Firefox

We live in an insane era where many companies would want to be selecting employees who had a proven ability to learn and succeed without the aid of AI tools… before then forcing them to use AI for everything once hired

The thing that really bugged me about Spore was how lame the “evolution” was.

If early developments in your creatures set certain things in motion that then played out differently that would be great and add replay value.

But nothing was meaningful at all, you could completely change stuff back and forth. Very little in your evolutionary history actually mattered, at all.

I’ll grab a Mutazione key if there’s 3 going 👍

Been trying to read more of The Witcher this weekend, I used to be so good at reading books and I’m useless these days…

I see a Ghostbusters quote, I upvote

Oh wow. So that’s what it’s doing. I could see it was ignoring most metadata that other software would use, but never thought of that.

Great to have an answer, but a shame it’s such an incredibly stupid one!

Edit: With the help of a python script made by Claude I’ve made things better.

But even now that things are ordered correctly many albums ”start” at track 10 and finish with tracks 1-9, so I have to scroll back to go to track 1. Madness.

I both love and hate mine. The fundamental sound quality, size, weight and aesthetic is great. And I love an interface that means album artwork doesn’t matter.

Being a universal USB C DAC is great.

But the software quality control is horrendous. Every update introduces a new bug, you can’t update without wiping all your settings, and some albums won’t show the tracks in the right order no matter what I try.

Yep.

I can’t imagine ever buying another console again.

Have a steam deck and set up my budget Linux machine yesterday.

Got so many PS2 and PS3 games I can’t play anymore on a single device. Never going to have that problem again.

I truly adored the vehicle physics in that game.

Getting into a car in GTA V was probably the most disappointing gaming moment in my life. I never liked GTA V all that much, solely due to that.

Sounds ideal!

To be honest I’ve been half-looking at audio players for 2-3 years but never pulls the trigger as all I had to go on was Amazon and Reddit reviews of how things sounded, which is so subjective as to be almost useless.

I saw the Echo Mini in the Guardian for an article about DAPs and trusted that a little more and finally bit the bullet.

Apparently someone from FIIO in the forums said the Echo Mini wasn’t capable of gapless, which feels unlikely when iPods from about 2006 could.

Your device definitely sounds like it addresses my biggest “wants” for mine.

I find every firmware update fixes something but also breaks something.

Great they’re working on it but super annoying also.

Some updates crash the mini refreshing my library, and since about 2.7 a lot of multi-CD albums don’t show the tracks in the right order anymore.

Still a fan, but definitely not the easy ride that iTunes + iPod was on that front.

Oh, and cool you can use it as a nifty HQ external DAC also.

I’m pretty happy with my FIIO Snowsky Mini.

It mimics a miniature Walkman and looks really great, and has a cassette playing interface that lets you totally ignore obtaining / managing album artwork. I really don’t care about seeing album art when I play music, but equally I hate seeing a ? or something when an interface expects you to have artwork. This solves that perfectly.

It’s only up to 256GB, and it only lets you scroll through all artists or all albums so navigation isn’t the quickest.

It sounds amazing. People go on about how good certain iPod classics sounded, but this is audibly better than any iPod ever was.

Doesn’t do gapless playback.

Can get them for £40-£50.

Back on Fallout 4.

Never tried non-console modding before, but Vivid Fallout & Another Green Mod got it looking real nice 👌

A C64 is one of the only retro machines I’ve never encountered before in-person. Presume they were less popular in the UK because of the Spectrum.

But I have a default appreciation of it because of my childhood Amiga adoration.

I actually installed Virtual64 on the Mac the other day and was trying to learn some ways to mess around in BASIC. Hoping to get to know the C64 (and Spectrum) better, mainly just for the fun of it.

My 15” 2012 is on Debian 13 also.

Linux learning experience of a lifetime trying to fully get the graphics working properly, but got there in the end!

“There are more connections in the human brain than there are atoms in the universe”

Yes, exactly this.

As a personal example, when I was very young, possibly about 5, I saw a “ghost” of my mum, at home one evening when she was out. My mum is very much as alive now as she was then.

I don’t clearly recall the event directly anymore, and we would generally agree a child is a less reliable witness than an adult (although believers would counter that the child’s brain is somehow more open to such things). Although I remember that I wasn’t making this up, and I could describe the clothing and jewellery I saw her wearing.

So does my experience prove ghosts exist? As always it depends on what you mean by that. Scientifically the experience doesn’t carry enough weight to prove anything. It does add credence to the view that people who are being truthful report seeing such things.

But also, most people who believe in “ghosts” think they’re the spirits of the dead - which my experience actually runs completely contrary to. So from one point of view you could say my experience of seeing a ghost disproves ghosts!

No. Or maybe. Depending on your definition of each particular supernatural thing.

Do I believe that every “UFO” spotted in the sky is a craft from an alien race? No. However, do I believe people genuinely see things that can’t be explained or identified in the sky, that could plausibly be extraterrestrial, inter-dimensional or top secret in ways we generally don’t currently understand? Yes, absolutely.

Do I believe that we all have souls that exist outside our physical form, that persist after death? Absolutely not. But do I believe people who aren’t lying genuinely see people or entities that we would generally refer to as “ghosts”? Yes. But beyond believing people really do “see” these things, I don’t know if they are always hallucinations or if people are witnessing some kind of other phenomena.

I’m a sceptic at heart. There’s nothing I won’t believe for ideological reasons, but evidence is key. Things that there is currently no evidence for could theoretically still exist, but will always require proof for me to actually believe in.