And then after the backlash, the project director came out thinking the only issue was that the AI didn’t look good enough. Yeah bro that was the issue glad you’re in charge here to figure it all out.

“If someone asked me what I think about using AI, the honest answer is that I would have to think about it for a long time,” the director wrote. “The reason I chose AI was that I believed it could reach a level of expression our existing resources could not, and that it would let us focus more on the game itself, outside of story and cinematics.”

He continued: “That was a hasty judgment on my part. Unless AI takes one more leap and reaches a point where no one can tell the difference, what I believed was still closer to an ideal than a reality. I expected some of you would be disappointed by our use of AI. I did not expect it to become this big.”

…

“The truth is, we spent a long time trying to tell this game’s story with cutscenes made entirely by our own hands,” the statement goes on. “The results were devastating every time. We came to believe we could not properly deliver this game’s complex, difficult narrative that way, and that is why we turned to AI. But if that choice hurt your experience, the fault is not in the tool. It is in our own shortcomings.”

I don’t get it how do artists get captured by the Shortcut Machine like this? Genuinely what worm is entering these people’s brains where suddenly they don’t know or care what art is and just want to ask grok to “make it look cool with dinosaurs and lightning and an erupting volcano.” Brother if you can’t do what you planned to, change the fucking plans. Those constraints are how we get cool and interesting new works and themed and art directions. People love the ps1-era graphics look and it’s not because Square Enix asked chatgpt to generate a Tomb Raider cutscene in the style of Monet or whatever.

Couldn’t get into no man’s sky when I tried it s few years ago. Ended up returning it before the 2 hour window. I might pirate it to see if I’ll like it this time around before buying, but I have such a ridiculous backlog of games and other media that I doubt I’ll get around to it any time soon. Thanks for the recommendation though!

Modded Minecraft with shaders. Frankly I haven’t found a more immersive game for me than that, but I also haven’t played much of my library. I wanna try Satisfactory at some point too since I imagine it might meld with my brain in a very similar way.

I love Symfonium so much it’s such a stellar app that’s actively developed and very customizable. It was so so so worth the $5 or $10 I paid for it.

Tldr the author of this article isn’t drawing a distinction between caffeine and coffee, even though she should be, and the data is less cut and dry than the headline suggests.

Most adults can safely consume up to 400 mg of caffeine each day—the amount found in up to five eight-ounce cups of coffee—and doing so may have cardiovascular benefits, according to a July 20 American Heart Association (AHA) statement published in Circulation.

Here’s the abstract for what’s being cited (emphasis mine):

Caffeine is one of the most commonly consumed drugs in the world. It is found in various naturally occurring substances and can be ingested in a synthetically derived pure form. The majority of human subject–based research is observational and has focused on beverages and foods that contain caffeine. The relationships between caffeine and cardiovascular risk factors and diseases are complex, exhibiting heterogeneity depending on the nature of the caffeine consumed and individual-level propensities. Acute versus chronic caffeine-associated cardiovascular effects are often different. Most studies suggest an inverse J-shaped relationship between consumption of naturally occurring caffeinated products and blood pressure. Data on relationships between caffeine and diabetes are not consistent, but habitual coffee consumption has been associated with a lower risk of incident type 2 diabetes. Whereas no clear relationship between caffeine and blood lipids is evident, unfiltered coffee raises low-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Caffeine, studied primarily in the context of coffee, has been shown either to have no relationship or to be associated with a lower risk of coronary artery disease and heart failure. Randomized controlled trial data among regular caffeinated coffee drinkers showed that caffeinated coffee decreases the risk of atrial fibrillation occurrence but increases the frequency of premature ventricular contractions. Data are fairly consistent that moderate caffeine consumption, again studied primarily in the setting of coffee consumption, was associated with a lower risk of stroke. Data on high doses of caffeine such as that found in energy drinks are limited and generally suggest cardiovascular harm.

I think it also has integrations for some other things too, so you can use it to launch all your games from various launchers instead of remembering which games are on which launchers and opening each one to search for the game you want to play. It centralized your games into one spot which can be nice.

A vpn is (basically) just a connection between two computers where they can interact with each other as if they were physically connected to the same local network (ergo, “Virtual Private Network”). That’s not possible to ban. They can go after commercial providers, but not the concept itself.

On a bog standard phone with dns blocking and nothing more, it was able to identify a lot of information. Some pieces of information I didn’t realize are sent to websites when I visit them. It’s a good demonstration of fingerprinting.

I think rathole is unmaintained. It hasn’t been updated in forever and basic features like proxy protocol are just sitting there waiting for a new release to make them available. I ended up replacing rathole with gost and I actually like it better. I can run an identical setup to rathole with straightforward command line parameters instead of a config file (though a config file can also be used).

The standard upgrade command has this behavior though, which is unexpected to people like me and the author. You need a specific flag to tell apt to actually upgrade everything which is not the behavior I expected.

I run one of these free cloud vms as a reverse proxy for my reverse proxy. It runs rathole, which my homelab rathole client connects to, and it patches traffic through ports 80/443 into my homelab to my caddy container. My home ip is never made public and I don’t have to forward any ports at home or worry about traversing NAT. It’s a neat setup, but rathole hasn’t been updated in some time and I’m looking to replace it with an actively developed alternative like gost or connet.

Brother you are the insufferable unhappy person. You replied with this to a lighthearted comment about how a rising tide lifts all ships.

Never heard of it but this thing looks fully featured and very polished. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of it before since I’ve gone looking for decent launchers!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.otp.octopilauncher

You’re really telling me the Eiffel Tower isn’t real? Why would you type those words?

That only applies to new contracts from what I heard, not to existing contracts. Google certainly has a long term contract that wouldn’t be affected by the increased royalties for new H.264 contracts.

I imagine costs have increased (more expensive server components due to ai shortages, more users to stream to, ever-increasing storage for the unthinkable amount of video that gets uploaded to YouTube nonstop). I imagine Google going all in on ai (infinite negative money glitch) costs a lot and they’re trying to cover the costs elsewhere so the investor report doesn’t look so bad and spook stockholders into selling. I’d keep an eye on other Google services to see if their prices also go up over the coming months.

Forgot to check the sub lmao. Still a great app, but it is closed source yeah. My bad!

I don’t know about the rescan requirement you have, but Symfonium handles my very large Jellyfin music library (and supports local libraries and many other libraries as well). Has good equalizer options including volume boost and very good native theming that supports dark mode and material you. Paid app but very well worth it if you listen to lots of music on Android. I’ve been using it for years and it’s regularly updated, I’m very happy with it.

What makes you think this? Server costs have gone up, Bitwarden has increased their pricing. It’s a big jump, but it’s also still very very affordable (less than $2/mo). How is this indicative of them changing behavior in the future to start trying to take down legally licensed open source projects like Vaultwarden?

Maybe a minority take here, but I think this is good. I liked the first season and would honestly be satisfied with it ending where and how it did. Getting another season out of it is awesome so we can flesh out the backstories and experiences of the characters that didn’t get as much development, but I think this show is better served by just a couple really good relatively self contained seasons. I would hate to see the show dragged out beyond that, personally. I got into Star Trek from Lower Decks and I like having different shows tackling different aspects of the Star Trek universe, rather than one or two long-running shows that never truly end. I think I just like an open and closed show that has an interesting story with an end in sight so the story that gets told is more fleshed out and feels more important. I’m excited for another season and want to see what they do with it!