It does however have possibly the worst death animations in the history of gaming…

That wouldn’t be so bad per se… Many improvements in human conditions have been achieved by automating stuff and kicking people out. Think of the green revolution.

The problem is that the use case here is to massify the production of literal shit, like clickbaity articles on social media content, or ever larger volumes of advertisement. Those jobs don’t need to be replaced, they just need to go away for good.

Are we really going to use an AI to write motivation letters from a list of bullet points, to send it to an HR that will condense it into a list of bullet points using AI? Seriously?

Personally, I find myself in a bizarre situation.

I have some open source ““Ai”” solutions that I find really really nice and helpful e.g. the image search in Immich, or LanguageTool which bills itself as an AI spellchecker.

At the same time I am horrified at the stupidity underlying 99% of big tech AI stuff that gets wall street hot.

But… Isn’t that kind of the point? Slashing computational cost so that we can deploy that stuff wherever it’s needed without a tenfold increase in the world’s energy bill?

Whether we should do that at all is a very different question.

Buying isn’t owning

Often true

piracy isn’t stealing

Definitely true

Do pirate as needed, but also do try to send a few dollars to the dev’s pockets when you like the game.

They also have families to feed (or cats I guess) and if they can’t do it by making games, they’ll stop making games.

Great game… But I have to admit, I liked Hotline: Miami more.

A couple of oldies, that deserve to still be played. Disclaimer: I played both games when they were already ~8 years old, and completely outdated in terms of technology.

Planescape: Torment

One of the best RPG ever created, and that is entirely for the world building and writing, and how much of the gameplay ends up being based on these rather than the combat mechanics (which are just ok)

Deus Ex

Again it was way ahead of its time in terms of world building and depth, and it was still an unashamed PC game, that dared to challenge its users a little and didn’t need to have a GUI that could be used with a gamepad, unlike the sequels.

There are two expansions for the first one, Opposing Force and Blue Shift. These explore the same events, from the points of view of different characters.

After the second one there are also the two shorter, stand alone, stories, Episode One and Episode two. These continue the story from the point of view of the protagonist.

The whole “Apple products are great because they control both software and hardware” always made about as much sense to me as someone claiming “this product is secure because we invented our own secret encryption”.

I don’t find it at all annoying to keep NewPipe up to date.

I think you may need to take a look at Obtainium.

You can get e.g. pylance to work if you trick it:

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/1640

So, at least in that instance, it’s just Microsoft being a little petty.

The problem with that is the power consumption. It adds up.

VS Code is mostly open source though, with an independent build being circulated under the name “VS Codium”. Some proprietary Microsoft extensions will however refuse to run on it out of spite though.

The proprietary version of Inkscape would be Adobe Illustrator, I guess.

Never used it though.

You can definitely mount a windows share on a linux machine. I was doing it at my last job, because it allows you to do anything on it transparently as if its part of the local filesystem.

Here instructions from the Ubuntu wiki, most things should carry over to most other distros.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently

No car is fun in those instances. But that is how we spend the majority of our time on the road.

Hence, “fun driving is over”.

There are still fun cars. It’s getting incredibily difficult to have fun driving them.

I have not.

Do they somehow make it fun to be queueing at a busy intersection?

Is driving 70km/h behind a truck somehow a blast if you’re in a Tesla?

If so I’ll make it a priority to try one out ASAP!

Honestly, I lived in Antwerp for a while… I think the transmission is the least of their problems.

Agree that fun driving is essentially over, but I don’t think automatic cars are as common outside North America.

In Europe ~80% of cars have manual transmission, mainly due to the (in the past) better fuel efficiency.

Modern automatic cars have often slightly better fuel efficiency, but they cost quite a bit more to buy and maintain, and very nearly everyone knows how to drive stick, so people usually don’t bother.

Edit: As we stop having fun driving cars, should we finally also say goodbye to race biking, and fun motorcycling, once and for all?