It’s both funny and sad how they sort of threw around money when they were swimming in it, such as the acquiring of the Valhalla engine, which turned out to only consist of the rendering part of the engine during the buyout, yet at the same time don’t seem to be brave enough to try to make something else than Payday 2. Overkill’s The Walking Dead was basically a Payday 2 clone, and Payday 3 is the official successor to it, making both fall under the shadow of its still running cash cow. Even their cooperation with Lion Game Lion to make a spiritual successor/spinoff with Raid:WW2 seems harebrained, as it would immediately draw comparisons to PD2, which it could never really overcome.

Honestly, it’s odd how they just didn’t make Payday 3 a straightforward port of Payday 2 into the Unreal engine and have a smaller side project to keep the creative juices flowing as the player base slowly switches to the new engine.

Yes, after the reign of Stalin, where Khrushchev took over, the USSR deescalated the Cold War, yet it was the actions taken by Stalin’s regime that let the conflict start to begin with, with the USSR not retreating from Iran as the other Allied Forces did, the threat of force in the Turkish Straits crisis, comparing Churchill to Adolf Hitler and breaking the Yalta Agreement by meddling with the 1947 Polish elections.

Also, the article seems to be paywalled, so I have to see when I get around to reading it.

It might be that my comparison wasn’t the most accurate, since my main insight in the USSR is through the DDR, which was mainly a pawn in the face off between the superpowers at that time, and thus was a hotspot for tensions around that time. And I do believe that the wealth disparity wasn’t as extreme as in capitalist countries, yet it says little about what the actual average living conditions were compared to other countries. Also, corruption doesn’t always have a wealth disparity as a result. After all, people can also get corrupt due to self-preservation, which I think is most evident under Stalin’s later rule, after his wife committed suicide.

Yet I can’t really agree that it was “killed off” during its downfall, as I have my doubts that it would have survived much longer than it did without its subnations separating from it. The only way I could imagine it surviving would have been if they “licked their own wounds” after the war, so to speak, recuperate from their losses instead of its rapid militarisation that it gone through to keep up with the USA in order to win a dick measuring contest.

I am not so sure if the dissolution was really avoidable. I like to use the DDR as a comparison, as it does resemble the USSR post-war pretty well, due to the USSR pretty much dismantling factories in their occupation zone to compensate their own losses only to stop that as they realized the other occupation forces were strengthening their own zones and so reverting their course, leaving the then formed DDR in a similar state as the government that spawned in.

During the time of its existence, the DDR suffered from supply shortages to the point where the Trabant, the most driven car in the DDR had a chassis made out cotton-based thermoset. Yet at the same time government paranoia was at it’s peak, where the MfS (the East German equivalent of the KGB) coerced and blackmailed citizen to aid in the espionage and recruit them as informants against their neighbours, just to collect as much information on their citizen as possible in case they are suspected to be traitors as more and more people tried to flee the extreme poverty they had to live with. Yet the party was riddled with corruption, as the last generation of DDR politicians realized as the old ones resigned and allowed a new wave to take the lead, seeing the actual numbers of the debt of the government and the state of the country had to face with, even though the older generation of politicians were initially against Gorbachev’s Perestroika plan.

I think this level of hidden debt, corruption and paranoia/secrecy was the reason why Gorbachev claimed that the Chernobyl disaster caused the downfall of USSR, as it was the epitome of what plagued the whole nation ever since the war. Nobody wanted to speak out the truth for their fear of their status or even their lives, as they either get painted as a saboteur or gets silenced by those who would be targeted as well if the truth came out. Getting rid of that issue would be nothing less of a government dissolution, because no one could be really trusted.

Checked his credentials of Mike Booth. He seems to have come from Turtle Rock Studios, not the veterans of Valve. Departed the company before Evolve and worked for Blizzard.

However, considering that the main success of L4D and L4D2 lies in the tech provided by the core team of Valve, it seems unlikely that it will have a similar success as L4D, although some games managed to capture a similar feeling to it without having worked at Valve, so there’s still a chance, albeit a slim one.

Removed by mod

Still, Bazzite is pretty much one of the best Gaming distros out there. All drivers are included with the installation (you select which Hardware you have before downloading) and the OS itself is immutable, so you don’t have to worry about damaging the OS in any way. The only downside is that it exclusively uses Flatpaks, which does have a few problems regarding interoperability between programs (e.g. Firefox doesn’t allow KeePassXC to interact with the KeePass add-on). However, I would recommend Flatpaks either way, since it adds better security and reliability, since you don’t have to worry about an update breaking programs.

However, if you don’t need that interoperability, I’d say there is little reason not to use it if you want to play games. And when a game doesn’t work, protondb usually gives enough hints to how to fix these issues. Generally, I had less issues with games on there compared to other distros (e.g. OpenSUSE).

How do you play the missions? Generally I usually have almost enough for the next warbond after I maxed out the last one. I did hear that this struggle usually happens when people don’t look for POIs, which also results in resources always being rather slow to accumulate.

Overall, the game encourages to not beeline for primary objectives and rather plan out a route, especially for side objectives, as they can often be further away. It does help a lot that crashed resource drops (or what they are called) have a beacon that flashes higher the further away you are from them.

I think it can be both. However they are no justification as to why one should buy and like a game they clearly won’t like for various reasons. Even more, trying to “fix” a game can alter the game’s impact on the player. There’s a reason why roguelikes/roguelites are so hard, and taking away the difficulty will lessen the experience. That’s why most people also, for example, won’t use cheating tools for their single player games apart from screwing around.

Quick question about the overwrite passes: is it overwritten with random numbers or is there a sequence of passes?

Is there a benefit from this over the inbuilt Secure Erase functionality in most SSDs/NVMEs? To my knowledge, it instantly dumps the current from all cells, emptying the data on it.

Furthermore, another issue with SSDs/NVMEs is that it automatically excludes bad blocks, meaning that classic read/write operations can’t even reach those blocks anyways. Theoretically that feature could also be used against you to preserve the data on the disk by marking all blocks as bad, rendering them as inaccessible by the file system.

Of course there’s also the issue of Secure Erase not being implemented properly in some drives, leading to the bad blocks not being touched by the hardware chip during that procedure.

Apparently, Electronic Arts out of all companies has made a similar open source tool 4 years ago: https://github.com/electronicarts/Tunable-Colorblindness-Solution

Honestly, Sailfish is only worth it if you have a license, as there are very few native apps and the android compatibility layer is the only way to have a proper daily driver phone. I did try it with the Sony Xperia X II a 1-2 years ago, and honestly, it was still very buggy.

Generally, GrapheneOS ia pretty much the best privacy-focused android version you can have, as it will strip away anything that’s related to google while focusing on a small amount of supported devices to ensure that not many vulnerabilities are possible on the devices.

LimeageOS are less focused on privacy and more about availability. /e/OS is pretty much a downstream of LineageOS focused on Fairphones. Generally a good choice if you want android without google services.

One of the reviews on Steam mentioned that the AI uses NVidia tech that isn’t available on AMD graphics cards. Is that true?

Scanners like to do funny things

I know it’s not very relevant, but that reminds me of a talk held during a CCC (Chaos Computer Club) convention.

It’s in German, but I’ll try to summarize it: Someone noticed the numbers on a scanned page didn’t match the original, so they hired an expert to find out what happened. Turns out that the printer they were using had a feature that would detect symbols that looked the same and basically copypasted ome cutout of the symbol onto the other to save space on the final PDF. Due to the print/copy quality, this substitution sometimes malfunctioned, substituting similar looking symbols, such as 8 and 0.

Fun fact: those gas station pills also contain Viagra, to make sure they work.

So, just buy Viagra instead. You’ll be safer.