Good point, I missed adding that crucial detail.

Smart Homes arent terrible, but it is easy to end up with a terrible smart home if you don’t take care in designing it.

Consider who is using it. Are they tech saavy enough to use an app? Is every user only within your household? If not, make sure everything can be controlled without an app, smart buttons are a great solution. What automation actually benefits your lifestyle? Keep it simple where possible, start with just lights and maybe some sensors.

I think it is best to have an overall plan to make sure your devices work together, but start small. Choose devices that run on stable platforms and locally. Make sure everything can connect to Home Assistant, even of you don’t plan on using it, having the option may benefit you in the future.

I have a hard time calling this enshittification, it dilutes term if it is just used to mean anything getting worse. Rather it should be used to describe the purposeful corporate destruction of a service’s value to boost profit after attracting users.

This post assumes way too much and gives the businesses more credit than they deserve. All the AI companies are looking for is maximizing compute per unit of rack space. They are only operating under the goal of winning the AI race to become wildly profitable and powerful. There is no consideration for any bankruptcy proceedings if/when the AI boom comes crashing down as that isn’t their problem at that point.

The GPUs used for these LLMs are simply not in a form factor that could be used for consumer devices, they fit in racks that use far more power than a home computer would be able to provide.Making them that way would be utterly idiotic.

Companies do it because customers continue buying the products, if sales dropped significantly due to the subscription then they would be forced to change.

Personally I will not buy anything that relies on the cloud or a subscription to keep running. My only subscriptions are Tidal and a couple more independent streaming services.

Agreed, no matter what comes out Trackmania is the game that has me coming back day after day.

Xbox controllers can be a bit unreliable on Linux in my experience. I’ve got an 8BitDo Ultimate 2C wireless that I quite like. They are way cheaper than an Xbox controller, have hall effect joysticks, and low measured latency.

I went to 4K monitors many years ago and agree there is a big difference, that said there are a lot of issues with HiDPI monitors on desktop OSs, plus it requires a strong GPU for gaming. Since then I’ve gone to 1440p and think it is an ideal middle ground for performance while looking almost just as sharp.

I was holding onto Prime for the unlimited automatic photos backup (I had 300+ GB backed up) but I finally cancelled a few months ago. I’ve ordered a couple of times since then when I couldn’t find what I needed elsewhere and instead of 2 days shipping is has consistently been 3 days delivery.

Maybe if I used my selfie camera more often than never.

VGCG

I mostly came into the series at Tribes:Ascend during the beta, but had played a bit of Tribes:Vengeance with friends in the past. This video is a great summary of the mishandling of an amazing series that nothing else comes close to. There are few things more satisfying in gaming as flying at high speed across a map and hitting that blue plate special.

I was excited to see Tribes 3 until I saw it was old Hi-Rez employees running the show. I played a few of the early playtests and decided to hold off on purchasing anything until the game got into a more polished state. I don’t know if others doing the same was a contributing factor to development stopping, but by the time I started thinking about checking it out again, they had announced the cancellation of development.

The one I’ve noticed is that for videos with the 1080p “Enhanced Bitrate” option, the free 1080p video looks like a blurry mess compared to normal 1080p content.

Yes it is a subscription to access the servers. But you also get a ton of access to other content forever (all the past campaigns and TOTD tracks released) so the value is still pretty damn good. Considering I’ve got 2000 hours in the game since release and it has in total cost me about the same as a normal game I’m not going to complain about it being a subscription.

Trackmania 2020. Great example of a game that is simple in concept but super deep in skills that you can both play super casually at your own pace or super competitively. Plus there is a great community and endless content to play.

I like Floorp better for a Firefox variant, feels more developed and stable than zen.

No matter how I set it up it gives me suggestions to specific pages I don’t want instead of the base domain.

Some months ago they completely fucked up their address bar suggestions to the point where I have tried again to move to another browser. I’d prefer them to fix that before updating their UI.

Hi-Rez and shutting down games, name me a more iconic pairing.

Shit like this is why we need strong regulations for anything that is a medical device that is depended on by people. I don’t give a shit if it isn’t profitable anymore, these companies need to support their customers that may be significantly impacted if their devices don’t work.

Yeah they added “action keys” that can trigger different percentage presses (20-40-60-80-100%) as a “fix” because the bobsleigh blocks they added in the new game were not keyboard friendly and they wanted to even the playing field. They eventually changed the physics to get rid of that specific need (but not completely) but they are still useful in some situations.

Download the newest game! It has a free access tier which gets you access to the first 10 tracks of the quarterly campaign and to the ranked mode. It is a bit limited but enough to see if you might get back into it. There is a decent community on reddit for the game.