sailsperson

Starfield is a classic case of some misleading marketing on purpose, and, well, it just falls into the perpetually doomed category of games/media that will always suffer from extremely high expectations: sci-fi/space/cyberpunk. The imagination wanders especially far with games like these, and there’s little to none us, the consumers, and they, the devs and publishers, can ever do about it.

That being said, you’re right in not praising the game. It’s a niche fun in my opinion, and only shines if you take it for what it is, but not for what it seemed to have been marketed as.

TL;DR Stafield is a Bethesda game through and through, but with a coating some Microsoft PG-13 “play it safe” attitude.

That’s what I was going to suggest as well. Basically, the planets and whatever is on the could benefit from a greater degree of procedural generation, even if as trivial as variable room layouts, but a deeper system (variable objects, contents, colors, designs based on the module manufacturer like with ship habs, etc.) would greatly remedy the repetitiveness, as with the current system, you’ve basically seen all the POIs or the type once you’ve seen one of them.

Planet surface is nice, though, because I agree with Bethesda’s idea of barren and deserted planets being much more prevalent than those that support any kind of life or even atmosphere. Elevation and scenery changes are also fine by me.

But still, POIs are oddly repetitive, even if somewhat numerous. They definitely should’ve gone for the more roguelike approach or something and use more proc gen with these.

Microsoft will likely do fuck all and have us all rely on third-party solutions.

If you were a faceless algorithm

There are people behind algorithms. They don’t exist for the sole purpose of gathering the data for the sake of it - the data is later accessed and processed by people.

I’m giving my address and information to plenty of companies I get services from.

And how is that different from giving any of information to me? I’m just trying to gather some statistics here, nothing more.

Those false equivalences are why people don’t take you seriously.

Is this why Zuckerberg went to trial and the EU is preventing apps and services whose sole purpose is to hoover up some data about you to become available in its domain?

If you don’t mind such things one bit, would you mind sharing with all of here all of the following:

• your physical address (preferably in the format that would let anyone of us send you whatever we desire)
• your age
• your full legal name
• your phone number that you use most often
• your school
• your work (its address, your title, company, etc)
• your income
• your expenses
• the stores you go to and what for, also when and how often
• your hometown
• your pet names
• your mother’s maiden name
• your bank of choice
• what tech you own in detail
• your schedule
• your search history
• your browser bookmarks

And many other things, too. Somehow I doubt you’d ever do that, but you’re fine trusting this kind of data to be handed away to many corporations for absolutely no benefit on your end. They’ll just sell it for cash money, only to be bought by con-artsists to try and scam you out of something later.

I mean being a contempt consumer is one thing, but defending some entities hoarding more data about you than your entire family knows is just delusional. Especially given the fact that you are most likely more careful with your data in other circumstances, like talking to strangers or using the Internet for at least some things, but then you defend careless and irresponsible handling of your data when it comes to what, mobile apps?

You should really learn more on the topic.

Also, Zuck can point to us feddies not wanting to federate with him, and say “see? Interoperability is pointless, even the geeks don’t want it”. Which is oddly accurate…

I think the easiest counter-argument here is healthy disagreement.

Being exposed to multiple opinions is undoubtedly important and is far, far better for us all in the long run than only limiting ourselves to only those opinions and views we already share or at least like, but having an option to wall somebody off on an Internet platform has its benefits, too, like not actually wasting your time in endless and fruitless arguments. As great as it would for everyone to be able to have a healthy and productive conversation about the differences in their views, it simply isn’t wise to honestly expect that from everyone.

Besides, having two opposing ideas communicate on the same platform is not what the fediverse is for - not exclusively for sure. It’s the freedom to self-host and self-regulate places dedicated to specific things to various degrees: lemmy.world, for instance, is wide and large and encompasses many things at once, and has an option to federate and communicate with smaller, more niche communities and vise versa, while letting the users open a single account with either.

Otherwise it’s just the old Facebook formula of encouraging opposing views to constantly clash for the sake of engagement. That’s just not real, not healthy, and only exists for the purpose of being some sort of KPI in a corporation perpetually hungry for money and influence. So yeah, we don’t want that.

YMusic is great Android app, too. It’s mostly intended for being able to properly use your phone when you want to focus on the audio, i.e. you can freely disable the screen, browse other apps, set timers, tweak the built-in equalizer, that kinda stuff, but it is perfectly functional and complete video player for YouTube as well.

And it doesn’t roll YouTube ads.

As far as I know, it’s not entirely about some purism ideal they have in mind - the difference between the two nvidia camps on Linux is the functionality you gain with both drivers, and the proprietary driver is simply more restrictive, so, yeah, I agree that they have a point.

This is the reason I know very well that my next GPU is going to be an AMD one (given that their hardware has proper open source source by that time, that is). I bought by GPU back in 2017 or 2018, I think, a couple of years before using Linux and even considering it - had I known that today’s me was going to run LInux, I would’ve gone for an AMD GPU right away.

Even skipping the Nvidia driver debates, the AMD hardware has been a much more consistent and pleasant experience for me on Linux overall across several AMD-based laptops that I have installed Linux on. While I did manage to get things going on my desktop that has an Nvidia GPU, it definitely caused me more headache than I expected.

Here’s my config (no hardware):

• OS: Arch
• Kernel: linux-zen
• Window Manager: i3-gaps
• Compositor: picom

I’ve been running this for several years now across multiple PCs, all with different hardware, including Nvidia and AMD for graphics, and Intel and AMD for CPU - and it’s been working really well for me right up until recently.

After this paragraph, I will talk about the issues I’ve exeprienced as a gamer using my particular config. Please note that it’s just a couple of minor issues, and the rest of the experience has been more than wonderful, convenient, functional, and beloved, and I do recommed Arch as a gaming setup as someone who’s been running it to play games for several years in a row.

The most recent Steam Next Fest (June 2023) has revealed several demos that behaved like they launched, i.e. Steam changed my status to “in-game”, changed the Start button in library, updated the playtime properly, etc., yet the game did not, in fact launch at all. I managed to play the affected demos when I switched to the KDE Plasma desktop environment on the same PC… and back on the same config after that as well.

I would consider that a one-time error that was gone by, essentially, reloading the X server, but there’s been another consistent issue that I have only managed to observe in this i3+picom config. Ever since Steam’s most recent UI beta, the floating elements, such as the buttons that let you install the game’s demo, wishlist it, or navigate the store by the tags applied to the same game, all of which appear when you’re hovering your mouse pointer over the game’s thumbnail in Steam, are basically ignored; when clicking any of them, the click registers on the element that is supposed to be underneath the element you’re actually trying to click: for example, if you’re hovering your mouse pointer over a game and want to click the green wide “Install Demo” button, which is floating over another game’s thumbnail, you’ll click that thumbnail instead and open its Steam page. This particular issue persists between full PC reboots, X server restarts, i3/picom restarts, etc., and never occured in XFCE or KDE Plasma.

As I haven’t been using any of the store features in Steam prior to the June’s Steam Next Fest, I failed to notice any of the above, but now, I can’t deny that it’s been annoying. I really like my current configuration for everything I’m doing at my PCs: it’s great for my work, it’s even great for my gaming, it’s great for my leasure, and I don’t want to ditch it, because I have already tried many other tiling window managers, and i3-gaps is the one that stuck with me the most.

Now, I know there’s sway, which is supposed to be a drop-in alternative, i.e. I can use my i3 config with it no problem, but sway uses the Wayland compositor, so I can’t run it as easily: I’ll have to set up the SDDM display manager instead of the dead-simple lightdm in order to keep the convenient multi-user setup I have, and probably sacrifice some of the performance my GTX 1080 has been giving with the proprietary drivers (I know, disgusting, but it has worked the best for my hardware as compared to the nouveau, unfortunately). I guess it’s just time for me to tinker again.