I game on my bed too, and use a flat right-angled USB adapter. Basically, something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Duttek-Degree-Adapter-Extender-Support/dp/B0C244K2HC/
I use a similar but magnetic version with my phone and other USB-C devices, and it’s been a game-changer.
That’s incredible. Your son has far, far, more patience than I ever did. I still haven’t managed to clock most of the games I grew up with, such as Dangerous Dave, Prince of Persia 1 & 2, Wolf3D, Doom 1 & 2, Crystal Caves, Aladdin, Lion King, Jazz Jackrabbit, Mario (NES), Pokemon Red (GBA), Crash Bandicoot (PS1)…
Every now and then I try to clock one of those old games, but then I get stuck and/or lose interest, and move on to something else. Even among recent games, I spent over 400 hours playing BotW and only managed to do two of the divine beasts. I also have over 200 hours in TotK and still haven’t gotten to the first major spirit quest. Similarly, got several hundreds of hours in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, but never actually completed any of those games.
I think the only game that I recall beating would be the Bio Menace trilogy - which I finally managed to complete as an adult, and that too thanks to DOSBox’s save states. Oh, and Diablo II too, it someone had the perfect mix of action + story + game length, to keep me interested till the end.
Honestly I’ve no idea how people manage to stick to one thing for so long and see it thru till the end, without losing interest or getting distracted by something else.
That’s going to change in the future with NPUs (neural processing units). They’re already being bundled with both regular CPUs (such as the Ryzen 8000 series) and mobile SoCs (such as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3). The NPU included with the the SD8Gen3 for instance can run models like Llama 2 - something an average desktop would normally struggle with. Now this is only the 7B model mind you, so it’s a far cry from more powerful models like the 70B, but this will only improve in the future. Over the next few years, NPUs - and applications that take advantage of them - will be a completely normal thing, and it won’t require a household’s worth of energy. I mean, we’re already seeing various applications of it, eg in smartphone cameras, photo editing apps, digital assistants etc. The next would be I guess autocorrect and word prediction, and I for one can’t wait to ditch our current, crappy markov keyboards.
Summarising articles / extracting information / transforming it according to my needs. Everyone knows LLM-bssed summaries are great, but not many folks utilise them to their full extent. For instance, yesterday, Sony published a blog piece on how a bunch of games were discounted on the PlayStation store. This was like a really long list that I couldn’t be bothered reading, so I asked ChatGPT to display just the genres that I’m interested in, and sort them according to popularity. Another example is parsing changelogs for software releases, sometimes some of them are really long (and not sorted properly - maybe just a dump of commit messages), so I’d ask it to summarise the changes, maybe only show me new feature additions, or any breaking changes etc.
Translations. I find ChatGPT excellent at translating Asian languages - expecially all the esoteric terms used in badly-translated Chinese webcomics. I feed in the pinyin word and provide context, and ChatGPT tells me what it means in that context, and also provides alternate translations. This is a 100 times better than just using Google Translate or whatever dumb dictionary-based translator, because context is everything in Asian languages.
The exciting part here is the shell, not the insides. Indeed the Intel boards aren’t that great for gaming, but once Framework start shipping the AMD boards next month, this thing would become a real contender to the Steam Deck, ROG Ally etc. Load up something like ChimeraOS on it and you’d get a near-Steam Deck like experience.
The thing is though, with traditional forums you get a LOT of controls for filtering out the kind of users who post such content. For instance, most forums won’t even let you post until you complete an interactive tutorial first (reading the rules and replying to a bot indicating you’ve understood them etc).
And then, you can have various levels of restrictions, eg, someone with less than 100 posts, or an account less than a month old may not be able to post any links or images etc. Also, you can have a trust system on some forums, where a mod can mark your account as trusted or verified, granting you further rights. You can even make it so that a manual moderator approval is required, before image posting rights are granted. In this instance, a mod would review your posting history and ensure that your posts genuinely contributed to the community and you’re unlikely to be a troll/karma farmer account etc.
So, short of accounts getting compromised/hacked, it’s very difficult to have this sort of stuff happen on a traditional forum.
I used to be a mod on a couple of popular forums back in the day, and I even ran my own community for a few years (using Invision Power Board), and never once have I had to deal with such content.
The fact is Lemmy is woefully inadequate in it’s current state to deal with such content, and there are definitely better options out there. My heart goes out to @Chris and the staff for having to deal with this stuff, and I really hope that this drives the Beehaw team to move away from Lemmy ASAP.
In the meantime, I reckon some drastic actions would need to be taken, such as disabling new user registrations and stopping all federation completely, until the new community is ready.
Geez, don’t know what your issue is, you just keep whining when I’m proposing actual working solutions here. If you want a clean AIO solution then go complain to a TV maker. I don’t make TVs so no point whining at me.
There are plenty of HDMI switches or splitters out there that support audio extraction, just use one of them to sit between your monitor. Like this one: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00XJITK7E
??? The output is provided by whatever box you’re connecting to the monitor - set-top box, Android TV, Apple TV etc.
As I mentioned earlier, use a soundbar or dedicated speakers (most TV speakers suck anyways). Also, for a reasonably priced monitors, look for monitors marketed as “commercial displays” - they’re generally the same price or even cheaper than a similar spec’d TV.
Yes, Viewsonic for instance is one company that makes them. Although, they’re typically advertised as a “commercial LED display” or something like that. Basically look for “display” instead of “TV”.
Just get a monitor. The only real difference between a monitor and a TV these says is the lack of a speaker, and “smart” stuff. But TV speakers suck anyways so you’d be better off using a soundbar regardless.
Awesome, thank you. Guess that’s my weekend sorted. :)
Finished Mass Effect 2 and loved it
Did you play it on PC or console? If it’s the latter then how were the controls? I’m planning on getting it on console, but I suck at playing FPSes with a controller.
The Reddit-style presentation of topics and ranking comments isn’t really conducive to lengthy, quality discussions that persist over a period of time. The Reddit-style works for following current events and posting links to new things etc, but as a result, old topics - topics even a couple of days old - falls off the engagement radar. Once it’s gone from the front page, it’s gone from people’s consciousness. This is bad for a small community with few posts that value quality of discussions over blind sharing of links. For instance, say I create a topic called “share your favorite vegan recipes” - I may get some replies in the first couple of days, but then the topic will fall off the frontpage and completely die. This is further exacerbated by the voting system. On Reddit/Lemmy, topics and comments which have a higher number of votes get more visibility, and this creates two issues - one is it encourages group think and creates an echo chamber, the other is that it drowns out less popular topics or comments. This sort of intentional drowning of posts and comments actually may be a good thing - and even necessary - on high-userbase systems like Reddit, where a single thread could have thousands of comments - but it works against low-traffic communities like Beehaw, where every comment is valuable (unless it’s off-topic/spam etc of course).
Whereas in a traditional forum:
With all the above reasons, forums are therefore more conducive for encouraging discussions, over a place which simply acts like a feed aggregator. Traditional forums are the solution to the doomscrolling issues that plague modern social media. Plus, they offer better moderation tools, with better granular permissions granted to mods, so you could grant various levels of access. Also, you can place several restrictions on users to reduce spam, for instance, you could grant a user rights to post a topic only after they’ve read all the rules, and maybe participated in a quiz or something. You could grant additional rights to people who’ve gotten a certain number posts in their bag. You could have a “trusted poster” system where a user could have mod-like abilities. There’s so many ways a forum is a lot more flexible than a system like Lemmy.
So overall, I think Beehaw’s ethos and vision would align better with a traditional forum, over a feed-aggregator style forum like Lemmy.
Would be cool if Beehaw switched to old school forums, like Invision or phpBB. Invision have now moved to a hosted forum model, so you don’t need any technical knowledge to set it up.
Katamari Damacy - The objective is to roll a ball-like thing called a katamari, to roll up objects, and make the katamari bigger and bigger. You can roll up anything from paper clips and snacks in the house, to telephone poles and buildings in the town, to even living creatures such as people and animals. Once the katamari is complete, it will turn into a star that colors the night sky. Sounds weird, but it’s super fun, trust me. Plus, it’s soundtrack is kickass.
My bad, you’re right - Metroid Fusion was indeed on the GBA. I was playing Prince of Persia 1 on the Genesis - there’s a ROM hack for it which fixes all the issues with the port and makes it behave pretty much like the OG DOS version, with the added graphics of the Genesis version of course.
Sadly the Miyoo is a bit underspecced for the N64 and Gen 6 consoles, so the PS1 is the highest it can emulate. For newer consoles, you’d be looking at something like the Retroid Pocket 3+ or the upcoming Anbernic RG405V, but of course, they’re bigger and more expensive. The main reason I prefer the Miyoo is because of how lightweight it is, which allows me to game for hours if I felt like it, and it’s size makes it easy to carry around too. But I guess it won’t be long before we get to see a future Miyoo, or an alternative in the same form-factor, having the specs to emulate m Gen 6 consoles.
I did the TV -> projector swap last year, got myself a 4K projector that sits above my bed and projects a massive 100" image on the wall opposite my bed, and it’s awesome. I’ve got my PS5 and Switch hooked to it, and I’m currently living the dream of being able to game and watch movies on a giant screen, all from the comfort of my bed. Some games really shine on such a screen and you see them in a new light, like TotK, Horizon series, Spiderman etc and it’s 100% worth the switch, IMO.
Now I also have a regular monitor - a nice low latency QHD 16:10 monitor with HDR, hooked up to my PC, which also uses a 6600 XT btw. Main reason I use this setup is for productivity, running some PC games that don’t have console equivalents, plus the colors look much nicer compared to my projector. Maybe if I bought a laser projector and had one of those special ALR screens I could get nicer colors, but all that is way beyond my budget. Although these days I’m not on my desktop as much as I used to be (I also have a Ryzen 6000 series laptop that I game on btw), I still like my desktop because of the flexibility and upgradability. I also explored the option of switching to a cloud-first setup and ditching my rig, back when I wanted to upgrade my PC and we had all those supply chain issues during Covid, but in the end, cloud gaming didn’t really work out for me. In fact after exploring all the cloud options, I’ve been kind of put off by cloud computing in general - at least, the public clouds being offered by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft - they’re just in it to squeeze you dry, and take control away from you, and I don’t like that one bit. If I were to lean towards cloud anything, it be rolling my own, maybe using something like a Linode VM with a GPU, but the pricing doesn’t justify it if you’re looking any anything beyond casual usage. And that’s one of the things I like about PC, I could have it running 24x7 if I wanted to and not worry about getting a $200 bill at the end of the month, like I got with Azure, because scummy Microsoft didn’t explain anywhere that you’d be paying for bastion even if the VM was fully powered off…
Anyways, back to the topic of CPUs, I don’t really think we’re at the cusp of any re-imagining, what we’ve been seeing is just gradual and natural improvements, maybe the PC taking inspiration from the mobile world. I haven’t seen anything revolutionary yet, it’s all been evolutionary. At the most, I think we’d see more ARM-like models, like the integrated RAM you mentioned, more SoC/integrated solutions, maybe AI/ML cores bring the new thing to look for an a CPU, maybe ARM itself making more inroads towards the desktop and laptop space, since Apple have shown that you can use ARM for mainstream computing.
On the revolutionary side, the things I’ve been reading about are stuff like quantum CPUs or DNA computers, but these are still very expiremental, with very niche use-cases. In the future I imagine we might have something like a hybrid semi-organic computer, with a literal brain that forms organic neural networks and evolves as per requirements, I think that would be truly revolutionary, but we’re not there yet, not even at the cusp of it. Everything else that I’ve seen from the likes of Intel and AMD, have just been evolutionary.
I’m with you. In fact I’ll say even retro operating systems were better (no bloat, no spyware, easy to understand/configure/mod/hack around), as well as retro Internet (no Javascript crap, no browser fingerprinting/tracking, simpler HTML, super easy webdev) and retro computing (no soldered-on components, PCs were more modular and easy to repair)… heck, planet earth in general was better back then. We’ve been on a downwards spiral since the 2000s. Everything sucks now.