smoothbrain coldtakes

I like how part of Meer’s logic is that he’s basically inescapable in the franchise otherwise, since he voices so many NPCs as well as BroShep. He boils it down to listening to him some of the time or all of the time.

I just hope he can have a good night’s sleep, is all.

He looks like he did before he was famous; just totally fucking burned out.

It definitely is not an optimized game. It doesn’t run really well on my ROG Ally, so I can’t imagine trying to do it on a Switch.

The peak status any Canadian can achieve is to be commemorated by the Americans.

It’s a great concept but such an awful name. “Return of the ugly” is just such a bad and clunky title.

Housing Bubble 2: Impending Crash Boogaloo

Housing Bubble 2: Boomer Madness

Housing Bubble 2: Ah shit here we go again

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They can farm it out to an existing provider like Dropbox or something.

It doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t) be proprietary, just like Twitter integration wasn’t.

I tried Citadelum, which is a Roma-era city builder.

It’s a bit janky given that it’s an early demo, but it’s a neat premise given that the last Roman city builder I was aware of was Caesar 3 from '98.

I give it points for concept and setting, but I think Anno 117 is going to be my preferred Roman-era city builder when that drops, because I already know and love the Anno mechanics.

Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.

I wonder what kind of changes they will make to this iteration. I know VI was a big change from V, but eventually I learned to enjoy the different mechanics and have a ton of hours logged.

I agree.

Even using my examples of KOTOR and ME, comparing them to (relatively) modern counterparts, Jedi Survivor and Andromeda, you can see that the storytelling has taken a back seat to the open world. ME 1-3 were all very tight corridor cover shooters, going from fully constructed combat environment to another, while Andromeda tried to shoehorn in survival crafting and exploration. KOTOR has more deep RPG mechanics and overall a better story than Jedi Survivor, and I would agree it’s because the focus changed on providing sprawling open worlds over more bespoke environments. I would also say that the combat in Andromeda and Jedi Survivor are superior to their older counterparts, but at the loss of other things.

Most of them, honestly.

When you look back, it was cool what they were doing at the time, but progress is such that all newer games have iterated on those groundbreaking formulas and improved upon them, making the older games seem less spectacular than they were at launch. I have fond memories of playing PS2, N64 and Dreamcast, but when I go back to play some of those games I enjoyed as a kid, I find that there’s always something super sub-optimal like the controls or some arcane mechanic that doesn’t make much sense. I find this to be the consistent issue going back to PS2 era and earlier.

I think the PS3/360 era is the one I have the most nostalgia for all things considered. There were a lot of stellar RPGs like KOTOR and Mass Effect that generation. Stuff like Red Dead Redemption was coming out. Control schemes finally became generally standardized and understandable. Tutorials, saves and decent graphics were really finally all combined properly for the first time.

I find the same sort of issue with movies. When you go back passed the 80s, you start hitting pacing issues. Same with video games. When you go back passed the mid-2000s, you’re going to run into early installment weirdness.

The same amount of fools who created the largest civilian surveillance network with Ring doorbells.

TSMC equipment only has the materials to function for about two weeks before needing a shipment of replacement parts for the fabs when they wear out.

Again, there are easier ways to do this.

Biometric authentication can be required for some companies. You’d have to opt in to use the system or at least agree to the terms set forth by the employer. This kind of stuff doesn’t just get collected just because; it’s pretty sensitive data.

What you’re talking about is a cyberpunk nightmare; some corporate-assisted mass surveillance designed for like, union busting.

If you’re making vocal and facial profiles of employees you must have some reason to do so, and it can’t just be to burn cash. Like I said before, this stuff costs money, and it’s kind of pointless unless you’re using it in a way that makes money, selling the data somehow.

There are easier ways to spy on your employees. This is not cost-effective.

I use Zoom for work now and each call can be several gigabytes large, depending on resolution of shared materials and a few other factors. If you want to save that kind of stuff long term, you have to pay to keep it somewhere. If you multiply several gigabytes over a few dozen calls a day, you’re going to end up with terabytes of garbage you need to store. Zoom also informs you of when a recording is starting and active, offering for you to leave the call or otherwise implicitly agree to being recorded. You have to pay for all these things because there’s a significant amount of processing power involved. It’s not like it’s free to run facial recognition and speech recognition.

When I did contract work for Apple support, the spying was way more efficient than just listening to my calls. My supervisor could literally always see my monitor through the chat program we had installed. There’s all kinds of remote software for things like this. If an admin wants to see you misuse your equipment, they have easier ways of finding out than sifting through calls to find wrongthink.

There’s a transaction limit on tap payments. Sometimes you need to chip or swipe when it’s over $250 or something.

Don’t forget about the new Snapdragon X series. I heard they were pretty good, on par and better than M3s.

You can enable REBAR on older machines with a UEFI hack.

It’s been part of the PCI spec for ages but Nvidia and AMD only started using it recently.

You can check out the tool here.