Yeah, definitely hoping they consider bringing that to windows at some point, because it could be incredible. Obviously ultra-complicated, but it works unbelievably well on Series X. Being able to say, skip the loading of an emulator and hop directly back into the middle of a level in Demon Souls, jumping past all the logos and whatnot, would be amazing.

Man, I’ve been console for ages, but this January I bought a gaming PC and hooked it up as my dedicated console, and it’s been amazing. If you like a bit of tinkering, PC can dominate as a console.

• Playnite makes an amazing front end, stitching together everything my PC can do. Emulators, Steam, itch.io stuff, GoG and Epic and Xbox Game Pass, all seamlessly stitched together and 100% controller accessible.
• Emulators are fantastic, my PC plays Switch, PS3, Wii, everything.
• Real settings are a godsend, as is more powerful hardware. Actually play Elden Ring at a proper framerate. Play old games in true 4K/120.
• Tinker like crazy. Mods, ReShade, actual in-game settings, GPU Driver settings, if it bugs you, you can do something about it. Currently messing with emulating Demon Souls with ReShade, some mods, and connecting to RPCN for online multiplayer, and it’s a delight.
• More powerful hardware too. Great to be able to push games past console, in whatever way you prefer. I’m already planning a GPU upgrade to be able to do more.
• Heck, even sharing features. My GPU can save 5 minutes or more of instant replay clips, which I used to save all of my Elden Ring boss fights, just hitting a controller shortcut when I killed the boss. My PC shares those via FTP, so I can just grab those on my phone and upload them to YouTube. Faster than Xbox uploads, and actually my files, with no arbitrary storage cutoff like I hit on Xbox.

Basically the only thing I miss is Xbox’s Quick Resume, or suspending a game on Switch. But a good PC fires up games fast, so it’s really not a huge loss in the face of all the benefits.

They’ve done a surprisingly good job of maintaining this scene, actually.

Rebels: Kanan is dead by now, and Ezra would be lost in deep space at this point. Yoda also wouldn’t know about either.

Mara Jade: 100% still a Sith Assassin right now. Also not Disney canon or anyone Yoda would hear about.

Ahsoka: This is the best candidate, since Yoda would know about her, and likely regret the decisions that forced her to leave the Jedi Council, making it weird to dispute her status as “Jedi”. The most favourable assumption is that he assumes she’s dead.

All said, remarkable protection of an Episode 5 made before episodes 1, 2, 3, multiple TV shows, novels, and sequels.

Honestly… I kinda can. This is an extreme and unlikely scenario, but there’s a few things that make me think it’s not impossible.

A) Trump has publicly promised to back out of NATO.

B) Trump is generally very pro-Russia.

C) Trump has generally had poor relations with Canada.

If the US backed out of NATO, they’d have a lot of military power sitting idle, and NATO would be significantly weaker, as well as doubly occupied in Ukraine. Russia would certainly be interested in such a thing happening, given the strategic importance of Antarctica, and how much it would take eyes away from them. I also don’t doubt for a second that Trump would love to exploit our natural resources, especially oil, and the military importance of the top of the world. Not to mention it’d be an excuse to continue creating expensive military contracts and posturing as tough.

This is of course, mostly fantasy, but Trump is nothing if not unpredictable.

My issue is more with the math of it. Since it requires holding your frames until you’ve got one in reserve (can’t generate an in-between until you know what’s next), it fundamentally makes the game less responsive.

That said, if you understand that, and like the visual smoothness of motion with more frames, then it’s super cool tech. Not every game has to be treated like it’s competitive Counter Strike, and I think it’s really cool if you like it, but it frustrates me how poorly marketed and understood the actual technology and its compromises are.

Eh, FSR3 upscaling and FSR3 frame generation are different things. I’m personally a fan of upscaling, it’s great for a sharper picture on my large 4k TV without spending a fortune on a massive GPU (I use a living room gaming PC), but not at all a fan of frame generation, as it introduces more input lag for the illusion of more frames. Not a tradeoff I’m ever willing to make, especially when VRR already does an incredible job of creating the illusion (and a degree of reality) of good performance when my framerate drops.

Sounds like a CEO who doesn’t have a damn clue how code works. His description sounds like he thinks every line of code takes the same amount of time to execute, as if x = 1; takes as long as calling an encryption/decryption function.

“Adding” code to bypass your encryption is obviously going to make things run way faster.

Very much still Max’s to lose. Like… 57 points? If he DNF’d twice, absolutely, Lando could take it, but even if Lando and Oscar consistently 1-2’d, with fastest lap, the most McLaren could do, if Max places 3rd every weekend it’s unwinnable without sprints (11pts a weekend, x5 weekends, 55 of 57 needed points advantage).

In reality, even a decent Max Verstappen can lock out this championship with ease. So long as Red Bull don’t catastrophically tank his car for a few of these weekends.

Exactly, play by the original rules, and play aggressive as all hell. You don’t need almost any property, it’s just fine to mortgage everything but your main set, the goal is to get one very developed set ASAP.

Not only is this a pretty effective way to win (a conservative player who lands once on a very developed property is basically out of the game), it also makes the game progress much faster, especially if other players are willing to concede before the bitter end. 2 or 3 players like this, and you’ve actually got a recipe for a decent time.

Eh, not much nefarious you can do by pushing data around. Taking a lot of CPU/GPU usage? Certainly, you can do a lot of evil with distributed computing. But bandwidth?

Costs a lot to host all that data to push to people, and to handle streaming it to so many as well, all for them to just… throw it out? Users certainly don’t keep enough storage to even store a constant 100Mb/s of sneaky evil data, let alone do any compute with it, because the game’s CPU/GPU usage isn’t particularly out of the ordinary.

So not much you could do here. Ockham’s razor here just says… planes are fast, MSFS is a high fidelity game, they’ve gotta load a lot of high accuracy data very quickly and probably can’t spare the CPU for terribly complicated decompression.

Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.

What I don’t get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It’s a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.

Like… it’s neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that’s taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?

Again, it’s cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?

So like… from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it’s very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.

30% / 0% / 70%

Dang, this full out fooled me. Concerning, I guess we’re here now. Lots to catch once you’re aware of it, but totally passed by me while scrolling, even as someone who’s well aware of AI Image Generation, even in an image that’s intentionally ridiculous.

Honestly, makes sense, the active voice version is just… more efficient and easier to parse quickly.

Yeah, this is the problem with frankensteining two systems together. Giving an LLM a prompt, and giving it a module that can interpret images for it, leads to this.

The image parser goes “a crossword, with the following hints”, when what the AI needs to do the job is an actual understanding of the grid. If one singular system understood both images and text, it could hypothetically understand the task well enough to fetch the information it needed from the image. But LLMs aren’t really an approach to any true “intelligence”, so they’ll forever be unable to do that as one piece.

Eh, you’re applying generalizations universally. These last couple weeks, I literally bought Zelda Echoes of Wisdom day one, even bought NSO vouchers so I can buy the next big game that comes out. Day one, I dumped the game from my own modded switch, and started playing it on Ryujinx rather than on my Switch.

I modded the game to change the resolution to always 1080p native, remove the double buffered vsync issue to smooth out the framerate and let VRR work, boosted LODs for better distant assets, and swapped the UI for Xbox controls. Ryujinx also let me play at 2x internal resolution, so I could run the game at native 4k.

My game looks sharper, runs smoother, and is a lot of fun to tinker with. I’ve had a blast checking gamebanana every day for new mods, or for Ryujinx patches. I love it, and I’m preferring that experience to Switch. I’m also getting fun stuff like discord rich presence, and being able to record with my GPU driver, stream my gameplay to discord, play with a controller I prefer to a Pro Controller, everything.

I’m also looking forward to tinkering with mods for unlimited echoes once I beat the game. I’m more than happy to pay for the game, but this is much more fun for me, and trades blows with the real hardware experience well enough that I’d much rather play here than on Switch.

Yeah… even worse, it appears the admin didn’t even announce it, this is just one of the developers clarifying what the admin probably did.

As someone who uses Ryujinx, I literally spent the afternoon curious about an error I was getting while updating about the build server being down “probably because it’s building a new version, check back in a few minutes”, only to find a Twitter screenshot of this linked in slack that evening.

Eh, this is a thing, large companies often have internal rules and maximums about how much they can pay any given job title. For example, on our team, everyone we hire is given the role “senior full stack developer”, not because they’re particularly senior, in some cases we’re literally hiring out of college, but because it allows us to pay them better with internal company politics.

Ah, he recommends saving 1000$, then tackling your debt, then building to 3-6 months expenses. Which is… fine, I agree with the principle of it, but that number is definitely one of those things I’d consider being more flexible with. The amount I think you should save before tackling your debts depends on a lot of factors.

I also don’t necessarily agree with saving that amount in two blocks, we personally saved 1000$, paid the most pressing card off, and then saved another 1000$. I think it makes sense to adjust that minimum emergency fund number as your situation evolves.

Just another case where I find he works fine as a starting point, but where most people shouldn’t follow his advice to the letter.

Mmm, excellent addendum to my proposed changes. 1000$ is better than nothing, but it hasn’t really kept up with inflation, and circumstances really change things. For example, if you have a house, the potential opportunity and cost of an “emergency” goes up immensely.

But yeah, for us personally we pretty quickly went up to a 2000$ emergency fund, despite the relative stability of renting and driving a fairly new car. We’ll be working on our 3-6 month expense emergency fund soon. I definitely think it’s better to view the baby steps as flexible guidance on a starting point, rather than the concrete law they frame it as.