I bought the first one for $20. For the second I’ll play on Game Pass, if it is available, or again wait for $20. Maybe even less if I forget about it, which I might.

Someday, that’s what we’ll be sold as “The Singularity”. Some company like Apple or Google will offer us ascendance into the cloud, but we’ll actually just become digital slave labor.

I’m in the process of (very slowly) migrating my household from Windows to Linux and am currently testing Nextcloud as a replacement for OneDrive. In my case, I set it up using pikapods.com because I want offsite storage. The server part of the setup was incredibly easy because the host did all the work.

Getting my Linux client setup was kind of a pain (especially compared to the Android and Windows clients), but everything seems to work ok so far. Of course, I’m only backing up a small amount of data so far, so I can’t comment on the efficiency or speed for a major backup.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some exploits that have already been discovered that people have been sitting on in anticipation of support ending soon.

Another vote for Freetaxusa. TurboTax might be marginally easier to use, but it is far more expensive and Intuit is a horrible company. If you hate filing taxes (because of the complexity), that is because Intuit and H&R Block lobby congress to keep things complicated so they can sell you their products.

I use a budget app for tracking income and spending on a transaction basis and then keep the rest of my finances in spreadsheets.

Stock “news” is stupid, the Switch 2 announcement has been expected for a year. The only news is that the company confirmed it will launch this year, which was already expected. Real news is when we start hearing what games will be available at launch (or soon after).

That’s probably it. I get that many people enjoy overcoming difficult bosses by mastering the tactics, but I find it boring and repetitive. At this point in my life I enjoy games with an engaging story, cozy games, or open games where I can create my own story in my mind as I play it (like The Sims or Mount & Blade…such very similar games :D).

I always thought I despised soulslike games because they don’t let you adjust the difficulty level. I tried this game because they recognized that was bullshit and gave you the ability to easily overpower difficult bosses. Now I know I despise soulslike games for some different reason that I have figured out yet. I did not like this game.

Thanks, I’ll check it out!

I actually liked Opposing Force and Blue Shift better than HL1 back when they were still new. Recently I thought I would play through them all again, but I only made it a little way into the original before I quit. Going back to old mechanics is not generally enjoyable for me. Or maybe I should have just skipped HL1 and gone directly to the ones I liked better. To be fair, I skipped ahead to HL2 and am still struggling to enjoy the dated mechanics.

I don’t think the loading screens are the failure, the fast travel system is. Depending on where you are and where you’re going, you have different fast travel options. Sometimes you can pick your end destination directly (sort of). Other times you have to pick your planet (loading screen), land (loading screen), either run to your destination or pick a fast travel location on the local map (loading screen), enter a building (loading screen), take an elevator (loading screen) and now you’ve arrived. This is about the worst case I can think of with 5 loading screens.

Even in a best case scenario, like having the option to directly travel back to the lodge, you still have travel to the outside of the lodge (loading screen) and enter the lodge (loading screen). So, in most cases you’ll have between 2 and 5 loading screens unless you’re just traveling between outdoor locations on the same planet.

Which I guess takes us a step further and suggests that the pointless spaceflight feature of the game (or the pointless smuggling) is the real culprit. If you didn’t need to scan ships for contraband, they could have built a more robust map system that allowed better point to point fast travel. You’d still run into issues of indoor/outdoor, or indoors with multiple areas, but it would have been much better.

The bicycle, otherwise all that fast food is going to catch up with you quick.

I think they’ll go full terminal mode on the next iteration. You’ll download a 100MB launcher and then just do cloud gaming from there.

Deus Ex. When I first played it I was amazed by the graphics and I specifically remember being impressed that your character was reflected in mirrors. I’ve been replaying it recently and the graphics are obviously very dated, but it also doesn’t run smoothly on modern hardware. My PC gets louder and louder as I play it and eventually the game starts to stutter and I have to restart it.

So, is nvidia the cisco of this cycle?

Wish listed! Also bought Be a Rock, I look forward to being a rock later tonight, it sounds fantastic!

I’ve been curious about this too, but haven’t been able to find anything that puts a real price (including future profit margin) on GenAI. For example, having a chat conversation with a customer service agent in India might cost about $2-3. Is a GenAI bot truly cheaper than that once you factor in the energy & water costs, hardware, training, profits, etc.? It might be, but I’m skeptical.

I love the games (haven’t played 76, but the rest are great). I watched the first 3 episodes and thought they connected well with the games thematically, but I never cared enough to continue. Every now and then I think I should get back to it, but I always have something that interests me more, including just scrolling Lemmy. To be fair, I don’t really enjoy watching TV or movies that much though.

I’ve been applying similar thinking to my job search. When I see AI listed in a job description, I immediately put the company into one of 3 categories:

1. It is an AI company that may go out of business suddenly within the next few years leaving me unemployed and possibly without any severance.
2. Management has drank the Kool-Aid and is hoping AI will drive their profit growth, which makes me question management competence. This also has a high likelihood of future job loss, but at least they might pay severance.
3. The buzzword was tossed in to make the company look good to investors, but it is not highly relevant to their business. These companies get a partial pass for me.

A company in the first two categories would need to pay a lot to entice me and I would not value their equity offering. The third category is understandable, especially if the success of AI would threaten their business.