I don’t know about how cureent mods are but there used to be one which had save slots you could copy and back up. It was a fairly large mod and took Pixel Dungeon in a fairly different direction with you starting in a town and being able to return through a portal every few levels. It was cool but doesn’t solve your issue.

Could you back up the entire game data? Maybe that would do the trick?

https://www.foxbatteries.com.au/c22n2107-battery-for-asus-zenbook-14-flip-oled-up3404va-kn060w-ux3402va

That is a suitable replacement. It is a simple pouch battery with an easy connector so the actual physical work to replace it is fairly simple and the cost is very low for the convenience of using your system for long hours. It should also prolong the life of your laptop delaying replacement for a fairly long time.

The big question is about the quality of the internals of the battery. Is the material consistently folded? Are there overhangs or under hangs? Are there areas where the anode and cathode are close and will short in a few years of usage? I honestly don’t know how to actually check for this.

I don’t know about your local area and associated limitations but I can speak more generally.

Volunteering your time is a really rewarding thing and it can feel better than donating money. But that is feeling better for you. If you have specific skills, for example web development, then volunteering your time in that expert capacity can be very helpful. If that skillset is not needed then using that skillset to generate funds to donate is more effective. Your efforts are not fungible, but money is, meaning the organisation can use the effect of your efforts in the most beneficial way for their goals, even if it is not a good match for your skills.

Considering specific hours of your work as volunteering hours and donating those hours of earning may help you get the feeling you need, feeling like you are helping and involved, while turning that effort into something useful for the cause you care about.

“On Saturdays I volunteer for my favourite charity by working my normal job and donating the proceeds”

People have tried this a bit and it doesn’t work well. Remember that most games have some sort of plot which needs to move forward without deviating too far and this is not easy to manage with AI. AI systems are predictive text tuned up, so they tend to wander in the conversation and this can be disastrous for something like a video game.

The world is there to support the illusion but also to direct the player to game material. An AI agent going off on a tengent about some random thing that kind of fits the world could lead to users running around wasting their time and being frustrated.

Add to that the risk of the AI system stepping into awful places like reproducing Nazi ideology and it is a nightmare for developeds. Imagine getting your game rated when it can randomly start telling your character not to worry about saving those people over there because their skin tone is darker and that makes them less than human.

Now as a tool for building scripts quickly? Maybe, but it does produce slop now and if that will change I cannot predict when. Maybe it could be used as part of the process but I think it is so toxic now I would not bet on it. I also think it should be labeled as the use of AI comes with moral issues around the environmental impact and theft of content from other people. If a game has AI generated content I won’t be playing it, and I am not alone. Just the push back from audiences could be enough to discourage the use of AI systems.

Now on the other hand using a neural network design for making character behaviours more believable, for example using a series of needs and having the algorithm decide what to do next and so on, that could be cool, but we have that already and it isn’t considered AI.

I still occasionally open up Alley Cat which is much easier now that you can do it in a browser.

https://www.playdosgames.com/online/alley-cat/

That’s from 1984 so fairly old, but it just feels amazing. Amazingly clunky, but amazing. I love the fish bowl so much, the mice are evil, and dating is hard for a cat.

I also regularly replay SNES games and recently finished The Legend of Zelda, a Link to the Past. So much fun, such a well balanced game.

For most played it would have to be various solitaire games, especially Fourty Thieves. I have played these so much my phone has burned in card shapes, but that’s fine for me, worth it.

If I exclude cards it is Creeper World 3 which has at least 50 full days of play, but probably much more by now.

Gotta try ZyEl, such a good mod, cranks everything up to 11

Check out Open Arena. It is based in the source for Q3A but it is fully fleshed out with new characters and weapons. Absolutely frenetic and great fun.

+1 for micro machines, though I prefer v3.

And older GTA, GTA2 was my favourite. I play it every so often and always enjoy it, but it is hard to play GTA 1 with modern expectations, they really improved for 2. “And remember, respect is everything”

And fun. It is actually quite fun. The graphics are really nice, right in that midrange of not too low quality to be ugly but not too pretty to cook your machine.

This is exciting! I have wanted this since I was young and 30 years later VR monitors are finally getting here. I want to be able to switch into random positions and have my screens visible without rotation and angle issues. I have fairly severe ADHD and I move around a lot. Having this would mean I could throw my legs up the wall and still use my screen, then roll over to my belly and keep going. A phone works fairly well for this but does mess with shoulder position and is a strain, so getting something more reasonable would be awesome. Also I work with people with fairly significant mobility disabilities and I think this would be amazing for them. No dependence on where they can aim their head, just use software to correct the monitor to match their needs. Add some good inputs and it would be life changing.

Man, I really don’t like this study.

First, this is 44 people, 22 pairs of twins, followed for 8 weeks. This in not enough to be meaningful and the researchers knew this at the start. A sample of 44 people is so small you would only use it for a pilot study to show your study design and get funding.

Second, 8 weeks? That is an insanely short time. Again, pilot study, not real study.

Third, they didn’t measure heart disease, they measured LDL cholesterol. This is a proxy marker, not a measure of heart disease. It would be like measuring how many fires a city has by counting firefighters. It doesn’t measure how many actual fires there are, just how many resources are available to fight them. What if there is low funding? What if there is an issue with training? What if there is another disaster which is more urgent than the fires? LDL is not a good measure on its own for heart health.

There are lots of other issues but they all boil down to this being bad science. We know what questions should be asked and how to ask them. They chose not to ask questions correctly and get meaningful answers. This is not worth the paper it was printed on and means close to nothing.

If we get enough countries over time and the EU ends up encompassing the whole world it could become the Everybody Union and that would be cool.

What is crazy is this was actually a huge problem for frontier settlements. Tonnes of people would meet the indigenous population, be exposed to their society, learn enough of their language to communicate, and then go “fuck this” to all the European culture and just move in with the locals. They brought whatever skills they had including metalworking and so on and joined up and for the most part it went really really well for them, until the westerners came and killed everyone. Behind The Bastards had a great episode a few years ago about it, through the lens of one particular bastard, and yeah, faced with a culture where individuals were not exploited for every last shilling of value to the shareholders people wanted out.

First, the term hysteria is from a fairly mysoginist root, so maybe consider whether that is the best word here.

Second, for all the 8 million plus people killed by COVID it wasn’t hysteria, they died. They didn’t have the sniffles, they died. Dead. Not alive. There isn’t really a lot that is worse as an outcome from a respiratory infection, however we have that too! Tonnes of people who didn’t die have long covid symptoms, strokes, heart attacks, various thrombotic events, loss of function, and additional complications in the rest of their medical issues. On top of that plenty of people had parents, siblings, children, friends, or other people important to them die or become disabled.

Third, digital dependence? I mean, we were moving in this direction for decades before covid. It used to be nobody had phones at all. My partners grandparents remembered the house down the block getting a telephone and went over to see it. They didn’t have electricity. That was less than a century ago. The ramp up of technology over the last century has been insane and accelerating that whole time. In 2004 the coolest phone was a Motorola RAZR flip phone with a terrible 0.3 megapixel camera but a stunning 176x220 pixel display. In 2024 a Pixel 9 has a 1080x2424 display and a 50, 48, and 10.5 megapixel camera. The comparison of a rifle and a spear feels appropriate. We were already heading towards more technology in our lives, it just because super noticeable during lockdowns as it accelerated a little more for a couple of years and it was more obvious.

Fourth, why the quotes around expert? There is such a thing as an expert. Someone who knows more than me doesn’t have to know everything to keep knowing more than me. They can be wrong and learn new things and change their mind all while remaining more informed than I am. In fact, being an expert in a field means doing that constantly. Being at the frontier of knowledge means holding your beliefs more tentatively as you are more likely to change your understanding than an uninformed average person. The fact that they didn’t know how good masks would be at the start isn’t an indictment of their expert status, it is their first guess given previous knowledge. What they did after that is what makes them experts, namely changing their minds when new evidence came about.

Of course they do, especially when the number of people is ambiguous or when they are speaking about someone titled as a profession such as “I went to the doctor and they said…”

It is all a manufactured situation used to push hate and attack the marginalised. Singular they has been around for a very long time and there were options before they was they, not to mention in all the other myriad languages in the world.

None of these, Bruce Willis in the sixth sense.

Went to a job interview after my night shift with no sleep the day before, so awake from about 4pm to the interview two days later at 11am. So at 43 hours awake I had a technical interview and almost got the job. You can seem to function at a fairly good level tired, but depending on various factors it can be really bad for your performance. It is similar to being tipsy with regards to driving, so definitely don’t drive tired. Stimulants like coffee don’t make you better at thinking, they just make you less aware of how tired you are so you can keep going. Your performance is still shot but you are less able to judge. Other stimulants like Ritalin can help more for people who work well with them, but that is people with ADHD or some people who are autistic.

That said, longest would be post open heart surgery. Lots of pain, multiple days of missed sleep, lots of pain killers which don’t really work well for me, but eventually I figured out I could sleep slumped forward over a desk rather than in a hospital bed. You can go without sleep for a while without dying but you become less functional and it is bad for long term health.

I think they want it automated so it would need to be integrated to Sonar/Radarr etc rather than the machine you watch the media on.

I used to be a sysadmin in a web hosting company so I know my way around CentOS systems which are basically the same as Fedora both being derived from Red Hat. I liked the system and their SELinux configuration was really good. Package updates were reliable and easy though sometimes a bit out of date.

I found Debian to be rock solid but quite out of date and back porting something was generally not a good idea, it generated too many errors and complex problems with dependencies etc.

Ubuntu, specifically Mint, is something I have installed on a few peoples machines and they found it fine, no complaints really, until they tried to do something more complex or advanced. They could usually get one complex thing done but without lots of experience they tended to have one thing interfere with another and just make things unstable. I got one person to use a VM for some stuff as a work around and it was much easier from there. That said the defaults are good if you have a modern machine and don’t want to make massive complex changes.

As a server I really don’t like Ubuntu. They did things their own way to avoid systemd and honestly it was a nightmare to administer. Much better for me to switch to Debian for stable stuff or to CentOS or Arch for complex stuff.

The biggest advantage for Ubuntu based distros is the user base. Lots of people in lots of forums documenting their problems and eventual solutions. That seems to be shifting with Bazzite and CachyOS getting massive install bases in fairly short times, especially around Steam Deck style machines. I expect we will have more more change in that direction over the next few years and honestly more users means more of a useful position in the market driving more support from developers so I am all for it.

But yeah, using the CLI is harder at first because you have all the keys as an option and no idea what the names of things are, but it can get really fun especially when you start chaining commands together. For example, you can find files name *.log, grep a specific line out of them, the sort by time and merge it all together. The output is all the logs from these different files that match your search but in appropriate time sequence and it makes troubleshooting way easier. Or you can search for all files in your whole filesystem which match a characteristic like who owns them, check their sizes, and present the largest 10. All with a few pipes and filters. It makes you feel like you need a hoodie, dark glasses, and a projector blasting green text over your face while playing trance in the background.

I have the exact opposite experience with Ubuntu based distros and Arch based distros. I’ve done Arch from the CLI installer enough times to be comfortable following the quick guide with the full beginners guide for a couple of places, and since running plain Arch I have aged around with EndeavourOS and ended up switching over for the good defaults and having Timeshift setup built right in with all the hooks like during updates etc.

When I tried an Ubuntu distro not too long ago I was lost. Their init system was different from what I was used to and it was really hard to figure out for me. I couldn’t get logs and errors easily and my troubleshooting was really slow and laborious. I had trouble with graphics drivers and using pass through for a VM in KVM, so I never got that working. I switched back to my familiar Arch based stuff after realising it is all the same in the end with small differences of exactly how to do things but nothing really important being different.

I am more comfortable with Arch and that family but for someone more comfortable with Ubuntu or Fedora family distros I understand staying there, you should go with what will make computing fun and useful for you, not what someone else likes. If you like BSD you should use it and enjoy it, not use the distro I like because I say it is good.

Sort of correct, but modern drug tests can distinguish actual ADHD meds from methamphetamine reliably. When I got tested I let them know my dose and what medication and they didn’t have to adjust anything at all.