Honestly the actual hardware is very competent for the price, and a lot of the technologies Valve is showing off (foveated streaming, Windows PC games on ARM Linux VR, etc.) are awesome!

It’s more how people are comparing the price to the heavily subsidised Meta doodad that is less open, has similar or worse specs (especially when it comes to streaming it seems), and is owned by Meta (selling your eyeballs to advertisers is not something I would like to do personally)

More people who kiss the toes of dictators. Those who ignore the atrocities of Stalin and similarly despicable figures, “tankie” as in the tanks used to silence civilian protests

Anarchists are far left, but they would be very insulted if you called them tankies (their whole thing is anti-authoritarianism!)

People who love authoritarianism and intentionally skip over their atrocities, the term “tankie” refers to how the military (tanks) were used to crush the rebellions of many authoritarian regimes, notably, the Hungarian uprising in 1956 being crushed by the Warsaw Pact and the Tianamen square massacre in 1989 by the PRC.

It’s usually used to refer to supporters of the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, etc. who deny all the bad, inhuman things about those states.

My littlest brother still loves replaying Titanfall 2 on the PS4

The PS4 (the original)! I used to love playing on the Wii as a kid during “social skills class”, which I attended because I was diagnosed with Asperger’s (now part of the autistic spectrum), but we never had one at home.

Hooray for emulation! PS2 and GameCube were a golden age for gaming, and the DS/3DS catalogue is unfathomably large.

I don’t think we need to dedicate a holiday to some racist guy. Strokes the ego of the racists too much in my opinion.

We should also abolish the birthdays of monarchs as holidays for similar reasons.

If you define a stupid question as one where discussion is difficult or even impossible, then no, this is not a stupid question. Questions are meant to provoke debate and communication of differing ideas, and this is exactly what is happening now.

A true stupid question would be like asking if guns can kill people. Of course guns kill people, there is no discussion about this. A better question could be how we should regulate guns and ways to avoid placing them in the wrong hands.

It’s 2160x2160, so less than 4K (which is 3840x2160) horizontally, since it’s a different aspect ratio but it’s still more pixels. About 8 million for a standard 4K display, while it’s 9 million for the Frame. Even streaming games on such a high resolution display is performance intensive, plus you have the controller + eye tracking

VR headsets effectively need to run two 4K displays, one for each eye, and you have all the processing for controller tracking too. You also have eye tracking, they’re doing the whole foveated streaming thing everybody has been gushing over about (it’s really cool tech!). The mobile chip they used is nothing special, it’s a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, a 3 year old smartphone processor (certainly powerful enough to run lighter PC games, but nothing more than that. It’s kind of insane that a phone can even do that nowadays!)

I feel like we should better differentiate between LLMs (the ones that literally tell you to eat rocks), generative models (the ones that are stealing the work of creatives without permission), and the ones that are actually used for neat science stuff, where they are trained on a specific set of data and are doing a specific set of tasks repeatedly in a controlled environment, rather than training on the entire internet and then some and trying to do everything!

I think we should label them as large language models, generative models, and predictive models (maybe? Or maybe “targeted predictive models”?). It’s important to emphasise that all of these, even the useful ones, are not intelligent, they do not understand what they are doing. They are just models of data that do thing go in, thing go out.

So I’m doubly wrong! That’s kind of neat

That’s actually pretty cool, I’ll be making an XMPP account then. Adding to my collection of chat apps!

Oh whoops, I didn’t know that! That’s kind of neat, didn’t know had encryption. I will amend my comment

Also, please don’t use LLMs for simple questions. Aside from the ethical, legal, and environmental concerns of LLMs, they also tend to be wrong more often than not, and when they are right, there is lots of word soup because the chatbot needs to act like it’s a smartass, to put it bluntly, because its job is to market itself and push you towards subscriptions. Try to avoid LLMs wherever you can, it’s almost always better to search it yourself. Don’t offload thinking to a chatbot, it’s not very good at it!

The only usecase where LLMs could have an application is translation. I have a friend who doesn’t understand English very well, so they use a chatbot to translate things into their native language, and it’s really helpful for that. Of course, it can get stuff wrong, but for non-critical stuff, it’s kind of neat! That avoids the question of the insane water and power usage involved in training these models, as well as the disregard of the rights of artists and creators by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. I believe my friend uses a local model, so there’s that.

I personally don’t use LLMs, they’re more trouble than anything in my opinion.

Have you ever had any experience with Scratch? It’s an awesome tool to learn basic programming concepts like loops, conditions, etc. I played around with it in my early years, but even if you’re older, it’s still fun to mess around with the blocks to make weird programs. I particularly loved the “remix” functionality, it lets you see the structure of other people’s projects and you can tweak them (and thus learn about how it works!)

After my years of doing Scratch, I moved on to Python, and it is probably the easiest programming language to learn (depending on how you define that, e.g. HTML), code is very human readable and unfamiliar symbols are avoided for the most part

W3Schools has a lot of good Python guides, and there are SO MANY good programming tutorials online. Back in my day, I learnt Python by reading a good book (and it was an awesome book), but resources to learn programming have never been more plentiful!

My advice is to work on a simple project, could be a small game (with or without PyGame), or maybe a useful tool that you want to make, lay out what you want it to do, and along the way when you don’t know something, search it up online (W3Schools, forums, video guides, docs, whatever) and figure out how to do it. Practice doesn’t make you perfect, but more practice does. Does that make sense? Not really, but definitely try your best!

Well, there’s also IRC and XMPP. Could those work better for older devices? Dunno, but neither are encrypted, so don’t use them for anything sensitive. Signal is good if you want security, they’ve been audited a lot, but they are based in the U.S. which isn’t great.

I’ve also heard of Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Fluxer, both are relatively new, but I would prefer Matrix over both since it’s more easily self-hostable (+ all those different clients to choose from!)

edit: I really didn’t know, but looks like XMPP does support encryption! (and it’s enabled by default on most clients!)

I have tried it before, it’s neat, but notifications are not reliable since it is peer to peer (both devices need to be online for a connection), a bit like Briar if you’ve used that before. I don’t think it uses the Tor network, so it might be faster than Briar (but also less anonymous?)

I don’t have experience with the jami daemon though, so can’t comment if that solves the peer to peer issue.

I personally like Matrix the best, since you have federation, options for encrypted chats, self-host able with Continuwuity (or Synapse), lots of alternative clients for nearly every OS (even mobile Linux, you have Fractal! FluffyChat also works but it’s definitely oriented towards Android devices)

The longer you look at the pineapple, the more your food tastes like pineapples. There comes a point when your food is too sweet, too acidic, but you can’t stop looking at the beautiful pineapple.

Alternatively, it makes everyone’s piss a deep yellow. Saturated and not healthy at all. Weeing is painful and feels like a pineapple getting squirted out of whatever hole you wee out of. Everybody avoids drinking water and only eat dried food, and they all die from dehydration within 3 days.

Yeah, maybe I exaggerated a bit on “borderline propaganda for the military” comment. I will amend my post.

I do think they are (mostly, GofG, Dr Strange, Thor Ragnarok, etc. you mentioned are exceptions) U.S. centric though, the superheroes are based in America and work with the U.S. government.

And yep, Transformers is very overtly “the greatest country in the world is the USA”

The Cold War by Kings & Generals on YouTube has lots of excellent videos / “minidocs” on the cold war era. They have many covering both West and East Germany, as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall + reunification.

They’re still internet videos though, they give you brief summaries that encourage you to explore for further details, so I can also recommend reading and listening to the other suggestions!