We played this game called Icarus last weekend because of a free weekend. It was okay for me, but I also have a pretty high-end PC for the 1080p monitor connected to it. Even for me the game was quite janky, but for my friends with older hardware the game wasn’t a good time. One friend’s microphone randomly turned into a max-volume noise generator while playing on multiple occasions, something that has never happened before. Another (who plays on Linux) experienced constant crashes and weird behaviour.

After that disappointment we went back in time to The Showdown Effect for the first time in years, which was still as hilarious as ever. Apparently there’s an updated free to play version now (called reloaded or something?) so we’d have to check that out. Would recommend it if you’re looking to have some mayhem with friends .

Edit: oh yeah and I also bought Grid Legends because it has a big sale and I like racing games. The driving physics don’t annoy me like the ones in The Crew or Forza so I’m having a good time with it till now

Interesting how experiences can be so different. To me Jedi Survivor was an improvement over the first game, which I already enjoyed a lot. As far as I can remember you keep most (if not all) of your abilities. In the first game Cal has almost nothing after he essentially cut himself off from the force after the trauma of order 66. It’s and entirely reasonable explanation of Cal not having most normal Jedi abilities.

Survivor also has better combat, because of the new abilities and weapons, better graphics, and better traversal (looking at you, Zeffo). While I really like the story in Fallen Order as well, I also think that Survivor is better overall. It’s not as clear cut as good vs evil. There’s many different factions and people with different goals. In the end, it’s about everyone just trying to survive the tyranny of the Empire, whatever it takes.

The games definitely does feel very “gamey” though. There’s a lot of places where it’s clear that things are only the way they are because this is a video game. But to me that’s okay. A game doesn’t always need to be the most realistic and life-like experience. I don’t mind that a specific puzzle is totally unrealistic and clearly only there to force you to solve it. I can imagine that some people will not enjoy that though, and that’s okay.

At the moment Assetto Corsa and Wreckfest.

Assetto Corsa because it’s a simracing sandbox. I’ve modded it to hell with Content Manager and CSP. I also have a lot of paid mods for mainly formula cars like the RSS Formula 1/2/3/4 cars and the VRC Formula E cars. The AI is the perfect level of silly to cause absolute mayhem with the right settings, but also pretty interesting races when you want them to behave.

Wreckfest is a joy on the Steam deck and for casual mayhem. It still has a nice driving model imo, while remaining casual. The maps are optimized for crashing into others which means you’re never safe.

I was just about to post the same thing. I’ve been using Linux for almost 10 years. I never really understood the folder layout anyway into this detail. My reasoning always was that /lib was more system-wide and /usr/lib was for stuff installed for me only. That never made sense though, since there is only one /usr and not one for every user. But I never really thought further, I just let it be.

Yeah it was very easy actually. Though fair warning to people who are sensitive to flashing lights: after logging in with DigiD (Netherlands) my screen went full strobe mode. Looked like multiple pages loading in quick succession with different background colours before finally landing on the success screen.

I’m okay with any delays as long as it doesn’t release in a totally fucked state. I have huge respect for the Devs, dealing with the Ukraine invasion and also building a game

From the train dataset that was frozen many years ago. It’s like you know something instead of looking it up. It doesn’t provide sources, it just makes shit up based on what was in the (old) dataset. That’s totally different than looking up the information based on what you know and then using the new information to create an informed answer backed up by sources

No. ChatGPT pulls information out of its ass and how I read it SearchGPT actually links to sources (while also summarizing it and pulling information out of it’s ass, presumably). ChatGPT “knows” things and SearchGPT should actually look stuff up and present it to you.

Oh I never knew, but it seems true. On his Wikipedia page both researches are mentioned. It’s so impressive how these researchers are behind so many different but interesting papers.

Machine learning and compression have always been closely tied together. It’s trying to learn the “rules” that describe the data rather than memorizing all the data.

I remember implementing a paper older than me in our “Information Theory” course at university that treated the creation of a decision tree as compression. Their algorithm considered sending the decisions tree and all the exceptions to the decision tree and the tree itself. If a node in the tree increased the overall message size, it would simply be pruned. This way they ensured that you wouldn’t make conclusions while having very little data and would only add the big patterns in the data.

Fundamentally it is just compression, it’s just a way better method of compression than all the models that we had before.

EDIT: The paper I’m talking about is “Inferring decision trees using the minimum description length principle” - L. Ross Quinlan & Ronald L. Rivest

I’m on Arch (actually a converted Antergos) and I have an NVIDIA card as well. My first attempt a few months ago was horrible, bricking my system and requiring a bootable USB an a whole evening to get Linux working again.

My second attempt was recently, and went a lot better. X11 no longer seems to work, so I’m kinda stuck with it, but it feels snappy as long as my second monitor is disconnected. I’ve yet to try some gaming. My main monitor is a VRR 144Hz panel with garbage-tier HDR. The HDR worked out of the box on KDE Plasma, with the same shitty quality as on Windows, so I immediately turned it off again. When my second monitor is connected I get terrible hitching. Every second or so the screen just freezes for hundreds of milliseconds. Something about it (1280x1024, 75Hz, DVI) must not make Wayland happy. No settings seem to change anything, only physically disconnecting the monitor seems to work.

I bought a ThinkPad new in 2014 for my study for like 1200 euro’s. She’s still happily purring today. Around 2019 I made the mistake of emptying a cup of tea into the ThinkPad accidentally and then holding it upside down to get the water out. I think I should’ve just let it leak out of the bottom since the laptop has holes for that, but I panicked. This broke the keyboard, but not the rest of the laptop. I got an official new keyboard for like 100 euro’s which came with a tool and the simple instructions, and since then everything has been working flawlessly.

So I recommend ThinkPads, although I can’t really say anything about compatibility of new models

My first experience with the Sims was jumping behind a random computer at some kind of event that was running the Sims 1. Most of the family had just died because the previous person behind the PC had let the house burn down. Needless to say, I was a bit confused. I’ve played the Sims quite a bit after that, and I honestly like messing around with it.

I don’t think I’ve ever played a game without cheating a lot of money. I don’t like that the Sims that I made have to go off to work or school, so usually I just build a big fence around the property to keep them all there. From there on it used to devolve into chaos when I was younger. Building huge mazes to access basic necessities, launching fireworks indoors, etc. Nowadays im a bit more behaved though.

Imo the Sims 4 is the best nowadays. The older ones are showing their age. That being said, the Sims 4 is definitely in need of some competition. It’s inexcusably buggy sometimes, and I personally think there’s a lot more that can be done with a game like this. Hopefully the upcoming competitors can spark some fire into this genre.

I got randomly recommend “Kena: Bridge of Spirits” recently by Steam and decided to go for it. I just finished the story and it was definitely a good recommendation. Hard enough to make me work for it, which I always like. It is kinda short though, finished it in like 12 hours. It’s a bit janky at times with the camera and jumping, but overall a great experience.

I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you. Everyone, and I mean everyone, uses WhatsApp here. Friends, family, work, doctors, landlords, etc. Not using WhatsApp will make you miss get togethers with friends, make it way harder to communicate with colleagues, take away a lot of convenience when talking to your doctor or landlord or something.

I have Signal groups with friends, but you’re never going to be able to fully lose WhatsApp here unless you’re prepared to be “that person” everywhere and miss a lot of convenience.

Microsoft does a lot of bad things, but I got to give it to them here. Their push for accessibility in gaming is definitely a good thing. They’ve been pushing multiple modular controllers in order to allow people with disabilities to play games in a comfortable way. Having the support of a major player in the gaming market like Microsoft will definitely help with support for these products.

I recently tried to get Wayland working. Followed a simple guide to enable some NVIDIA boot parameter. Somehow it fucked my complete grub and I couldn’t boot until I messed around a fair bit with live usbs. Cost me a whole evening.

So I guess what Wayland is missing is normal support from the GPU manufacturers.

I’m not a hundred percent sure, but afaik it has to do with how random the output of the GPT model will be. At 0 it will always pick the most probable next continuation of a piece of text according to its own prediction. The higher the temperature, the more chance there is for less probable outputs to get picked. So it’s most likely to pick 42, but as the temperature increases you see the chance of (according to the model) less likely numbers increase.

This is how temperature works in the softmax function, which is often used in deep learning.

How is Spotify a scam? I can probably at most buy one CD per month for the same price as Spotify. Yet Spotify gives unlimited access to good quality versions of almost every song out there. Even with raised prices it’s still a way better deal for most consumers than buying music directly.

Personally I tend to also buy a few albums a year, because I like owning them and I like supporting the artists. But the convenience of having every track at your fingertips is hard to beat

I kinda suck at Tetris. We had a “LAN” last year where we played some battle royale Tetris game, and there was one girl who absolutely demolished everyone. After that I feel like a kid playing (and failing) with one of those block shape matching toys whenever I play Tetris. It’s a cool game though. Nice simple gameplay, but high skill ceiling. I respect people who absolutely destroy me at a game due to pure skill