Speed wise 55Mb/s is fine. Higher speeds are nice for game downloads/etc but that’s plenty. I had to live with 3Mb/s until a couple years ago, and we were able to have multiple people watching Netflix/etc on different devices. Not 4k obviously, but surprisingly good video quality for the amount of data available.

The data cap could be a problem though. You’ll probably be fine if you don’t download many games, but that’s an easy cap to hit these days.

Brave has been surprisingly solid in my experience. I have noticed they tend to be lacking on image results though.

As far as I know, Kagi doesn’t have their own index. They use a mix of google and brave’s results (maybe some other search engines too?), and then sort their results to give “better” ordered results.

have you tried uninstalling windows:)

Twitter is by far the larger platform, and small independent creators have to work to promote their game on every platform they can, if they want to succeed. The moral high ground of not using undesirable social media sites is nice, but isn’t fair to people who are partially dependent on those platforms to make a living.

I’d love to see Monolith games come natively to other platforms, but they’ve absolutely flourished under Nintendo so far. They’ve been given a lot of creative freedom with their own games, and also have had a lot of success as a support studio on the Legend of Zelda games, Splatoon games, and a lot of the other major games.

They also have a reputation for being one of the better japanese developers to work for, with overtime not normally being allowed. They also seem to give their employees easy development deadlines, with games like Xenoblade 3 releasing several months early (because they finished it early), and Xenoblade 1 remake having extra content, because they finished it early and used the remaining development time to work on other parts of the game.

Cursing frequently seems like a sign of immaturity honestly.

Edit: to be clear, swearing in moderation is fine. But the only people I’ve known to swear excessively were always young, immature, or less than bright. I largely associate heavy swearing with kids and teenagers who swear excessively because they think it will make them see older.

I’m not used to hearing good things about EA, but good for them.

It’s an absolutely massive game, and has been in development for 17 years. They also were pretty upfront with the fact that there would be a price increase at launch. I’ll also mention it’s one of the rarer games where the devs opted out of any Steam DRM, so you can copy the game files and run them on any machine without needing Steam installed. I keep the game on a thumbdrive for playing on my work PC when I have downtime.

All in all I think the price is well deserved, and I hope they do really well.

I had one time a couple weeks ago where I was scheduling jobs on Monday, we were supposed to be rained out Tuesday, light/scattered showers Wednesday, and heavy rain Thursday.

Actual results was no rain Tuesday, absolute downpour on Wednesday, and sunny Thursday and Friday.

Yeah, I’ve long thought that weather forecasts are a perfect use case for AI. AI is great with complicated systems that are hard to model accurately but have lots of available data.

Current weather forecasts kinda suck. I try to schedule jobs around when it’s going to rain, and have to frequently reschedule because rain forecasts aren’t very accurate. I really hope we can see improvements.

These cards sound good, but I’m generally soured on Intel as a company. It’ll be years before I feel comfortable buying hardware from them.

30% as industry standard

That’s the same as app stores/etc, and is still a common cut to take. I’m not convinced the cuts that Epic is taking are actually sustainable for offering downloads/updates/etc for a game indefinitely, but it’s hard to tell since the Epic store is already bleeding money.

I’ll also mention that Audible (which has a monopoly in the audiobook space) reportably takes a 60-75% cut of audiobooks sold on their platform (they take only 60% if you agree to sell exclusively on audible, but they take the full 75% if you want to sell the book somewhere else as well). Monopolies abusing their position is really common, but I haven’t seen anything similar from Steam that makes me think they’re abusing their position. I suspect PC gaming would be in a far worse state if another company controlled the popular storefront.

Being a small game dev has a lot of uncertainty and risk. I wouldn’t blame any small dev for taking a guaranteed paycheck from Epic. Larger studios with safe prospects should be blamed though imo. Gearbox with Borderlands 3 for example.

Except they’re trying to strongarm people into using it by using huge amounts of money to buy exclusivity rights.

People don’t want monopolies because companies can abuse their position to hurt consumers. But steam provides a very user friendly experience with lots of benefits and features like mod hosting, remote play together, etc. Epic provides a store that people hate using, and people only put up with because epic abused fortnite’s success to buy exclusivity deals*. Despite being the much smaller storefront, Epic already feels like the abusive monopoly in the PC gaming space.

*Many people also play on Epic because of free games, which is a valid and pro-consumer way to attract users. I’m 100% cool with this strategy, although giving away merchandise at a loss is also a common monopoly strategy.

A Chinese flagged ship disabled it’s transponders (so that people wouldn’t know where it was), slowed it’s speed, then dropped anchor and dragged it 100 miles across multiple underwater cables. This is almost certainly intentional sabotage, although it’s not yet clear what governments are responsible. The ship was loaded with Russian fertilizer, which is the main link to Russia.

Also:

The Yi Peng 3 joins a growing list of incidents fueling Western suspicions of Russia’s covert operations. Last year, the Newnew Polar Bear, another Chinese vessel, allegedly severed a Finnish gas pipeline and cable while carrying Russian sailors.

Source

There was a request to halt sales until the specific mechanics were removed, with the mechanics being throwing pokeball like items and riding monsters.

That lawsuit might take years, and the requested damages from Nintendo are only $66,000. Palworld isn’t going to be shut down anytime soon, even if they lose the case.

Great game, it and the original Pixel Dungeon were my most played phone games for years.

Another high quality mobile experience I can’t recommend enough is Slice & Dice. Gameplay is quite different from Pixel Dungeon, but it’s basically replaced all other phone games for me. Been playing it almost continuously now for the past 3 years.

Yeah, games like DRG prove that season xp/unlocks can be fun and rewarding. But the key there is that:

• It’s completely free
• You can replay old seasons anytime, so there’s no cosmetics that you miss out on if you don’t finish by the end of the season

Done like that, it’s a fun system that gives you extra rewards for playing. But there’s never any punishment for not playing enough in a fixed period of time.