I finally got around to restarting God of War. I played the first few hours on PS4 a while back, and was overwhelmed, felt like it threw too much at me all at once, and I couldn’t be bothered to learn all the combat and mechanics. I got it for PC and started fresh, took it slow and used exploration to learn all I could, and shit, now I get it, this game is a masterpiece. It looks gorgeous in 4K, and the combat is loads of fun. And quite possibly my favorite thing is getting to hear Teal’c again (I freaking love Christopher Judge).

Now I just need to play something mindless to fill the next few weeks before Ragnarok releases on PC.

My parents used to use AAA TripTiks to plan our trips. Granted this was decades ago in the olden days of paper maps, so I have no idea how good they still are, but apparently they still exist. Worth checking out.

I did a cross-country move about 8 years ago, and just planned each leg of the trip separately. I chose where I wanted to sleep, planned the route to get there, and then did the same for the next leg. There’s really no wrong way to do it as long as you connect the dots and go the way you want to.

Cool, if you have nothing to say, then please don’t say anything.

FYI this is a right wing Christian news site that, according to their About Us page, was founded in 2004, in response to Pope John Paul II’s call for a “New Evangelization."

I appreciate the advice. My PS4 is just a lowly slim, not a Pro, so it is definitely showing its age. But I’ll for sure take this into account, thanks!

I got a ton of play out of my PS4 at the height of the pandemic, and have been considering a PS5 for a while now, but I just didn’t think it was worth it. I’m probably in the minority, but I think I would probably buy this, if the spec bump was significant enough. I also really hope they release it in black. It’s silly, but the white 90’s router is so so ugly, and frankly one of the reasons I’ve stayed away. If they charge more than $600 though, it’ll be a hard no. Don’t fuck this up Sony.

Whoa that was pretty eye-opening, thanks for sharing. I’ve been frustrated by the seemingly widespread blind trust of these systems, this really helps explain why they should not be trusted.

It’s a pretty strong indictment that the system can express the fact that it shouldn’t be trusted, but can’t do anything about it, even in the same session, but especially across sessions. Until and unless the devs figure out a way to be transparent and fix these massive problems, I’m still staying far away from LLMs.

Walking on the ground was hard enough, now they want us to walk on the beach??

Okay I’m in.

I’m no dev, so I can’t speak to the codebase or mod tools, but I honestly don’t think it’s going to get much better than this right now. Lemmy has its issues for sure, but the community has been surprisingly stable, with little growth spurts here and there, and more healthy engagement than I expected. I get frustrated every so often, and there are accounts that make me want to scream, but that’s normal in any place where strangers interact.

I’m curious what other folks have to say, because if there’s a better alternative that I haven’t heard of, then I’m all in, but it’s been pretty hard to keep Lemmy as active as it is. It sounds like you might be a dev? If so, would you be willing to build the tools you want to see for the services you mentioned? It’d be awesome if folks with skills worked to improve existing open source stuff like Lemmy rather than building whole new ones that don’t have any active communities.

I’m about to have this issue in about 10 hours. Are you older than 30? Cuz I really started feeling the pain after 30. I recently bought an awesome inflatable pillow that keeps my head upright, so I can maybe possibly sleep instead of just fidgeting and suffering through the whole flight. I feel your pain, internet stranger.

Also, constipation. It’s so hard to shit the day after flying. Most people don’t seem to have this issue.

It’s also one of the most breathtakingly beautiful buildings in the world. I dare anyone with eyes to stand under the oculus when the sun shines through and not be overwhelmed by its beauty.

The fact that it’s standing intact, pretty much exactly the way it was when it was built by the Romans, is incredibly impressive. They knew how to concrete.

That was a super interesting read, thanks for sharing!

Voyager has this, it’s a super useful feature.

Unfortunately you can’t just “filter” out lands with cultural heritage significance, first you have to conduct a survey to determine where they are.

a land survey funded by the developer, Avangrid Renewables, had omitted more than a dozen sites of archaeological or cultural significance on the public parcel included in the project area. (Emphasis mine)

The developer essentially lied on a state form by omitting more than a dozen sites. This pause is good, and could have been avoided if the developer had not been disingenuous, greedy, and disrespectful of the indigenous community.

That article really rubbed me the wrong way. It was a bunch of marketing people basically saying “privacy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be because it doesn’t make poor people rich” and “you’ll ruin the ability of small businesses to thrive if you don’t allow them to base their businesses on intrusive mass surveillance.”

The arrogance is astounding. If you can’t start a business without invading my privacy, you should rethink your business model. Just because surveillance marketing makes finding customers easier, doesn’t make it right. This part in particular is absurd:

Privacy can be, in some sense, a problem of the privileged. We know of no rigorous study showing that toughened digital marketing privacy policies produced tangible economic benefits for anyone, let alone lower-income consumers.

No, privacy is a problem for all of us, not just the privileged. To suggest otherwise is a deflection. It’s not always just about economics, even the working class have other things we value.

Wow, props to Castellucci for being a stand up person and not using their discovery to control or mess with tens of thousands of people’s power supply. And props to GivEnergy for not turning around and suing them after they reported finding the issue.

This could have gone badly in either direction, but we lucked out that this Castellucci seems to be an excellent and conscientious citizen.

This is heartbreaking, but in a backwards way it makes me feel a little better about getting these kinds of texts. Now, instead of automatically getting pissed off that some rando is trying to scam me, I’ll feel sympathy knowing that the person sending the texts is more likely a victim themselves. There’s still very little I can personally do about it, but at least now we know, that in some instances like this, someone doing something shitty might only be doing it because they’ve been forced. That makes a difference (selfishly at least), but this whole situation is still just awful.

Haven’t we always known this? It’s the same concept as a Stingray device, which is used to spy on people because their devices connect to it automatically, assuming it’s a normal cell tower. People don’t know what tower they’re connected to, so if you connect to a “fake” or exploited tower, you’ve basically handed over the keys. This is essentially the same thing, but on a 5g network, which is presumably made up of even more nodes/towers.

The justice system doesn’t apply to corporations, even though they’re people. And since the corporations are run by billionaires, the most peopliest people there are, the justice system definitely doesn’t apply to them. Money = speech, and these corporations have the most money, therefore they get the most speech, meaning they have more rights than us normal people, and can get away with breaking the same laws that would get any of us thrown in jail.

/s but not really…

We’re doomed.

I just finished Ghost of Tsushima. It was a beautiful game with really fun combat, and a pretty solid storyline. Exploration was excellent, despite the rewards being a bit underwhelming, but it was one of those rare games where I wanted to explore every corner of the map. I loved the variety of the map, every region genuinely felt unique and gorgeous for its own reasons. It was also the perfect length. I did alllll of the side quests, so the main plot ended up feeling just right, not too long, definitely not too short. Highly recommended.