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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • When I see articles like this and climate problems in general it just screams to me how fucked we are. My only hope is that I die before things get really bad because I don’t believe that capitalism will let our government change the status quo. They’ll push for new desalination techniques they can charge a pretty penny for and kick the can down the road further before allowing regulations and serious action to take place.

    Yes this is a defeatist attitude because honestly I feel pretty defeated and I don’t see a way things will get better in the current political climate.


  • Maybe it’s different for the upper management types, but for me I am easily 3x more productive at home in < 6 hours than I ever was at 8+ hours in the office.

    There are soo many distractions in the office environment we had (cubicle farm). People chatting behind me, constant noise, people coming up to my desk throughout the day to ask me something and disrupt my entire workflow.

    I work in my quiet home with headphones on listening to music. When people need something from me they ping me in Teams or send an email and I get to choose when to stop my work to respond. And when I really need to focus I can throw on Do Not Disturb mode. In the office “Do Not Disturb” was me booking a conference room for myself to work in silence.



  • This is my best summary, it is long so sorry about that but there’s a lot to it.

    Linus is probably the largest tech youtuber there is.

    He’s been rapidly expanding his company, building out a full lab that is trying to rigorously test products (mostly in an automated way) so that consumers can have confidence that a $50 power supply isn’t going to shit the bed, or that this GPU will get you the same performance in these games at this resolution so save your money, etc.

    The initial controversy is that they have issue with the automated testing where results were often super wrong and that slipped it’s way to multiple videos and instead of taking the videos down and correcting them, they left them up and just had a little text graphic over the video with the correction. Many youtubers do that kind of post video correction, but LTT does it a lot. Additionally they tested an $800 prototype watercooler on a 4090 when it was built only for a 3090ti which pretty much invalidates the entire test, but they still gave a conclusion that the watercooler sucked and was a bad product. That could tank that company. They did not bother re-testing with the proper GPU because Linus felt no one should buy an $800 watercooler block anyway. Additionally(x2) they reviewed a mouse and said it was terrible because the glide was really bad. Turns out there were protective stickers on the mouse feet that needed to be removed. They took multiple days to correct the video and by that point the damage was done.

    The second controversy is around a Madison (former employee) where she received tons of verbal abuse, degradation, from various LMG employees/management and some even sexual harassment. There was a lot of hand-waving of her raising those complaints as “causing drama” and to “calm your tits” and other various things. She suffered a lot mentally from it and even “cut her own leg” just to go to the ER to have a day off. Her write up is pretty long and fairly brutal.

    I think a large part of the issue is everyone is incredibly overworked at that company and crunching every day to release as much content as possible which leads to a fuck ton of errors, very heated and emotionally charged employees and lack of oversight over serious issues. Couple that with rapid expansion of employees without a functional HR (I think someone was hired recently) and the vast majority of people effectively “learning on the job” how to be a manager, director, leader, etc. and it’s just an explosion waiting to happen. And it has exploded quite spectacularly.

    I’ll be curious to see if they turn it around and also what comes from the outside investigation.


  • (all the copy and paste rule of 3 quests to find three MacGuffins then SAM will figure out how to find a location for another fight).

    This has been my biggest complaint as I’ve been going through ME:A for the first time. I have limited time/energy to play so jumping into ME:A for 2ish hours and basically accomplish nothing really hurts my motivation for the next play session.

    When I first started playing it, I was really enjoying the game. It was about the 3rd planet where I had to go to 3 places to unlock a vault to do a thing that the progression loop really started to weigh me down.

    The original trilogy was brilliant for me. Get in, do a couple of missions (each one progressing the story a little more) maybe get sucked into a couple more missions and go to bed excited for the next session. But ME:A is just a slog. I’m doing various loyalty missions which is a little better, but still seems to require a lot of go here, here, and here and shoot some guys and then go into here to finish up.




  • I just started the show earlier this week and just finished season one. I really like it!

    It brings back some of the flavor of TNG where it’s more about exploration and diplomacy, but keeps some of the “modernness” of the Star Trek movies. Graphics, set design, wardrobe are all fantastic. I love the crew, everyone feels unique and authentic. It’s been a lot of fun.

    I don’t have that “omg I need to watch the next episode” thing which IMO is a good thing because I can watch a couple episodes and then go to bed at a reasonable time. The episodes don’t leave you on cliffhangers, each one wraps up nicely.


  • Final Fantasy 7 when Aeries dies. I was a teen then and it was the first RPG I ever played and the first time I experienced a main character just die and is gone from the game.

    I don’t think I experienced anything like that again until maybe Destiny 2 when Cayde died. Little different with that though as they should his death in a live stream about the launch of that DLC. Had a different impact but had to be done since the entire premise of that DLC was getting revenge so couldn’t hide it from the promo materials.


  • Read through the post, OP mentioned a few times that this isn’t about a phone war. It’s just one persons experience going from Android to iPhone; what worked well and what didn’t.

    I think a lot of folks have picked an ecosystem and never strayed from it; seeing a post like this helps fill the gaps of their curiosity. Being exposed to other people’s experiences and experience a change yourself is a good thing.

    At the end of the day phones are just tools to help you go about your day to day. We don’t have to foam at the mouth over a discussion like this. iPhones are very good devices and have great synergy with other Apple devices and apps. Android is a very customizable experience which has many great phones at very good prices. You can’t go wrong with either IMO.




  • Yeah it was a headache for me in the past too, but the latest Steam Big Picture which behaves more like a Steamdeck has made it pretty easy. Since it launches right away, I can easily launch and quit steam games with 0 issue and when I’m done I used big picture to just shut the PC down.

    One issue I found was if I let the PC sleep, it always brings up the login screen on wake so I just shut it down everytime. NVME’s are so fast the boot up is whatevs. Non-steam games are also a little painful as sometimes it won’t switch active windows, or I have to login or something.

    I only use this machine for games. Like you said, HTPC was a pain. I have a different server that I have Plex setup on and I use Apple TV’s / Roku’s for streaming.


  • I wouldn’t buy any consoles, I would build (though you can buy) a really powerful gaming PC to plug up to my 4k TV. I’ve actually recently done just that and it works amazingly well.

    Things to make it a good experience:

    1. Make sure you have a 4k TV with HDMI 2.1 for 120hz gaming
    2. Configure Windows to bypass the login screen on boot
    3. Configure Steam to launch in Big Picture mode on startup
    4. Buy an Xbox Controller and the little dongle for it (it works better than just bluetooth)
    5. Buy a small wireless keyboard with built in trackpad for the odd occasion you need to use a mouse and keyboard (looking at you EA Play).

    With that, you’ve got the best console ever. Huge backlog of games, games on steep discounts, a machine that has a much better experience outputting to a 4k TV than something like a Steamdeck or a console. I’ve tried the Steamdeck to a 4k TV and the quality was pretty awful; 720p does not upscale to 4k well at all. And if you wanted to, you could set it up with emulators using retroarch for any games you are missing.

    My TVPC specs:

    1. Ryzen 7800x
    2. 32GB DDR5-6000
    3. 2TB NVME SSD
    4. RTX 4080
    5. Fractal Design Torrent Nano

    I picked that case specifically for the huge 180mm fan in the front, the fact it can fit a massive cooler like the Peerless Assassin and the GPU gets fresh air from the bottom. It’s not the smallest case, but it stays cool and super quiet.



  • I agree with that for most people. I’m a bit of a weirdo who has a PC and Xbox Series X. I bought the X purely so I can play Destiny from my recliner chair on days where I just can’t sit at my desk anymore. It (along with GamePass) has also benefited my wife immensely. She’s played so many games on GamePass on the Xbox, it’s great.

    Most recently I tried to make my PC hybrid between desk and TV and the experience was so frustratingly bad. Trying to send audio to 2 different places was bad (even with Voicemeter) and then the monitors kept getting all screwed up because of the TV being sometimes seen and sometimes not. It was a terrible experience. Eventually I said screw it and built a completely dedicated PC for my tv couch gaming and it honestly works pretty damn great.