Pxtl

Pxtl , 1 day ago

Did they miss the memo on Armored Core 6? If they're bringing back a Dreamcast franchise, it's Virtual On

Pxtl , 1 day ago

Tags are a workaround for bad search systems. They've been a solution looking for a problem since platforms started getting better at search.

Imho, Mastodon should be using hashtags like subreddits/lemmy-communities (they have moderators who can control what gets posted under that hashtag) then they'd have a real reason to exist on that platform now that they've got proper search, especially since a F/OSS platform like Mastodon has difficulty with moderating.

Pxtl , 2 days ago

Tomb Raider 2013 would only pop up the hud when you did something that involved it, by default the GUI was fully hidden.

The ultimate original "no hud FPS" was Jurassic Park Trespasser, where checking your health involved looking down at a tattoo on your breast.

Pxtl , 2 days ago

Not if you customized it in win10. I dock mine along the left edge of the screen. They removed that ability.

Pxtl , 2 days ago

Still not updating until you let me keep my taskbar where it is.

Pxtl , 2 days ago

No.

Pxtl , 2 days ago

My taskbar is laid vertically along the left edge of the screen, so I can have full ungrouped small-icon text labels for every application. Monitors are wide, horizontal real-estate is cheaper than vertical.

Pxtl , 2 days ago

Technically I do left-side-left-monitor, right-side-right-monitor, left is primary, right is chat.

Pxtl , 2 days ago

IIRC there's a F/OSS version too, forget the name.

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki

Pxtl , 2 days ago

No, as in, the left edge of the screen. Not "along the bottom, justified left" but "taskbar entries are a vertical list running down the left edge of my screen".

Pxtl , 4 days ago

Yes. I'm quite tired of hearing "it's not our fault that toys full of lead were sold on our storefront and stored, fulfilled, and shipped from our warehouse in boxes bearing our logo! When we said that we 'recommend' the product, we meant, like, algorithmically, not for realsies. We had nothing to do with these products! It's all XGZDoo, a company we kicked off the store. And now would you like to buy any products from XGZDee, our latest new seller?".

Pxtl , 4 days ago

Problem there is the gas cost of blockchain is too high. Recording transactions on chain is expensive. It might be worthwhile for full game transfers, but for cosmetics? I doubt that.

Pxtl , 4 days ago

Yes, but crypto keys recorded with an owner in a public ledger, so there's a clear single owner.

Pxtl , 3 days ago

What blockchain doesn't have high transaction costs once it scales up to large usage? Fundamentally blockchains are about hyper-redundant indestructable storage with expensive costs for writing to that storage to prevent flooding it with garbage. The most mature and sophisticated blockchain that doesn't involve burning down a forest to solve sudokus is the Ethereum network, which is probably the one to point to when we're talking about a large blockchain, and that's one that uses the subcurrency of "gas" to model paying for recording into that ledger.

Are there any blockchains that could handle transaction volumes on the scale of a game-store like Gog or Epic (much less Steam) without putting non-trivial prices on writing the transactions to the ledger?

Pxtl , 4 days ago

Or about 5 f150 lightnings

Pxtl , 6 days ago

Uh, that’s practically all software and games these days.

Pxtl , 6 days ago

I mean I’ve bought 2 Overwatch passes using those points. I couldn’t justify paying cash for skins to myself, but MS rewards points I could rationalize. But I basically fire up Edge/Bing to collect the points and then go back to Firefox & DDG. It was obviously not sustainable for them.

Pxtl , 6 days ago

For ones where they give you a code for a non-MS service (eg LoL or Overwatch tokens) couldn’t you bot-farm this and then literally just sell the redemption code?

Pxtl , 6 days ago

Obviously. Don’t get caught.

Pxtl , 6 days ago

I hope so. Theyve already got scary implications for creative parts of the economy.

That said, we’re in the Cambrian explosion of the tech. As it plateaus, the next step will be enhanced tooling and convenience around it. Better inputs than just text, better, more applications in new spaces, etc.

Pxtl , 9 days ago

In captivity a gray wolf can reach 70 kg and live to 15 years old.

There is no reason for large domestic dogs to be short lived except the horrible things that inbreeding has done to them.

Pxtl , 10 days ago

The Prius Prime isn’t too different, in that it’s also a compact PHEV although the battery range is a bit shorter.

Pxtl , 10 days ago

Do they have licenses for any of this stuff? I mean, Id/Bethesda still sells Doom 1, you can’t really call these “abandonware” by the normal definition. They’re just “really old”.

Pxtl , 11 days ago

Opens tab

Anime game with many characters with different gameplay? Sure I’ll take a look.

Zenless Zone Zero is an upcoming free-to-play urban fantas…

Closes tab.

Pxtl , 15 days ago

I have one of those Lenovos for reading comics, and they’re great. Nothing amazing but you can’t beat the bang for your buck.

Pxtl , 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago)

e-ink isn’t (edit: good) color.

Tablets are the ideal form factor for things that would traditionally require a large, full-color book. That is: passing around a photo album, reading magazines, textbooks, comics, playing turn-based games like board-games and strategy games. If you use a stylus they’re excellent for things that require free-form pen-and-paper like math homework and creating art.

Now, when they were a $600 luxury item that didn’t really make sense as a product. But now that they’re like $150 for a solidly good tablet they’re absolutely a worthwhile purchase for those use-cases.

Pxtl , 14 days ago

Ahh, yes, well I suppose if you’re mostly reading comics that were made in the '70s and you really want to capture that faded 32-colors-Ben-Day-dot-printed-on-newsprint feel, that’ll be just perfect.

Pxtl , 14 days ago

Fair point. Will correct my above post. But either way: unless you find screens particularly eye-straining or have extreme battery-life desires, I don’t really see e-ink tech as worth the downsides at this point, at least for non-text content. For a watch where I want an always-on screen and endless battery and I’ll never watch video on it? Yes, I want more e-ink and low-power LED tech and the like. But for tablets? I’m good with the vibrant colors of a glowing LED screen.

Pxtl , 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago)

Huh, that’s disappointing. It’s funny how everybody keeps experimenting but nobody seems to have topped the Pebble for watch form-factor: low-power gameboy-ish LED screen and more of an old-school micro-controller chip instead of a phone-like chip and just use the “shake to wake” functionality to brighten the backlight.

Pebble might not have been the smartest smartwatch, but it was definitely the watchyest smartwatch. Always-on screen and week-long battery.

Pxtl , 15 days ago

There’s a huge discrepency between the scary warnings about Q* calling it the lead-up to artificial superintelligence, and the actual discussion of the capabilities of Q* (it is good-enough at logic to solve some math problems).

My theory: the actual capabilities of Q* are perfectly nice and useful and unfrightening… but somebody pointed out the obvious: Q* can write code.

Either

1. “Q* is gonna take my job!”
2. “As we enhance Q*, it’s going to get better at writing code… and we’ll use Q* to write our AI code. This thing might not be our hypothetical digital God, but it might make it.”

Pxtl , 14 days ago

Facebook: messenger for kids, which is messenger but with good parental controls. Believe me as a parent I want more products to look at this.

Also Threads. Jury’s still out if it wins but it’s a good product.

Netflix buying the long tail of excellent old Android Indie Games to offer as a platform benefit is a fun idea, jury’s still out on that one too.

But imho the one that’s winning at product development isn’t faang, it’s Microsoft.

Pxtl , 15 days ago

Transbians calling themselves gay furry hackers is not outside of the realm of possibility, but yeah false flag is also possible.

Pxtl , 16 days ago

We all have hundreds of games that are $0, it’s called “all the games in your steam account you already own that you haven’t played yet”.

Pxtl , 17 days ago

If you cannot drive safely around pedestrians in normal street clothes, you should not be driving. You are the one bringing a lethal machine into the equation, they’re just out living.

Pxtl , 16 days ago

AFAIK the law here in Ontario is that pedestrians can cross mid-block on a non-controlled-access-highway (ie a regular road not expressway) as long as any oncoming vehicles have plentiful space to safely come to a complete stop. You only lose the right-of-way as a pedestrian if you’re doing something that forces drivers to make emergency manoeuvres.

Pxtl , 16 days ago

They should run proper goddamned metrics. I go to considerable effort to ensure good quality wifi.

Pxtl , 17 days ago

I only played it briefly at my nephew’s house back in the day but it actually seemed really janky. Was it actually good or was this just “omg GTA but with Simpsons I’m 11 and this is cool!”?

Pxtl , 17 days ago

Deep Rock is good at letting you ignore what you don’t care about. I’ve never needed a wiki for it. It’s just fun and silly co op action, with massive complexity mostly about trivial things.

Pxtl , 18 days ago

I had the same problem with my work-issued Thinkpad. No overheating, but frequently pulling the laptop out of the bag and finding battery dead. Solution I found was to bind the power-button to “hibernate”, and just using that any time I knew I was going to be putting it away into my bag.

One problem I ran into writing my first Windows Store application like 10 years ago was that Windows Store seemed to have no interest in mobile-style security where you request permissions one-at-a-time and only the ones you need - the intended workflow was that you either requested no secure privs and let your app be “untrusted”, or you made your app “trusted” and requested all the privs. This was actively recommended by MS.

Of course, this means “wake from sleep” would be something that every app would have permission to do accidentally, even if they didn’t want to.

Pxtl , 18 days ago

Well, I can see useful use-cases. I mean, laptops are often used disconnected right? So if a laptop sitting in a bag can wake up, sync all your emails and do all your patches while it’s in your house and internet-connected, that means it’s ready to go when you’re using it at the doctor’s office where he’s got no wifi and you don’t want to turn on pairing on your phone because every time you do that it somehow blows through all your data.

Obviously the trade-off failed miserably. I’d much rather have a full-battery laptop then a laptop that tried to sync everything 2 days ago then ran down the batteries. But it should’ve been able to work in theory.

Pxtl , 18 days ago

It didn’t have any peripherals, I mean, like, external USB ones.

Pxtl , 18 days ago

Oh, this is about the delay if you’re using a full adblocker? I’d assumed this was about the awful choppy rendering performance I get in FF Mobile when it’s just starting up a vid (which smooths out after about 5 seconds). I just use FF on Android to be able to run YT vids in the background or with my phone-screen locked.

Pxtl , 22 days ago

Google had the game in their hand and then they destroyed Hangouts.

Pxtl , 22 days ago

So how is she going to make them non-anonymous in a way that businesses can properly verify identity? Does every single social media site need to have its own ID analysis system for every state-ID? I mean that seems like it would be ridiculously hard.

For that to be practical, they’d need something nation-wide, and probably digital.

So, does she want to suggest to her fanbase a national digital ID? How would htat go?

Pxtl , 23 days ago

Kill third party everything. No more CDNs, no more tracking pixels, no more cookies, no more content from anything but the domain in the url bar.

Pxtl , 24 days ago

This is why the digital good I buy the most of is music. MP3s are just dumb files. There’s no subscription fees, no DRM. Nothing but digital watermarks. The “service” is the ability to redownload and stream the songs that I’ve purchased on other devices, but I also store the raw files on my fileserver.

Now, the challenge for the vendor is that I can also just as easily pirate these same files.

And yet somehow I still buy.

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and Large Corporate Landlords: There’s a perception that these entities buy up substantial amounts of property, making it difficult for individuals to purchase a home due to increased prices and limited supply.

People keep looking for the bogeyman here but this is one where that’s too facile. Rents in Canada have skyrocketed, and REITs rent out their properties. Sure, they rent them out as expensive as they can, they’re jerks. But they’re profiteering off of the shortage of rental properties. And if they’ve got a crapload of property, and they’re profiting from the shortage… well they’re not really the cause of the shortage when they’re offering a lot to rent, are they? They’re profiteering from it, but they’re not causing it. If there was truly endless money buying up everything and then renting it out, prices to buy would climb, but prices to rent would plummet, and that’s obviously not happening.

You want to look at the cause? Look at people who prevent new housing from getting built. Petty bureaucrats. Wealthy NIMBY neighbours.

And yes, as much as it goes against Canadian values: if you’ve got more immigrants than you’ve got new housing, you’re going to run out of homes, and the people who have homes can price them as high as they want because everybody needs a roof.

Pxtl , 25 days ago

Yes but the typical gameclip set up where you have the DS-style setup of the controller at the bottom and the screen at the top is surprisingly uncomfortable because of how top-heavy that is.

Too bad phone makers have given up on experimenting with form factor. Just an endless array of oddly-sized rectangles, but not quite consistent-enough to make gameclips feasible.

Also I’ve hit problems with gamepad+Bluetooth audio giving my game controller bad audio latency. Had to switch to wired audio.

Pxtl , 26 days ago

I’m not sure how feasible that is. Batteries are heavy, and take up space, and there’s only so much room under the hood for battery modules. If you cram it to the max, can the frame take that load all the time? It might work for a short-ranged car - maybe 100km range, to avoid going much heavier than the normal curb-weight.