Really been enjoying Guild Saga: Vanished Worlds. I haven’t found a TBS RPG that captured my interest for a long time, and this combines a lot of the things I like from Divinity: Original Sin (like elemental effects with the environment, and talking to animals), with nice pixel graphics and very classic DnD game feel. It reminds me of Icewind Dale, vibe-wise.

I’m the weirdo that thinks FF8 was the best one. Squall actually grew as a character, matured from an angsty emo teen into an adult who assassinates authoritarian leaders (or at least tries to)… And don’t forget that Rinoa launches her dog like a wrist-mounted crossbow, as an attack. Best FF game.

I fear we can’t have a fair and free market if people are so easily manipulated.

We can’t, certainly at least in the US. People falsely believe the government will protect them from exploitation by corporations, but corporations have long since proven they can and will manipulate the government into serving them.

Technically, they haven’t yet. In the past they’ve sometimes transitioned ownership of country-code TLDs over (like the Soviet Union’s .su to Russia). I think they just don’t want to wade into the debate over the Chagos Islands in general.

Unfortunately the IANA decided to kill the TLD altogether, but the Chagos islanders have been asking to get control of it themselves so they can receive the registration fees. This was sort of the worst of both worlds: they could have given the Chagos islands it’s own TLD, or given control of .io to the Chagos islanders, but instead they just said, “you’re not sovereign, so you get nothing”.

edit: I’m reading elsewhere that it’s not yet decided for sure whether to kill the TLD, but no one seems to think it will be given to the Chagossians, unfortunately.

For people who haven’t been following this story, the Chagos islanders don’t want companies to stop using the .io domain, they want to receive the registration fees, which is much more important to them than having the TLD go away.

Unfortunately, because the territory is going to Mauritius instead of to the Chagos islanders, IANA is killing the TLD entirely (since Mauritius already has their own country TLD).

Main backlog I actually want to play currently:

• Greedfall 2
• Cassette Beasts
• Shell Runner
• Selaco
• The entire Atelier series (Ryza 1+2, Sophie 1+2)
• Isles of Adalar (note that this game’s development is on-hold currently)
• Construction Simulator 3
• Dishonored 1+2
• Monomyth

If you can’t tell from Isles of Adalar and Monomyth, any game that looks like a Morrowind knock-off is a high priority for me. :P

In reality though, I’ll just play more Avorion and Starsector.

Cute :)

This is for people who want (and can afford) at least 4K with ray-tracing in the latest games and all of this at triple-digit frame rates

Sure, but are there really enough people who fit into that category to justify these cards? Based on the 4080 series sales, it seems not, but they’re still coming out with even beefier, more expensive cards anyways.

I know this is going way off-topic

In a similar vein, I grew up around IT because my mom worked on mainframes. I remember lots of nights of sitting under her desk at 3am because she got called in as Production Support when jobs would ABEND. When I was in high school, wanting to learn more about mainframes I set up Hercules, a mainframe System3xx emulator (looks like it supports z/OS now as well), and managed to find boot media for System370 and MVS. The desktop computer I was running the emulator on (a Gateway, showing my age), was more powerful than the original mainframe hardware.

I’m running a 2080 in my desktop, and I haven’t run into a game yet that I need a better card to run (at least, not with my 1080p monitors, which I prefer over higher-res ones). I also got a Framework 16, with the discrete Radeon 7700S GPU, and everything on it runs butter-smooth.

Point is, I can’t see justifying something that is $1600 just so I can run Starsector at the same 60 FPS I already get. It would take some truly groundbreaking game to come along to force me to consider upgrading to these ridiculous cards, and I don’t see that happening given the current consoles out there.

One thing I’d push back on in the article is:

That cost-per-user doesn’t decrease as you add more customers. You need more servers. More GPUs.

This is assuming constant use, which is not the case. If I have a server handling LLM prompt requests, and for illustrative purposes each request uses 100% of the single discrete GPU in it, and I only have 1 customer, but that one customer only uses it 5% of the day (which would actually be pretty high in real terms), I can still add additional customers without needing to buy additional servers. The question is whether the given revenue of a single server outweighs its cost to run.

And when it comes to training, that is an upfront cost, that you could (if you get a model to where you want it) stop having to pay whenever you want. I’m pretty surprised they haven’t been really leaning into training models for medical diagnoses, because once you have a model that can e.g. spot a type of tumor with n% accuracy beyond a human, you don’t really have to refine it further if you don’t want to (after all, it’s not like the humans can choose to do it better themselves at that point, like they can with writing prompts).

To me, it’s why Right to Repair laws are incredibly necessary. Repair parts, manuals, everything needed to operate and maintain a sold product should be mandated as “must be available to buy from the patent-holder, or the patent expires and the part is legal for anyone to manufacture”.

MS doesn’t realize how close they are to being disposable to gamers. If a few more game companies made their catalogs linux-native, they’d be toast.

Lots of people would be shocked just how many games offer linux-native binaries, not just windows ones that work with proton.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: plastics are going to be the leaded-gasoline of our generation(s)

Nice to see a court get it right for once, though I suppose they could ignore their advisor.

How can you have a “positive problem” with something? That seems like an oxymoron.

When it’s being employed properly, it’s absolutely an important tool, but the way they’re presented to most users, such as on-device biometric data stores (e.g. Apple’s secure enclave, or a TPM verification), aren’t the proper implementations. Nor is using biometrics as your primary auth method.

It’s supposed to be “something you have and something you know and something you are”, not “have or know or are”.

NIST standards for biometrics require the biometric data be stored on a secure remote server, and that the scanner device check against that during auth. Putting the biometric data on the device means that you’re losing a big part of your non-repudiation.

And it’s even worse when you’re using a secondary factor (biometric) as your primary or only factor (e.g. a phone unlock), that grants access to your other factors like password store and OTP tokens.

Biometrics are never supposed to be a single-factor auth method when used properly, but that’s how most people use them now, and it degrades their security.

If your phone requires a passcode, a TOTP grant, and a biometric scan, by all means, please do employ biometrics, but if it’s going to be your only factor, DO NOT.

Or, for simplicity to the average forum reader:

Never use biometrics. It’s just not worth the tradeoffs.

There are tons of games that are playable on smartwatches. Apart from that, there are a lot of single watch-games from the past. McDonalds and BurgerKing have also had a lot of watches with games or toys, as well.

Tamagotchi watches came back in 2021, which is one great option.

There are a ton of retro LCD video game watches out there, but they can be pretty pricey.

Never use biometrics. It’s just not worth the tradeoffs.

Oh no! Anyways…