I used to do this when I was below 30 and it works pretty well for a time. If you work and have a family, this is the only segment of time you can carve into, to create more time for yourself.
One thing to be careful about though- there is growing evidence that not getting enough sleep earlier in your life like this can lead to dementia when you’re older.
Honestly all of this bullshit is why I went with a Steamdeck a few years ago. As a working adult with a family I have different economic obligations and priorities.
I need to build a new PC soon (mine is now 10 years old) but I can’t justify spending $5K on a gaming rig. If I built now with a flagship card, just the card itself would cost more than I spent on my entire rig when I built it in 2014/2015. Pair that with Microsoft’s ridiculous operating system enshittification, and the PC situation gets even more complicated for me.
Consoles have gotten to be a bad value proposition for me as well. Paper launches, scalping during the pandemic, DRM etc., services going offline. All that garbage leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I’m having a decent enough time with Steam sale games, Indy games, and retro emulation.
Here’s the thing… It was a bubble because you can’t wall off the entire concept of AI. This revelation was just an acceleration displaying what should’ve been obvious.
There are many many open models available for people to fuck around with. I have in a homelab setting, just to keep abreast of what is going on, get a general idea how it works and what its capable of.
What most normie followers of AI don’t seem to understand is, whether you’re doing LLM or machine learning object detection or something, you can get open software that is “good enough” and run it locally. If you have a raspberry pi you can run some of this stuff, and it will be slow, but acceptable for many use cases.
So the concept that only OpenAI would ever hold the keys and should therefore have massive valuation in perpetuity, that is just laughable. This Chinese company just highlighted that you can bruteforce train more optimized models on garbage-tier hardware.
Wonder what the driver support will be like…
I was hoping this could be a viable option for someone who last built a new PC nearly a decade ago now, and can’t stomach the idea of spending more on one flagship card than my entire old build cost altogether.
At the same time, with all the invasive changes Microsoft has made to Windows during that time, I am not building another Windows PC. Last I looked the Intel Arc series of cards had crappy support for Linux so hopefully that improves.
I have one of these sitting new in box unopened. If I have time later I will give this a try.
EDIT: To answer what you said, the reason you might want to do this is that this hardware doesn’t need to be chromecasted to by a phone or laptop or something. It can have native apps installed directly on it, and be controlled via your normal TV remote control.
Granted I haven’t tested this yet to see if it works with the alternative OS.
It would be truly awesome to have a degoogled streaming device that you could sideload apps on, use your regular TV remote with CEC etc. Even better if you could use alternative apps to get ad free YouTube streaming.
In contrast, for the unmodded device, the default GoogleTV setup and UI is horrible. You have to manually remove all the garbage apps you don’t want. It still shows you suggested banners of terrible content exclusive to certain apps that you don’t even have installed.
Right, they need close air support, infantry support, scouts, supply chain logistics etc. all working together to be peak effective. If you just give some dudes an Abrams and a crash course in driving it and firing the main gun, they will be better off than the same crew of randos in a technical made out of a Toyota Tacoma, but they will still be vulnerable to modern threats.
It’s easy to understand why the modern drone threat is uniquely game-changing if you think of war like chess. Most advanced powers have now figured out that having a developed drone program is like giving yourself infinite pawns. You keep trading pawns for the opponents more valuable pieces. If Russia is able to spend a few thousand in drone hardware and explosives and destroy a multimillion dollar tank, they’ll make that trade any day.
This is insane. The new default in civil suits is just to go after whoever is tangentially related to the situation at hand who also happens to have money. Neither the manufacturer of the weapon nor Activision is liable. They sell legal products.
What would be more just, is a mechanism for pilfering the shooters organs and selling them on the open market, collecting his life insurance, and then dividing that combined spoil among the victims.
Since a lot of commenters don’t remember or didn’t play the original games - There are tribesmen and monks and whatnot. Some are enemies and some are friendly. They are caricatures sorta like a lot of the “natives” are portrayed in Indiana Jones movies.
The second game also depicts Venetian mobster guys as bad guys. Not sure if that is offensive to anyone.
Meanwhile you have MUCH smaller devs releasing awesome games and sometimes even free updates etc. Stuff like Stardew Valley has probably hundreds of hours of gameplay (and more if you install free fanmade mods)… the original game was released by one guy.
I do a little bit of napkin math and see that I’ve got 50+ hours of gameplay from Vampire Survivors which I paid $4 on sale. 200+ hours out of Stardew Valley which I paid $15 for. 500+ hours out of Caveblazers which I paid $1 for.
I’m to the point where I’m not going to fuck with AAA until it is on sale. I don’t see the value.
Billy Mitchell can sue people all the live long day and win or lose it doesn’t make him less of a clown.