I’m with you. In fact I’ll say even retro operating systems were better (no bloat, no spyware, easy to understand/configure/mod/hack around), as well as retro Internet (no Javascript crap, no browser fingerprinting/tracking, simpler HTML, super easy webdev) and retro computing (no soldered-on components, PCs were more modular and easy to repair)… heck, planet earth in general was better back then. We’ve been on a downwards spiral since the 2000s. Everything sucks now.

You could make yours a Geocaching app with fog-of-war. They’ve got an API for third-party apps too, so it should be easy enough to develop, and actually fun to play.

If you’re feeling ambitious, add some RTS elements like from Age of Empires - eg if you add someone as your ally, you can share their line of sight. Finding certain types of caches, or POIs, increases your resources (gold/stone/food/wood - maybe visiting Pizza Hut gives you extra food lol). And with these resources, you could build virtual structures like castles etc. Other players could spend resources to take it down (but they need to be physically at that location), and you could spend resources to defend your building.

Kinda like Ingress basically, but with medieval/RTS elements and geocaching thrown into the mix. How’s that for a challenge? :)

I game on my bed too, and use a flat right-angled USB adapter. Basically, something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Duttek-Degree-Adapter-Extender-Support/dp/B0C244K2HC/

I use a similar but magnetic version with my phone and other USB-C devices, and it’s been a game-changer.

That’s incredible. Your son has far, far, more patience than I ever did. I still haven’t managed to clock most of the games I grew up with, such as Dangerous Dave, Prince of Persia 1 & 2, Wolf3D, Doom 1 & 2, Crystal Caves, Aladdin, Lion King, Jazz Jackrabbit, Mario (NES), Pokemon Red (GBA), Crash Bandicoot (PS1)…

Every now and then I try to clock one of those old games, but then I get stuck and/or lose interest, and move on to something else. Even among recent games, I spent over 400 hours playing BotW and only managed to do two of the divine beasts. I also have over 200 hours in TotK and still haven’t gotten to the first major spirit quest. Similarly, got several hundreds of hours in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, but never actually completed any of those games.

I think the only game that I recall beating would be the Bio Menace trilogy - which I finally managed to complete as an adult, and that too thanks to DOSBox’s save states. Oh, and Diablo II too, it someone had the perfect mix of action + story + game length, to keep me interested till the end.

Honestly I’ve no idea how people manage to stick to one thing for so long and see it thru till the end, without losing interest or getting distracted by something else.

That’s going to change in the future with NPUs (neural processing units). They’re already being bundled with both regular CPUs (such as the Ryzen 8000 series) and mobile SoCs (such as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3). The NPU included with the the SD8Gen3 for instance can run models like Llama 2 - something an average desktop would normally struggle with. Now this is only the 7B model mind you, so it’s a far cry from more powerful models like the 70B, but this will only improve in the future. Over the next few years, NPUs - and applications that take advantage of them - will be a completely normal thing, and it won’t require a household’s worth of energy. I mean, we’re already seeing various applications of it, eg in smartphone cameras, photo editing apps, digital assistants etc. The next would be I guess autocorrect and word prediction, and I for one can’t wait to ditch our current, crappy markov keyboards.

• Summarising articles / extracting information / transforming it according to my needs. Everyone knows LLM-bssed summaries are great, but not many folks utilise them to their full extent. For instance, yesterday, Sony published a blog piece on how a bunch of games were discounted on the PlayStation store. This was like a really long list that I couldn’t be bothered reading, so I asked ChatGPT to display just the genres that I’m interested in, and sort them according to popularity. Another example is parsing changelogs for software releases, sometimes some of them are really long (and not sorted properly - maybe just a dump of commit messages), so I’d ask it to summarise the changes, maybe only show me new feature additions, or any breaking changes etc.

• Translations. I find ChatGPT excellent at translating Asian languages - expecially all the esoteric terms used in badly-translated Chinese webcomics. I feed in the pinyin word and provide context, and ChatGPT tells me what it means in that context, and also provides alternate translations. This is a 100 times better than just using Google Translate or whatever dumb dictionary-based translator, because context is everything in Asian languages.

Bear necessities you say? All that a modern bear needs is a pic-a-nic basket and a trusty sidekick.

Given the current pace of development, how long would you reckon it might take them to get rid of the bugs, at least, the annoying game-breaking ones? I don’t mind incomplete content, but game breaking bugs is something I don’t have the patience to deal with. Like, I made the mistake of pre-ordering Cyberpunk - dropped it on day one cause of the bugs and didn’t touch it until three years later, when it was finally in a playable state (for me). Just wondering if Star Citizen would reach that sort of bug-free stage within the next couple of years.

It’s not in the opposite order, it’s just flipped around in the photo lol.

Looks like this might work: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005094002506.html

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If it’s just for personal use, why not just use Tasker? Judging by what you’ve written, it could be easily done without needing any Android coding experience.

That was a fun read, cheers for sharing!

I just wish more places offered beans as an alternative protein option. I ordered a burger yesterday from this new restaurant, and their only veggie option was a “plant-based patty”. And as it turns out, it was a fake meat patty, which tasted gross. I don’t understand why they don’t just offer a bean patty instead - it’d be cheaper, healthier and tastier.

But Bethesda could very well release a Skyrim Extra Special Edition in the interim, and fans will lap it up, no doubt. Jokes aside, there are many large fan-projects in the works which fans are looking forward to, such such as OpenMW, Skyblivion and Skywind, not to mention more “normal” mods for Skyrim itself, so I doubt the interest in the franchise is going away any time soon.

I’m one of the foolish ones that actually pre-ordered the game. Was super hyped for it too, did a countdown till midnight so that I can start playing at launch, and I even live streamed it (and also had a few other streams going on two laptops). Took the day off to play the game as well.

The clock hit 00:00 and less than 30 minutes into the game, I ran into my first bug. I stuck was in a dialog loop and couldn’t get out no matter what I tried, so was for forced to load an earlier save. Then I got stuck somewhere else, or something funky would happen. I’d never been so utterly disappointed in a game until Cyberpunk came along. So anyways, I was so put off by it that I’d decided not to play it any further, until they patched it all up. So the first patch came along, but this time I decided to read the reviews first - still plenty of bugs. Thought I’d wait for the next one, noope, still buggy. And the next one. And the next. And then I decided to ignore the game completely, until not only they fixed the bugs, but also added QoL stuff into the game. Like better AI, better peds, better driving etc. Make the city more immersive. I mean, I had waited for so long, so might as well wait and play until it’s at it’s best version.

So, not only will I not play now, nor when 2.0 comes out, I’ll play it only when Phantom Liberty is out, and will enjoy the game, for the first-ish time, the way it was meant to be played.

Assuming of course that Phantom Liberty isn’t a dud, but having learnt from my previous experience, I might wait a bit after it comes out and see if they release a post-launch patch or something first.

Never again pre-ordering a game… unless it’s a Zelda.

Yep, like me. I normally like my food spicy, and can usually tell whether a dish needs pepper or not.

Also, at the nicer restaurants, the waiter offering it to you is part of the tradition and experience. It can be seen as the restaurant being attentive to the diner. It’s not just pepper, they may offer to grate cheese as well, and I guess customers have come to expect such service as those restaurants.

It’s not like you’ll be installing it in there permanently. If you’ve got a Framework laptop or PC case for instance, you could also use it in there. Basically it’s a BYOM (bring your own mobo) situation, so when you’re not gaming on the go, instead of wasting that piece of idle hardware, it could be put to good use. Or vice versa. Maybe you already have a Framework laptop and want to convert it into a handheld gaming device.

The exciting part here is the shell, not the insides. Indeed the Intel boards aren’t that great for gaming, but once Framework start shipping the AMD boards next month, this thing would become a real contender to the Steam Deck, ROG Ally etc. Load up something like ChimeraOS on it and you’d get a near-Steam Deck like experience.

To be fair, that’s the case with Linux and laptops in general right? Unless you’ve got a mainstream/popular model (or a brand known to work well with, or officially supports Linux), issues like sound, battery life and even suspend, wifi etc are fairly common. Which is why one of the most common Linux questions (besides “which distro”) is “which laptop”.

Depends on the hardware. If it’s an x86 then that’s most certainly a yes, if it’s an ARM then YMMV.