I game on my bed too, and use a flat right-angled USB adapter. Basically, something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Duttek-Degree-Adapter-Extender-Support/dp/B0C244K2HC/
I use a similar but magnetic version with my phone and other USB-C devices, and it’s been a game-changer.
That’s incredible. Your son has far, far, more patience than I ever did. I still haven’t managed to clock most of the games I grew up with, such as Dangerous Dave, Prince of Persia 1 & 2, Wolf3D, Doom 1 & 2, Crystal Caves, Aladdin, Lion King, Jazz Jackrabbit, Mario (NES), Pokemon Red (GBA), Crash Bandicoot (PS1)…
Every now and then I try to clock one of those old games, but then I get stuck and/or lose interest, and move on to something else. Even among recent games, I spent over 400 hours playing BotW and only managed to do two of the divine beasts. I also have over 200 hours in TotK and still haven’t gotten to the first major spirit quest. Similarly, got several hundreds of hours in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, but never actually completed any of those games.
I think the only game that I recall beating would be the Bio Menace trilogy - which I finally managed to complete as an adult, and that too thanks to DOSBox’s save states. Oh, and Diablo II too, it someone had the perfect mix of action + story + game length, to keep me interested till the end.
Honestly I’ve no idea how people manage to stick to one thing for so long and see it thru till the end, without losing interest or getting distracted by something else.
That’s going to change in the future with NPUs (neural processing units). They’re already being bundled with both regular CPUs (such as the Ryzen 8000 series) and mobile SoCs (such as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3). The NPU included with the the SD8Gen3 for instance can run models like Llama 2 - something an average desktop would normally struggle with. Now this is only the 7B model mind you, so it’s a far cry from more powerful models like the 70B, but this will only improve in the future. Over the next few years, NPUs - and applications that take advantage of them - will be a completely normal thing, and it won’t require a household’s worth of energy. I mean, we’re already seeing various applications of it, eg in smartphone cameras, photo editing apps, digital assistants etc. The next would be I guess autocorrect and word prediction, and I for one can’t wait to ditch our current, crappy markov keyboards.
Summarising articles / extracting information / transforming it according to my needs. Everyone knows LLM-bssed summaries are great, but not many folks utilise them to their full extent. For instance, yesterday, Sony published a blog piece on how a bunch of games were discounted on the PlayStation store. This was like a really long list that I couldn’t be bothered reading, so I asked ChatGPT to display just the genres that I’m interested in, and sort them according to popularity. Another example is parsing changelogs for software releases, sometimes some of them are really long (and not sorted properly - maybe just a dump of commit messages), so I’d ask it to summarise the changes, maybe only show me new feature additions, or any breaking changes etc.
Translations. I find ChatGPT excellent at translating Asian languages - expecially all the esoteric terms used in badly-translated Chinese webcomics. I feed in the pinyin word and provide context, and ChatGPT tells me what it means in that context, and also provides alternate translations. This is a 100 times better than just using Google Translate or whatever dumb dictionary-based translator, because context is everything in Asian languages.
Given the current pace of development, how long would you reckon it might take them to get rid of the bugs, at least, the annoying game-breaking ones? I don’t mind incomplete content, but game breaking bugs is something I don’t have the patience to deal with. Like, I made the mistake of pre-ordering Cyberpunk - dropped it on day one cause of the bugs and didn’t touch it until three years later, when it was finally in a playable state (for me). Just wondering if Star Citizen would reach that sort of bug-free stage within the next couple of years.
It’s not in the opposite order, it’s just flipped around in the photo lol.
Looks like this might work: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005094002506.html
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But Bethesda could very well release a Skyrim Extra Special Edition in the interim, and fans will lap it up, no doubt. Jokes aside, there are many large fan-projects in the works which fans are looking forward to, such such as OpenMW, Skyblivion and Skywind, not to mention more “normal” mods for Skyrim itself, so I doubt the interest in the franchise is going away any time soon.
I’m one of the foolish ones that actually pre-ordered the game. Was super hyped for it too, did a countdown till midnight so that I can start playing at launch, and I even live streamed it (and also had a few other streams going on two laptops). Took the day off to play the game as well.
The clock hit 00:00 and less than 30 minutes into the game, I ran into my first bug. I stuck was in a dialog loop and couldn’t get out no matter what I tried, so was for forced to load an earlier save. Then I got stuck somewhere else, or something funky would happen. I’d never been so utterly disappointed in a game until Cyberpunk came along. So anyways, I was so put off by it that I’d decided not to play it any further, until they patched it all up. So the first patch came along, but this time I decided to read the reviews first - still plenty of bugs. Thought I’d wait for the next one, noope, still buggy. And the next one. And the next. And then I decided to ignore the game completely, until not only they fixed the bugs, but also added QoL stuff into the game. Like better AI, better peds, better driving etc. Make the city more immersive. I mean, I had waited for so long, so might as well wait and play until it’s at it’s best version.
So, not only will I not play now, nor when 2.0 comes out, I’ll play it only when Phantom Liberty is out, and will enjoy the game, for the first-ish time, the way it was meant to be played.
Assuming of course that Phantom Liberty isn’t a dud, but having learnt from my previous experience, I might wait a bit after it comes out and see if they release a post-launch patch or something first.
Never again pre-ordering a game… unless it’s a Zelda.
It’s not like you’ll be installing it in there permanently. If you’ve got a Framework laptop or PC case for instance, you could also use it in there. Basically it’s a BYOM (bring your own mobo) situation, so when you’re not gaming on the go, instead of wasting that piece of idle hardware, it could be put to good use. Or vice versa. Maybe you already have a Framework laptop and want to convert it into a handheld gaming device.
The exciting part here is the shell, not the insides. Indeed the Intel boards aren’t that great for gaming, but once Framework start shipping the AMD boards next month, this thing would become a real contender to the Steam Deck, ROG Ally etc. Load up something like ChimeraOS on it and you’d get a near-Steam Deck like experience.
To be fair, that’s the case with Linux and laptops in general right? Unless you’ve got a mainstream/popular model (or a brand known to work well with, or officially supports Linux), issues like sound, battery life and even suspend, wifi etc are fairly common. Which is why one of the most common Linux questions (besides “which distro”) is “which laptop”.
Depends on the hardware. If it’s an x86 then that’s most certainly a yes, if it’s an ARM then YMMV.
Finished Mass Effect 2 and loved it
Did you play it on PC or console? If it’s the latter then how were the controls? I’m planning on getting it on console, but I suck at playing FPSes with a controller.
Also, the article doesn’t mention anything about nanoplastics, which are far more dangerous. Nanoplastics have a larger surface area, which makes them more reactive - they can also penetrate cells, and cause damage to DNA, proteins, etc.
“Coax,” “Force,” and “Lie.”
I’m pretty sure the original was “Accuse” instead of “Lie”, and the dialogs also made more sense thinking the response was “Accuse”.
Still I’m not convinced of Steam OS compared to Windows 11, since I would like to play also Epic games and maybe some emulators
How much time, relatively speaking, do you spend playing multiplayer Epic games? If it’s more than 50%, then yeah, SteamOS may not be for you. But if it’s less than that, then SteamOS would be a better experience, simply because it was built ground-up for gaming. No Windows Defender slowing down your system unexpectedly, no Windows Updates to hijack your system at the most unexpected times, no other bloatware or nonsense services like Bing/copilot crap or ads in Explorer - just pure gaming. These Windows handhelds you speak of are barely optimized for gaming, the most they do is add a launcher and call it a “gaming console” - you still have to put up with various Windows annoyances, which defeats the point of a dedicated gaming console - you want to be able to just pick it up, turn it on and game - no nonsense. One of the cool things about SteamOS is how reliable the sleep/resume is when you’re gaming, which allows you to just pause and game whenever you like. This whole streamlined experience is why people love the Deck.
BTW, SteamOS has no issues running emulators. I can’t think of any popular emulator that runs only on Windows, or runs significantly better on Windows.
the screen of the Steam Deck, apparently of lower res
The lower res is actually better because it’s a small screen. A higher res on a small screen makes things harder to see, plus with a lower res you get more FPS and a better batter life.
very big hazels (to me looks like the first Nintendo Switch).
It may not look good, but it actually makes it more ergonomic and easier to hold. Check any review of the Deck and you’ll see they all praise it’s ergonomics, like this one: https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/pc-gaming/steam-deck-review#section-steam-deck-form-factor-ergonomics-and-gamepad
“Despite its undeniable girth, the Steam Deck’s attention to ergonomics makes it an incredibly comfortable device to hold, even during extended gaming sessions”
In fact, read the rest of the article - or any other in-depth review. You’ll find that the Steam Deck is a much more polished experience overall compared to the others, and this is thanks to both it’s hardware and software.
There’s no need to wait for a sentient AI for that. I mean, the current publicized method for blocking these bots is via robots.txt, which is only a very polite way of asking bots to duck off - they really have no reason to respect it, if they wanted to. OpenAI (or anyone else) could also use multiple public proxy servers for scraping, so websites won’t be able to point fingers at them. Even if the bot makers avoid using proxies, they could still get the content indirectly by scraping other sites which repost the content, such as archive.org or even just normal sites which repost stuff. Heck, they could scrape off say, Lemmy indirectly, for instance we’ve got the AutoTLDR bot here, combine that with comments and quotes from several people, and any competent LLM could easily learn the content of the original article without even having to directly touch it.
So unless the site has posted a 100% unique piece of information, which hasn’t been published anywhere else, AND they’ve also implemented a strict “no reproduction in any form” rule that also extends to prohibiting any discussion of the source material, it would be near-impossible to stop or blame the bot creators of bypassing ToS. And we all know what happens when you go to great lengths to try and silence a subject matter on the internet…
I’m with you. In fact I’ll say even retro operating systems were better (no bloat, no spyware, easy to understand/configure/mod/hack around), as well as retro Internet (no Javascript crap, no browser fingerprinting/tracking, simpler HTML, super easy webdev) and retro computing (no soldered-on components, PCs were more modular and easy to repair)… heck, planet earth in general was better back then. We’ve been on a downwards spiral since the 2000s. Everything sucks now.