Wildmimic

You can already use FSR4 on Steam Deck btw, no need to wait if you want to try it out!

https://steamdeckhq.com/news/we-can-now-use-fsr-4-on-the-steam-deck-for-better-visuals-with-a-power-tradeoff/

I already use it in combination with an portable monitor, scaling the output to 1080p - that’s my balcony setup ;-)

I’m a socialist, not a communist. And yes, i am chronically online and a gamer. I am also on disability, which gives me the luxury to do as i said and try to buy local and from smaller vendors whenever in my financial power (which is pretty meager - my income is only a little bit over the living wage in this country). I also have the luxury of not wanting a lot of stuff in general outside of a few things i focus on, and having an very inexpensive living style. My last vacation is now close to 10 years back, and that was a 3-day-trip i won. I do not have a car, and my largest expense outside of simply living is my therapist and my cats. I rarely if ever get food delivered outside of getting a coupon which reduces the costs to an acceptable level, cook all my meals for myself and am even getting back into baking my own bread (which will be a part of how i will heat my living space this winter).

If you really want to make the most ethical buying decisions, you have to invest a fuckton of time researching both vendors and manufacturers, and practically make a table where you list +/- for every single one of them. Even if the manufacturer works ethically, this still does not mean you can acquire their goods through an ethical vendor. Your worldview is VERY black and white.

People working 2,3 jobs or having children do have a substantially smaller time budget for these things than me, and they have to decide to either go the route that is pretty cheap and saves them a lot of time (and i mean a lot - getting something from amazon, if you know what you need, is done in under one minute. compare that to finding a smaller, ethical vendor with comparable prices and then having to do the dance of creating a new account, depositing your data and payment info, confirming your email-address so you can finally order) or cutting back on something that might be more important.

And in a time where rising cost of living is eating the poorer part of society alive, paying 80% markup to support a B&M business might not even be an option. I know it isn’t for me even for goddamn groceries these days. This development will eat B&M stores outside of the premium segment alive, and it is not the fault of the common people - It is the fault of the people who fuck with our world economy, the people who drive down wages and fire half their staff, and who hoard money and therefor remove it from circulation - the latter 2 also reduce tax volume in countries, making it harder for states to support their populace.

Facebook took about 2 months back then for me, but this was shortly after the GDPR was enacted.

Issue is probably not the database query, but that it is a bunch of databases, and that they are not willing to assign more than a skeleton crew to these things, because they only cost them money and they wouldn’t do it if it were possible to deny it at all.

We all are guilty in some way, because - let’s say it all together:

“There is no ethical consumption under capitalism”

We all have to make choices where we invest our energy and money. Many people do not have the time to search for the “least worst” option for getting what they need, because this takes ages nowadays - researching every crappy thing every vendor or manufacturer has done and weighting them is hard work with a very small personal benefit, while often leading to larger expenses for the same products.

Also, dependent on where you live and what you need, some things are not available in brick&mortar stores in your area or at such a high markup that you’d rather decline to buy there if it isn’t an emergency.

We also have the category of people who are physically dependent on delivery services.

I try to look for smaller and/or local vendors where possible for my needs, but there is a substantial amount of things that don’t leave me with many choices, and those are then mostly Amazon, Temu, Shein and Aliexpress. All of them are garbage, but with Amazon i can at least be sure that returns are a non-issue, and it also doesn’t take the goods months to arrive.

Mine just told me that they do not have any information about me outside of my shopping history and tried to get me to activate Alexa to change that - over my dead body lol

I had mostly luck in my labs, outside 2 occasions: a lab partner (an exchange student - luckily his english was passable, because he had no local language skills) who was utterly unable to work under sterile conditions and KEEPING them sterile, scratching his head while holding the tools in in that hand at the same time. it was infuriating to watch, and gently telling him did not result in behavioral change.

The other one was a professor for an organic chemistry lab course that had obvious problems with me being overweight, including fucked up comments in front of the class. I was already over 30 and had my share of rude costumers beforehand when i started, so outside of being pissed at him i ignored him as far as possible. Imagine being 19, still not really an adult and getting disrespected like that in front of the class by the person who should be the last to be guilty of such an behavior.

The seminars which required long term close cooperation, especially outside the lab or class itself, were where things truly fell apart for me. I wasn’t able with the constant, long term social noise in my life at all - the separation between private and work practically vanished with those.

Yeah, you are right, base management is an integral part to Necesse.

Core Keeper is so cute!it changes the Foreground/Background recipe of Terraria to a 3d- Floor/Walls receipe, which works great in the way they have implemented it.

And if you like Terraria, Core Keeper and Necesse might be right down the alley for you too!

Fair enough - wasn’t really reaching for hyperbole, it really was longer in my mind

Yep, getting actual experience in the summer months was practically a requirement, even if noone told you that outright. I was lucky enough for my ex knowing someone in a neighboring town working in an university research group on heliobacter pylori where i was able to gain some experience in a friendly environment, which would have sufficed if i had been actually able to finish my degree.

I was close to finishing my molecular biology degree. I always had a nice quaint job in some lab doing basic stuff in mind - an ok paycheck, no big ambitions.

In the last 2 years i realized how big the “socializing” part of this whole gig is. The first years i was getting by learning on my own (i’ve always been good at that). The amount of seminars and group work where working alone was not an option anymore was suffocating for me (i was able to deal with presenting stuff as long as i could work on it on my own, but cooperation over a longer timeframe with random people was insane stress for me), and in combination with my mental issues made me drop out in the phase of choosing a project (I even already had decided on a bioinformatics project) and seeking a mentor for finishing my degree.

The amount of social competency STEM needs is very underemphasized - i am pretty sure this extends into all of STEM.

This is the way to keep being attached to what you create. Noone can force you to use AI for your own stuff. And if corporate life does get unbearable, there’s still the path of trying to sell your own software. Not using LLMs for that is a big plus nowadays in the eyes of costumers too.

I think this is part of the reason for the massive explosion - close to cambrian proportions - in the indie games market in the last years. It gives people a creative outlet and if it goes well (sadly that is not often the case - yet. Steam has been experimenting heavily on matching the right player with the right game which has already made some impact in actual sale numbers from what i read, and the fruits of this experimentation are bound to come into play next year), it might pay the bills.

Edit: Here’s Steams announcement where the are replacing curated slots with ones personalized to the account: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/676258795703240952

They are awesome when used in combination with the gyro for precise aiming! Aim in general with the pad (maybe assign something like double tapping it for a 180° turn in appropiate games) and the gyro for small, accurate movements, and the accuracy is close to using a mouse after a short while. Steam Input in general is absolutely great - there’s not much you can NOT do.

I am somewhat biased because i absolutely love the input options on my steam deck and would love to replicate this to both my PC and the Steam Frame (where i am also on the waitlist). I was already a user of the old Steam Controller (and had 3 steam links in total, because they were the cheapest and most reliable streaming options from a pc back then outside of Nvidias overpriced solution, and my ex-wife made sure we had spares - 2 of them are still up and running) and loved the flexibility it offered - so many things Valve offers are essential to freeing gamers from their desks, making gaming in more relaxed situations a lot more viable.

I’m still on the waitlist for the Steam Controller with an estimate of 2027 -.- Second hand ones go for around 200€, double the price. I can deal with using my Speedlink Rait MX with hall effect sticks and gyro until then.

Edit: I also upgraded my PC right before prices were getting insane, upgraded to 64GB DDR4 and an 5950X, in addition to a direly needed AIO Water cooling system for that CPU (with even a fucking chunky 2 fan cooler the CPU was throttling down hard after ca. 45 seconds of full load), which is the max my mainboard supports. If i ever want to upgrade my system, a completely new one is needed - but if prices dont go down in the next decade, i will keep this sturdy beast running, whatever it costs. I still have enough spare parts to keep it running at a bit lower performance for the next years.

Looked it up yesterday, the cheapest 5090 is available for the low, low price of 6000€ in my area. I could even sell my 5070 that i bought 1 year back with close to 80% markup.

These people are NOT talking about parental control, they are talking about taking control over what children have access to regardless of what specific parents think. If your child were less impulsive, as most children are, you wouldn’t have to be that restrictive - some common sense rules and limits would probably suffice, and these things are important to both build trust and develop responsibility in most children.

But they want to do the same with children online as they did with public spaces starting decades ago - taking away the possibility of experiencing the world on their own terms in adequate environments for those children who are capable of it. They are already taking away their communication channels on a large scale in addition to deanonymizing their citizens on the internet, and now they are still pushing for more.

The parental controls on Steam are absolutely fine, and there’s even the possibility of setting the account into offline mode or needing approval for every single login on the parents phone if they want to. Roblox… is a completely different can of worms, and i would never allow my child a roblox account, because normalizing what is going on there is a very bad idea.

Don’t let yourself get fooled. They want to decide how much you can trust your children, regardless of how good a parent you are or how well behaved you child is.

That really depends on how you design the pop-up dialogue. If it looks like a standard EULA, yeah, most people will just skip reading. If you darken the screen, and use large, flashing warnings with a short and clear info about the limited amount of cases for such a dangerous permission to be ok, they will for sure look closer.

Late Edit: And make sure you don’t fatigue your clients with a permanent spam of warnings! Holy fuck, MS with their UAC really had to learn that one the hard way. If every single software installation and change of system settings warns you of proceeding then the warning becomes useless (and these warnings were actually one of the first things i deactivated on fresh installations exactly of that issue)

There are a few things at work here:

• big search engines deemphasizing going directly to a source and instead offering AI summaries as top result
• and the results below that are ads
• people having less time to actually engage with things they search for because of rising economic pressure
• large amounts of different media forms vying for the users attention
• in addition to that the absolute flood of ads penetrating every area of our life, making many people disregard even important information
• social media distorting reality or outright lying to your face

Ok, we had a similar article a while back. Here’s Horvaths Blog entry, and the situation is a lot less black and white than this reductionist article.

https://thedigitaldelusion.substack.com/p/i-told-the-senate-gen-z-is-less-cognately