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d3Xt3r

@ d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

Posts
12
Comments
134
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Am I the only person that feels that retro games are better?

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  • 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.

  • Ars Technica | Not-a-Linux distro review: SerenityOS is a Unix-y love letter to the ’90s

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  • As a retro enthusiast, I've been following this project for a while and it's been great seeing all the improvements over the years. I recommend checking out this video on its current state: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nWjAxNHXd_8

    Equally, or possibly more interesting, is their Ladybird browser, which is cross-platform. Its been making great progress as well, and I sincerely hope that it can compete with the big two some day - would be nice to have a major browser/engine that's not based on Webkit or Gecko.

    I wish 90s interfaces would make a comeback, I really miss the aesthetics of that era. Luckily there are some excellent themes out there that scratch that itch, like Chicago95 for XFCE - and here's bonus a screenshot of it running on my Galaxy Fold 4:

    :)

  • A map app for mobile phones with fog of war

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  • You could make yours a Geocaching app with fog-of-war. They've got an API for third-party apps too, so it should be easy enough to develop, and actually fun to play.

    If you're feeling ambitious, add some RTS elements like from Age of Empires - eg if you add someone as your ally, you can share their line of sight. Finding certain types of caches, or POIs, increases your resources (gold/stone/food/wood - maybe visiting Pizza Hut gives you extra food lol). And with these resources, you could build virtual structures like castles etc. Other players could spend resources to take it down (but they need to be physically at that location), and you could spend resources to defend your building.

    Kinda like Ingress basically, but with medieval/RTS elements and geocaching thrown into the mix. How's that for a challenge? :)

  • What details/tools have you found help people transition to similar, open software from closed software, or think could help?

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  • You should check out Pinta then, I find it easier to use than Paint.net, yet reasonably feature-packed (obviously nowhere near GIMP/Photoshop).

  • Maybe hot take: as a handheld, the regular switch is an awful handheld

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  • A personal argument for a benefit of gaming

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  • 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.

  • Generative AI is still a solution in search of a problem

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  • 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.

  • What do you personally use AI for?

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    • 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.

  • What do you think the bare necessities of the current world is?

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  • Bear necessities you say? All that a modern bear needs is a pic-a-nic basket and a trusty sidekick.

  • $600 Million And A Decade Later, Where Is Star Citizen?

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  • Given the current pace of development, how long would you reckon it might take them to get rid of the bugs, at least, the annoying game-breaking ones? I don't mind incomplete content, but game breaking bugs is something I don't have the patience to deal with. Like, I made the mistake of pre-ordering Cyberpunk - dropped it on day one cause of the bugs and didn't touch it until three years later, when it was finally in a playable state (for me). Just wondering if Star Citizen would reach that sort of bug-free stage within the next couple of years.

  • Can I replace the wired USB cable with a USB port in this keyboard?

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  • It's not in the opposite order, it's just flipped around in the photo lol.

  • Can I replace the wired USB cable with a USB port in this keyboard?

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  • Can I replace the wired USB cable with a USB port in this keyboard?

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  • Say I want to make an app on my phone for personal use. How to begin?

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  • If it's just for personal use, why not just use Tasker? Judging by what you've written, it could be easily done without needing any Android coding experience.

  • FOSS Image editor

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  • If you're interested, there's a patch for it that makes it look and behave more like Photoshop.

  • The Elder Scrolls VI will skip PS5 and isn’t coming until at least 2026

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  • But Bethesda could very well release a Skyrim Extra Special Edition in the interim, and fans will lap it up, no doubt. Jokes aside, there are many large fan-projects in the works which fans are looking forward to, such such as OpenMW, Skyblivion and Skywind, not to mention more "normal" mods for Skyrim itself, so I doubt the interest in the franchise is going away any time soon.

  • Why do you use firefox?

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  • [Meta] I don't think there's a need to cross-post this within Beehaw. Beehaw is low-activity as it is (in terms of new posts) so most people here would be just browsing new/local so they'd be seeing this post in their feed twice.

    Even if you're not browsing by local, most people in this community would likely also be subscribed to the Technology community as well, so again, there's a double-up.

  • I am so pumped for Phantom Liberty and Cyberpunk 2077 v2.0!

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  • I'm one of the foolish ones that actually pre-ordered the game. Was super hyped for it too, did a countdown till midnight so that I can start playing at launch, and I even live streamed it (and also had a few other streams going on two laptops). Took the day off to play the game as well.

    The clock hit 00:00 and less than 30 minutes into the game, I ran into my first bug. I stuck was in a dialog loop and couldn't get out no matter what I tried, so was for forced to load an earlier save. Then I got stuck somewhere else, or something funky would happen. I'd never been so utterly disappointed in a game until Cyberpunk came along. So anyways, I was so put off by it that I'd decided not to play until it any further until they patched it up. So the first patch came along, but this time I decided to read the reviews first - still plenty of bugs. Thought I'd wait for the next one, noope, still buggy. And the next one. And the next. And then I decided to ignore the thing until not only they fixed the bugs, but also added some life and QoL stuff into the game. Better AI, better peds, driving etc. Make the city more immersive. I mean, I had waited for so long, so might as well wait and play until it's at it's best version.

    So, not only will I not play now, nor when 2.0 comes out, I'll play it when Phantom Liberty is out, and play the game, for the first-ish time, the way it was meant to be played and enjoy it to the fullest.

    Assuming of course that Phantom Liberty isn't a dud, but having learnt from my previous experience, I might wait a bit after it comes out and see if they release a post-launch patch or something first.

    Never again pre-ordering a game... unless it's a Zelda.

  • Modder Turns Framework Laptop PCB Into a Handheld Gaming PC

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  • 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.

  • Gaming @beehaw.org
    d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

    Modder Turns Framework Laptop PCB Into a Handheld Gaming PC

    www.tomshardware.com /news/modder-turns-framework-laptop-pcb-into-a-handheld-gaming-pc
  • Technology @beehaw.org
    d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

    Google extends Chromebook lifespan to ten years

    www.zdnet.com /article/google-extends-chromebook-lifespan-to-ten-years/
  • Free and Open Source Software @beehaw.org
    d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

    Ventoy 1.0.95 Released

    www.ventoy.net /en/doc_news.html
  • Gaming @beehaw.org
    d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

    PiBoy Mini: just add a Raspberry Pi and you've got a handheld retro gaming system

    www.raspberrypi.com /news/piboy-mini-just-add-a-raspberry-pi-and-youve-got-a-handheld-retro-gaming-system/
  • Operating Systems @beehaw.org
    d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

    Linux 6.5 Released With AMD P-State EPP Default, USB4 v2, MIDI 2.0 & More Hardware Bits

    www.phoronix.com /news/Linux-6.5-Released
  • Technology @beehaw.org
    d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

    Google's Bard Urges Google to Drop Web Environment Integrity

    archive.is /UIosX
  • Gaming @beehaw.org
    d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

    The long-rumored 'Quake II' remaster is out now on PC and consoles | Engadget

    www.engadget.com /the-long-rumored-quake-ii-remaster-is-out-now-on-pc-and-consoles-183652854.html
  • Operating Systems @beehaw.org
    d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

    Zorin OS 16.3 is now available and ready to make using Linux even easier

    www.zdnet.com /article/zorin-os-16-3-is-now-available-and-ready-to-make-using-linux-even-easier/
  • Free and Open Source Software @beehaw.org
    d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

    FEX-Emu 2308 Continues Striving To Be "The Greatest x86/x86-64 Emulator On Linux"

    www.phoronix.com /news/FEX-Emu-2308
  • Operating Systems @beehaw.org
    d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

    Systemd-Free Immutable Distro Nitrux 2.9.1 Is Out Powered by Liquorix Kernel 6.4

    9to5linux.com /systemd-free-immutable-distro-nitrux-2-9-1-is-out-powered-by-linux-kernel-6-4
  • Free and Open Source Software @beehaw.org
    d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

    Flatsweep Cleans Leftover Data from Uninstalled Flatpaks - OMG! Linux

    www.omglinux.com /flatsweep-flatpak-cleaner-app/
  • Gaming @beehaw.org
    d3Xt3r @beehaw.org

    Diablo IV has been disappointing so far