Toribor

Toribor , 4 months ago

I figure half the purpose of these sorts of devices is to prove just how insecure certain systems are to bring about change. Governments rarely have a good grasp on this sort of thing though. It’s not like banning the device will make anyone more secure.

Toribor , 4 months ago

I bought Factorio a couple years ago and played for about 4 hours. I thought it was pretty fun but I didn’t really get hooked or anything so it sat in my Steam library for a while.

Early last summer I gave it another go and something finally clicked. I probably spent a whole month doing nothing but play Factorio when I wasn’t eating sleeping or working. My wife was concerned. It was by far my most played game last year and it’s now probably one of my favorite games ever.

If you’re into programming or dev ops it definitely aligns with that mindset once you get deep enough in the game you start seeing the patterns and trying to optimize your factory design. But that sort of game isn’t for everyone.

Toribor , 4 months ago

I’m kind of baffled how frequently Bard refuses to help at all. I can copy and paste the same exact prompt into ChatGPT and get a fairly good response. But fairly regularly Bard will start to give a reply and then just stop halfway through and be like “I can’t help you.”

Not sure what is going on there.

Toribor , 4 months ago

Exactly. Explaining to a computer what a photo of a dog looks like is super hard. Every rule you can come up with has exceptions or edge cases. But if you show it millions of dog pictures and millions of not-dog pictures it can do a pretty decent job of figuring it out when given a new image it hasn’t seen before.

Toribor , 4 months ago

The narrative is something that can really only be experienced once. It’s a game I really enjoyed but I haven’t had an urge to play it again.

Toribor , 4 months ago

I sort of feel like it’s correctly-rated. It’s a serviceable third person cover shooter with an interesting setting and some great visuals. The reveal of “you’re the real monster here” has a good amount of impact but it’s hard to totally land that message when the game offers no alternative.

The main problem was that all that was a bit of a pleasant surprise. The good parts of the game were sort of hidden behind the disguise of a generic military shooter. The box art couldn’t possibly be more boring. It sold very poorly and gained momentum later for being actually good.

It’s a bummer to see it leave Steam knowing that less access to it will mean less people get to check it out.

Toribor , 4 months ago

Chungus.

Toribor , 4 months ago

Not if you have to run an entire android emulator to access it.

Toribor , 4 months ago

It’s more work than using an alternate front end in the browser… of which there are plenty of excellent options… all which are optimized for use on desktop. But you do you I guess.

Toribor , 4 months ago

Piped.video and Yewtu.be are both web frontends that work in the browser and require no installation.

Freetube has installers for windows/mac/linux with no need for the overhead of android emulation.

I haven’t tried this out but I wonder if any of the popular Android youtube clients would work with Windows Subsystems for Android on Win11. It’d be way harder to setup than Bluestacks but would require less overhead.

Toribor , 4 months ago

He’s a completely insane horny man that loves action movies. His games tend to be high quality and even when they aren’t good they are at least entertaining and try something new.

He may have gone full George Lucas at this point though where he’s so overhyped that no one second guesses him at all. Death Stranding had some weird shit even for Kojima. I wonder what he could make if his personality wasn’t so dominant in a game and it had some input from other creative visions to reign in his weirder ideas.

Toribor , 4 months ago

Real life sucks so that’s a low bar for VR to surpass.

Toribor , 4 months ago

Who could have predicted such a thing? Only every economist on the planet.

Toribor , 4 months ago

You’ve just summed up the last 40 years of antitrust.

Toribor , 4 months ago

Jokes on them. I’ve been using the same no-cd crack for Brood Wars for like 25 years now.

Toribor , 4 months ago

This is the right answer. A better backup strategy is an actual backup strategy. Snapshots, drive mirroring, rsync copies, etc aren’t really backups.

Toribor , 4 months ago

I’ve started using Ansible to apply windows settings and manage packages because of this. It’s a bit of work to setup the playbooks but I just run it occasionally on my windows hosts to keep Microsoft from reverting defaults.

Toribor , 4 months ago

Hypnospace Outlaw is hilarious and perfectly captures the weirdness of the early Internet.

Also don’t forget to talk to your kids about the dangers of shonking.

Toribor , 4 months ago

I used to. Magnets on old hard drives were better. Any drive I’ve taken apart over the last ten years or so are smaller and more brittle. Not as worth taking apart.

Toribor , 4 months ago

Microsoft software may not be flawless, but at least it’s expensive.

Toribor , 4 months ago

If you’re this concerned you might as well be running Windows in a VM with gpu passthrough.

Toribor , 5 months ago

Execs have stressful jobs. Imagine how stressful it must be to lay off a bunch of people!

Toribor , 4 months ago

[glances at Bloodborne, cries]

Toribor , 5 months ago

A surprising amount of people still ask questions about µTorrent and assume it’s still popular. Apparently there was a lot of value in that brand name. But yeah it’s an utter disaster.

qBittorrent is my choice as well. Deluge is also great, along with Transmission.

Toribor , 5 months ago

I’d argue that there are a lot of offline mode frustrations with Steam but none of them are Steam’s fault, they are all due to individual games online requirements or DRM implementations.

Toribor , 5 months ago

I’ve been holding off on buying a new robot vacuum, hoping that the open source ecosystem around it continues to grow. I really want one that can run valetudo which can allow for network controls that are entirely local with no cloud requirement. The downside being that sometimes getting root on the device to install custom firmware requires intruding pretty deep into the hardware or isn’t possible at all.

Toribor , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Fast travel is useful when a player needs to get to a specific location to progress and the alternative is a route that doesn’t pose any challenges or offer any opportunities for something interesting or unexpected to happen.

Conversely, you can remove fast travel (and potentially improve your game) if you can meet some of that criteria to make travel interesting. Is it just taking time to get there, or is there some sort of encounter along the way? Red Dead Redemption does a good job of this where a stranger on the road might strike up a conversation or some bandits might ambush you. Sure you could fast travel, but there are tons of events like that so even going back through the same areas will usually yield some sort of unique experience.

Alternatively, traversal itself should be interesting. The Insomniac Spider-Man games allow you to fast travel to various subway points on the map but swinging around the city is such a joy that I rarely ever fast travel. Death Stranding is built entirely around traversal, and at least in the early parts of the game you need to plot a route, pick appropriate gear and balance your load carefully. If anything the game gets less interesting when traversal is trivialized by zip lines or vehicles you can just drive between deliveries.

Valheim is a good example of a game that limits fast travel in an intelligent way that enhances the game. You can build point-to-point teleporters that allow for instant travel but there are certain resources that can’t be teleported. This allows for a lot of freedom of movement across a very large map but also ensures that you must still periodically load up your ship with valuable ore and make the long and dangerous journey back home to process it.

Toribor , 5 months ago

This exactly. If you already have Pis they are still great. Back when they were $35 it was a pretty good value proposition with none of the power or space requirements of a full size x86 PC. But for $80-$100 it’s really only worth it if you actually need something small, or if you plan to actually use the gpio pins for a project.

If you’re just hosting software a several year old used desktop will outperform it significantly and cost about the same.

Toribor , 5 months ago

True. I did some rough math when I needed to right-size a UPS for my home server rack and estimated that running a Pi4 for a year would cost me about $8 worth of electricity and that running an x86 desktop would cost me about $40. Not insignificant for sure if you’re not going to use the extra performance that an x86 PC can offer.

Toribor , 5 months ago

I’m so behind on Pokemon that I genuinely can’t tell if this is a Pokemon or a Pal.

Toribor , 5 months ago

No kidding. I’m an Ops guy and I’ve hosted hundreds of web applications professionally and for fun over the years but Lemmy has been one of the more frustrating and brittle experiences I’ve had.

I’ve figured out a few of the quirks by now but I definitely spent a whole afternoon troubleshooting why the front end wouldn’t load at all only to discover the real issue was with Pict-rs.

Toribor , 5 months ago

I’m not really on Reddit much anymore but every time an article would get posted about how Redditors were the least valuable social media users for advertising purposes I was always like “Fuck yeah.”

Toribor , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

They either force it on everyone or bundle it in the enterprise package that businesses already pay for and then raise the price.

It never works, but maybe this time it will. I mean it won’t… But maybe.

Toribor , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Exactly. It’s like hey… If the corpos take a dump in your mouth you can either leave or you can stick around and complain about the taste. And yet the people who left are the whiners?

Toribor , 5 months ago

Snap is what finally got me to drop Ubuntu for Debian. Such a pain.

Toribor , 5 months ago

I’m a sysadmin as well and I consider spinning up a new instance and rebuilding a system from scratch to be an essential part of the backup and recovery process.

Upgrades are fine, but they can sometimes be risky and over a long enough period of time your system is likely accumulating many changes that are not documented and it can be difficult to know exactly which settings or customizations are important to running your applications. VM snapshots are great but they aren’t always portable and they don’t solve the problem of accumulating undocumented changes over time.

Instead if you can reinstall an OS, copy data, apply a config and get things working again then you know exactly what configuration is necessary and when something breaks you can more easily get back to a healthy state.

Generally these days I use a preseed file for my Linux installs to partition disks, install essential packages, add users and set ssh keys. Then I use Ansible playbooks to deploy a config and install/start applications. If I ever break something that takes longer than 20 minutes to fix I can just reinstall the whole OS and be back up and running, no problem.

Toribor , 5 months ago

Can you increase the game speed with these Nintendo Online games? I have been emulating them and find that takes the edge off the grind quite nicely. I agree they can be bit of a slog in some places because of it.

Toribor , 5 months ago

I’ve had exactly this same thought. Doing it client-side seems easy enough, it’s just like creating a multi-reddit and then when you want to post you have to choose which instance to post in.

The hard part is probably that these communities will have different moderators and different rules which complicates things substantially.

Toribor , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

In my opinion trying to set up a highly available fault tolerant homelab adds a large amount of unnecessary complexity without an equivalent benefit. It’s good to have redundancy for essential services like DNS, but otherwise I think it’s better to focus on a robust backup and restore process so that if anything goes wrong you can just restore from a backup or start containers on another node.

I configure and deploy all my applications with Ansible roles. It can programmatically create config files, pass secrets, build or start containers, cycle containers automatically after config changes, basically everything you could need.

Sure it would be neat if services could fail over automatically but things only ever tend to break when I’m making changes anyway.

Toribor , 5 months ago

Are you sure you’re not already a programmer?

Toribor , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Fallout: New Vegas.

Love the game, it’s potentially the best in the series. But I’ve hit the same game-ending glitch twice. Basically at a certain point an important faction decides to become completely hostile towards me despite me having positive faction rep and despite lots of tweaking with console commands to try to work around the problem.

I’d even restored a save from ten hours prior to triggering the bug and still had the problem once I progressed a quest line.

Super frustrating. I’ve experienced a lot of the early game multiple times but never gotten to the end of any of the major quest lines.

Toribor , 5 months ago

I don’t get the hate on custom keyboards. Sure you can go overboard, but like… I spend eight hours a day using a computer for work and then when I’m done I use another computer for fun. It’s not absurd to spend a few hundred bucks on a keyboard that you can expect to last 15+ years instead of the $20 ones that you throw away every year or two or as soon as one thing breaks.

There are definitely keeb elitists though, which is always shitty no matter what hobby you’re talking about.

Toribor , 5 months ago

I’m in the same boat. Lemmy has some decent ‘gaming’ communities, but very few active communities around specific games. So when I need to find advice or discussion I still end up having to search Reddit for that sort of thing.

Toribor , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

These are some of the generalish gaming communities I’m subscribed to across lemmy:

• !Games
• !Games
• !Gaming
• !Linux_Gaming
• !Linux_Gaming
• !Nintendo
• !PC_Gaming
• !PC_Master_Race
• !Patient_Gamers
• !Steam

Toribor , 5 months ago

I really like Kopia. I backup my containers with it, my workstations, and replicate to s3 nightly. It’s great.

Toribor , 6 months ago

My imaginary train is even faster.

Toribor , 5 months ago

I’ve had a lot of good luck with Syncthing. If you’re just syncing files locally you can disable nat traversal.

Toribor , 4 months ago

No, the pi zero is not going to be capable of running a Lemmy instance. I wouldn’t recommend running it on a Pi at all unless you plan to store files on an SSD. I currently run my very tiny instance with just two users on a vpc with two CPU cores and 4gb of RAM but I still occasionally have performance issues.