Too big of a map ultimately becomes a deal breaker for me because it will inevitably have too much empty space and get too boring and time consuming to play through.
Smaller more refined maps are better than larger maps where the team can’t sufficiently justify every single corner and make sure every inch truly is fully designed and makes sense.
Thunderbird still supports RSS, however I’ve found many news sources don’t provide proper RSS feeds anymore
AI at least provides a clear product that can be a helpful workforce multiplier, whereas Bitcoin provided an unprotected alternative to traditional markets with none of the safeguards nor legal precedents of traditional markets, so it’s only led to illegal activities piled upon illegal activities
To be fair, if I had an option to effectively invest in Google circa 2004 in 2024 I would toss some spare money at it, and that’s basically what OpenAI is offering at this moment. They’ve established themselves, shown strong leadership and established strong relationships with major companies. They’re a leader in a particular product segment and while they could falter and fail, there’s enough momentum that they’re more likely to be acquired than to actually fail, plus they’re swimming in extremely uncharted waters so there’s plenty of opportunities for them to both greatly improve ongoing operational efficiency and to create new products with new markets, much like where Google was in 2004
On the other hand some breakthrough in either hardware or software could make AI models significantly cheaper to run and/or train. The current cost in silicon is insane and just screams that there’s efficiencies to be found. As always, in a gold rush, sell pickaxes
Fortunately Google messages filters all of it to spam and makes it very easy to toss whatever doesn’t get filtered into spam. Here’s mine from Wisconsin!
Personally I keep my installed apps to a minimum, heavily use Firefox on mobile with uBlock Origin, and heavily curate what’s allowed to send notifications and when, so my phone is quiet and not distracting but there when I want it/need it
If my grandmother makes it to the next election I might move her to an android phone for this reason alone. Her iPhone doesn’t block the spam at all, and even appears to not have a way to delete the messages
The nice thing about these thrift stores is they’re actual charities and if you are in a hard place they’ll often help you get the stuff you need for free rather than charging the $0.25 an item they might otherwise
I loved the wildlife zoo there when I visited Rochester on a whim a few years ago!
I love that I knew exactly what classic it would be just from the bash.org archive link
Every former windows phone user I have ever talked to has sworn up and down about how amazing of a platform it was. I honestly suspect Microsoft could have legitimately won a sizable slice of the mobile market if they simply chose a different name than “windows phone”
But then, this is the same company which held a mock funeral for the iPhone upon the launch of the Windows phone so…uh…yeah that actually happened…
I mean, the person who did it did technically manage it by running an emulator of a different similarly ancient architecture
Ars has a decent summary of the blog post if you don’t feel like reading the full blog post
No joke I read an article a while ago about a computer cafe in like Nepal I think it was? where users had to pedal a small DC generator to power the computers because power is so scarce up on the mountain
It’s more than just a TPM requirement. They have actual processor requirements cutting off all 7th gen and older Intel processors and all 2nd gen? Ryzen and older AMD processors so that they can modernize instruction sets. Many perfectly capable if a bit old machines that have years of life left in them that will be going to the recycler who will attempt to extract something of value from these machines.
I’m all for modernizing instruction sets and cutting off literal ewaste machines that nobody should still be using like the Core 2 Duo for example, but this is just going to produce mountains of ewaste, which is about the last thing we need with the looming climate apocalypse and dire need significantly reduce emissions rapidly
Oh my gosh, I had 2 kids, went back to college, rocketed my fledgling IT career forward and gained a mortgage during the pandemic. Granted I probably would’ve done all those things without the pandemic, but many of the pandemic era policies helped make each of those steps much easier than they normally would have been
It’s for the safety of IT departments everywhere that furries’ need for travel is limited
My oldest is about ready for her first computer, so I have an ewaste laptop earmarked for Christmas that I’ll have to tweak the configuration a bit more on before then.
She’s been getting better at better playing Minecraft and learning how to ask us how to spell the names of things so she can search for them in Minecraft, and getting pretty good with the mouse and keyboard too
PayPal is nice since it gives virtually zero trust to the seller to secure customer info. But as you alluded to, PayPal has lots of problems mostly stemming from it trying to get all of the benefits of being a bank while accepting none of the responsibility of being a bank, and therefore customers receive none of the benefits of a bank while still getting all of the drawbacks of another entity handling their money
I started playing that one a couple of years ago but found myself horribly lost on one of the introductory quests (I think the first lockpicking was what did me on?) and kinda lost interest from there. I can see the appeal though and at some point I’ll certainly circle back to it