Opens up? It's pretty much pure grind, level after level, unless you got very lucky with your class and skills, or got the "rich" trait at character creation.

Better go play a less bad game, like Diablo 4.

I run a "server" (old 9-year gamer laptop) with an 8 GB Geforce 1070 Max-Q. It's currently running full GPU-offloaded stock llama.cpp, with Unsloth's Qwen3.5 9B at UD Q4_K_XL (good enough quantization for coding assistance and short agentic tasks) and a 90k context at around 300 t/s prefill and 25 t/s decode, which are good enough speeds for daily use.

It can't vibecode GTA6, but it can help with quick scripting, research and things like that.

You know that small teams of developers already make lightweight games? A lot of them, in fact. The indie scene has never been better, in terms of production (the problem right now is discoverability, so the good ones rise over the bad ones, specially over the AI slop).

Many people compare the current times to the videogame crash of the '80s, but while the scenario for the AAA companies is similar, the AA and indie scene is a lot more healthier and would probably survive a AAA crash without major issues.

Considering that politics is about the exchange of ideas between people so a society can be governed (by whatever system applies) and laws can be enacted to make that government functional, I would consider political basically the political process itself, laws, philosophy, maybe history (which informs the other ones and usually has some inherent biases), maybe literature (the same) and a few other disciplines. Mostly things that are by nature subjective and can't be measured in an objective way (like math, or engineering in general can).

That doesn't mean that the latter can't be "contamined" by politics, especially the disciplines which are a mixed bag of objectivity and subjectivity, like architecture or the economical sciences. But that's why the key word here is "inherently": those disciplines are not inherently political, they've been co-opted by interest groups precisely because of that subjectivity.

Don't agree. Computing is no more inherently political than a knife is inherently a murder weapon. It's a tool, and can be used for many things, including political use (or misuse, nowadays).

There's some truth to the fact that anti-intellectualism plays some part in the backlash to both vaccines and AI.

But there's a difference: vaccines were pushed by medical science and governments around the world as a solution to a real problem (disease), with pretty much no side effects at societal scale.

Generative AI is being pushed by greedy companies (and governments that don't want to lose this artificial "arms race") as a solution to nobody's problem, and with a lot of side effects (global warming, raising power bills, raising the cost of electronic devices, filling the internet with crap, making the internet less secure, lowering open source incentives, making it easier for bad actors to influence democracy, etc. I could go on).

I don't dislike GenAI, and I think it can be a good technology when well implemented: narrow AI, or general AI with open training datasets and open weights that anyone (or at least a small company) can run locally. Instead we're getting super general AI controlled by an oligopoly of companies that see you as the product, partnering with governments that want to surveil and control you.

Maybe don't assume everyone on the fediverse is USA-ian.

Most of these cinematic effects are not so bad when used in moderation. But when the chromatic aberration looks like a russian camera from the '70s, or the lens flares makes you think the game was directed by Jar Jar Abrams, that's bad design. And sadly, that's like 90% of the games that try to look realistic.

And I haven't seen anyone mention the worst of all: vignette. That's one that never, never works.

Upvoted for unpopular.

I have a heavily customized firefox (through the weird css that firefox uses), and this update broke everything. Thank god for:

(about:config)

• browser.nova.enabled = false
• sidebar.revamp = false

I hope they don't remove the settings for a long time.

I don't think I could just limit my candidates to three. One of my personal criteria is that the game was awesome when released (one of those games I kept obsessing about, outside gaming time), but is also good now when replayed (discounting the typical gameplay QoL improvements since then). Several really good games do that for me (in no particular order):

• Silent Hill 2
• Morrowind
• Terranigma
• Bloodborne
• Chrono Trigger
• Half-Life
• Baldur's Gate 2
• Pokémon Crystal
• Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
• Tactics Ogre
• Ultima 6
• Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines

... and many others.

Most of them are old, mainly because I don't know if my modern favorites will pass the test of time in 10 years (games like Crimson Desert, Control, Lies of P or Wuchang).

Even though I love Elden Ring, Bloodborne is a better, and I would say more interesting game.

God of War can suck my ass though. The original was awesome for its time, though not really a candidate for "best game". The new one is just boooring.

I disagree. The Nixon government was awful, but so were many governments before. It wasn't a decline per se, it was just part of the constant change (both good and bad) in leadership.

The real decline began when corporatism started to take over the political/legal system, which was mainly a Reagan phenomenon. Large businesses started pulling everything towards their shareholders, nothing for the workers. Syndicates lost power. The political system started being bought by the corporations. Whole laws started being bought by the corporations.

While corruption has always existed, previously it was something to hide, to be ashamed of. But with the corporate takeover of the USA it gradually began to be normalized, and now it's almost expected from any relevant figure.