Official Microsoft controllers were absolute peak with the Xbox 360…

…but modern Microsoft Xbox controllers have absolute dogshit build quality. Just the worst, constantly breaking for no reason. I’m just done with Xbox controllers because old DualShock 4’s are cheap and quality.

Soon:

Another series worthy of discussion!

You know, you bring up a really good point, honestly.

My friend had a similar complaint about Baldurs Gate III.

“Why so much body horror and gore? When I was growing up and playing DnD, we were never exploring that kind of stuff. DnD can be so much more than just body horror and gore.” Not verbatim, but you get the idea.

As much as I love BG3, I don’t actually disagree with his sentiment at all.

There should be an opportunity for people to play similar style of games that aren’t so gory or depressing or both. Not every stealth game needs to be cyberpunk and depressing.

System Shock 2 is begging for a remake with actually functioning netcode for multiplayer way more than the original.

Bioshock would eventually iterate on this, but the RPG systems of System Shock 2 are so, so deep, and I always appreciated that you could still get attacked by enemies while trying to hack machines. It made doing things like hacking feel very dangerous. Bioshock literally pauses time for you it’s so weak by comparison.

Top-tier writeup. The original will always hold a special place in my heart but Mankind Divided was an excellent modern interpretation of similar systems of gameplay.

I never asked for this.

Oh no, just like if you were actually hired to do a red team simulation for a business! They would have strict rules of engagement and certain systems would potentially be defined as off-limits.

How terrible of Hackthebox to *checks notes… promote industry standard Red Team practices.

Just a mild burtation.

You can just assume it is every US company because it is.

This stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

CEOs talk to each other about this kind of shit and plan together.

Just like how “AI” has been shoved into fucking everything by everyone even though it is useless and makes a lot of people upset.

Expect all of them to do it so you don’t have a choice and they all did it to “stay competitive with each other.”

Making sure there isn’t another option is one hundred percent part of industry plans.

Just like how trying to replace fast food workers with automation and touch screens has been in the works since the 80’s at least. The tech is just finally cheap enough is all.

I don’t know how many times we have to keep saying this:

BECAUSE LLMS HAVE NO INTENTION OR ABILITY TO TELL TRUTH FROM FICTION SO WHEN THEY APPEAR CONFIDENT, THEY ARE BULLSHITTING EVEN WHEN THEY ARE CORRECT.

Even a bullshitter can be correct sometimes, it doesn’t make it suddenly not bullshit. Even when LLMs get it right, they’re still bullshitting.

This isn’t complicated. They don’t think. They have no concept of truth. They just fabricate sentences from previously copied sentences, there is no intention, no thought, no planning, no reflection.

The groups producing these LLMs are just sourcing the entire internet, they don’t care how much of it is lies. There seems to be very little curation going on.

Anyone who expected anything other than this outcome is an idiot who isn’t paying attention.

Having an angry Fax machine/copier is much, much easier since it’s more helpfully communica—

PC Load Letter? What the fuck does that mean?

Thanks for the kind words. Cheers.

Oi vey tell me about it.

I’ve gotten way more wary about the stuff I put in my body since I got on these cancer drugs.

Increased depression is actually a symptom of my cancer, and I had a lot of hallucinogenic mushroom caps I had stored away for a rainy day, and a friend suggested maybe that would help. Recent studies as well as our own personal experiences spoke to the idea that a good “trip” can help alleviate depression.

But my immediate reaction was… there’s basically been no studies done on the interactions between psilocybin and the drug I am taking. Literally, who the fuck knows what could happen? The reminder that I had them actually lead me to give them away because, fuck me, I’m not risking it.

Also, CBD honestly needs the same warnings as Grapefruit since it works on the same metabolic pathways and can decrease effectiveness of certain drugs.

…like my cancer drugs.

If your drugs say to avoid grapefruit… You should probably consider skipping CBD as well.

My point was that people who are likely obese are busy trying to suck down protein shakes when they probably already have enough protein. Like I said, if you’re in the USA and not explicitly vegan, you probably already get enough protein from your daily diet to build muscle.

When less than 25% of the country is a healthy weight, people don’t need to build muscle, they need to lose weight.

I am fucking fat myself, maybe that’s why I feel so strongly about this. America has a massive obesity problem and it’s tied to our eating habits (especially overly processed foods… like protein shakes) and we’re not going to find out way out of it by buying protein shakes.

The protein supplement industry alone is currently a $6.57 billion industry. Are you really going to tell me the only people buying them are that sliver of people with healthy weights?

If you’re overweight and want to lose weight, you don’t need a protein supplement. Yes, it’s more complicated than calories in/calories out but the reality is and has been 1. portion sizes in USA are out of control, 2. the vast majority of the country have weight issues not muscle issues, and 3. Excess protein doesn’t help you lose weight.

The less than 25% of the country that has a normal weight is not the source of the $6.57 billion dollar market cap of the protein supplement industry.

But sure, it’s not that fatasses are focusing on the wrong fucking things, like protein. The vast majority of Americans like to think they would pump iron but most fucking don’t and the evidence is that over 75% of us are overweight, obese, and morbidly obese.

Gyms would cease to function if all the people who paid for them actually tried to use them.

Finally, the men who suck these down are trying to look like men who suck down tons of steroids. Those results are not achievable with protein and exercise alone, thus making protein a snake oil to cover for steroid abuse. Steroid abuse is real and hiding behind this “you just need more protein” bullshit is a farce. The number of men who claimed to be gaining insane muscles while only “exercising and eating healthy” to only have it come out that they abuse the fuck out of steroids is too damn high.

See: Elon Musk’s distended gut and man-boobs from sucking down steroids but not actually putting in the work of lifting. Joe Rogan’s distended stomach is looking pretty rough these days, too.

I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping tenfold for no discernable benefit.

An extremely reasonable position to take! Because even if the increase in energy usage is negligible locally, when widespread, those small chunks of energy use add up into a much larger chunk of energy use. Especially when including transferring that over an endless number of networks.

I always talk about this in regards to automobiles and manual roll-up/down windows versus automatic windows. Sure, it’s an extremely small amount of energy to use for automatic windows on a car, but when you add up the energy used on every cars automatic windows through the life of each and every car with automatic windows and suddenly it’s no longer a small number. Very wasteful, imho.

Unless you’re vegan, you’re probably already getting more protein than you need.

Protein is needed for building muscles but most meatheads in the USA just eat all the protein and don’t do enough of the exercise.

Only about 24% of people in the US aren’t “overweight” to “obese.”

Literally almost nobody needs this fucking protein because almost fuck-nobody is exercising.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States

For the following statistics, “adult” is defined as age 20 and over. The overweight + obese percentages for the overall US population are higher reaching 39.4% in 1997, 44.5% in 2004, 56.6% in 2007, 63.8% (adults) and 17% (children) in 2008,in 2010 65.7% of American adults and 17% of American children are overweight or obese, and 63% of teenage girls become overweight by age 11. In 2013 the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that 57.6% of all American citizens were overweight or obese. The organization estimated that 3/4 of the American population would likely be overweight or obese by 2020. According to research done by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, it is estimated that around 40% of Americans are considered obese, and 18% are considered severely obese as of 2019. Severe obesity is defined as a BMI over 35 in the study. Their projections say that about half of the US population (48.9%) will be considered obese and nearly 1 in 4 (24.2%) will be considered severely obese by 2030.

What many US citizens need is portion control and regular exercise.

which, incidentally, means they use up significantly more data/storage space and cost more money

All of this is very true, but this is the only issue I really disagree with here.

I am in an era where a good quality rip of a movie can be almost 50 gigabytes by itself. That means for every terabyte of storage, I can store just 20 of movies of this size.

Don’t even get my started on television series and how big those can balloon to with the same kind of encoding.

An entire collection of FLACs, thousands of albums worth, is still less than 500 gigabytes total, in other words half a terabyte. (My personal collection anyway)

I mean, the average size of one of my FLAC albums is around 200-300 megabytes. Even with the larger “hi-res” FLAC files you’re still not getting as obscenely big as movie and television files.

Sure, it takes up more space than an MP3 or a FLAC properly encoded to CD standards (my preferred choice, for the reasons outlined above), but realistically, the amount of space it takes up compared to those is negligible when compared to other types of media.

Storage and energy to operate storage has become incredibly cheap, especially when you’re dealing with smaller files like this.

The American Dream… because you have to be asleep to believe it.