I’ve worked for an org where Firefox with uBlock Origin were standard for everyone. They knew what they were doing.

After their recent Nazi symbolism affair I’m not really feeling like spending any money there.

They knowingly used runes associated with Nazism in a promotional newsletter in a manner that only Nazis are using them - and they knew they were doing this, because this e-mail was deliberately not sent to users who had set their account to German; this kind of thing is illegal in Germany. If you had set your account to English, you still received the mail, even if you were in Germany. What followed was a dishonest non-apology, while the developer of the game they were promoting was utterly befuddled why gog had done this to their title.

Because you know they’ll always work. Linking directly to posts on various pages comes with the risk of directing people to dead or altered content.

They are more of a thing in Asia, as well as in developing countries around the world where ownership of PC hardware is prohibitively expensive, not just due to lower incomes, but also because computer hardware is costlier and more difficult to get there than in the developed world.

Spotify competitor. Pretty decent in my experience, although it’s been years since I last used it.

Thanks for taking the time to write this in-depth reply!

The disadvantage is that this is the first time I’ve heard of Friendica (and I usually hear about these kinds of things much earlier).

Perfectly understandable. Putting Linux on any kind of OEM device can be a bit of a hassle. I’ve had the best experience with PCs I built myself, not things with custom components, weird drivers and locked down nonsense.

Have you considered installing Steam OS?

Barely anyone remembers Sony shipping rootkits on their music CDs as well.

The real issue with this game is just how off-putting and abrasive writing and characters are (including and especially the astonishingly unbearable protagonist). I think I played it soon after release on Game Pass and despite the impressive visuals and art style, it felt deeply unpleasant as an experience because of this, to the point that it actually upset me. It tries to replicate the “shiny Utopian paradise that actually isn’t” shtick of Bioshock Infinite, but it feels like a pale imitation that mistakes production values for actually saying anything valuable. With better writers, it could have perhaps been the Russian equivalent to that masterpiece, deconstructing founding myths and sham ideals of the Soviet Union just like Inifinite so eloquently did with American exceptionalism, but it falls way short of that.

Despite the imaginative Soviet utopia of Atomic Heart collapsing even more spectacularly and embarrassingly than the real one, the devs do not have anything meaningful to say about either of these universes, being deathly afraid of appearing too political and critical of the Russian past in Putin’s Russia - but by being this “pretend-apolitical”, they are of course making a very loud and obvious political statement, one that is not a good look for them or the country this game originates from at a time when said country is trying to brutally subjugate a smaller neighbor.

It doesn’t help that in terms of gameplay and pacing, Atomic Heart is merely average at best. There’s a stark contrast between how it looks in carefully edited gameplay footage vs. how it feels to actually play, but I would be more than willing to tolerate such shortcomings if writing and world building (beneath the admittedly gorgeous veneer) had been any better.

For the price, it’s very bad, regardless of the progress that has been made.

No. Chinese GPUs have been complete disasters for gaming. Instead of the claimed 4060 competitor, the one you are referring to (which is the most powerful) struggles to compete with a 660 Ti from 2012.

https://www.howtogeek.com/are-chinese-gpus-coming-to-eat-nvidias-lunch/

They might be more useful for AI, but as of right now, they are extremely far behind in the GPU space, far more so than in most other areas.

detested the CCP

Detested or detest?

Good point on availability, by the way, especially globally. It reminds me of cheap Chinese cars booming in the developing world, for example. They are often extremely subpar, but some people like to take the risk of a new car that might be crappy over the perhaps even greater risk of an imported used car with an unknown history.

I’ve heard of CXMT RAM and it appears to be solid in the few tests that exist, but by ‘viable’ I meant commercially viable. Even with current RAM prices (where their stuff is barely any cheaper than reputable brands), I don’t know how much they rely on subsidies from the Chinese state. Production capacity appears to be limited, with one issue being relatively low yields, just 80% for DDR5. They are also using an outdated 17 nm process, which means it’s running a few degrees hotter than the competition (and you need more or bulkier chips for the same capacity) - make sure your system airflow is up to snuff. This is what I meant by playing catch up with moving targets.

Granted, you don’t need the latest node for every computer, especially in the consumer space, but personally, I wouldn’t risk running RAM from an unproven vendor (same with storage). I’ve had issues with faulty RAM in the past, which, among other things, resulted in data being invisibly corrupted over the course of months, so I tend to err on the side of caution. If their stuff turns out fine over the course of the next four or five years or so, I might probably change my tune - or be simply forced to buy from them, if for example the memory shortage continues.

Yup. Recording TV shows and movies aired on TV was far more common than copying tapes. No copy protection to worry about (although there were some attempts to prevent fast-forwarding over ad segments, IIRC) and you only needed a single tape mechanism instead of two.

China isn’t competitive yet and might never actually be, given that they are playing catch up with moving targets.

How’s compatibility with older games these days? I remember drivers having trouble with games that aren’t among the typical titles used for benchmarking being a surprising weakness of Intel cards.

Wow, that’s oldschool. I haven’t even thought about IRC for at least 15 years. How actively is this still being used in general?

Is it just me or do production values look surprisingly low? This barely looks like an AA game - not exactly what I was expecting from Sega.