Honestly all of this bullshit is why I went with a Steamdeck a few years ago. As a working adult with a family I have different economic obligations and priorities.

I need to build a new PC soon (mine is now 10 years old) but I can’t justify spending $5K on a gaming rig. If I built now with a flagship card, just the card itself would cost more than I spent on my entire rig when I built it in 2014/2015. Pair that with Microsoft’s ridiculous operating system enshittification, and the PC situation gets even more complicated for me.

Consoles have gotten to be a bad value proposition for me as well. Paper launches, scalping during the pandemic, DRM etc., services going offline. All that garbage leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I’m having a decent enough time with Steam sale games, Indy games, and retro emulation.

They need to make an open source version of the Hitster card game that lets you use this to listen to the whole song (if you choose) whether you have a Spotify account or not.

Here’s the thing… It was a bubble because you can’t wall off the entire concept of AI. This revelation was just an acceleration displaying what should’ve been obvious.

There are many many open models available for people to fuck around with. I have in a homelab setting, just to keep abreast of what is going on, get a general idea how it works and what its capable of.

What most normie followers of AI don’t seem to understand is, whether you’re doing LLM or machine learning object detection or something, you can get open software that is “good enough” and run it locally. If you have a raspberry pi you can run some of this stuff, and it will be slow, but acceptable for many use cases.

So the concept that only OpenAI would ever hold the keys and should therefore have massive valuation in perpetuity, that is just laughable. This Chinese company just highlighted that you can bruteforce train more optimized models on garbage-tier hardware.

All they have to do is sell a million copies for $700 each and they break even!

Luckily the YouTube app gets way worse with each update. Mine now tries to dark pattern you into signing in, and now features extra ads when you pause a video.

I’m switching to sideloaded SmartTube on a GoogleTV with Chromecast dongle.

Did Tipper Gore get resurrected somehow? I thought she got banished to the shadow realm.

This could be a blessing in disguise… My main purpose would be to avoid Apple-style “client side scanning” which, in the hands of vertically-integrated Google hardware and software, amounts to exposing yourself to constant and on-demand warrantless searches.

Since there is no transparency into the hardware backdoors, the internal workings of the close sourced Google ROM, or the business agreement to cooperate with LE / intelligence agencies, bare minimum is to run an alternative OS that complicates their efforts to undermine user privacy. Hobbled AI features on the chip itself might actually be another safeguard, depending on how it is implemented.

Don’t forget it also created a 5-10 year period of otherwise-tech-illiterate ditsy chicks with comm or marketing degrees rebranding themselves as “Social Media Marketing Expert”, because they knew what buttons to click in Facebook UI.

While you should do this to block your TVs telemetry and other undesirable behavior, realize that YouTube native TV app ads can’t be blocked at DNS level alone without also blocking the core functionality of YouTube, due to the way it serves the ads.

Yeah, this is dumb.

I own original hardware and buy 100% of my games but sometimes you just wanna run games that aren’t originally crossplatform on your Steamdeck for convenience, or on a PC with resolution upscaling, or for ease of streaming the gameplay, or tons of other legitimate reasons.

Nintendo has some great IP and gameplay, and I guarantee you their sales are not meaningfully hurt by people who pirate/emulate games. Those people were never their customers anyway. If anything the emulation community enabled streamers to boost the popularity of their games. (People like PointCrow did more for the sustained popularity of BOTW than all of Nintendo’s marketing efforts combined)

I bought the original on Steam sale about a year ago. Played 2-3 hours. Didn’t really feel hooked by the story or the gameplay. Graphics looked great to me on the SteamDeck.

MarioKart - Yoshi

Smash Bros - Samus

Mario Party - Monty Mole

It also makes one hell of a Duck/Marry/Kill

She posted about this. Basically the party aparatchiks came to her house and told her to stop her “subversive” activities (posting on YouTube, talking about devices useful to protestors, mentioning being a lesbian in public media) or she would not like the consequences. She said she would leave the country entirely, except her romantic partner cannot leave (I assume this is due to political travel restrictions or family reasons).

I think her content was awesome and it showed someone defying expectations of who can do product design, fabrication, electrical engineering, etc.

China should very much get roasted for silencing speech.

Turns out making everything into a subscription service doesn’t make it better, it just makes it worse.

Abigail is best girl

I enjoyed a lot of the game objectives… Automating the farm, going to the bottom of the mine and the desert thing, completing the community center, courting a spouse etc.

A lot of the grindy bits weren’t as fun, such as missing some season-specific cutscene or event and not having the exact right item, the feeling of needing to speed grow certain crops at the beginning of each season, etc.

Overall it was a chill and positive experience. The music is awesome, character interactions not too laborious. This game plays great on SteamDeck and with proper settings it sips battery. For a long flight, I would pair this title with stuff like Animal Well, Dead Cells, and Cave Blazers.

Trespasser was a vibe in some ways. The clean screen and unique control scheme was innovative at the time. Granted it doesn’t hold up very well now, but there were some cool concepts at least.

I have a 2021 mfg one NIB that I got as a giveaway. I can’t guarantee it will work but I will try and followup.

I have one of these sitting new in box unopened. If I have time later I will give this a try.

EDIT: To answer what you said, the reason you might want to do this is that this hardware doesn’t need to be chromecasted to by a phone or laptop or something. It can have native apps installed directly on it, and be controlled via your normal TV remote control.

Granted I haven’t tested this yet to see if it works with the alternative OS.

It would be truly awesome to have a degoogled streaming device that you could sideload apps on, use your regular TV remote with CEC etc. Even better if you could use alternative apps to get ad free YouTube streaming.

In contrast, for the unmodded device, the default GoogleTV setup and UI is horrible. You have to manually remove all the garbage apps you don’t want. It still shows you suggested banners of terrible content exclusive to certain apps that you don’t even have installed.

Right, they need close air support, infantry support, scouts, supply chain logistics etc. all working together to be peak effective. If you just give some dudes an Abrams and a crash course in driving it and firing the main gun, they will be better off than the same crew of randos in a technical made out of a Toyota Tacoma, but they will still be vulnerable to modern threats.

It’s easy to understand why the modern drone threat is uniquely game-changing if you think of war like chess. Most advanced powers have now figured out that having a developed drone program is like giving yourself infinite pawns. You keep trading pawns for the opponents more valuable pieces. If Russia is able to spend a few thousand in drone hardware and explosives and destroy a multimillion dollar tank, they’ll make that trade any day.