BananaTrifleViolin

Well first off have Taco Bell stopped providing napkins? One person couldn’t find napkins in one store and suddenly it’s greed driven corporate policy according to OP?

It seems unlikely that a food chain would completely abolish napkins. It is possible they’re no longer freely available because people were taking them “for their car” whatever that even means!?

Are there bigger versions of the same communities elsewhere? One of the problems at the moment is duplicates, and finding the one where people have coalesced can be be hard, sometimes just dumb luck.

Incase you still don’t, it’s referencing a late 80s to mid 90s sitcom Married with Children. It’s surprisingly good. Katey Segal who voices Leela played one of the main characters, Peggy.

Almost the whole of black Friday is a nonsense. The only things worth buying are things you would have bought anyway but know are on discount.

Many items prices go up for a period before black Friday so they can then be discounted, and manufacturers even have cheaper versions of models of their products that they supply to discount chains and companies like Amazon for black Friday.

The only things I’d buy on sale are items I’m watching via camelcamelcamel which have hit discount, or software on discount. There are a few specific items I need to buy that I might buy if they’re genuinely on discount but most of the stuff thrust in your face during the sales is cheap tat or lies.

I’d go back and prevent the 11th Sept attacks.

The world would be a different place because so much happened as a knock on of that but at the same time it’s hard to imagine what the world would be like. Probably very similar but also different in substantial ways.

Like obvious things like no war in Iraq or Afghanistan (at least not those wars), and less obvious things like how the attacks have reshaped liberal democracies like the US and Europe (for the worse imo), and how they empowered right wing politics in many countries (also bad imo).

Yes - because the future of gaming is probably VR spaces so games on a 2D screen will become nostalgic to an extent.

The nostalgia may be loading up a space with a virtual pc and playing an old game on a mouse and keyboard or controller.

VR headsets aren’t yet there but but when they’re light weight and high definition enough, it may make more sense to play a game on a virtual screen which can be 40 inches or room scale, than your desktop. If I could see my hands and the mouse and keyboard I’d probably already be doing it. It already works with virtual desktop and controller based games.

So, alternative take. If you have a home PC would you be better upgrading it and getting a cheaper laptop for more basic use?

Basically do you really need a mobile work horse? If you’re doing video work then you may be better with a graphics card or CPU upgrade £ for £. Do you really want to be editing videos on your sofa or in bed? It doesn’t seem like the easiest or most productive way to work in that particular use.

You can also stream any game from your PC to a low power laptop (or other devices) using Steam or other streaming tech. The pc can be on but with the sound and screen off, while you’re elsewhere streaming a game.

So maybe a PC upgrade and a shared basic laptop for video and internet would be enough? The only downside is if you genuinely think you would want to do full on video work on the go - out of the home or abroad for example. Then it makes more sense. But a powerful laptop around the house when you have a PC that does the same seems a bit pointless. It also means work drifts away into the rest of your home, whereas now when you’re not at your PC you’re not working.

But if this is more talking yourself into buying an expensive toy, there may be better toys to be had for far less. Like a steam deck - under £400 for a decent machine, play games anywhere in the home (on the device or streaming to the device), get a dock and plug it in to your telly.

Edit: other way to think of it: do you really need the laptop? What could you spend that money on instead? There is an opportunity cost if you spend that money or take on debt for something you don’t really need. You could save that £42 a month and treat yourself to something else in 6 months or a year.

So the other 55% of the time it’s a Lemmy user? I.e. the majority of the time!? There is so much irony in your post.

This has already been confirmed a non story. He said this around the launch time and Larian have since confirmed that the section has been found and played.

This article shows the poor state of gaming “journalism”. Stories taken from each other and no actual work done by the “journalist”. So false rumours spread.

Kotaku have an updated version of the story, link below. I have no idea if they broke the story first or are another of the copycats though.
https://kotaku.com/baldurs-gate-3-astarion-voice-actor-hidden-area-section-1850860934

Are you sure it’s cats?

Have you seen the cats pooping or just sniffing the poop?

Depends where you are, but foxes would be a more likely bet. Fox poop stinks too - really foul stuff. Cat poop generally is quite inocuos once it drys out, although a lawn mowing bot slicing it up would make sense for making it worse.

I have never heard of cats pooping in the middle of a lawn before. Normally they like private and safe spaces to poop as they’re vulnerable when pooping, and normally they’re fastidious about burying it where possible.

iF it really is cats, then maybe get a gravel section next to your lawn that they might prefer to go in? A litter box essentially.

A mesh has others have said. I use Google WiFi as it’s cheaper and gets the job done. But it’s a potential compromise as the more expensive mesh systems offer better bandwidth.

I tried Homeplug systems - they can work well on a well wired house, but mine was giving me about 10% of my bandwidth from the router downstairs to my home office upstairs.

For comparison Google WiFi is giving me 100% of my 250mbs connection. If you’re looking at much higher bandwidths or users, you may need a more expensive system. Alot of mesh systems have a dedicated back channel separate to the user facing channels but Google WiFi does not - that makes it cheaper but could be a bottleneck if you you’re at the very high ends of internet speeds and home usage. For most home users though I suspect Google WiFi is more than enough.

This doesn’t make sense. It’s more likely we’ll pack more into a high end device then say goodbye to them in tasks like gaming.

Computing power has been constantly improving for decades and miniaturisation is part of that. I have desktop PCs at work in small form factors that are more powerful than the gaming PC I used to have 10 years ago. It’s impressive how far things have come.

However at the top end bleeding edge in CPUs,.GPUs and APUs high powered kit needs more space for very good reasons. One is cooling - if you want to push any chip to its limits then you’ll get heat, so you need space to cool it. The vast majority of the space in my desktop is for fans and airflow. Even the vast majority of the bulk of my graphics card is actually space for cooling.

The second is scale - in a small form factor device you cram as much as you can get in, and these days you can get a lot in a small space. But in my desktop gaming tower I’m not constrained such limits. So I have space for a high quality power supply unit, a spacious motherboard with a wealth of options for expansions, a large graphics card so I can have a cutting edge chip and keep it cool, space for multiple storage devices, and also lots and lots of fans, a cooling system for the CPU.

Yes, in 5 years a smaller device will be more capable for today’s games. But the cutting edge will also have moved on and you’ll still need a cutting edge large form factor device for the really bleeding edge stuff. Just as now - a gaming laptop or a games console is powerful but they have hard upper limits. A large form factor device is where you go for high end experiences such as the highest end graphics and now increasingly high fidelity VR.

The exceptions to that are certain computing tasks don’t need anything like high end any more (like office software, web browsing, 4k movies), other tasks largely don’t (like video editing) so big desktops are becoming more niche in the sense that high end gaming is their main use for many homes users. That’s been a long running trend, and not related to APUs.

The other exception is cloud streaming of gaming and offloading processing into the cloud. In my opinion that is what will really bring an end to needing large form factor devices. We’re not quite there but I suspec that will that really pushes form factors down, rather than APUs etc.

Lens is a visual search tool. Take a picture, ask it to search or answer a question based on what’s in the picture. Like take a picture of a tree and ask it what species is it

Yeah. For apple users Lens is not the simple andtoid camera app (which yes can translate text on the fly and read QR codes) - Lens is a visual search tool that can answer queries based on pictures.

Like if you take a picture of a tree you can ask what species it is, or a picture of a person you can ask where the clothes are from etc.

Google Lens doesn’t just translate text, it contextually searches based on what it sees and interprets in an image. The translation stuff is already built into the Android camera app; Lens is something more

No; it depends on the individual package whether it is open source of nor. Ubuntu uses a lot of Open Source software (including the Linux Kernal) and packages but is not entirely open source. It derives it’s own package base from Debian, and then adds it’s own flavour to things as well as commerical tools it pushes.

Linux Mint is an Ubuntu derivative; its sounds like the Indian Government would be doing the same thing. Basically like Mint, they would use Ubuntu and it’s packages as the basis of their system and rely on most of it to be updated & maintained by Ubuntiu’s teams upstream, but then build their own repositories that contain other software or their own perferred modified versions of things originally taken from Ubuntu. They can build a version of Linux that they control including what software is installed, and when it is updated.

They would not have to make their distribution freely available, but if they modified any open source packages they would have to make those available as open source packages (depending on the license of the open source software). However that can be very difficult to inforce, and if it’s done in a closed military system you’d never even know a modified version of the software exists if they chose not to share it.

Although Ubuntu contains a lot of “open source” software, it doesn’t mean the Indian Governments version would necessairly be open source. But the big benefit to India would be potential complete control of any part of the software chain, and no reliance on big tech companies like Microsoft for the OS and core software like Office. That saves a lot of money and is also potentially more secure (in a national security sense), depending on how much people trust the US government not to interfere in american Tech companies. There has been talk of forcing backdoors into US software in the past which would make any big nation nervous about being reliant on their software.

You can make zips using 7Zip. I use 7zip and send Zips to other people, but use 7z compression for my own files. Zip files are more ubiquitous and readily opened by most OS; certainly Windows opens them natively, and I assume MacOs does.

Of course it also depends what you’re sending. I wouldn’t send secure files in just a zip even with encryption due to zips flaws. I would use 7z eoth encryption as a minimum, and more secure methods depending on how valuable the data is.

I used to have a clam phone when I was a kid and I love the idea of a foldable phone now.

But I wouldn’t buy one any time soon - the idea of a hinged phone and screen just sounds far to vulnerable to wear and tear. As soon as you start adding moving parts you increase the risk of failure.

It’s a great concept but at the moment it’s a superfluous luxury and as they’re so expensive then the cost of a breakage is just too much to tolerate. As the technology and manufacturing improves and/or becomes cheaper I might get one. But at present I don’t want to risk buying a very expensive phone that could break in such a basic way as a hinged phone and folding screen could.

Instead, the researcher claims “a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch”: open-source AI models that the researcher says are “faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable.”

The sentence you quote says who the 3rd faction is: Open-source AI models.

They have range of stuff; the cheapest is their Leaf 2 - €240 which is 350 CAD or £210. But yes it is more expensive than Kobo and Amazon; I try to remember they subsidise their ebook readers as they want to lock you in to their stores, and the Boox is more versatile as an Android e-ink device. I haven’t used the Leaf 2 myself, but the reviews I’ve found sound like it’s a pretty good ereader.

If not interested in e-ink, then any good generic Android tablet beats out Kobo and Kindle devices for freedom and are comparable in price.