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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • Based on some other coverage I’ve seen, specifically from reviewers who were denied early review copies, it looks like BioWare/EA is doing what most companies do and shopping around for reviewers who will be especially positive. They’re just being especially aggressive with it this time around. It’s not a good look, but it’s expected for basically any major publisher.

    It sounds like after the early press only event they did a while back, a bunch of reviewers who were critical of the game then got ghosted by EA’s PR people and never received early review copies.

    So, like all pre-launch reviews take any reviews you’re seeing now with a grain of salt and wait until a week or so after launch to see the reviews that weren’t cherry-picked by EA’s corporate PR.


  • Eh, FOOF is so unstable that it’s very hard to make enough of it to do any real damage. It’s also just very hard to make. It’s only remotely stable at cryogenic temperatures, and is so reactive that without an inert atmosphere it will rapidly decay into something more stable. Granted, it will do so by oxidizing the molecular oxygen in the air (which is as insane as it sounds) and release a ton of energy in the process but assuming you don’t already have a bunch of it, you won’t be able to create enough of it fast enough to do any meaningful damage without a specialized laboratory and associated equipment.

    Chlorine Triflouride however, can be made in your kitchen, and is just stable enough that, assuming you’ve taken some precautions, it’s possible to accumulate enough of it to immolate yourself in one of the worst possible ways.




  • A 2011 GMC Terrain. It burned oil like none other. The power steering would occasionally just not work upon starting the car, requiring me to turn it off and on again a several times. Sometimes, I’d stop at a red light, the engine would die, and when I’d restart it it’d go into limp mode. And traction control and AWD would occasionally just give out, which can be dangerous where I live due to ice and snow.

    The thing was a hazard and GMC and all associated brands can fuck right off.






  • Personally, I don’t like the idea of any recommendation or advertising algorithm using personal information of any kind. Though I can understand why location would be needed for advertising: in order to ensure ads for regional services are not shown outside of that region.

    The kinds of data that I think should be used:
    -Recommendations:
    -Like history
    -Watch (or view) history - specifically (and only) if I click on a post or watch more than some reasonable percentage of a video that would indicate I watched the entirety of the video.

    -Advertisements:
    -Location (based solely on IP)
    -The content currently being viewed, based on a general categorization of the content. If I’m watching a video about technology I don’t need to be seeing ads for financial services.


  • Something I only saw mentioned in a somewhat snarky comment in this thread (apologies if I missed it elsewhere) is that Windows has the option to do a full system image backup.

    If you have an external hdd or a nas, from the Windows Backup applet in control panel (not settings) you can create a system image that will contain a full backup of your C: drive and, optionally other drives in your system. You can then restore that backup from the recovery options in your windows install media.

    For the windows install media, I’d recommend using the windows media creation tool to create a usb installer on a separate usb key from your Linux installer and then setting it aside just in case. Trying to create windows install media from within Linux is, while not impossible, difficult.

    Obviously, you should do all of this before committing to installing Linux to disk. Most Linux install media also functions as a live Linux environment from which you can try things out and see if things will work for you.






  • This is some good advice. I’d add two caveats though: - For learning the distro’s package manager, while I’d say it’s definitely good to learn it (and do so early on), I’d also say beginners should probably stay away from the command line version of it unless it’s absolutely needed. - For running commands from random websites rather than a blanket prohibition, I’d say don’t do it unless you can confidently say you understand what the command will do and are willing to take the risk that you’re wrong.


  • My experience has been that 1440p is noticeable jump in quality on desktop monitors but less so laptops. On desktop 4K is virtually unnoticeable, a high refresh rate, HDR, and OLED are far more noticeable.

    For TV, I’ve found that it depends more on distance from the screen and resolution and bit rate of the media. I sit about 8’ from a 65” 4K tv and the difference between Blu-ray quality at 1080p and 4K is night and day.