Yeah BioWare has felt like a kind of zombie studio to me for a while. They managed to coast along on Mass Effect/Dragon Age momentum for like a decade or so, but I can’t remember the last time they had a big hit game.
Plus those type of games are the ones that take quite a lot of time and resources to do well, so I can’t see that fitting in well with EA’s new “generate endless AI slop until we pay off our debts” business model.
My first thought was they’ll probably use it to generate endless slop assets for The Sims, since people seem to pick up whatever they put out for that.
Just sitting here playing the long game, waiting for EA to finally implode and get sold off for parts so we can finally get a new Command & Conquer.
I was at a barbecue on a Saturday night once when my boss called in an emergency because he thought we were being hacked. The reason being, because he was in Starbucks trying to look at our website on his phone and it wasn’t loading properly. I had to explain that:
That was a stressful job lol.
I used to have a not well known webcomic and would get death threats/“kill yourself” messages pretty regularly, so yeah for drawing a cartoon would be mine I guess! They never used to bother me especially though, I thought they were funny. I used to have a page up where I’d post the dumbest ones lol.
One thing you could look into is your router, some of them let you run a VPN directly on the router and you can choose which devices go through the VPN based on MAC address (at least that’s how mine works) so that way I get my Steam Deck going through Mullvad without installing it on the Deck.
Of course that only works when you’re on your home network though, so it’s a bit limited.
I always find that with GNOME it seems like super basic features that should be included are made as extensions instead, which wouldn’t be a huge deal except that the extensions update completely independently of GNOME and each other, with no regard for cohesiveness or compatibility. Every time I’ve run a machine with GNOME it feels like there’s always at least one extension broken at any given moment meaning there’s always something vaguely irritating going on.
Ah but that’s not how being a gamer works. When the game companies do something sleazy you have to:
Complain about it endlessly online
Buy the game anyway and play it for 500 hours, stopping occasionally to post online about how terrible it is
Buy all the DLC, complain about it being a ripoff and then leave a negative Steam review
Then start saving for the sequel, which will be nowhere near as good as the first game.
Also, the word doublespeak isn’t from Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he used the term Newspeak, meaning a sort of clipped form of language designed to limit expression of thought, and doublethink, the practice of holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time and believing both to be true, but he never used the word doublespeak.
Interestingly though, it actually predates Nineteen Eighty-Four, but nobody really knows who coined it exactly.
Ah okay. Well if you grab either of those programs I linked to it’s pretty straightforward, you pretty much just choose your model from a list and away you go. You can run them even if you don’t have a great GPU, but they’ll be slower.
That’s essentially what I do, I don’t have any accounts with ChatGPT or anything, I just run it locally off my laptop. IDK if you get better results with ChatGPT (I’d assume probably) but my local one seems fine for everything I need it for. It’s a little slow too, but who cares?
My take on it is that it’s just a tool, and as with most tools you can use it in a sensible way that’s positive, although many people choose not to. So as an example, I work in a creative field and I see a lot of people relying on it to do their creative work for them, which I don’t really agree with. What I use it for is kind of like an assistant to handle all the admin crap that usually gets in the way of doing creative stuff. So sometimes you have to write form letters, grant things etc. - basically formal stuff that wouldn’t require any creative thinking if you did it by yourself anyway, but still eats up time and brain power. I just give that stuff to the AI, make sure it sounds vaguely presentable, and send it off. I could also see a use case for it in areas where I’m weaker like marketing my stuff, maybe for at least coming up with an outline strategy of some sort, although I haven’t really tried that out yet.
Essentially, AI will do your creative stuff for you if you let it, or you can just use it to handle the day-to-day piddly crap to free yourself up to do the creative stuff yourself. It’s up to you really.
Smashing Pumpkins - Thru The Eyes Of Ruby, Bristol Academy 1996 is the ‘proper’ version of the song in my head now, the album version sounds weird lol
I played through exactly one full game, and it just felt… pointless, I guess? Like I was just clicking through turns to get to the end and none of it mattered. Then it told me I’d lost and was like “K” and then played Civ VI for a bit.
Yeah I have two without noses now, but I finally got Flesh Shaping unlocked so soon I can start pumping out replacements. Also the leader got a bionic spine, then immediately got both legs blown off in the next fight. She is costing me a lot in advanced components lol.
I’m very deep into a full Rimworld playthrough with the new DLC. Being able to build a grav ship and hop around the world has opened it up so much that I’ll probably be on this for a while yet.
Obligatory weird Rimworld storytime: I’m currently super invested in this one character who was a dirt mole kid that some colony guests just left behind. We took her in because why not, and she turned out to be a pretty good melee scrapper with a penchant for losing body parts. No worries, we have bionics, we can rebuild her. So a bionic eye, an arm and a couple of new legs later, she gets her nose shot off by a turret. At the same moment some vampires arrive and want to have a meeting in our spaceship, and offer to make someone a vampire in return. So now I’m pretty sure immortal noseless cyborg vampire girl is going to end up leading the whole colony but I really want to see where this goes. The current leader is the last OG colonist still alive, but she’s currently ruling from hospital because a lancer blew the spine right out of her body so her effectiveness is limited until I can source a new spine.
Yeah I’ve tried it and bounced off it a couple of times, but I get the sense that it’s one of those games where eventually I’ll push past the beginning part and then become obsessed with it for a while lol. Alien: Isolation was one of those too.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Poetry is hard to
I used to work in a store that was on a busy intersection, and there was a homeless guy who used to stand there all day with a sign. He was harmless and everyone kind of knew him. One day he got hit by a car on the intersection (by accident), so I called 911. I started telling them and they were like “Oh yeah we already had about 10 calls about him, don’t worry.” Then an ambulance came and got him and he was fine, he was back there like a week later.