Might be that they ordered online and the food is done before they get there?

I was a fan of Miranda IM because that’s what I used for everything else (ICQ, MSN, XMPP, AIM, occasionally Skype though that plugin didn’t work that well). If I remember correctly, joining multiple servers was a bit more cumbersome than with other clients but having everything in one application was amazing.

Bah, the young ones joining IRC through a web interface. Back in my day, we used telnet, typed the IRC commands by hand and hoped we were quick enough to reply to PING to not get kicked from the server.

Well, not really but I did it occasionally to better understand how the protocol works.

The best chat platform is the one where the people you want to chat with are.

If you don’t have anyone specific you want to talk to and just want to join a community that shares your interests, maybe look into Matrix, which is an open and distributed protocol with many servers.

Well, not necessarily. I’ve had my phone for almost five years now. The battery is at 78% of it’s original capacity and still gets me through the day without problems, even on heavy use. The only times I need to charge during the day is when I’m on a long distance train and listen to podcasts or audio books for hours.

Chances are that something else will fail long before the battery. And even if not, the local phone repair shop offers a battery replacement for about 50€ which is more than reasonable for something that will get me another couple of years.

Then you don’t need to worry. Battery degradation isn’t much of a problem for those.

That’s why modern phone operating systems will charge your battery to 80-90% at the beginning of the night and then charge the last bit just in time to be done when you wake up, based either on when your alarm is set or on past usage statistics.

I’m German. Back in my day, we had 9 years of English classes in school and from what I’ve heard it’s even more now. I was lucky to have a teacher who had spent a couple of years in the UK so he had much less of a German accent than most other teachers at our school and was also able to give us a lot of insight into how people actually speak, compared to the rather formal and stilted examples in our textbooks.

Between social media, movies, shows and a job in software engineering, I would say that on most days I read and listen to more English than German.

Oh yeah, exactly what the PlayStation needs: more soulless shooter sequels from Microsoft. What ever would we have done without Halo? Played CoD?

Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, a collaboration between Ensemble Studios and Lucas Arts to reskin Age of Empires 2 for Star Wars. The base game had campaigns for the OT and Phantom Menace and a bit later there was an Attack of the Clones expansion.

I would really love for them to port this to the AoE2 Definitive Edition engine and add more content.

They have gone the safest path for over a decade now, making reskins of the same three games over and over to the point where Assassin’s Creed and FarCry which used to be real innovations in their fields are now just boring copies of copies. They haven’t taken a single risk since AC2.

They got negative feedback to including Yasuke - a real historical figure who did exist in the era the game depicts - and now they’d rather preemptively cancel their own game than tell a story about freedom and rebellion from an unusual perspective.

Cowards.

Cowards.

So in other words, you pay more and unless you’re on the highest tier, they take away the one thing that made Game Pass worth the money: new games available on day one.

I’m not a fan of subscription models overall but getting a ton of new releases for about what two full price titles per year would cost was a great deal. Not anymore.

And there goes another reason to keep a Windows machine around.

Nirav talks about that in the other video they released today. They’re working on it and in the meantime there is a DIY solution.

DB: “At least we’re not National Rail.”

National Rail: “At least we’re not Amtrak.”

Do NOT, I repeat NOT do this. Someone very close to me did something similar and got irreversible brain damage that still shows itself years later in the form of epilepsy. Our brains are not made for that little sleep over long periods of time.

Absolutely and it has done so for over a decade. Not LLMs of course, those are not suitable for the job but there are lots of specialized AI models for medical applications.

My day job is software development for ophthalmology (eye medicine) and people are developing models that can, for example, detect cataracts in an OCT scan long before they become a problem. Grading those by hand is usually pretty hard.

I only found out about E.V.O. way later, probably around 2005 when a friend made a web game that combined its evolution theme with gameplay similar to Legend of the Green Dragon. I still wonder why E.V.O. wasn’t more popular. It’s an amazing game, I still occasionally play it on my Analogue Pocket.

I would say Age of Empires 2 which was where I first used the name that I still have on here, over 25 years later. Its amazing editor also resonated with my urge to create my own games without requiring programming knowledge that I just didn’t have at 11 years old. I went on to create custom content for Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, eventually studied computer science and joined some indie gamedev communities where I made a lot of friends, some of whom I still meet in person once or twice a year. I never became a full time game developer but I worked on some stuff part time in the mid 2000s and still do it as a hobby.

My question was specifically about “the general non-technical population”. Do you expect my mom to even remotely understand what different servers are and why talking to me is securely encrypted but talking to her friends group isn’t? The point about secure software is that it needs to be secure by default or else, entry level users will manage to accidentally send their stuff in plain text and not even notice.

For nerds like us, I agree that Matrix is probably a good choice. For someone who needed to be told that “the internet” isn’t the blue “e” on their desktop… not so much. I’d rather send carrier pigeons than explain Matrix to my family.