More advanced hardware from a country the US see as an adversary sounds like it should be great for the stock of Lockheed and Co., actually.

Well, people love to complain. I didn’t feel Inquisition was as good as Origins, but I still had fun with it, and I assume the same is gonna be true for Veilguard.

Anyways, that’s curios. I think the Dragon Age Games are some of the few I own on Origin. I’d be kinda surprised if EA made the effort to patch the games on their own client, though.

Might try running it tomorrow, out of curiosity.

What problems did you have with it? Still runs surprisingly well for me. Haven’t tried Veilguard yet, but plan to as soon as I have some time. Felt that none of the sequels where able to match Origins yet, though.

Most mainline Linux distro work pretty seamlessly with secureboot these days.

Depends on the model, and the manufacturers would certainly prefer you replaced it, but I’ve privately fixed a few phones for friends/family. Fucked up and broke the first one, but the ones after are pretty much all still running without issue.

Yeah, though as someone who has a thermaltake psu - depending on the model and sku, it might as well be.

Also, the non-descript psus from SIs that also do servers tend to be pretty solid, from experience.

I personally pretty much stopped using Word Editors, and wouldn’t use a proprietary one if I did, but I recognise they’re still pretty important for the majority of people.

I worked with a company that used O365 last year. Was kinda underwhelmed. Desktop Apps still don’t really work well with simultaneous editing of a document, Web Apps don’t have all the features of the desktop versions (didn’t matter that much in Word, but was annoying in Excel).

I think that the online collaboration implementation of Google’s Suite is still a lot more seamless. O365 Desktop and Web stuff feels like a weird attempt to mix two separate products.

For most use cases I’ve seen, you could probably give the user any modern office suite, whether it be proprietary or open source, and they wouldn’t mind too much.

Independent of all privacy concerns, I personally just don’t like Edge’s UX, but I recognise that it’s a serviceable Browser.

I’ve also got the cheapest possible pledge. Played the game with friends a bunch, was a lot of fun when it worked.

Honestly, I feel like I got my money’s worth. If it comes out, nice, if it doesn’t, oh well.

“Drinnen saßen stehend Leute, schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft”

There’s a whole bunch of such surrealist art, and while me being a rather lazy student for most things art history means I have no idea whether there’s a better name for it, or how connected the artists behind them are, I still tend to find them rather fascinating.

Also, I’m not saying that surrealist art must necessarily miss a narrative throughline, though it’s true here.

I looked up the rest because it piqued my interest. Black Cat City by Jay Kinney, published in 1980.

I get called like once or twice a week, and it’s usually something time sensitive or important. Always found people just flat out refusing to answer the phone crazy.

That presumes that those corps have any respect for their customers.

Anyway, I get the Smart TV Problem. I personally solved it by living in a studio with no space for a TV, but I like your approach too.

I know, but what other OLED panel manufacturers are there? Samsung? Not sure their smart TVs are better, privacy wise.

Actually, I’m pretty sure any manufacturer that also sells high end smart TVs has a 2k TV that sells your data.

I also never understood his apparent expectation that a higher end model from a manufacturer that sells data will be more privacy friendly. Wealthier people make for more expensive ad sales.

I mean, LG Displays aren’t bad in that regard. The different departments of some of these conglomerates might as well be wholly different companies.

Also, if you buy an OLED Monitor from another Vendor, chances aren’t all that bad it’s a LG panel either way.

I mean, they’re pretty old planes. I don’t expect them to rip out all the equipment and replace it if it still does the job.

Seriously. I really liked Origins and had fun with 2 and Inquisition. If this is great, I’ll happily play it. If I don’t like it, I won’t - I have more backlog than time for games anyway. I don’t get what people get so angry about.

Huh. Dunno how I feel about layered three dot menus.

I mean, I’m not a fan of the iOS UX, but I feel like they’re doing pretty good with consistency, and would like it if the system app Devs took a slice of inspiration from that (though not necessarily everything else).

What do the three dots do? Settings settings?

For me it’s in the alarm settings, but I’m on lineage. If it isn’t there, I’d consider getting a different alarm app.

They do have a pretty fun playable game though. I bought one of the basic packs forever ago, and at this point, I wouldn’t even care if they where to exit scam. I don’t think they will, but I’ve certainly gotten my money’s worth out of it.

but I don’t see why a one plus should be any better than Xiaomi

It likely isn’t. I just got it very cheap some years back, and don’t see a good reason to replace it while it still works.

a random ROM with possible unknown interference should be safer/better regarding privacy

You could always have bad actors, of course, but these Roms tend to be mostly open source community projects, so the incentive structure leading to bad behaviour seems less clear to me, and such behaviour would theoretically be more detectable (how much anyone actually audits the code in practice is another question, of course.) In the end, running any Software you haven’t written yourself involves a certain amount of trust.

That does make sense, I guess. I forget that most people aren’t hardcore privacy nuts sometimes. I’m currently on a OnePlus with a custom rom, which’ll probably be good for a few more years, but the only new phone I’d consider at the moment would be a pixel with Graphene.

I get people buying cheap Xiaomi phones because they can’t afford a more expensive phone. I kinda don’t get why people buy expensive Xiaomi phones.

Haven’t played in forever, but this seems like they’re selling an A-rated, non-engineered ship. Don’t think this is pay to win. I don’t like it, but the game has been going for 10 years, and Frontier doesn’t seem to be doing great financially, so it might have well been this or shutting it down entirely.

It has been many years since I’ve used an OS without full disk encryption, so I can’t really compare, but I have a Windows Partition for some proprietary software that doesn’t like Wine on my PC, and it is really smooth. Might be because it’s on a NVME SSD, though.

Well, it kinda does. If you choose to print your keys, you can use print to file and safe them to the encrypted drive, if you really want to for some reason.

OpenOffice and OnlyOffice aren’t related. OnlyOffice is way closer to MS Office in look and feel.

There doesn’t have to be anything wrong with it, though I seem to remember that BitLocker isn’t all that difficult to break if your passphrase isn’t long enough. I just found it a bit weird because unlocking via TPM very much feels like the standard solution under Windows.

So good it broke time.

Aren’t you using the TPM for full disk encryption, though? Or are you entering your BitLocker Password at every boot?

I mean, not defending Win11 here, it has lots of other issues, but I’d just put each excel sheet on a different virtual desktop and switch with the keyboard. Always felt that clicking was a bit inefficient anyway.

Piracy is gonna get more interesting.

Cracked, removed AI Server lock, bring your own API key, or host model of choice locally.

Known Issues: If you use the OpenAI API, the NPCs will sometimes tell you that killing is against the ethics policy while shooting at you.

That seems bound to loose them money if they don’t charge a subscription.

Yeah, dunno what Google’s on. I’ve noticed that on my brothers pixel, it’s not possible to deactivate the visual guide in the bottom of the screen for gesture navigation. The option just doesn’t appear in his settings. It’s all a bit silly.

Uh, this is kinda awkward, but I actually use a Gnome extension to be able to use KDE Connect.

Edit: Oh, wait, I read KDE instead of KDE Connect. Well, ignore the above, then.

I mean, sure, but both lineage and the stock rom on pixels should be reasonably close to stock Android, compared to stuff like, for example, MI UI.

Hmh. Annoying. I’m on lineage, and I noticed that the stock Pixel Rom seems to be more limited like that in some ways.

What version are you on? 15? I’m on 14, and for me it’s as it ever was. Also, can you replace it by editing the Shortcuts? I was able to replace the Internet thingy with separate toggles for Mobile Data/WiFi by doing that.

I have used AI to RP some stuff (don’t ask), and while the higher end models, and even the better self hosted models are really good at answering in a way that makes sense and works in context, it is pretty hard to make them do anything, new, interesting, or unexpected, without prompting it specifically.

Nothing that I’ve seen playing around with LLMs makes me think that a well-written work of fiction could be improved by including them, unless there is a significant leap in capability.

And this is ignoring all the discussion about LLMs and copyright/stolen content.