Wait, what does the onion do in this scenario? That seems oddly specific.

Just to be clear, Monster Hunter is 60% boss rush, 30% resource management and 10% gear progression.

Compared to Souls gameplay, Monster Hunter is more grindy and mission-based and you’re always pointed at the next big thing. Beat a monster, collect materials, craft weapons and armour, repeat ad nauseam. And do everything all over again when you hit High Rank.

Don’t go into Monster Hunter expecting a Souls game, it’s a different experience.

That said, I absolutely love the Monster Hunter series and have probably sunk over 800 hours into different entries combined. Definitely give them a go! And if you do, keep in mind that the newer games have some handholding QoL features not found in older games, so keep that in mind when you decide in which order you might want to experience the games.

I hate the fact that none of the big names support CalDAV natively. DAVx5 is cool and all, but app developers really need to step up their shit and support CalDAV already. Not just Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar but CalDAV as well. It’s not like they need to rebuild their apps from scratch.

At this point you might just be better served using a web app instead of a native mobile app. Maybe K-9 Mail transformation into Thunderbird Mobile might bring some good news, but I’m not holding high hopes.

Maybe we should, under the EU’s DMA, force anyone that bundles a calendar/note app with their phone OS to support CalDAV as well as any proprietary protocol of their choice.

As others are sure to point out: welding bad for health.

UV radiation that will give you a near-instant sunburn. Combined with IR radiation that will literally burn your retinas if you don’t protect them properly.

Then theres the fact that you’re dealing with upwards of 1200°C/2200°F molten steel. And depending on your process you also have argon/CO2 gas leaks to worry about. That or the flux fumes or vaporized oxides and various metals will get you.

But welding is also fun as shit, and surprisingly accessible as long as you’re not doing structural stuff without proper training.

Yeah I believe this to be a fallacy. If all your contacts use WhatsApp, they still haven’t grasped the concept of installing two applications side-by-side. Or they don’t fully understand why people are using signal over WhatsApp. If you fail both of those, congratulations, you’ve failed to be a self-aware tech user and you’re now demoted to a braindead consumer.

I know, mind blowing right? Point is, society in general should not accept others forcing you to keep the WhatsApp monopoly in tact, which is exactly what’s happening here.

It will take some time but eventually adoption will spread, even among your contacts. It’s just a matter of critical mass, and there are some pretty compelling features within Signal that make it a worthy replacement.

Not necessarily a bad thing though.

Think of it this way: There’s value in having access to a list of curated content others have deemed “worth reading or looking at”. But there is just as much value in engaging in some banter, provided it doesn’t lead to outright war in the comments.

I admit, it is tiresome trying to seriously discuss a topic when people haven’t actually read the article, but there is still an upside to a topic triggering at least enough interest to where people actually want to engage.

Especially Germans, and your cousins who live in the swamp next door.

We can’t help the fact our languages just arent’t that elegant, no need to apologize for it.

Had the exact same experience the other day. Fuck these machines, fuck printers, fuck microwave ovens, fuck software updates and fuck time estimates in general.

It’s a global phenomenon, caused by infinite growth based economic modeling (you know, where you base your whole economy on extracting increasing amounts of value from finite resources).

This type of modeling has been proven wrong and debunked early in the previous century, but it is still practised because it works very well for those gaining most of the profits.

You’ll usually hear the politicians promoting policies that help the larger companies argue that such policies directly create jobs and thus economic value for the people. But this is more of that trickle-down economics bullshit that doesn’t apply in the real world.

Because politicians worldwide have been so fixated on financial gains as a measure of the economy, they fail to measure and correct on (mental) healthcare, housing, education and equality.

Just some context on how large our housing problems have become: There is currently a deficit of 450 000 homes, which is projected to grow past 500 000 by the end of 2024.

The time we stop running countries like we do companies is when we’ll see things improve.

Certified European here, can confirm individual member states and EU as a whole as not being a utopia.

Especially us Dutch folks who have been fucked over and held hostage by a waaay to large upper middle class for years. To the point where we’ve managed to abolish the ministry of housing, open up the housing market to foreign investors, replace a functioning healthcare system with a healthcare market where insurance firms rule with an iron fist and demand more bureacracy than actual care being provided.

… and the list goes on.

It’s a worldwide symptom of economic unequality and the decrease in social skills stemming from the fact that we live our lives increasingly isolated in our own online social bubbles. We’re turning increasingly hostile towards each other because we’re no longer confronted with all people and perspectives in our surroundings, but just the ones we like.

The United States, being a large country filled with very diverse people, despite all being taught to “love America”, still deals with Nebraskan farmers having wildly different wants and needs, and way different social standards than the Californian yuppies.

You’re a large country, with 334 million people spread out over a vast amount of land. Meanwhile, we’re 18 million living on a patch of marshy land roughly 3/4th the size of West Virgina, and we’re further from being united than ever before. The fact that you’re even holding together as a country is nothing short of amazing considering the fact that your political systems probably cause way more chaos than ours do.

A lot of Europeans probably mean it when they say “How are you even a country?”. And it’s not so much an attack on the American people as a whole (though some of y’all deserve to be made fun of), but geniuine amazement at the fact that it has more or less held together since 1776.

For this to become a serious issue a couple of conditions need to be met:

• there has to be enough second hand supply to meet demand and keep prices low.
• …which means lots of people need to circulate their games.
• …which means they didn’t like your game enough to want to keep it in their collection for replayability
• …which means you made an unremarkable game

Now, given the fact that I have full confidence in your ability to create something worthwhile (because you would do so from passion), this cycle will likely be broken at some point.

There’s also the other option where people will circulate their second hand games with the knowledge they’ll be able to buy back another copy somewhere down the road.

But yes, you’re right that this will bring a new factor to the gaming industry that everyone has to take into account. Keep in mind that your financial security in the indie gaming sector is fully dependant on wether you develop something worthwhile. You are in no way entitled to be able to make a living from publishing games regardless of their quality. Which is the beauty of the indie games segment: the more love and care you put into your game, the bigger the chances are that it’ll be a success.

Yes, this is the best argument in favor of air cooling. Air cooling has less points of failure.

With water cooling there’s tons of potential problems that “haha wind go brrrr cooling” just doesn’t produce: Water block gummed up with mold? Take a performance hit. Pump dead? Sucks to be you. Leak in the system? Enjoy replacing your motherboard.

Main issue you might encounter in air cooling is just “fan died, replace fan”. (Obviously not counting thermal interface materials since they are required for both cooling solutions)

Wood you believe it

You little shit… Keep this up and I’ll stick it to ya!

Not sure how I should feel about that. It’s highly likely any party engaged in tracking activities will try to grab as much data as they can. So a non-Google device seems like it would be doing twice the amount of data collection.

But considering Google also controls the hardware design of the Pixel, it wouldn’t surprise me if they have some additional tricks up their sleeve.

What we really need is a full open-source phone, including firmware. Maybe we’ll get there one day.

Additionally, if you’re into mapping, give QGIS a try.

It’s an open source geospatial data management application, which is available cross-platform.

It neatly integrates many processing tools into a relatively intuitive GUI, and having even some basic skill can lead to some job opportunities.

You can even import OSM data through plugins or download services, which you can use for all kinds of fancy things.

That was awesome, thanks for sharing.

I fully get what you’re saying and I think I know a thing or two about how lifestyle branding consumes people’s lives to the point where they’re fully absorbed.

Social media platforms seem to be by far the worst offenders of stimulating this kind of addiction (let’s just name it for what it is).

Coming from a background of designing products, as opposed to selling them I tend to be focused on product representation, rather than selling an idea. Which is not actually the route to making stupid amounts of money.

You’ve convinced me that marketing is definitely part of the problem. Here in the Netherlands they’ve recently (about two years ago) relaxed some legislation on online gambling (gambling itself is legal, just the ads weren’t) and since we’ve seen a surge of ads on television and social media featuring sports icons and influencers. The result has been a giant increase in profits, which directly corelates to figures of increased debt, prevalent mostly in young adults. I firmly believe this is toxic and needs to be fixed asap.

If you do decide to host a Q&A I’ll be sure to have a look for more cool insights.

Interesting take, mind if I dig a little deeper?

The key part of Apple’s success is that they make idiotproof devices for people who want something to “just work” (insert linux desktop memes here). The way I’ve come to understand it in the last couple years (having relatives who’ve drank the cool-aid and are starting to spot the cracks in the facade), is that they have been pulled in by values way up high in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. They are locked into the ecosystem, believing that their current solution is somehow ideal and they seem most of all afraid that anything else will completely turn their world upside down. The weird part is that Apple manages somehow to convince people they are the only ones capable of providing an experience that will cover those needs.

The thing is: Being convinced that there is no greener grass elsewhere puts up a barrier to entry into the unknown. I really do wonder if the solution there is cracking down on marketing, as it would require broad sweeping legislation that would likely defeat the purpose.

Sure, companies will put forth the occasional blatant lie, misrepresenting their product, but oftentimes the heavy lifting is done by the established brand image. I would not know where to begin preventing such an image from forming in the first place without community pushback.

And that is where my original point comes in: If we push back by ridiculing the userbase we’ll have a culture war on our hands. The trick is to be smarter than that and actually show them that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Every time the consumer gets fucked over by corporate greed, it is because we’ve let it happen by accepting the slippery slope brought upon us. (Publicly traded) companies will only listen to financial consequences from their actions, which means we have the power to stop their bullshit by not buying into it. Doing so requires a large enough group of people to start spending money elsewhere.

Problem is: The current market is affected by Apple’s shenanigans (though examples of the same pattern are also found in other industries). Which means other manufacturers are copying all the anti-consumer design decisions and you’re not left with much of a choice.

This is where legislation comes in. By providing basic consumer protections like in the proposed right to repair bills, we can at least be sure to have the option of choosing our own repair provider.

Though I’m curious if there is an additional angle we need to explore as consumers. Having said all the above, would you still disagree that educating our peers in a respectful manner will lead to people changing their behaviour, and if so, why?

Agreed, they’re usually influenced by their emotional attachment to the Apple brand (or [insert fashionable electronics manufacturer here]). And my hunch is they respond to valid criticism with a defense along the lines of “they obviously know what they’re doing” or “tech is hard/dangerous/intellectual property, we can’t have just anybody working on it”.

The reality is, they often fail to see the bigger picture because they’re blinded by what they’ve convinced themselves is the truth. This unfortunately also means that clowning on them is counterproductive, as they won’t see the light without being eased into it.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t judge people for believing soldering an SSD to the motherboard is somehow innovative and progress, but it is hard to accompany our laughter with the patience to actually explain to them in a respectful manner that this is not the way.

It takes a hard reality check in the form of their data being gone when their SSD inevitably dies someday, and recovery not being an option “because you should have paid for an iCloud subscription”. Or it takes a way for “them” not to see “us” as the enemy when we’re advocating for Apple and competitors not to pull us further into a dystopian technological hellscape where devices are single use. Try convincing a cultists that they’re in a cult and they’ll see you as a threat. We have to make sure this doesn’t escalate into polarizing tech culture war any further than it already has.

We need repairability and sustainability to be the basis for consumer electronics going forward. Corporate profits don’t justify wasting resources on single-use electronics.

Seconded, depending on what your goals are with transcoding, you might want to reconsider your strategy.

Hardware encoding (with a GPU) is mostly useful for realtime transcoding applications like streaming video. There are definitely some caviats that come with the realtime performance, and you’ll find that NVENC encoded video is almost always inferior to the slower equivalent software encoded variants.

So let’s talk codecs: While h.265 might seem like the holy grail, it is way more computationally intensive than h.264 is. In some cases the difference in encoding time will even be as high as 3-5x. Not really worth it if all you’re gaining is a slightly lower filesize.

Your results will vary by the media you’re encoding, by your encoder quality settings, tuning and encoding speed. As a rule of thumb: slower encoding speeds equal more efficiently compressed video (a.k.a. relatively higher quality for lower file size).

Handbrake is my choice of software for encoding video. It includes pretty much everything you could ever want if you’re not looking for niche codecs and exotic video formats.

I find myself mostly using x264 because it is relatively fast and still provides awesome results. My encoding speed is always set to “slow” or “superslow” (not much difference for my setup). I usually set the quality by making use of the preview function in handbrake, which transcodes just a short section of the video which I use for pixel peeping and checking for any major artifacts that would ruin the content. The resulting file also provides an estimate for how large the final transcoded file will be. If you’re happy with the quality setting, you can opt to mess with the encoder tuning. There are different presets for film, animated content and such. I usually do use film tuning if transcoding live-action media.

All this generally leaves me with pretty compact file sizes for 1080p media. And transcoding usually happens at a rate of 60-75 fps depending on the resolution. Going up from “slow” to “medium” improves fps by about 25% and increases file size by about 10%. The ideal balance is up to you.

Advanced tips: try using VMAF (objective video quality analysis algorithm developed by Netflix) to score and compare your different encoding settings. VMAF is neatly integrated into FFMetrics, which is a GUI for FFMpeg and a couple of video analysis algorithms. I also use MPV (open source media player) with FFMpeg command line arguments for playing videos synchronized in a 2x1 or 2x2 matrix. This helps compare the results for quality.

While this is very much welcome news, I am a little skeptical because this might still be a PR stunt.

Apple has shown they have the engineering capacity to design their devices to be virtually unfixable, all while still technically being compliant with this proposed piece of legislation.

Nonetheless, this show of support might finally be a means for us to end the ongoing culture war on repairability. It has been too much of a polarized debate lately, where opponents seem to be under the impression that a lack of repairability is a good thing for everyone, when it is really just having a choice that matters most.

Now that Apple has officially put in writing it’s support for repairability of consumer electronics, we can finally stop debating wether or not repairability is a good thing, and instead how we’re going to ensure the new situation works for everyone involved. Hopefully.