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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)BA
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648
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2 yr. ago

  • Wow, I'm a huge fan of Terry Pratchett. What a lovely story - I didn't realise he was a such a big fan of oblivion. Also the makers of that mod are very kind to have adapted the mod in ways that would help him enjoy the game despite his Alzheimer's.

  • I wanted to stay in the EU but I don't want to rejoin.

    Just look at whats going on in Hungary where Viktor Orban is essentially a dictator, and is holding back the EU on it's Ukraine response. Look at Poland where it skirted past descent into a right wing nightmare, and even now the leftwing government are struggling at unpicking the damage. Look at the Czech Republic where it looks very likely a right wing populist government is going to take power - they're also against Ukraine. And look at France, which is in political turmoil internally - right winger Le Pen has a good chance of being the next french president unless the centre and left can unite around an alternative.

    The EU is powerless to deal with Orban, was powerless to deal with Poland as the right wing government tried to dismantle their democracy and institutions. We've already seen what's happening in the US play out in Europe - twice! And the EU could do nothing.

    We're better off outside the EU at the moment. I never wanted to leave, but the UK is lucky to be outside the EU as it gives us a degree of flexibility and freedom to deal with the current crisis. We don't need to be distracted by the internal problems of the EU and it's rogue member states. Instead we're working directly with the countries that want to work with us like France and Germany, and not having to deal with the countries that don't like Hungary.

    I wish the EU the best - I want it to succeed but ultimately it has a serious problem with how you get things done when you have countries inside holding back the EU from pursuing it's best interests. The EU leaders talk big about grand plans and high ideals including now over defence and Ukraine, but when it comes to getting things done it only takes 1 country's veto and there is paralysis or weak compromises. The EU needs to reform and become an actual democratic superstate but it won't happen because again it only takes 1 country to veto progress. It's clear Hungary will be holding the EU back when it comes to Putin for the foreseeable future. And maybe soon so will the Czech republic. And what happens in the EU if Le Pen is president of France?

    No thanks.

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  • In fairness to the register they also ridicule moving to a dedicatdd ERP in the same article.

    You're r absolutely right there is nothing wrong with Excel. Its powerful software and ultimately it cones down to human and organisational processes about whether its being used to its best or not. You can also have the most expensive top end dedicated ERP in the world and still be a total mess. Similarly business used to run on pen and paper and could be highly efficient.

    Software is just a tool, and organisation go wrong when they think it alone is the solution to their problems.

    Also I doubt Health NZ overspend has anything whatsoever to do with excel. Instead it'll be due to rising demand, and inflationary pressures on public finances. We have the exact problems here in the UK with the NHS just scaled up to a £182bn.

  • Its interesting - the article has taken one view of this as the the target being Palestinian children.

    However reading this, the target actually seems to he the "prank" victims. Young people are goading older israelis into showing how angry, biased and racist they are when asked to help Palestinian children, and then sharing that and laughing at them?

    It feels like Israeli children are mocking Israeli adults. Its a bit crass but the targets aren't really Palestinian children. If anything its showing just how racist Israeli adults are.

    Of course there is also the disturbing element of Israeli children seeing this all as just a joke, and not seeming to care about what this means about their parents and the country they live in. To see people get so viscerally angry when asked to help starving children is shocking yet I don't think the Israeli youth seem atnall disrtubed by how hateful the people they're talking to really are.

  • One thing Phil Spencer does not seem to care about is emulation. There are already Xbox and PlayStation emulators that allow access to more of both platforms back catalogues than any of the current generation consoles are capable of..

    Xbox could build cloud based emulators off the open source tools already available and make their entire Xbox back catalogue accessible to current users to stream. They could help improve the tools to ensure greater and greater compatibility for titles and then it would be there forever.

    The reason it doesn't happen is money. They dont see money in game preservation so they dont bother beyond a few big name nostalgia hits. Muse AI isn't about game preservation, its about game development - they're just pissing around with game preservation to feed it content as a punt on the future for it somehow making game development cheaper.

  • AI can make Shakespeare BETTER! Like it can put it in modern text speak, and shorten it down to fit in a 30 second tiktok, plus give space for ad breaks and temu product placement. AI will help enhance user engagement with Shakespeare and also leverage new monetisation options and cross platform synergies.

    All we have to do is let people copyright AI made content because ultimately it wasn't Shakespeare that did the hard work, it was the AI tech Bros who transformed it into a modern content meme and raised 3rd quarter profits for everyone!

  • Yeah, instead game preservation is being solved by abandonware and copyright infringement.

    Legal open source software is doing the heavy lifting, and then torrenting is sharing by he files. But there is a huge risk as there is no safety net to preserve the niche and unpopular games.

    The game publishers and broken copyright laws are blocks to preservation but fortunately people are just doing it anyway. And the more the big companies push against it (including targeting emulation systems for current systems) the more they push it underground and out of any control they might have had. Typical greed and stupidity.

  • The article totally misses the big intervening step between Skyrim/old Bioware and the failure of Starfield/Dragon Age: CDProjectRED.

    While those studios largely just made "more of the same", CDPR made Witcher 3 and then Cyberpunk 2077. Both games are way better narrative experiences and pushed RPG forward. Starfield looks very dated in comparison to both, and Dragon Age failed to capture to magic. Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 are successes because they also bring strong narratives and emotional connections to the stories.

    Starfield would have been huge if it had been released soon after Skyrim. But now it just looks old fashioned, and I think the "wide as an ocean, as deep as a puddle" analogy is good for Starfield. Meanwhile Witcher 3 - which is 10 years old! - has quests and storylines with choices and emotional impact. BG3 and KC:D2 are heirs to Witcher 3.

  • The circumstances for a bird flu pandemic are already shockingly perfect in the US and they get worse every day.

    Bird flu is running free in US farms, with limited attempts to stop it. The chances of it moving in to humans is already very high in fhe US. And the CDC is barely monitoring this anymore, the US has left WHO and now the US is abandoning flu vaccines.

    The US is a perfect incubator for a major flu pandemic. It will be random luck as to how deadly a coming flu pandemic will be, but its been given the best chance to develop and spread. This is increasingly scary.

  • This started in the UK in the 90s with a research paper by Andrew Wakefield linking MMR (measle mumps rubella) vaccines to autism. It was trash research but it for published in the Lancet (a major international journal) before being retracted once other doctors pointed out the massive flaws in the research.

    There was and is no evidence of causation - autism happens to be diagnosed usually after childhood vaccines are conpleted but thats because vaccines are mostly in young ages and it takes a while for autism to be diagnosable as its only obvious once children reach a certain age when the socialization aspects of the diseases become more obviously.

    However despite it being trash research and eventually being withdrawn, the damage was done. Enough parents of children with autism wanted to believe that this disease was inflicted upon them and have someone to blame rather than accept it is largely genetic and bad luck. A perhaps understandable feeling but that gave an opening for conspiracy theorists to blame the government for a "cover up" even though all the counter evidence and push pack is evidence based and freely unavailable.

    Andrew Wakefield eventually got struck off the UK medical register - he was found to have had undisclosed financial interests that would make him millions in selling bogus test kits. The real conspiracy was his but Hes managed to move to the US and make a career as a "victim" and "outsider" to the pharmacy industry.

    This whole vaccine conspiracy has been taken up with the US right wing and religious groups. Its a perfect conspiracy for them as it plays into the ideas of the US federal "forcing" then to do things against their will. In this case vaccinating children (which depends on a majority of children getting vaccinated to protect the whole population - herd immunity) and is used as an example of "socialism" vs their preferred extreme individualism. They already rail against being told they cannot indoctrinate children by lying about science in schools (trying to suppress evolution teaching etc) or use the states infrastructure to discriminate against groups they disagree with such as gay or trans people, or be downright racist asis often seen throughout the bible belt.

    So the vaccine conspiracy theory is basically one of many tools used by the right wing and religious allies to rail against supposed state interference in their lives. Instead most people who believe in this nonsense are either extremely ignorant and easily manipulated or deliberately using the nonsense to further their own goals. So some of these people are highly intelligent and don't care whether this is true or false - only that it aligns with their world view and goals so they dont challenge it. Some will even know its all bullshit and go along with it to further their own goals.

    The covid vaccines has supercharged this debate. The roll out of vaccines with massively reduced testing and safety steps to try and control the pandemic, and then the side effects seen has all helped fuel this conspiracy and grow it within the right wing echo chamber.

    There is no evidence whatsoever that vaccination causes autism. However parents are refusing to have their children vaccinated with MMR and now you have outbreaks of diseases like Measles in the US. People will die, people will become infetile - all from a disease that is easily prevented by a vaccine.

    Tl:dr: The vaccine conspiracy is a right wing aligned nonsense started in the 90s andnuper charged by covid, and is a sign of the extremely polarised and disinformation heavy nature of right wing US politics (and is seen in other western countries if you dig into it even if fringe stuff)

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  • This looks like a good build.

    A couple pf considerations; which really come down to your budget and future plans.

    The Ryzen 7700 X is a good value per £ spent, and a good chip. But if your budget allows then £140 more gets the Ryzen 9 7950X, which has twice the threads at 16, better specs generally and nearly double the bench marking scores. Obviously prices vary in different regions but I'm seeing the 7700 X at £330 and the 7950X at £470. For 40% more you'd get about 100% more power. Those sorts of things are worth considering when you build - a higher budget now may save you money longer term as you may not need to upgrade for longer and youre already sinking the £330 in which you wouldn't get back when you upgrade.

    However you would also need to think about CPU cooling and may end up spending more on a fan too. But fans are generally cheaper and if youre already getting a good fan it'd be moot. Do get a fan; I dont think the 7700 X cones with one and generally stock fansnwith CPUs are OK but not the best for high performance use like gaming.

    For graphica the RX 7900 GRE is a slightly better AMD graphics card. Its about 11% more powerful. I'm seeing t at £560 versus £520 for the 7800 XT. About 7% more expensive. 11% is a more marginal boost but again might be worth it. I'd definitely go with AMD at that price range - Nvidia 4070 is similar performance to the 7900 GRE but I'm seeing the 4070 as more expensive and Nvidia drivers are not as good on linux.

    Thats not to say the drivers dont work - I do have a 3070 on Linux and I have a good experience gaming. The problems are ive had bad driver updates ive had to roll back, and I have problems with Wayland so use X11.

    However if money were not a limit, the top end cards are Nvidia and you'd still get your gaming power from them on linux. Its just frustrating and annoying when drivers lag Windows, or have buggy updates. In terms of value for money and Linux, the AMD RX 7900 GRE is the better buy.

    (Edit: worth saying too for single player gaming the ones youre playing are the ones that make good use of ultra high end graphics - so for example Witcher 4 is going to making use of top end graphics in the years ahead. GTA VI too. Not sure that justifies the cost of high end cards though - they are rediculousl overpowered and overpriced fr current uses)

    Last thing, again coming down to budget vs future proofing. 32gb of ram is good but maybe worth getting 64gb if you can afford it to future proof. However if sticking with 32gb get a brand and combination you'd hopefully he able to buy more of down the line. Its not a good idea to mix ram sticks so you could get 2 16gb sticks now, and then another two 16gb sticks in the future - so make sure its a decent brand like Corsair that will still sell in 3-5 years. However if you get 64gb you might be OK for 5 and maybe even 10 years.

    RAM is also always one of the cheapest and first and easiest ways to boost performance in a systemif you had to pick just 1 item to boost. (Edit: but in your case 32gb is already top end so you probably wouldn't notice the 64gb unless you have some very memory intensive scenarios. I do have 64gb - which I do use for Cities Skylines as I load so many mods. So 64gb can still be a good buy if you'd use it)

    Edit 2: also get a 4k gaming monitor because with the specs youre considering you'd be playing at 4k. I play at 4k with high and ultra settings still on my 3070, and that's less powerful than what youre buying.

  • Well, Europe needs to grow a pair and tell Trump to fuck off. We need to accept that he is leaving Nato, and European countries need to take it over or set up a new organisation. He can make any deal he likes with Russia; Europe and Ukraine can just tell him no and show him the true limits of his power. He cannot dictate to Europe and he is not our president.

  • Conservative commentators criticized the portrayal as outdated and offensive, calling it an unfair caricature of Trump voters.

    Who cares? Time to stop giving a crap about racists and biggots feelings. What a bunch of snowflakes.

  • Neither of these systems are powerful, and they're also running Intel integrated GPUs which are frankly generally poor.

    If you want to game with Proton, then the device still needs to be able run the game well if it had Windows installed.

    As a general very rough rule, most games will work with proton if other games work with proton on your system. Its basically a compatibility layer between the game and your linux PC - if Proton can communicate well with your graphics card and CPU, and it has the right specs, it should just work - proton does the heavy lifting. But if no 3D games are running then most of them wont.

    When it doesn't work, the first place to look is your drivers and hardware. There are then certainly lots of caveats for specific games which may behave peculiarly with certain hardware and needs adjusting but I find that is the exception rather than the norm. Start with your drivers and hardware.

  • Most services are forced to carry DRM only versions of Ebooks by the book publishers. But there are ways of legally removing the DRM - it's a faff but doable. I buy epubs and don't use Kindle (haven't for a long time) as it's much harder to remove the DRM and actually own your books.

    But way I look at it - if I bought the Kindle version of a book, I can just download a DRM free version by sailing the seas. Fuck Amazon.