of. It helps with the inbetweens, not human moments. From animation to physical acting to voice acting, you can get a blend of the most generic, but nothing memorable, nothing that stands out, no quirks. That is literally a core component of the technology and no amount of development can fix that. GenAI can be a tool to help us focus on those human moments instead of mountains of generic shit, especially in massive games like RPGs, but it will never outright replace the creative process.

Again, Cleverbot. You could have “conversations” with a computer as far back as 2008. Generative models are better, but still terrible at giving accurate information or even at staying on topic without constant nudging in the right direction. Actual acting is FAR out of their range.

Take the robotic, stilted automatic animations that have been used for decades in games like Skyrim. It’s fine if you don’t care at all about looking natural, and AI can make that trashy bulk animation a lot better, but it will never replace the quirks and characterization provided by hand animated cutscenes like you can find in Uncharted or Red Dead, let alone stylized games like Pikmin and Mario.

Oh yeah, that’s why nobody reads regular fiction anymore, it’s all choose-your-adventure these days.

Bots will never be able to act as well as humans do until they are literally sentient. They might sometimes sound like someone naturally speaking, but they will never be able to intonate the correct emotion the way we do. They will never be able to make creative decisions and work with a director. And they will never be able to hold a real conversation. ChatGPT and Deepseek can hold their own longer than Cleverbot did, but they still devolve into nonsense in short order. Zero chance they’ll be able to hold together consistent fiction the way a human writing a script does.

it literally happened to me but ok

I did a quick install of windows (last year I think?) and it sorted everything into a onedrive folder. documents, pictures, videos, downloads, all that stuff, looked normal from the file explorer, but was sneakily placed into a onedrive folder. it went something like c:/users/me/onedrive/. didn’t realize what it had done until like 2 days later and it gave me some popup about not being able to upload. i don’t even have a onedrive account; it just decided that was how it should be done. no idea what, if anything, it actually uploaded.

now if i have to install windows i have a script from privacy.sexy i run before doing anything else. havent had that happen again yet. still, probably best to assume anything on a windows machine is not private.

I’m just surprised it seems to actually be in c/users instead of a OneDrive folder

Holy shit. I had been thinking about upgrading while prices were still relatively low but have been trying to convince myself my 6700xt is fine and will hold up… Guess that window is closed now lol

Valve has made attempts to take down projects that follow those rules. TF2Classic is the example that comes to my mind since it’s the main one I’ve played, but I know there are several others. In TF2C’s case, they tried contacting Valve to find out why they’d been hit with a C&D, never heard back, and eventually quietly resumed development.

Some kind of miscommunication between legal and the devs? Maybe internal drama? Maybe they didn’t really pay attention and still aren’t aware TF2C is back up? Who knows. Still happened tho.

On the one hand calling it AI is annoying, but on the other we’ve been calling video game NPC logic “AI” for as long as I can remember and no one thinks they’re actually sapient. Surely we can get to that point with GenAI as well.

Absolute worst case scenario, you have to reinstall Windows, and that’s really no harder than installing Linux in the first place. I don’t think there’s a situation where you’d wind up “stranded”

Seconding the person saying not to dual boot on a new partition. That was how I started with Linux like 10 years ago, and even then Windows would fuck up grub every time it updated and it took me ages to learn how to get boot into Linux again. Plus if you ever decide to ditch windows entirely, wiping that partition and adding it to the Linux one can be a pain in the ass.

If all you have is a laptop and a dream, maybe that’s the way. But if there are any other options…

It’s a completely different film, far more action-oriented

Terminator 2 is tonally almost completely different from 1. 1’s soul is much more a horror movie, complete with a damsel in distress and a heavily uncanny villain. 2 had every chance to lean into that sense of unease, but really doesn’t explore that uncomfortable emotion despite the T-1000 being much more threatening on paper.

The same could be said about terminator 2

Lucky you. I’ve been letting calls from any number I don’t recognize go to voicemail for years and nothing ever seems to change.

I wonder if switching up the order more often would be a good way to remind everyone that every letter is a separate group of people