Why the hell do you have a Hot Topic gift card?

Correlation does not equal causation.

You have to be a little off to WANT to interact with ChatGPT that much in the first place.

I know! I worked and slaved for 30 years only to find out they were right all along!

So here’s what you do. Retire. I play video games as long as I want. I sleep whenever I want for as long as want. It’s pretty great.

Ecstatic! I’m sure it will go bad somehow, though.

I don’t know anything about the NG+ system because I steered way clear of Starfield, but it sounds like somebody at Bethesda saw people playing Skyrim over and over and thought “How can we monetize that”, hence the grind you’re alluding to. They expected you to encounter it organically because of course the game was such hot shit everyone was gonna play it forever. Oops.

Call me a cynic if you want but these are the guys who invented paid cosmetics.

Why do people do this shit to themselves?

I swear if the Borg came down some people would be lining up to join the club.

$20 million on microtransactions

Please don’t.

$73 million on games and DLC

$42 per person average? Those are rookie numbers!

Dump a bowl of Lucky Charms marshmallows in there and baby, you got a stew going!

Thanks for the tip, I’ll check it out. Most of my AHK scripts are simple, not really macros, just adding toggles to keys or remapping stuff, like putting mouse buttons on a keyboard key, or remapping WASD to ESDF for games that don’t support key remapping. I messed around with some key remappers for Linux about 9 months ago but I couldn’t find anything that worked well in the game I was playing (Dyson Sphere Project). That’s almost certainly due to my ignorance. I really need to learn python.

Thanks, Debbie.

Can confirm, I’m just hitting my first year of using Tumbleweed as my main OS after giving up on Microsoft. It plays almost everything without issue. The very few things I boot into Windows for are games that I want to use Autohotkey with, old games that don’t work well with Proton, or VR.

When you switch and realize how much better it is than Windows, and you can rest easy knowing your own OS isn’t spying on you or stealing your data, it tends to make you a little bit of an evangelist.

Installing the popular Linux distros today is easier than Windows XP was, and it’s arguably easier than Windows 11. It definitely asks you less questions and doesn’t require you to change 30 different settings from the defaults.

Linux has come a long way from my first install of CentOS on a server in the mid 00’s. You had to be pretty dedicated to run linux successfully back then, but these days it’s cake.

Incompetence, poor planning, probably a healthy dash of managerial stupidity not listening to the engineers. And they never drill for this which is why it’s lasted so long. But having your expensive IT staff do regular disaster recovery drills is complex and expensive so almost nobody does it properly.

Recently retired from one of the major telcos. They would do DR exercises with tabletop discussions. No actual testing or hands on. Once I learned that I knew the first big disaster we had I was just gonna walk. It was that bad.

Gotta disagree, for home use at least. I have found it to be the opposite of a nightmare.

Moving my home routing and firewall to a VM saved me hours, and hours, and hours of time in the long run. I have a pretty complex home network and firewall setup with multiple public IPs, multiple outbound gateways, and multiple inbound and outbound VPN setups for various purposes. I’m also one of those loons that does outbound firewall with deny by default on my network, except the isolated guest VLAN. With a complex setup like that, being in a VM means it’s so easy to tweak stuff safely and roll back if you mess something up or it just doesn’t work the way you expected. Turns what would be a long outage rebuilding from scratch into a 30 second outage while you roll back the VM. And being able to snapshot your setup for backup is incredibly useful when your software doesn’t behave properly (looking at you, PFsense).

All that said, I run redundant, synced hypervisors which takes care of a lot of the risk. A person who is not well versed in hypervisor management might not be a good fit for this setup, but if you have any kind of experience with VM management (or want to), I think it’s the way to go.

I’ve been doing it for probably 8 years now without any major issues related to being a VM. In fact, that made recovery extremely easy the two times my PFsense VM shot itself in the head. Just load the backup of the VM taken the day before and off to the races. After switching to OPNsense a couple years ago I haven’t had a single issue.

These days I run two identically spec’d hypervisors that constantly sync all my VMs to each other over 10GB NICs, so even a hardware failure won’t take out my routing. That is something to consider if you don’t have redundant hypervisors. Not really any different than if your physical router died, just something to plan for.

My understanding is there’s a licensing fee for another company to say they have an ‘android’ phone.

That part doesn’t matter to me. I ran de-Googled custom ROMs on my phones for many years, including cyanogenmod and later Lineage, only to find out they were tracking all of us against our will (and device settings) all along. That was the last straw for me.

I listened to both videos completely. That thing sounds INCREDIBLE.

Glad I abandoned Google 7 years ago when they made it obvious what they were really all about. I do miss my customized Android phones but it’ll be a frozen day in hell before I give them another cent.

A lot of them probably remember what appeasing Nazis leads to and don’t want to fund their own antagonist.