Man, AnandTech came from the earlier type of Internet, where independent media outlets were fully in control of their own presence on the web. (E.g. they were not a YouTube channel.) Even though they weren’t still independent for a while now (purchased by a publishing company in 2014), I’m sad to see one of the originals go.

I love when anti-progressive people “take a stand” against California by moving to Texas, and then they move to the most famously progressive city in Texas.

Austin: For those who are stupid enough to relocate based on culture war bullshit, but not stupid enough to think that you’re hiring software developers and creatives out in the boonies.

Thank you! Was just about to ask if there were any suggestions for someone who had never played the original.

This may not work out the way I want it to, but I’m actually a little excited about these tech companies making a bunch of anti-consumer decisions all at once. So many mainstream users will be looking for alternatives, and it’s going to provide a great opportunity for non-profit open source projects. It’s already happening with the fediverse suddenly becoming a viable place for discussion in the last 1.5 years. After Windows Recall was announced, I’ve seen more people talking about switching to Linux than ever before. Part of me can’t wait for unskippable Youtube ads.

I think the the previous post was sarcasm. :)

The original video already had a bunch of quotes (like that one) that have lived in my head for years. This remake just added, “Mum pisses in jars!” to the list. :D

Similar story for me, too. I’m not in the game industry, but Morrowind is the game that made me realize how great a game could be. It got me really into gaming, which made me want to be a game developer. I ended up not becoming a game developer, but that’s what got me on the path of learning to code, so it certainly affected my life.

I remember waking up early on Saturday mornings so that I could play Morrowind for a bit before my parents woke up. A friend and I would take turns playing as our different characters after school. Before that I had played Sonic the Hedgehog, Wolfenstein, and Duke Nukem – and those were fun – but Morrowind put you inside of a story, a really good story, that took place in a world that felt completely real.

While it’s too bad to see that The Elder Scrolls 6 likely won’t deliver that same kind of experience, I’m sure games like Baldur’s Gate 3 are filling that role for kids today. There are still people making inspirational virtual worlds, and players are still being changed by them.

Every time I hear about this problem, I get that one part from the song Love Shack stuck in my head.

🎵 Your what?!?!
TEEEEEEEEEEES-LAAA!
…rusted

Love shack,
Baby love shack 🎵

It does look cool! I’m worried about that too, though. I would only be buying it for the “snap it shut” action, and it’s more expensive than any other phone I’ve owned. The original Razr was premium for it’s time, but that was when “premium phone” meant $300.

My last phone before getting a smart phone as a Motorola Razr, and man that one was so satisfying.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen them ask for donations as visibly as Wikipedia does. Sometimes there’s a small banner at the top of their website with a donate button. Currently, if you go to https://mozilla.org and scroll all the way down, there’s a “Donate” link in their footer.

Seems like they’re always kind of subtle about asking for donations – I wonder if they think that if they pushed for donations harder, it would just make more people use Chrome. (On the other hand, there is no real alternative to Wikipedia, so they can do the big banner once a year.)

Always sucks to have more tech layoffs.

The article mentions they’re “decreasing their investment” in Firefox Relay, which is a service for creating burner email addresses that get forwarded to your real email address. It’s honestly the best spam-prevention method I’ve ever used. If Mozilla decides to axe that project, I hope the Thunderbird team can somehow pick it up. Seems like it could be an opportunity for some recurring income for them.

23andMe was always a product with a very small upside and absolutely massive downside. Best case scenario, it’s a neat little thing to learn about yourself. Worst case scenario, it’s a massive opportunity for discrimination and blackmail.

Completely unrelated: for some reason, on kbin, the thumbnail for this article is the thumbnail for this youtube video, and that is a cooler thing than 23andMe by far.

I read that as “surrendered to the authorities” and I thought WOW there must have been some Billy Mitchell developments that I was not aware of.

Microsoft’s initial departure from Microsoft-brand peripherals meant it would only focus on more expensive, higher-end designs worthy of Surface branding.

They’re saying this like we didn’t all just read an article about the official Xbox Toaster yesterday…

I’m sorry I have nothing helpful to add, other than congratulating you on the achievement of filling up a Gmail account. That is impressive.

Google should send out awards for that. Like, if you get a Youtube play button for having 1 million subscribers, they should give you some kind of “I’ll get to it later” button for having 1 million unread emails in your inbox.

Yeah, this is perfectly consistent with the idea that people don’t want to read AI generated news at all.

The title of the paper they are referencing is Or they could just not use it?: The paradox of AI disclosure for audience trust in news. So the source material definitely acknowledges that. And that is a great title, haha.

I never played the classic “Quest” games that Sierra made, but they published a bunch of really good ones from other developers, too.

I remember their logo coming up before each of the Half-Life, SWAT, Tribes, and F.E.A.R. games. I was always like, “dang, someone there knows how to pick 'em.”

Yeah, I actually haven’t seen the nag screen in a couple days, whereas I was seeing it often last week. Whatever updated circumvention uBlock has figured out, it’s working just about perfectly.

Then I guess it’s just down to cookies?

I assume so. But I don’t see why they would need your main session’s cookies to tell if you’re using an ad blocker. I’m guessing this is still something left over from when they were giving you one nag-free video per day, so private tabs will probably see the nag screen too eventually.

I just checked and I do have uBO enabled for private windows, so I’m not sure why it isn’t getting caught. I started doing it because I noticed that YouTube was giving one “free” view per day, and then your second view would get the nag screen. So I figured the private window might make you show up as a new person each time, so you always get the initial nag-free video.

But it seems like the nag screen shows up even on the first view now, so I’m not sure why this private tab trick is still working.

I’ve noticed that the nag screen never shows up in a private tab. In the last week I’ve gotten in the habit of right-clicking a video and choosing Open Link in New Private Window. It’s not very convenient, but it has been working.

It showed me the same thing, but after searching again a few times I’m now seeing a summary of the articles on their homepages.

Side note: I’ve had a weird bug a few times with DDG lately, where it showed me results for current events that were completely unrelated to what I was looking for. I searched for something like “10 inch chef’s knife” but the results were as though I had typed “US house of representatives speaker.” This has happened maybe three or four times in the last two weeks.

I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but that does sound like a very possible explanation.

Poo. I was hoping DDG would keep LLM-generated summaries out of their UI.

I have not heard of cherrytree before, I’ll check it out.

…I’m pretty sure every feature in obsidian can be done in emacs.

It definitely can. Unfortunately, I was the only emacs user on my team at work, so switching from org-mode to something that used plain markdown files was beneficial. There’s a network effect here – sharing notes is valuable.

Also, since Obsidian (and Logseq, which is what I use now) both use save plain markdown files, you can still edit your notes in emacs.

Honestly emacs is pretty decent for almost every text related task and many non text related tasks as well.

For sure, emacs is still my favorite operating system. :)

Obsidian is reaching market criticality so I’m expecting enshitification any time now.

You could be right, but I’m not 100% sure of that. From the article:

Keeping the team small and spurning outside investment is Obsidian’s way of avoiding incentives that might lead the company astray.

If they can stick to that, they can avoid going downhill. The main driver for enshittification is big shareholders that want the company to keep growing – shareholders don’t care about stable profitability, they need growth for their ownership stake to increase in value. If Obsidian is profitable now and they’re fine with just keeping it that way, they can make it work.

Obsidian is great; I was a happy user for a couple years. But I recently switched to Logseq and I think I’m already liking it more, and it’s because of something Logseq doesn’t do.

Obsidian lets you write a full markdown file, so step one is deciding how to write something down. Is it a nested list? Or a table? Or headings and subheadings with paragraphs?

In Logseq, everything is a nested list. This feels like a limitation, but I’ve been preferring it. The decision is made for you: you’re going to jot this information down as a list. So then you just start writing it.

People often tout that Logseq is open source, and while that is great, IMO there is also a design consideration that makes it better. Pretty much any kind of information you want to write down can be represented as a nested list. Doing it that way keeps everything simple, consistent, and more searchable. (Logseq’s built-in querying feature seems to be more powerful than Obsidian’s Dataview plugin, although I can’t say much about it since I haven’t really played with it yet.)

Both Obsidian and Logseq save (kinda) standard markdown files, so if you spend a lot of time in a plain text editor, you can still use that. You don’t lose anything by editing a file in a separate editor – they will both parse and re-index the file next time you view it in the respective app.

That’s what I’ve been doing as well, only using the Steam Controller for strategy games. That means I don’t use it much these days (which is too bad, since it’s a great controller), but I since it can’t be replaced now I figure I’ll only use it for the games it really needs.

@fightinggames

^ I started that one a while ago, with the idea being that the fighting game community loves its gameplay clips, so we shouldn’t fill up other instances with gameplay clips and cause storage problems for other servers.

I haven’t promoted it (or even posted much to it yet) because I only just barely got the file storage worked out last week, but it works now so I’ll starting trying to get it active. Plenty of space for gameplay clips and pictures of your arcade sticks, what with Mortal Kombat 1 coming out soon and Tekken 8 not long after that.

Absolutely; if I buy Starfield it’ll be like a year from now. But all the hype around it has reminded me that I haven’t played NMS for a while.

X4 is another space game that I’ve been wanting to get back to.

I’m hoping for a Steam controller 2. I’ve been using a PS4 and PS5 controller ever since they discontinued the original Steam controller. The gyro on the PlayStation controllers works great, but the touchpad isn’t useable (or even reachable) like the Steam controller’s trackpads were.

I’ve been thinking that would be their next product ever since they released an official dock. Seems like the two make sense together.

I don’t have an 8bitdo Ultimate controller, but I have several of their other ones. They all work for me over bluetooth when I pair it with my PC and then use Steam to recognize the controller. They show up as a Switch Pro controller, meaning Steam won’t be aware of the back buttons (I’m guessing you need to use 8bitdo’s software to do that). But you can remap the regular buttons and the gyroscope in Steam’s UI. If you use xinput mode, then you are limited to the controls on an Xbox controller, so no gyroscope.

That does mean you need to use Steam to launch all of your games, even if you bought them elsewhere, but Steam has a controller-friendly interface, so I prefer to do that anyway.

edit: Bah, I just saw @mp3’s comment. Too bad that their Ultimate controller doesn’t work like their other ones, that’s a big step backwards.

Oh man, I loved playing Dragon’s Age: Origins. I had a sort of “unexpected companion” when I played through it in college.

I was a computer geek; I had a gaming PC. My roommate was in a frat and had an Xbox 360. The only games he ever played were Call of Duty and Madden.

One day he came home with a copy of Dragon Age for the 360. He said, “This seems like a game you would know about. One of my fraternity brothers lent it to me. Have you played it?” I had just bought it a few days earlier but hadn’t played it yet. Of course I’m expecting Call-of-Duty-Madden-360 roommate to hate it.

Later that week I was going to party and he was staying home – a reversal of how things usually went. I got home very late, very drunk, expecting 360 roommate to be asleep. But no, there he is, playing Dragon Age. As soon as I walk in he says, “BRO I’M IN THE DWARVEN CITY HOW FAR DID YOU GET CHECK OUT THIS SKILL I UNLOCKED FOR ALISTAIR AND DUDE THERE IS A DOG.”

We played through the campaign on our respective machines over the next week, sharing tips and strategies along the way. It was great.

I had to torrent SWAT 4 a few years ago to get a copy of it, even though I had paid for it. I bought it on Direct2Drive back when that looked like a good option for buying games long term. When Direct2Drive was purchased by GameFly, you suddenly had to download games from the GameFly client, and not all of Direct2Drive’s catalog was available there. For the games that weren’t available on GameFly, it would just show you your CD key.

Today they aren’t owned by GameFly anymore, but SWAT 4 still isn’t downloadable, it only shows your key. I finally bought it again on GOG a couple months ago when it was like $1. I almost didn’t want to do it out of principle though, haha.

Hades. I bought it a few months ago and finally installed it yesterday. Only played about 30 minutes, but love it so far. I didn’t even know it was a roguelike – I thought it was more like Diablo from the screenshots. I just bought it because everyone said it was amazing, and I think I’m going to agree with them.

Capture ships, attack forts, trade goods.l… just a great game.

I love games in that genre, they’re so endlessly playable. The Mount & Blade series is kind of like a more recent take on that same idea. And X4 Foundations is like that but in space.

Thanks for the lists! Seems like whenever someone asks for some lesser-known indie games, people start mentioning ones like Stray and Hades, which are good, but not exactly deep cuts. :)

I looked through my most played and least reviewed indie games on Steam, and found these three. They’re super cheap for the summer sale right now, too.

Venineth - 178 reviews - currently $8 - released 2020

• Physics-based 3D puzzle platformer. You play as a ball, with a lot of momentum, that rolls around some amazing looking, mysterious landscapes. Chill ambient music plays in the background. I haven’t gotten very far yet; the reviews suggest that it gets harder as it goes on. The first couple hours are very relaxing.

Stealth Bastard Deluxe - 628 reviews - currently $1 - released 2012

• 2D puzzle platformer with the best soundtrack ever (and the soundtrack is 40 cents right now). You need to have very precise jump timing, so it has more difficult platforming than most puzzle platformers. Very replayable with leaderboards, community-made maps, and unlockable new skills that let you solve a level in different ways.

AaAaAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity - 625 reviews - currently $2 - released 2009

• I stayed up way too late playing this one many years ago, and I can’t even explain why it was fun. You just kind of fall downwards, aiming at things as you go down, and trying to find new routes to hit the things you want to hit and avoid the things you don’t want to hit. I can’t really compare it to anything else, except for maybe some platformers where there’s a “falling level.” Except this is all falling levels. It’s weirdly good. They’re working on a new one, although it’s very delayed at this point.