LandenLove

That was an interesting read! I've been driving in Japan for the last 3 years. Mostly rural, so it's pretty chill. But city driving can be stressful and chaotic. I don't think my heart could take driving in Chinese cities. As the author wrote, having mopeds everywhere would be stressful.

I didn't know that the IDP does not work with China. I needed an IDP to drive in Japan for my first year. After the first year, I got a Japanese driver's license.

Also, it was funny how many times the author mentioned WeChat. You really do use it everywhere in China!

Yeah. Websites like https://amiunique.org show more details about your browser.

I just heard about that. Won't work in the long term. Either the spammers will create a tool to bypass it, or they will continue to run services in third world countries where people complete captchas for pennies.

You are right that foreign powers abuse these platforms, but I don't personally believe that the platforms care. They just want to sell ads. Controversy will likely drive more traffic and more ad conversions.

I imagine that the companies who purchase these ads will see a drop in conversions and start to ask questions.

It might be a nice stock boost in the short term, but the goal for a majority of these companies is to sell ads. If advertisers see a drop in conversions, I doubt the platforms could keep the fake user ruse going for long.

My theory is that age verification is just another way to push human verification. These large tech companies need a way to verify a user is a real person and not an AI bot. Both for displaying ads to real users and cutting down on spam.

Nobody would support a "give away my anonymity online so I can be shown an ad for Coca Cola" bill. But it's easier to sell a law to boomers and lawmakers if you use the disguise of "It's for the children ." As if any of these companies care about the well being of children. See Meta confirming their platforms affect the mental health of children and doing nothing about it. Also platforms like TikTok and YouTube optimizing their algorithms for stealing user's attention spans.

I found GDScript to be quite powerful in terms of functionality. I don't have experience in professional game Dev to be aware of the benefits of C# beyond it being the industry standard for Unity.

Single threaded audio is a big concern. I haven't implemented music in my game yet to know if it is a deal breaker.

The main problem that I have run into is shader compilation stutters on the compatibility render. Makes the game basically unplayable. My work around was to spawn certain objects on the main menu out of sight to force compilation. I believe the forward renderer has some pre-compilation.

As much as I dislike webdev stuff, I love the way you can distribute entire programs through WASM. Super cool stuff! For those who are interested, I recommend checking out Godot for exporting games on the web. It's really easy to do and you can host it on Itch.io

I love TF2 as well! To be a little less negative, I will say that game engines like Godot give me lots of hope for the future. It sets a good foundation for future game devs to make something great. Also, game devs now have access to lots of different platforms to publish their games.

Again, that was a personal take. I understand millions of people are still able to enjoy modern video games.

I am primarily an FPS gamer. Old school COD was great. I also love older version of Minecraft. Also most Valve games. Portal 2 being my favorite.

If I had to summarize my major problems with modern games/game industry they are this: Unrelatable stories (to me personally), micro transactions, poor optimization, and planned obsolescence (You can never player Overwatch 1 ever again). Then there are other bonus problems like the fortnite-ification of games, E.g., putting every IP know to man into a single game.

Also, loot boxes. Horrible, disgusting business practice. Literally selling gambling to children.

I don't know what the degradation for NAND storage is, but another aspect that I didn't mention in my original comment is the fragility of disc based media. In terms of scratches and other damage.

I was completely unaware that PS5 discs could hold that much data! But that leads me to the next question, what is the read time look like on that? lol. I found this manual on google for the ps5 disc drive, but I don't understand these units.

Read speed BD-ROM (66 GB/100 GB) ~10×CAV BD-ROM (25 GB/50 GB) ~8×CAV BD-R/RE (25 GB/50 GB) ~8×CAV DVD ~3.2×CLV

In my opinion, disc based games have been a ridiculous way to sell modern games because they are physically incapable of storing the amount of game data required for modern AAA games. I understand that they still exist because of the resale value, but solid state storage similar to Nintendo Switch cards makes more sense to me.

On an even more personal note, very few modern games, if any, are worth purchasing for my own enjoyment. The gaming landscape overall has dropped so low that I don't even care anymore.

I have a simple blog if anyone is interested: https://landenlove.com/

I hate everything about modern vehicles. Built cheaply, yet cost a fortune. Are filled with laggy infotainment computers that requires subscriptions and replace reliable and easy to locate climate controls. They are the size of tanks despite having a smaller bed size than a Japanese kei car. The list goes on and on.

Seems like they put a lot of time and effort into this article. It's a shame that I cannot read it because it is covered by, "Sale ends soon. $0.50/week for your first six months year. Subscribe!", on my screen.

I have one of these. It's a fun little laptop. My biggest complaint is that it has noticeable coil whine when running under high load.

Despite using Firefox, I keep chrome installed in case there is a website that requires it. I have recently started receiving Windows 11 notifications from Chrome, advertising their new AI features. This happens one two different devices. I haven't launch chrome on either of them for some time.

It is maddening how much they are pushing this useless and inaccurate garbage on us.

The part where they highlight the rippling in the lithium battery was interesting. They mention it can accelerate degradation over time. It's unclear if this specific example is within tolerances, but I have seen in other CT scans how dramatic the lithium rippling can become.

But overall, yeah, this is mostly an advertisement. They have other videos on their YouTube where they scan random items.

Additionally, they fail to recover said account when it's taken over. My father's FaceBook account was hacked (likely through phishing) and it was impossible to contact anyone to get it back. The scum who stole his account also uploaded illegal context, so the account, along with ~10 years of personal memories, was deleted without any recourse. It was impossible to talk to a real human being at Meta. Nothing but an insanely unhelpful FAQ page.

I highly advise that you download and backup any of your personal data on all your social media accounts for yourself and your loved ones. These large companies do not care about you beyond showing you ads for dropped shipped garbage from China and AI slop tiktoks.

I am pretty sure I purchased my cap and gown instead of renting. But my college was a bit smaller.

Now do 1x2 using Morse code.

I hope they ship to your region soon!

Next gen AI is going to become really proficient in scrolling Hacker News.

I recently watched "A Course on Puzzle Game Design" by Matthew VanDevander and he mentioned Stephen's Sausage Roll a few times.

https://youtu.be/85mAmP4k1Co?si=yuxpJ2xhkH7r_eo3

The video has lots of helpful information for puzzle game design. I have started to incorporate some of that knowledge into my own puzzle game https://qcgeneral29.itch.io/lets-learn

It's unfortunate that I am unable to access these new products because Framework does not ship to Japan. I have an original Framework 13 that's CPU fan has been making death noises. There is also a broken screw mount in the base.

I didn't do shipment forwarding. I just bought the product and later moved to Japan. Also, Framework supposedly blocks shipment forwarding.

It's odd, because I remember them advertising a Japanese keyboard layout in the past. They must not see a large enough market to justify the costs.

Unrelated to the article, but the sticky AI prompt at the top of this page is infuriating. I've added the element to my ublock filter.

I like how Lightroom simplifies a lot of the editing process. Alternatives like Rawtherpee are very intimidating.

I also like the cloud backup and sync that Lightroom has. But I swear it gets slower and slower with every update.

Please release me from Adobe Lightroom.