And you can use a keyfile separate from the database for even more security. If the database is backed up on Google Drive and the keyfile is saved on a USB or in a (non-Google) email somewhere for the rare times you add a new device, your passwords should be safe even from keyloggers or Google themselves.

Fittingly, it was only a happy landing for the ones who crashed it.

Hey now, Trump appointed Musk and DOGE to hollow out all the regulatory agencies that could have prevented the AI bubble from getting so big, so he at least deserves the credit for how bad things will become once it finally collapses.

He was very open in interviews during/after his first term about how he didn’t actually care about his campaign promises, but went with whatever got the best response from the crowds. IIRC he directly stated this about the whole “lock her up” movement he spearheaded. Somehow those confessions never made headlines.

I don’t know why the Democrats didn’t simply run ads showing all the times he crapped on his own movement and supporters. There’s easily enough content for an entire series of ads and it’d be way more effective than anything they actually ran (aside from Waltz pointing out how weird they are, which the party made him stop doing despite it being the single most effective part of the 2024 Democratic campaign).

Poor old Resolute suffering one last indignity under him.

Many of them are, but most are afraid of the cult. They’ll put their own future electability ahead of any amount of damage to the country or its institutions.

Sync for Reddit users: “First time?”

We already know a bit about Valve’s internal culture due to leaks and interviews, and it’s dysfunctional but in a completely different way from almost every other company.

Thanks to having a small headcount plus more money than God, Valve has zero (internal) pressure to release, and has embraced a culture of freedom where developers can work on whatever they want. This has led to tons of Valve projects getting 80% finished before being abandoned once they reach the final stages of development and are no longer fun to work on. Every release they’ve managed since Steam took off has been due to a few major players with the charisma to swing others to join their pet projects and stay for the long haul.

In a rarity for the field, I’m not aware of any toxicity issues in Valve’s workplace or a single complaint about Gabe himself. Those who’ve quit have nearly always said it’s because their passion project got canned due to it being so hard to get anything past the finish line. Other than that, employees seem to love working there (the massive paycheck probably helps too).

Gabe seems to be held in high regard, even though the internal structure he’s cultivated is such a mess. And I still prefer this clusterfuck of inefficiency to literally any other AAA developer.

The official forums and main Discord are fine - the original community still hangs out there and remains chill and friendly. It’s just the wider community (Reddit, 4chan, etc) that spawned after Sseeth’s video that’s a problem.

For example, some guy on 4chan made a lovely little mod called R*peSector where you can capture enemy officers and story characters and… well, yeah. When the subreddit mods tried to ban discussion of it, the community went nuts and was like 90% in favor of a mod that adds explicit sexual assault as a feature to a freaking spaceship combat game, one where character interaction is a perfunctory feature that makes up like 1% of the experience.

Seeing the new community rally around that kind of thing destroyed my interest in the game, even if by all accounts the dev and official communities are horrified by its existence.

I’ve never encountered them either, but the game is about a pale white supersoldier produced by a shady government eugenics program specifically for cracking down on internal dissent (Spartans were created to violently put down rebellions on human colonies; then the aliens showed up).

Though how anyone could read the backstory and decide that ONI were the good guys is beyond me…

I’ll never forget how after DE accidentally added an extra zero onto the research cost of a middling clan-only weapon (the Hema, I think it was?) and refused to fix it, players made a bunch of freely joinable clans just to share the blueprint with others so they could avoid the weeks of grinding it could otherwise take to unlock it. And they kept this up for years despite it costing them their only clan slot.

A lot of indie games have amazing communities. Stardew Valley, Kerbal Space Program and Deep Rock Galactic, to name a few. Non-competitive games with active and friendly developers tend to have good fanbases.

On the other hand, a lot of indie games have incredibly toxic and user-hostile communities. Competitive games especially, though you’ll also see it when the community becomes upset with the developer (such as 7 Days to Die and pre-redemption No Man’s Sky).

And then there are the external factors. A game could become a meme or get covered by a pure cinnamon roll of a streamer and gather a wholesome fanbase despite its content (Doom 2016 comes to mind), or an existing friendly community could get overshadowed by a bunch of 4chan rejects if the wrong YouTuber covers the game (see any semi-obscure game reviewed by SsethTzeentach - I’m still upset about Starsector).

What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Windows went all-in on AI including for internal development, despite removing their dedicated QA teams years ago.

Yeah, but a small handful of American (or non-American but willing to pay bribes) CEOs will make tons of money off of this as the economy craters.

Maybe this DLC is going to drop the deep lore on why giving droids water cannons is a terrible idea.

Morrowind remains the gold standard. Even if you kill a plot-critical NPC (the game lets you do this freely and simply warns you afterwards that you broke the plot), there’s a hidden back route to complete the main quest. Even side quests tend to have an alternate route if a necessary NPC is likely to be killed as part of another quest.

I think there’s only a single NPC that’s actually required to beat the game, and even then you can work around his death by abusing some wonky gameplay mechanics.

If you’re a vampire like the title makes it sound, killing people you like makes sense. You’re simply… making friends.

We’re already at the point where Windows programs sometimes run better on Linux with a compatibility layer (WINE/Proton) than they do natively. The stuff that doesn’t run is mostly games ladened with kernel-level DRM that Linux (rightfully) can’t emulate.

Linux even runs old Windows programs better than Windows itself, and long-term compatibility is supposed to be one of Windows’ biggest selling points.

Didn’t the PS5 boot signing keys leak recently? The word when that happened was that it blew PS5 modding wide open in a way that couldn’t be closed without new hardware, though I guess publishing anything that used Sony’s key would have their lawyers after you real quick.