[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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.

[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

As a retro enthusiast, I've been following this project for a while and it's been great seeing all the improvements over the years. I recommend checking out this video on its current state: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nWjAxNHXd_8

Equally, or possibly more interesting, is their Ladybird browser, which is cross-platform. Its been making great progress as well, and I sincerely hope that it can compete with the big two some day - would be nice to have a major browser/engine that's not based on Webkit or Gecko.

I wish 90s interfaces would make a comeback, I really miss the aesthetics of that era. Luckily there are some excellent themes out there that scratch that itch, like Chicago95 for XFCE - and here's bonus a screenshot of it running on my Galaxy Fold 4:

:)

[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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? :)

[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

You should check out Pinta then, I find it easier to use than Paint.net, yet reasonably feature-packed (obviously nowhere near GIMP/Photoshop).

[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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.

[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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.

[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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.

[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 18 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)
  • 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.

[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

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

[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] d3Xt3r@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

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

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submitted 1 year ago by d3Xt3r@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org

What if the modular computing evangelists at Framework decided to make a handheld? YouTuber Pitstoptech has largely answered this question by building a "fully upgradeable gaming handheld" around one of Framework's upgradable motherboards.

Pitstoptech intends to prepare and sell handheld DIY kits "soon," based on the prototype design you see in the pictures / video.

48
submitted 1 year ago by d3Xt3r@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

Starting next year, Google will provide Chromebook security patches and software upgrades for up to a decade. This will effectively guarantee that no existing Chromebook will expire within the next two years.

However, a Google spokesperson added the caveat that, "In making changes to the expiration policy, we have to coordinate with each partner making any component in these devices. It requires a security and performance guarantee from the makers." Other Google sources indicated that the major Chromebook vendors are expected to work with the company to extend their hardware's lifespan.

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Ventoy 1.0.95 Released (www.ventoy.net)
submitted 1 year ago by d3Xt3r@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

Ventoy is an opensource tool to create a universal bootable USB drive for ISOs and other image files. With Ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over to create a bootable USB for different images, you just need to copy the image files to the USB drive and boot them directly via a dynamic menu.

New in v1.0.95:

  • Drag to resize Ventoy2Disk.exe dialog width.
  • Fix a bug when booting veket_24.
  • Fix a bug when booting the latest UOS server ISO.
  • New distro support: vanilladpup
  • New distro support: FydeOS 17
  • languages.json update
75
submitted 1 year ago by d3Xt3r@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org

Retro gaming is a massively popular Raspberry Pi application, and while loading your favourite old video games onto an SD card is pretty straightforward, building the physical shell of a gaming system can be daunting for those of us without 3D printers or design skills of any kind. PiBoy Mini bridges that gap by providing partially-assembled devices to their customers. The rest is BYORP: bring your own Raspberry Pi.

21

Linux 6.5 has many great features from the AMD P-State EPP driver default rather than ACPI CPUFreq for Zen 2 and newer supported AMD Ryzen systems, initial USB4 v2 enablement, initial MIDI 2.0 kernel driver work, more Intel hybrid CPU tuning, and a whole lot more.

228
submitted 1 year ago by d3Xt3r@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

I asked Google Bard whether it thought Web Environment Integrity was a good or bad idea. Surprisingly, not only did it respond that it was a bad idea, it even went on to urge Google to drop the proposal.

118
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by d3Xt3r@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org

Quake II is back - and it's cross-platform and cross-play too!

3

If you're looking for what might well be the most polished and user-friendly Linux distribution on the market, Zorin OS has a new release for you that covers all the bases.

26
submitted 1 year ago by d3Xt3r@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org
1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by d3Xt3r@beehaw.org to c/operating_systems@beehaw.org

Nitrux uses OpenRC instead of systemd, unlike most mainstream distros. It also features the Liquorix kernel, described as "an enthusiast Linux kernel designed for uncompromised responsiveness in interactive systems, enabling low latency in A/V production, and reduced frame time deviations in games."

New in this release is kboot, a utility to switch kernels on-the-fly without needing a reboot, and VMetal, which allows users to run Windows in parallel to Nitrux to provide users of access to Windows software.

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submitted 1 year ago by d3Xt3r@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org
2
submitted 1 year ago by d3Xt3r@beehaw.org to c/gaming@beehaw.org
  • The field-of-view is weird. Seems less isometric and more top-down and too zoomed in.

  • As a Sorc, the design and animations of the spells suck. Chain lightning looks weak af and not fun/OP, like how it was in D2. Hydras in particular look atrocious, even the D3 Hydras looked better.

  • I constantly run out of mana, preventing me from spamming my main spells and enjoying playing as a Sorc. D2 had mana issues as well in the early game, but at least you could stock up on mana potions and have them available as a hotkey. Even without a mana potion mechanic, D3 was still pretty fun to play as a Sorc and you could still spam spells, but I'm just not getting that feeling of fun yet in D4. I cast a Hydra and a couple of chain lightnings and I'm out of mana, and have to go back to the lame main spell, which is very unsatisfactory.

  • The font seems cheap and not Diablo-y. Seems like they literally just used Times New Roman for everything, and I don't get why, just makes the game look like a cheap and generic ARPG that we've seen these past few years. The fonts used in D2R shows that the classic Diablo font still looks awesome, same with Project Diablo 2 with their new S7 graphics and HD fonts.

  • The music so far has been very unremarkable and again, not dark and Diablo-y. I miss the Diablo 1/2 music, the haunting guitar strums, the middle eastern desert themed music, the dark Indian chanting. Music play a big part in creating atmosphere, and that is missing from D4.

  • Same with other audio effects and monster sounds. Why are the Fallen no longer praising Rakanishu or Colenzo?

  • The new attribute and game mechanics isn't really clear. For starters, I'd like to be able to adjust my attributes like in D2, like say what if I wanted to try out a max-block build? Or one that emphasis on greater mana availability at the cost of vitality? The effects of items also aren't really made obvious. Like, what the heck is "Item power" on an amulet supposed to mean? Also, if I equip a staff that gives an INT boost, shouldn't the damage I deal go up? But I don't see the damage number changing when I swap weapons with different INT, does that mean INT no longer affects the damage? If INT still affects damage, what if I equip a weapon with a low damage value but high INT, would it be better than a weapon with no INT boost but high damage?

  • I miss the old transparent overlay automap. With the new one, I find myself constantly checking the big map and switching out, because the minimap is too zoomed in and kinda useless (why can't I zoom it out?)

Overall it's been pretty unsatisfying and not worth the hype for me. I'll begrudgingly complete the campaign though since I bought the game, and go back to playing PD2.

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d3Xt3r

joined 1 year ago