Ancient Chinese Proverb found in Fortune Cookie says:

“You can walk on water too, if it is cold enough.”

The appeal is that these games were made well before Elden Ring and Witcher 3; before ‘open world’ was mainstream. Every single NPCs had daily routines, quests were dynamically generated, and what you do in the game had consequences beyond pissing one character off. This made triggering specific quests or events difficult if you were just going ‘off the hip’, and made replayability a big feature. Because of these systems, there were several interesting “game breaking” issues, but these things were charming in their own right due to how new all these systems were put together with almost nothing like it.

In retrospect, not all the “game breaking” issues were truly understood at the time, and most are a consequence of several factors - the most common being that some quests activate behind the scenes and prevent other quests from starting, even if you haven’t picked them up and added them to your journal. So it is possible to do mostly everything in the game with careful planning. But at the time, it really did seem like each playthrough was unique.

It is/was also highly moddable for its time. While it took a long time to detail every aspect of the game, today there is nothing mods can’t do. Even Witcher 3 mods can’t do a bunch of things that Skyrim mods can. And it’s a good gateway into learning how to mod, and modding can be just as fun as playing. Some mod guides are so long it takes days or weeks to implement. It can get quite insane, with some people maintaining multiple ‘mod versions’: one to play (most playthroughs won’t let you add/remove mods mid-play), one to test new stuff, and one to keep up-to-date with whatever mod guide/group they are following (you know, for fun…and the next playthrough).

But mostly it’s nostalgia, like how some people like older Zelda or Final Fantasy games. Or how you might play that pointless cozy game you played a million times because it connects you to something deeper to what was going on at that time. We know TES games are pretty bad in a lot of regards, but graphics, gameplay, or story isn’t what we are after. Hell, there are now adults booting up Minecraft because it’s just the game they grew up with.

Also, kinda hard for me to imagine eating a god. Just…ew.

It’s not too hard. AI requires a LOT of work. Work requires energy. Some energy is wasted during this and the byproduct is heat. The heat has to be removed for many reasons, and water is very good at doing that.

It’s like sweating, it cools you down. But you need water to sweat.

Even better: Freeze them!!! Seriously, it tastes like banana ice cream. It’s delicious!

Keep in mind, still discussing the underlying fundamentals and not the user experience.

MitM attacks are frequently covered in white hat hacking, often after an actual event takes place. It is considered a third party attack, and it does break trust. It is a security threat, and to claim it doesn’t count is absurd. I’ve seen a few reports personally from internal, but I’m not at liberty to speak specifics about them. On the topic of replay attacks, TOTP is vulnerable, but passkeys are not (yet, I’ve seen people try though). This isn’t the only type of MitM attack, and, again, both are somewhat vulnerable.

TOTP is nothing, nowhere similar to passkeys in any way. You do NOT generate codes with passkeys. Passkeys are a form of public/private keys that are used to create a challenge/response request and used to generate a digital signature. The keys are not passwords (aka “shared secrets”). Digital signatures are also not passwords. The only other thing I can think you mean by “code generation” is that you’re using it as a generic catch-all, but that happens with…well everything (even passwords), depending on context.

I don’t want to sound too much like a die hard passkey fan - and you are right - passkeys are extremely overkill if you use anything above a plain old password. In some cases, layered security can be just as effective. The problem is that most people do only use plain old passwords. If we can get any kind of extra security, even TOTP, then all the better. There are also some cases passkeys are not feasible, so it’s good to have alternatives.

That’s false, TOTP can and has been the target of man in the middle attacks, successfully. The implementation of passkeys makes man in middle attacks more difficult, but it could still happen. So both are susceptible to third parties to some degree.

As far as point of view, I was assuming we were talking about the process, since the goal of passkey UX is to be largely the ‘same as’. Which, to be frank, is way less dedicated since both the implementation of passwords and passkeys can vary widely (2fa, email, id, otp, etc). If we exclude those, the UX is the same - some users might be even using passkeys and not know it.

TOTP is based on shared secrets, just like passwords. As such, it’s susceptible to many of the issues passwords are and is much closer to passwords than passkeys. Passkeys on the other hand, don’t have shared secrets and operate completely differently under the hood.

Perhaps he means the process of setting it up. Or when it doesn’t work. Or when passkeys are lost. Or using another device. A lot of people’s complaints about passkeys aren’t really about when it works.

It’s valid I think, but also some people forget passwords can have similar experiences. For one, there seems to be this idea that if you lose your passkey you get locked out of your account forever. The recovery process should be no different than losing your password.

No. It’s a completely different process. It’s a bad name for what it actually does. (Unless you’re talking about how computers do things, then EVERYTHING is numbers)

Look up public/private key pair encryption. It’s the process that has changed.

The problem with all these “what are passkeys” guides is that it’s difficult to convey the differences between password and passkeys if you don’t have a deep understanding of encryption or authentication systems.

I haven’t been in the loop, but wasn’t pragmata everyone’s hope for a MegaMan reboot?

I get what you mean, you’re not the only one. There are generations of games that have explicitly trained you on fast twitch button mashing with graceful dodge frames and intentionally engineered safeguards so rng is in your favor to bring about the best experience. And I’m not mocking you…it’s just how it is and it gets me too. Trying to unlearn that is hard.

I also hate the ‘difficult for the sake of difficult’. I know some people get a high over doing something incredible, but I don’t get that from banging my head on the same thing over and over. Any souls, souls-like, souls-lite or weighty mechanics games like MH get a hard pass from me.

However, I really enjoyed Remnant, it’s a mp souls-like - something about witnessing everyone’s shenanigans but still being able to pick each other off the floor is a lot of fun. It feels different and more like what souls should have been (imho).

Back in the day FFXIV 1.0 distributed updates via torrent iirc.

How is grave of the fireflies not at the top of this list?

If you think you have it bad, just remember - Laura Croft’s entire life has been in ruins.

This reminds me of that reddit thread where op took a photo of his phone screen and people kept asking how he took the photo…and he just kept delivering.

Have you tried moving his system closer? Have you tried using your system near his location? It’s not just microwaves that can interfere with wifi, but also some kinds of fluorescent lights, or even infrastructure (pipes, electrical, mesh retaining, etc).

What is the signal db loss? Ping is a catch-all metric but isn’t reliable for nailing down specific problems. Also the varying ping times is called jitter, and some jitter is perfectly normal - wifi tends to amplify ping and jitter. Don’t get too hung up on high ping unless it is a problem.

If db loss is acceptable, is his tcp/ip stack compromised? Run a virus check, ensure his network configurations aren’t being hijacked (check dns, proxy, etc). Reset the stack and configs if necessary.

Has his router been compromised? There is firmware that is going around hijacking routers for botnets - very hard to identify and reverse from what I recall. Try another router if you have one. Aside: Might be a good idea to factory reset the router and start with a clean slate too.

Is your wireless network congested? too many devices can cause large ping and jitter, even if they aren’t on your network. Removing devices, changing wifi channels, disabling guest connectivity, and enabling game mode on the router can improve the congestion issue to varying degrees.

TPM has nothing to do with networking, which is good because there are bootable USB OS’s you can run to test your hardware without wiping your current install if you feel like it might be another type of compatibility issue (TPM would make this much harder to do).

Evermore also had a lot of bugs. I remember getting softlocked so many times in the game. SoM had a few bugs too, but I didn’t recall being softlocked as often.

Only if it’s a present the size of a car in the garage and you invite everyone over to witness him unwrap it.

Oh that one is a good one, it’s very busy. Using the first method the trees are on the ‘bottom’ and everything progressively pops out with the fish/turtle on ‘top’.

The other way is reverse, the trees are on the ‘top’ and the fish are on the ‘bottom’ (like I’m looking in that ‘box’). It’s also really hard to see the whole picture this way, but that’s just me.

Also, ‘In a Box’ might not be the best analogy, you can make one that intentionally feels like you’re looking inside something – it’s just that most of these are made to pop out at you.