Yeah, I've been thinking of getting one, but I don't really need a new computer.
I already have the Clockwork Pi handheld, but it's obviously in a very different category from a Steam Deck. It runs on a modified Raspbian.
]]>At home I was running some Windows, Linux (I think Ubuntu), and FreeBSD at the time. I knew their annoyances, and wanted something new.
Now at home I have W10 and various Linux boxes, and iOS. Everything sucks, yes, it's just picking the ones that suck the least, for me. (Not sure what the game consoles and such things have but I don't need to know their OSes to know they suck...)
]]>So which OS is fine with you? Is only MS the problem, or are there others?
Even I'm not paranoid enough to build my own internet shared disk (and that would be kind of paranoia-inducing, considering that having a file server accessible from the public internet is kind of a nice target for all kinds of malcontents...). So I'd be happy to hear suitable options.
]]>I just want to point out that air traffic, especially for short trips, has much of the same problem. The planes are fast, yes, but getting to the airport and to the tarmac is quite an effort, and then it's the same on the other end.
For rail, in Finland there're now plans to reduce the train travel time from Helsinki to Turku to one hour. This would mean new track and equipment and of course would cost a lot. The travel time is now a bit less than two hours, according to the schedules. There are many people who don't understand why it's worth that much to reduce the already short travel time.
]]>Same in the rest of Europe.
Yeah, same in Finland. I live in the second-largest city in Finland, in a suburb (which is again different from the various suburbs elsewhere). I have good public transport and we don't have a car. I can basically walk or take the various public transports to get where I want, and bike when it's warm enough (and it is possible to bike throughout the year, I just don't like it).
Still, go a bit further away and it is much harder to live without a car. And this is also a (relatively) big city, anything smaller and the bus going once every hour during peak times might be considered good public transport. If there is a bus at all.
]]>I'd think that the Conservative Party thinks it itself is not based on any of those but only pure logic, so the criteria don't apply. If you don't promote that kind of an idelogy, everything seems to be just fine.
From outside of the Conservative Party things might be different and some people might have the opinion that the extremism criteria apply to the Conservative Party. Like, all objective observers.
]]>This of course creates occasional problems.
]]>This could also be a source of (in my opinion) unnecessary strife when the person decides to change their name later in life. Either the real, daily name, or the official one. It seems there are a lot of people for whom the name of a person is basically set in stone when first given and it cannot be changed later, especially not by the person in question.
Which seems to me to be a bit... inflexible. Nobody has greater authority of what their name should be except the person in question (well, states often have some restrictions), and not trying to use the name people want to be used of them seems quite impolite, to say the least. Sometimes it feels like maliciousness when people use a name which the person in question does not want to be used.
Also people often do have many names, depending on the situation and circles, and time. I haven't changed my official name as I'm quite fond of it and comfortable with it, but I have had many nicknames and obviously I'm not called by my full name basically ever. 'Mikko' is quite a common first name in my age cohort so most of us have been called by surname or various nicknames.
I used to be called 'Jay' in some contexts in real life, too. This was the nickname of an MMORPG character I played for years and our player collection was very international. In live meetings it was easier to just use the character names and I still know many people only by their in-game name. The name has no connection to my 'real life' but I still got occasionally confused when some other people had that as their nickname.
]]>It took us some time to figure out how to start the game.
]]>I'll just drop 'ECS era Amigas with 4 Mb or more memory and a hard disk' for the MC68000 series here.
(I had an OCS A500 at the end of the Nineties, long after it was relevant, and never really programmed it, but many of my friends had Amigas and it was a brilliant machine - for its time. Atari ST was the competitor, at least here, but kind of lost the game. The hardware might have been part of it; Amiga had IMO better helper chips, at least in the beginning and later ST upgrades were too little, too late.)
Now I have the mini-Amiga re-issue, but it runs on an emulated MC680X0 and not the real chip. Sadly I think it's impossible to get new MC68000 chips with MMUs, otherwise I'd be tempted to build my own computer out of those. I haven't done anything real on the mini-Amiga either, I got annoyed because it comes with a joypad instead of a joystick and my trusty USB-Competition Pro doesn't map the buttons properly, so it's unusable.
I had an 8086 XT clone and later a 386, so I was never personally part of the Amiga-ST wars, but for a (seemingly) long time the x86 computers were worse gaming machines.
]]>Still, there's a lot of stuff which the LLMs make easier to do. Generating posters, scripts and all that kind of stuff takes effort even if it is minimal effort. Even typing out something vaguely sensible-looking as a script is a time-consuming task, so using an LLM to vomit such things makes things easier. And making even bad posters takes some time and skill.
So this makes things easier and faster.
]]>Which is a big reason why every 'it will get better in the future' feels a bit off to me. You scraped the internet already, are you going to go for a smaller dataset? How do you sell it? How do you even know which parts to scrape now? (How did you earlier? Wait, you didn't so you just scraped it all...)
The vetting problem becomes harder all the time because there just is more and more crap generated to be scraped.
I admit that for smaller datasets and limited applications LLMs can be somewhat useful. Like I've said elsewhere, in my software development job automatic code generation is nice but typing in code is only a very small part of the job. I haven't yet seen any systems which would be so good as predicting what I want to type that I'd consider the effort in building them to be worthwhile.
]]>I'm not sure he'd like the direction even the tabletop D&D games are going to, even in the official material. There's a lot of work to be done, sure, but WotC has been taking steps in my preferred direction. Even talking about gender in the rulebooks and getting rid of species stat modifiers. They did lose the negative ones already years ago, I think.
I'm not sure how he felt about World of Darkness games in the early Nineties, even. I'm not sure how much they were on his radar though.
(There are some bad implications for saying that 'these people have a -1 modifier to intelligence and charisma'. Now it's something along the lines of 'everybody gets +1 in whichever two stats they want to'. Stats are 3-18, rolled with various methods but the 'basic' one is '4d6, drop the lowest' or a given list of numbers to distribute.)
]]>This is getting perhaps a bit geeky here, though. (Me, I'm considering running Dungeon Crawl Classics which is a modern(ish) game pretty much like BECMI D&D or maybe even the earlier versions. It has only ten levels, too.)
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