UK here and they are turned on.

Thanks a lot, Brexit :(

I had so many good times on forums back in the day.

The personal nature of them was great for being social and making friends, but it was also good for the quality of the content for and user behaviour too.

When everyone recognises you and remembers your past behaviour, people put effort into creating a good reputation for themselves and making quality posts. It’s like living in a small village versus living in a city.

The thought of being banned back then genuinely filled people with dread, because even if you could evade it (which many people couldn’t as VPNs were barely a thing) you’d lose your whole post history and personal connection with people, and users did cherish those things.

The worrying truth is that we are all going to be subject to these sorts of false correlations and biases and there will be very little we can do about it.

You go to buy car insurance, and find that your premium has gone up 200% for no reason. Why? Because the AI said so. Maybe soneone with your name was in a crash. Maybe you parked overnight at the same GPS location where an accident happened. Who knows what data actually underlies that decision or how it was made, but it was. And even the insurance company themselves doesn’t know how it ended up that way.

Kinda wild that you could patent a super basic mechanic that pretty much anyone could come up with

He didn’t get jail time for falling for a scam, he got jail time for stealing people’s money.

That’s the strategy, yes

Even if the common advice is to avoid spoilers, I’m glad you found your own way to enjoy it :)

I’m sure I could play it again myself and still enjoy the atmosphere, even if the discoveries weren’t new. Or maybe it would be fun to watch a stream of someone else playing for the first time instead!

Yay!

This may be a nonsense suggestion but is the game trying to activate the headphone mic?

If so this could be switching it to a different mode and cutting your headset audio quality in half.

EDIT: two other people suggested the same thing at the same time, never mind :)

The blogpost was made four years ago, though.

Quite a fascinating read, nonetheless :)

For real. It’s an amazing game that just can’t be the same again once you know all its secrets.

I bought it for two of my friends, and they both ended up hating it lol. I don’t blame them, but I think it’s very much to do with the mentality of how you approach the experience.

One friend just got plain stuck and gave up. The other found it frustrating that they were doing the same thing several times over, and just wanted to rush as quickly as they could to make progress.

Personally, I enjoyed the slow pace of discovery. I loved that feeling of being a true explorer, discoving facets of lost civilisation. Watching in melancholic awe as a world crumbled around me. Finding just a small piece of new information was always a joy, and made it feel worthwhile to get there, even if I’d done 90% of the journey before.

Slowly getting richer in a game where the only currency is knowledge.

Time to start a boycott movement against Black Ops 6 :)

So, Calyx or Graphene to ensure this AI garbage can be disabled, I suppose.

Yes, it was a bad decision all around.

If they had committed to it being 18 rated, it would likely have been much better and more enjoyable as a movie.

I’m not saying they made the right decision, I’m only saying that I understand the chain of thought going through some executive’s head that lead to this decision being made and the end product we now have.

The entire problem is that movies are often made with the primary intention to make money, rather than being made to be the best possible movie they can be, and that can be a huge hindrance to the final product.

I agree, but it’s obvious why they did it.

The teen demographic represents a huge part of the movie theatre crowd, and cutting that section out with an 18 or 15 rating can be the absolute death of a movie financially.

If a movie is an 18, like a horror, they need to lean into the adult marketing really hard and make it feel like it’s worth going to for busy adults.

Movies that have action and comedy elements rarely do well with an 18 rating. They will miss the adult crowd because they seem childish and not worth going to, and they’ll miss the child crowd too, because they literally can’t go!

They messed up on this so bad by not committing at the outset to what they were trying to do, and not sticking to it all the way through.

The number one thing I noticed after installing Linux on my old macbook was that the battery life was immediately halved.

I totally expected that to happen, though, because my previous experience had always been that power management on Linux was kinda terrible.

Time to try this out and see!

“I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said.

There’s nothing ‘altruistic’ about reddit

The fact that it’s much hyped as a painting tool was actually the reason I didn’t start using Krita earlier. Felt like it was only for artists and I’m thinking “I’m not an artist, just need to do some image manipulation” but actually, it’s fine for that too :)

Try Krita too then, if you’re interested in moving to free and open source. The paradigm is very similar to Photoshop.

As a former Photoshop user, I found all the paradigms and ways of thinking in Gimp were just so utterly different from what I was used to. Simple things like cropping, resizing selections and layer management felt like exercises in frustration.

Tried Krita instead, and I’m immediately feeling at home and able to be productive straight away.

I’m sure Gimp is awesome but my brain didn’t like it. If anyone else is feeling the same way, give Krita a try.