“Might makes right” authoritarianism has no use for it. Why bother with getting people to like you when you have all the guns? Besides, these troglodytes are a pretty unlikable bunch in the first place - it’s simply not how they navigate the world.
That man is a menace.
I had a dusty laptop running a homelab for you, and figured I should show something nice on the screen. Then, I typed in my password like an idiot. Not gonna put that online. :(
It’s super neat. Map quality is all over the place, but most are real gems. I’ve only had one soft-lock in about 20 maps, and only a handful of those had impossible to beat final fights (I’m sorry, but failing to take down 15 shamblers at once, in a room with four central columns for cover is not a “skill issue”).
In fact I never heard much about Quake having singleplayer.
It had good singleplayer for the time. IMO, it hasn’t aged particularly well. ID was learning how to do a fully 3D game on the fly here, and it shows in spots. The best moments are built on experience with building Doom maps, but that’s practically a different sport.
Hell I’ve gotten back into Doom in the past few year
There’s also the Quake Brutalist Jam 3 that came out last month. It’s playable with a modern Quake I engine, and man, some of those maps are incredible.
All for the low-low price of $0.
This could literally cause the collapse of the entire western AAA gaming industry.
Wouldn’t be the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
TL;DR: A much smaller gaming industry was enshitified at an alarming pace, barely after it got started. There were too many competing options, many of which were sub-par experiences, and there was no way to tell until after purchase.
Perhaps that’s not directly comparable, but to my eye, the biggest similarity is not enough value for the liquidity (disposable capital) people are willing to put forward on a product. At some point, people will just spend less or spend on something else entirely.
Meanwhile, you have older gamers like myself that are more than happy to take a trip down memory lane, since a few decades can make those old games fun again. I’m in this 14%. That said, I tend to buy new indie titles, mostly due to the lower pricepoint, lower expectations, reliably better art, lower system specs, smaller time commitment, and so on. Games like Assasin’s Creed Odyssey showed me that big studios aren’t necessarily pushing more and interesting narrative into monster-sized titles, opting for cut/paste easter-egg hunts and aftermarket content purchases instead. Less really can be more.
Really, these are great for most things and a dirt-cheap hygiene option too. Use them for potato chips, cheetos, cheeze-its… everything where you’re tempted to lick salt/powder/sugar off of your fingers. Did we really learn nothing from the pandemic?
Yup. When cheap PC clones came around, everyone had that one Com, LPT, or VGA port with the missing screw terminal. Fortunately you need zero of those for the port to actually work.
What’s kind of amusing is that all those old ports with the screw-in fasteners were moving around anywhere from 3v to 12v at about 45mA on the high-side. Meanwhile, USB-C can move 240W and has nothing to prevent disconnecting while sending enough power to run a power tool.
And to monetize the display of video. Licensing of that port’s supporting technology is holding everyone back.
Yup. That’s basically what happened with TikTok.
For me, the big problem with adapting to modern electric (resistive coil, not induction) was the fact that the coil takes time to get to temp and stays hot after you remove power. That hysteresis is a problem for everything but boiling water, and is completely unlike gas or induction. It takes practice to get used to it - I always wound up keeping a burner clear so I could move my fry/saute/whatever off the heat when needed.
The heat cycling you mention is another one. It can cause spikes in temperature, especially when you’re doing something small like sweating half an onion or something like that.
Back in the bad old days, electric ranges were 100% analog with no PWM. Power in was determined by a variable resistor, so the coil was always humming along at 60hz, just at a different wattage. This was a better arrangement, IMO.
There’s gotta be a way to fingerprint the output though. Like some kind of shibboleth that gives the model away based on how it responds?
True, but IMO it makes a lot more sense to support markdown under Wordpad than Notepad since the controls and doc-style layout/rendering support is already there.
it only exists so they could easily shove copilot into it.
No idea. I want to say ‘yes’, but the last time I installed Power Toys was under Win2k.
I made a small edit to reflect this! You are correct: that’s a huge part of what’s driving innovation and fresh ideas in this space. Plus, it’s usually for a bargain.
I think that gaming is headed fast into some kind of deep economic divide.
On the one hand, we have high-end gaming that chases seasonal updates, massive multiplayer experiences, requiring high-end system specs to even start. It’s all practically a subscription model one way or another: keep buying new games, DLC, hardware, just to keep playing with your friends. Alternately, sign up for a subscription to play all this stuff in the cloud, dodging the need to maintain your own hardware, but never really owning anything in exchange.
Then there’s the other way.
Right now, we’re sitting on top of nearly 50 years of video games going back to the primordial sludge of Pong. Modern system specs are far more than what’s required in almost all cases so it’s practically all there for the taking for cheap. I promise you, there are grand single and multiplayer experiences to be had by dipping into that monstrous catalog. At the same time, some of the very best of those are getting new life with modern updates, fan-edits, fan-made content packs, and so on. Finally, there’s the hobby and indie scenes, where new things are being made all the time in various game-jams, early access on Steam, and so much more. You have to dig for all of that of course; the people pushing you to pay a high price for entertainment will never make this easy.
Tabs were a welcome addition, but that’s where the good idea train swiftly leaves the rails.
What we needed was a built-in hex editor, and maybe some better tools for working with unicode that you can’t just type in on whatever keyboard you have.
Instead, they turned it into WordPad, which we already have.
That’s the sad thing about most cubicle furniture. We stopped innovating somewhere in the last 30 years, and the cubes in this picture could easily be 40 years old if not for the lack of wear-and-tear. Same goes for carpet and lighting. The only thing that dates it newer than all that is the office chair - we started making those just before the turn of the 21st.
Meta. But perhaps an additional and entirely petty reason: It’s a terrible pun.