Even earlier than that there was the killbind. Nothing beats your teammate or opponent finding you in an unfortunate or unexpected moment, taunting as you killbind shortly before they killbind themselves.

That’s why I enjoyed TF2 for such a long time. While teamwork will always give you an advantage in matches, you will nearly never find it on public matches and people just do their own thing, and occasionally see a push forming and join in to get further. It also helps that the TTK in TF2 is much longer than in other team based multiplayer games, and you spawn back into it within 10 seconds or so.

Sadly there are so few games that follow that formula of goofy fun and rather just try to make games that are “strategic” or “competitive”, which sucks majorly.

I’m not sure about the Proton thing, but yeah, Mailbox sets up PGP for you at server-level, which means they are still unencrypted on the server but will always be sent encrypted.

The initial mode is that they will try to negotiate whether PGP is supported by the other side, with you having the option to always use it for the price of the opposite side having to encrypt them.

You can even enforce it on a case by case basis by adding “secure.” To the mailbox.org domain, however I don’t know if that is also possible when using your own domain.

A big difference (for some) is that the mailbox is not fully encrypted. However I only see that as a requirement if there is an actual potential threat against you (like as a journalist).

Also, Mailbox has app passwords, so you can control which applications can access it and a simple revocation will end it. Connecting directly is not possible for security reasons.

They also offer 25 free aliases, 50 additional ones if you use your own domain. And they do make it rather easy to set up the necessary records to send via your domain. Plus throwaway addresses (which will only exist for 90 days each and can only receive emails).

My first introduction to winget as a sysadmin was horrible. Why Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to make winget reliant on the user environment still baffles me. Why on earth would they require admin rights for some commands if you need to have logged into the system once?! Even the user created for LAPS does not have that requirement!

Even getting it to run through a service on system level requires you to find the nondescript directory of the executable (which may or may not he the same on other devices!) To get basic functionality going. But even with the --ignore-unknown flag (because it is not able to determine the version of packages when run through a service) winget will refuse to update without a user environment.

Not to be a smartass, but wouldn’t the answer to the question be either ‘yes’ or ‘no’? It was the following question after all.

I’ve read a lot that this generally puts a strain on things.

If you ever consider getting back into it, maybe suggest making DM’ing a rotating role? After all, it pays off to understand the role of the DM as a player too, and premade adventures can serve as a good way to ease into the role by taking the strain of world building from budding DMs. And even then, you could still play a supportive role for them at first so they can get the hang of things.

And if your players refuse to do that, then simply ask them to look for another DM. Your role as a DM is scarce, so you have all of the bargaining power. And why should you respect players that don’t respect your role?

Were you a “forever DM”?

Well, piracy increases sales of a good game. Same as demos, though demos may misrepresent the actual gameplay if done poorly.

That is true. However, 2 things have to be considered here:

1. LLMs are easily manipulatable. So if the LLM says some advice, the person can easily spin it in a way where the LLM believes that its own advice doesn’t apply even when it does. And admitting problems in oneself exist is harder in some people.
2. LLMs can talk like a person, but will miss out on details about the other, making their advice rather boilerplate, which can be very hit or miss.

In contrast, people can overcome both hindrances. They can either try to make the other realize the issues they are denying are going on, or coerce the other to still try the advice. Generally, our gift of reading little aspects of how the other talks/behaves helps us communicate with the other a lot more than we think.

Overall, not really, since with a competent talking partner you also would get ways to improve your situation, and help with pressing matters. It might be good in the short term, but there needs to be more to be good in the long run.

My guess would be the same phenomenon that existed with ELIZA. People want to be heard, especially lonely people, and LLMs are pretty good at that, asking questions and acting supportive, by design.

This whole situation reminds me of that fact that some people hire escorts to just have someone to talk to.

Apart from the vibe-coded stuff (though I guess that was due to it being a test run rather than something solid) this is pretty neat! I don’t think anyone will really use it for competitive games (since you can’t edit the levels), but I see how that would make it much easier to do virtual walkthroughs. It’s cheap, relatively easy and uses a lot less resources, I imagine, than using classic rendering techniques. The environment itself reminds me a bit of the levels in SteamVR, where Valve digitised some locations for you to visit on your own.

I think another big problem that hampers the computer age in many places is bureaucracy and clinging to old structures.

For many companies there are checks that are enforced, simply because there is no trust in a new system, or the processes to be automated requires a major reorganisation that spans departments, and those departments might oppose such a restructuring, may it be for fear of their jobs, simply clinging to old processes or not having the capacity to carry out bigger projects.

Not only that, but a cheap PSU can also fry your other PC parts due to power surges when it breaks.

I find that move extremely funny, since it’s purely made for sensationalism and nothing else. I mean, if you hate how systems implemented age verification, then why don’t you remove its identity verification too, i.e. also optional fields for stuff like your address an e-mail that most users don’t even fill out.

There is no mechanism verifying what birth date you type in - you can type whatever date you want and systems doesn’t care.

I’d say no matter where you stand with age verification, this is the best solution to handle the situation. After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways. There is no real knowing how other systems are checking ages, and there is AFAIK no real government mandated rules on how it is verified. They could make you scan your ID’s front, back, nuclear composition and dietary preferences and give you a result that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a proper age verification procedure.

If the government wants to introduce age verification, they have to do it themselves - build an API that handles the age verification, similar to how the digital ID in Germany works, as an example. If they want proper age verification, they also have to take the blame themselves if things go wrong.

What’s up with the sink plug thing?

Also, if anyone wants to learn writing code, they should first ask themselves what engine they want to use. C# and python seem to be the most sensible stuff. If someone’s interested in Godot, then I can recommend the free course by GDQuest. It does teach some few basics for scripting, and their paid courses are very good thanks to their inbuilt practices and encouragement for experimentation. It does cost quite a bit and is still in Beta however.

If understanding the logic of programming is a struggle, then Scratch is a great tool for understanding it.