Epic have come a long way from Epic MegaGames, and it isn’t always a fairytale story I suppose.

Someone here on Lemmy highlighted that quite nicely when Valve dropped their Half Life documentary. Valve embraces their past. They cherish it. They still maintain their old games to honor their success.

Epic on the other hand completely wiped old Unreal titles from the relevant stores and don’t give a fuck about supporting any of them. Which is a shame. Also I admire the tech behind of modern Unreal engines, so there are still geniuses at work who are likely passionate. Too bad they essentially only ride the Fortnite train outside their engine development.

I counted 68 so far, but I fell asleep in between, so I may have missed some. I am also starting to believe, the cats just go back inside to jump out again.

I don’t think it got worse. At least in regards to webcams. It looks more like that for many years they essentially re-used the same sensors in different cams and didn’t really evolve. Which always seemed weird, given that smartphone with fantastic sensors have been around for ages now - with lenses which are likely even smaller than what a webcam would be able to allow. Only the relatively recent home office trend has brought some change. But so far it still doesn’t look too good.

It was a Logitech C922. It’s a piece of shit though. A bit less than other webcams I had, but I can’t even properly key out my greenscreen if the lighting in the room is not 100% perfect. With the smartphone cam it works even with completly shitty lighting.

The only webcam I would have somewhat hope in would be the Obsbot Tiny 2, but €350 is too much for something I can solve with an old smartphone. (Also I don’t need 70% of the features of the obsbot tiny; I mainly want a good sensor and image processing.)

I bought one of those arms you can attach to the desk and then position as necessary. They have a standard ISO mount you can use for cams, microphones, etc… I also attached my normal webcam to it before. No I have a smartphone mount (this one, to be precise) on it.

True, you will need 10 to 20 seconds setup each time. But the video quality is really impressive. And another upside: you can be damn sure that no one watches you without you knowing, because you have to setup the cam each time and it doesn’t just sit there. But I guess that’s only a minor advantage.

I put up a specific mount to quickly put the smartphone in place and have a dedicated charger cable right beside it I just need to attach real quick. If I used my iPhone, I could probably make use of the MagSafe mechanism to mount and charge in one go. (I think there are also MagSafe compatible cases for other phones, so that might be something to think about in general.)

Do you have an old SmartPhone lying around? Or could you put aside your SmartPhone during those usage scenarios? Then grab DroidCam (or rather DroidCam OBS, if you mainly need it together with OBS) and you have a camera quality that can compete with dedicated cameras (not webcams). Almost all webcams suck hard in comparison.

Legal Eagle? Let’s french this up a bit and call him L’Eagle.

That is - IMO - what critical thinking is meant to be … thinking about alternative explanations and evaluating their viability or probability.

Unfortunately a lot of people use the term “critical thinking” as just another way to rationalize why they are against something, without actually weighing the options.

Dark humor is like food… not everybody gets it.

Maybe not your particular board, but platformio supports Linux for ages. I worked with that 6 years ago (on arch, btw).

I would consider Todd Howard to be part of development (since he directs the creative and narrative angle, from what I understand).

He defended bad performance with “get better hardware”. He defended criticism of the content with “you play the game wrong”.

Both are bullshit “excuses”. The first one was even debunked by modders who showed that there was potential for optimization. And modders are far more limited than engine devs. The game doesn’t look ugly, but there are far better looking games with more scene complexity out there that run better.

And “you play it wrong” is bullshit because if enough people play it wrong to have an effect on the rating of the game, then the game is badly designed. Part of game design is making sure the game explains itself or subtly pulls players in the right direction. Either they failed with that, or there simply is no clear direction. But that’s not the players fault.

Yeah but businesses typically don’t go out and rub that in their customers faces. That’s basically what most of the complaints are about: Bethesda should just shut the fuck up and swallow their pride. Is some/most of the stuff people throw at them unfair? Likely. Is it completely unwarranted? No. Should they defend it? Also no.

But that’s a good thing. If everyone considers the status quo as final, no one would research anything. It’s fine to question stuff, if you at least follow scientific methodologies. Just saying “nah, I don’t buy it” and then leaning back doing nothing is just lazy, and not critical thinking.

If we only ever act on things we think we got 100% nailed down, we will either be as ignorant as these fools who locked Semmelweis away or we will stop doing anything at all, because realistically there is always a chance we got some seemingly basic understanding wrong.

The only intelligent thing is to work with a good mix of “what you know” paired with a sane amount of “critical thinking” and an assessment of potentially involved risks.

Covid was also an example (at least here in Germany). People fought against the invonvenience of having to wear masks or stay inside (or get vaccinated) because (as they said) we don’t know for certain how dangerous the illness really is and/or how effectice these measures are.

For me the calculation was simple: doing these measures and being wrong has far far less fatal consequences than being wrong and not doing these measures.

IMO the common sense part isn’t “oh right of course those are germs”, but following the observation that points to some correlation. They don’t have to know or understand the root cause to at least consider (or accept) that something is wrong.

I think it’s technically still there… hidden behind custom fronts.

I can second that. Valheim has a very neat balance between exploring, fighting and building. If you don’t progress to quick, even your base is relatively safe. Although I now have turned off raids completely. So my base is always safe and if I want action, I can venture out into the world. I like that.

But daddy…

Google had deals that were revealed. For example Spotify was exempt from paying those 30%.