Was gonna say - how long after Elden Ring did Shadow of the Erdtree DLC come out?

Payday 2 was a really novel idea a long time ago. Highly scripted replayable missions with unique aspects but RNG for procedurally variable elements like guard patrol positions, locations and security aspects… in addition to dynamic changes based off how successful the player was at doing a job without letting security escalate the mission to going “loud.”

It made otherwise boring repetitive loops of missions feel new and different enough each time that it was exciting. Being randomly matched with others fed into the unpredictable heist aspect as well…

But instead of focusing on constantly further improving upon those systems, fixing terrible issues related to both friendly and antagonistic A.I. (I remember how for the longest time your teammates could not literally pick up a duffle bag), they saw dollar signs with in-app-purchases… and with Payday 3, they doubled down on that aspect… so no one got on board… and eventually longtime players like myself stopped playing Payday 2 as well.

Valve showed how to do this right years ago at this point with the Steam Deck.

1. Force (or at least put a sizeable number of devices to be available for exclusive) purchase through their own store.
2. Limit to only a single unit purchase per official account.
3. Require the official account to have already been present before the device was announced to be available to purchase.

Boom. Scalper market collapsed for Steam Deck, PS5, etc.

thx. fixed.

Also, what a fucking piece of shit Google is for doing that. I fucking hate them so goddamn much.

I immediately installed this extension in Firefox to auto-strip that out from now on.

I hate that this was my first thought… but just in case no one else was aware of this literal classic moment in gaming villain history…

There used to be stories (not sure how many were true) of him going to events like E3, Tokyo Game Show, Gamescom, and other developer-centric game conventions.

He also was a key figure / contributor in some old school PC adventure games like Indiana Jones from waaaaay back in the day.

Bingo. Shield pro, and blacklist the MAC address of the TV and NEVER update the firmware.

iOS DID have Yattee, but it’s basically unusable at this point unless I’m doing something terribly wrong on my end. Every time I try to use it, even when signed in, I get errors no matter which back end I use.

That’s the Steam Deck.

Because “AI” isn’t actually “artificial intelligence.” It’s the marketing term that seems to have been adapted by every corporation to describe “LLMs…” which are more like extra fancy power guzzling parrots.

Its why the best cases for them are mimicking things brainlessly, like voice cloning for celebrity impressions… but that doesn’t mean it can act or comprehend emotion, or know how many fingers a hand should have and why they constantly hallucinate contextless bullshit… because just like a parrot doesn’t actually know any meaning of what it is saying when it goes “POLLY WANT A CRACKER…” it just knows the tall thing will give it a treat if it makes this specific squawk with its beak.

If it had all those features and was made with some real quality parts, I would gladly pay 500 bucks for it.

My friend do I have some exciting news for you…

https://youtu.be/2Tf342fIUVs

There is no perfect controller…

…But I do have a list of features I would want my perfect controller to have based off all the controllers that have ever been made :

• TMR joystick modules (successor to Hall effect sticks)
• adjustable tension springs and locking mechanism for varied stick cap types (Xbox Elite series 2 does most of this but uses magnetic caps which would interfere with the TMR sticks so ball bearing connections or other option would be preferable)
• 6 DOF / gyro sensors + infrared camera (Wii Motion Plus)
• Adaptive haptic triggers (PS5) which can be toggled to hair trigger mode via switches (Xbox Elite series 2)
• multi-touchpad on face (PS5)
• analog face buttons (DualShock 2 controller had this but only a few games utilized this… the best example was the PS2 era Metal Gear Solid games)
• customizable “per-button” color assignment / micro OLED or e-ink screens so button graphics can be swapped (PBTails new controller does the per button RGB color assignment)
• USB-C / 4 wired connectivity + charging
• baseplate contact-charging (PS5 controller has these so you can set them on charging docks)
• hot swappable battery pack + AA battery holder pack or ability to not have a battery on at all when connected via USB-C (Xbox 360 controller had this)
• swappable non-magnetic Zinc-alloy faceplates (PBTails new controller has these)
• removable back triggers with dedicated button assignments (like the Steam Deck’s L4/5 and R4/5 buttons; not just cloned face buttons like Sony and XBox do)
• integrated microphone with hardware toggle (PS5)
• proper “separate keys” d-pad… not the mushy type
• touch-sensitive surfaces for every button and stick (Meta / Oculus Quest controllers do this)
• per-finger-joint touch sensitive grips for each finger segment (Valve’s VR controllers did this)
• the ability to separate the halves of the controller so that each hand could hold one half independently and have them track similar to most standard VR controllers (think combining the switch controllers and Quest controllers)
• NFC communication (Amiibo-stuff for example)

If any single controller did even half of this, they’d easily be the GOAT.

As long as there are killer 1st party titles exclusive to a console platform, there’s a reason to buy one.

Personally, I love Zelda, Mario, and most recently I’ve been excited about the new Astro Bot game about to come out.

Outside of Steam Deck emulation, you need a console to play those, and I do enjoy the convenience.

The last Xbox worth buying was the 360, because all Xbox titles are released on other platforms now - eliminating the need for an Xbox console.

Scrolling to find out what “EE” is… I can’t find anything. Can someone fill me in?

Oh man, I LOVE introducing folks to Robert Evans from Behind the Bastards. The guy is an internet legend.

I still remember the first time I recognized his voice on an old pre-shit era Cracked video feature about how cops won’t help you when you’re being stabbed. I submitted it to Reddit a while back and it ended up making the front page.

Can’t recommend his stuff enough.

I hate to break this to everyone who thinks that “AI” (LLM) is some sort of actual approximation of intelligence, but in reality, it’s just a fucking fancy ass parrot.

Our current “AI” doesn’t understand anything or have context, it’s just really good at guessing how to say what we want it to say… essentially in the same way that a parrot says “Polly wanna cracker.”

A parrot “talking to you” doesn’t know that Polly refers to itself or that a cracker is a specific type of food you are describing to it. If you were to ask it, “which hand was holding the cracker…?” it wouldn’t be able to answer the question… because it doesn’t fucking know what a hand is… or even the concept of playing a game or what a “question” even is.

It just knows that it makes it mouth, go “blah blah blah” in a very specific way, a human is more likely to give it a tasty treat… so it mushes its mouth parts around until its squawk becomes a sound that will elicit such a reward from the human in front of it… which is similar to how LLM “training models” work.

Oversimplification, but that’s basically it… a trillion-dollar power-grid-straining parrot.

And just like a parrot - the concept of “I don’t know” isn’t a thing it comprehends… because it’s a dumb fucking parrot.

The only thing the tech is good at… is mimicking.

It can “trace the lines” of any existing artist in history, and even blend their works, which is indeed how artists learn initially… but an LLM has nothing that can “inspire” it to create the art… because it’s just tracing the lines like a child would their favorite comic book character. That’s not art. It’s mimicry.

It can be used to transform your own voice to make you sound like most celebrities almost perfectly… it can make the mouth noises, but has no idea what it’s actually saying… like the parrot.

You get it?

For those who don’t know…

Yep. LG OLED disconnected from all web connections - literally has its MAC address blacklisted from my router, changed the launcher from stock Google for my NVIDIA Shield to a non ad-riddled launcher called WOLF, side-loaded SmartTube for ad-free YT, and Plex = non-dystopian media experience.

My next experiment will be to install a glue-tun bound Invidious instance via docker on my NAS, and then point Yattee on my iPhone to it for a mobile version of YT that’s not filled with non-stop ads… now if I can just figure out how to launch it correctly… 😓

I think it’s because some people reading who aren’t terminally online like some of us, just see the word “liberal” in there and just immediately ignore everything else and take a defensive stance as they see themselves as aligned to their perception of the meaning of that word, and decide to push back as if you weren’t actually just accurately assigning blame to the economic school of thought that largely has led us to the massive upward curve of inequality we now see still growing…

…A curve which FDR had initially reversed starting in the 1930s after the Great Depression, but has since increasingly been clawed back by the rich getting a hold of all the necessary levers of power since then.