It doesn't matter. As long as Google is not held accountable for showing you a scam ad that makes you lose $10k, Google doesn't care about the trustworthiness of the spammer.
I'm a passionate Software Engineer with 16 years of experience, and have had worked on a wide variety stacks and frameworks. Last, I've worked on Pharmacy robots. Before that, I've enabled customers access to enormous amounts of log data over MCP, with a focus on reducing token usage. And before that I worked on Audio/Video hardware using Rust and C, built Authn/Authz systems for PII using Rust, React and TypeScript, and handled SMS using React, TypeScript, MongoDb and Box.
i'm like that in anything vaguely RPGish, videogame/board-top/cards/whatever.
if there is a such thing as a potion or anything like it i'll horde it and never use for fear of needing it in the future, well past the last boss or the credits..
I'm kinda opposite on reason, I feel like using one means I failed to do the battle the normal way and picked the easy mode.
I've mostly healed from that affliction, at least for buyable consumables, now it is just math, if I buy X potions I won't have to go back to rest and heal, so it's more efficient to grind while spending a bit of gold earned on regen
I've noticed this a few times where I've hoarded items to use later only to find I've finished the game before that challenging "later" arrives.
For some odd reason, the specific game that comes to mind for this was Horizon:Zero Dawn PS4/5.
Conversely, I'm playing Half-Life:Blueshift right now, and I didn't try to save anything, now I've hit a couple of points where I'm out of ammo or health and can't progress without loading an older save.
I had one fun experience in Black Mesa (HL fan-remake) where I was knocked off of the edge of a "cliff" by a large enemy (no spoilers) and it auto-saved mid-air, so it reloaded me falling forever >_<.
I'm definitely the type to always be saving items "just in case" and the Half Life series is definitely one where I felt the most paranoid about that.
I played HL1 on the PS2 recently with a memory card that was really limited in space so I was only managing a single save for most of the playthrough until I soft locked myself in a room I couldn't leave using my ONLY save and had to start at least carrying a second backup save to prevent that happening again.
Half Life 2 felt like it almost made fun of me at times for building that hoarding mentality, always dumping health and ammo on me when I had already been preserving it as much as possible right before. Meanwhile the few things I would run out of it would never give any more of for entire sections.
> I played HL1 on the PS2 recently with a memory card that was really limited in space so I was only managing a single save for most of the playthrough until I soft locked myself in a room I couldn't leave using my ONLY save and had to start at least carrying a second backup save to prevent that happening again.
I get very little time to game these days, which has the benefit that I have saves usually spaced no more than about an hour apart. Sometimes a couple of hours on the weekends. There were a couple of points in HL1 where I had to go back to a previous save because I was in a bad situation, I'm playing on PC so there was no real limit on the number of saves I can keep.
I've not started HL2 yet (this time around, and it's been 20 something years since I last played it) so I can't remember what that was like.
I'm going to finish Blueshift, then go on to HL2, but I'd really like some texture and quality updates; HL2 is a real downgrade from Black Mesa. I tried it in VR but was feeling nauseous within a few minutes.
All of this is to lead up to Alyx on my Steam Frame which is just sitting there waiting until I replay these so I can remember what happened.
> Half Life 2 felt like it almost made fun of me at times for building that hoarding mentality, always dumping health and ammo on me when I had already been preserving it as much as possible right before. Meanwhile the few things I would run out of it would never give any more of for entire sections
I'll bear this in mind. I think HL1 was a little too obvious; you suddenly get a cache of rocket ammo, you know what's coming.
Me but with notebooks. Not unique or interesting ones. All of them. I'm always worried about ruining the notebook by putting the wrong stuff in it so I just have an ever increasing collection of blank notebooks that I thought were definitely the one I would finally use.
I haven't worked with paper in a long time, but IIRC some notebooks I used in school had pages you could tear out, sacrificing a strip along the side, while preserving holes that'd work in a 3 ring binder. So then you could just write anything in one of these notebooks, tear it out, and put it in a 3 ring binder afterward. The binder could be more thematically organized then, separate binders by subject. A bit like opening your text editor, writing stuff down, then deciding which dir to save it to later.
Also even if your paper doesn't have the holes, you could use a punch to add them, assuming you have space on the side without writing.
> It is a good idea to apply for your child's Social Security number and birth certificate at birth. If you apply at the hospital, the state agency that issues birth certificates will share your child's information with us. Then, we will mail the Social Security card to you. If you wait to apply, there may be delays while we verify your child's birth certificate.
At least on our TCL (which has an array of thousands of back lights) some of the unhance options actually need to be turned on.
We bought it because it has crazy high brightness (it is in a bright room with direct sunlight hitting the panel while we are watching it), and while it can beat back the sun, it cannot do so by just turning all the zones on 100% because it would melt or something.
So, if all the image slopping were turned off, the contrast ratio would drop 100x, and the TV wouldn't really be fit for purpose.
(For when the sun is not actively trying to kill the panel, I have a de-slop shortcut setup. That also has the backlight enhance stuff turned on -- as low as possible -- to get true black on the LCD. It works OK. OLED is not quite there yet for this corner case.)
This kind of trade-off is often a dark pattern used when forced to offer a feature by regulators or by competitors offering it. The evil trick is complying with the regs or being able to advertise the feature but making it so unattractive users won't activate it, enabling the manufacturer to still earn that sweet $35-$60 / yr from advertising, app install payments, rev share and selling your viewing data.
> the image enhancements.
Having spent a couple decades working in and around digital video production tooling and engineering, as well as being a filmmaker and home theater enthusiast, it's worth mentioning that today almost all television image enhancement features are net negative, even if they make the image subjectively 'pop' or motion appear smoother on typical scenes, they'll introduce artifacts or trade-offs in other kinds of scenes.
In my experience doing a lot of testing over the years with objective signal analysis tools at work as well as subjectively across 7 generations of upgrades in my own home theater, the trade-offs aren't worth it. There are a few context and content specific exceptions but they're quite rare and usually involve slightly improving significantly degraded signals which no longer exist in most home theaters (eg noise reduction in analog sources like laserdisc, DCT macro-block smoothing in highly compressed old MPEG 1/2 sources or dynamic range expansion on legacy SD sources).
With today's 4K and HD digital sources encoded at high bit rates in modern codecs, the director, colorist and mastering engineer can finally deliver their precise intent all the way to your eyeballs. The ~$20 chip calculating synthetic frames and pixels in your TV introduces surface curb appeal at the cost of artifacts and a poorly integrated image. If it actually made the image look better, the director and colorist have more and better tools than that $20 chip that they're already applying to the source. You're just turning a $20 chip loose on 'full auto' to guess at (and often undo or muddy) intentional enhancements manually applied frame by frame over days by experts.
Do whatever you like but I encourage you to critically audition each of those enhancements across a range of source types (4K, HD, HDR, HDR10, SDR, 24, 30, and 60 frame) and diverse scenes (low-light, quick panning, smooth dollies, and synthetic test signals, etc). Once you compare the before/after across that breadth back-to-back you'll see what I mean. I run my calibrated, high-end 3-laser projector (150" screen) as close to neutral, native settings as I can get and it looks sensational. And to be clear I'm not being a purist, if 'enhancements' really improved some scenes meaningfully without degrading other scenes, I'd be "Fuck the director's intent, it's just better." But for every scene an enhancement improves, I can queue up a scene from another film it makes noticeably worse. Fortunately, on most high-end Sony TVs you can get an un-hyped, accurate image in the standard UX without going to the calibrator or factory menus.
> Having spent a couple decades working in and around digital video production tooling and engineering, as well as being a filmmaker and home theater enthusiast, it's worth mentioning that today almost all television image enhancement features are net negative
Yep, generally you don't want anything the TV manufacturer markets as "enhancements." They basically all add things to the signal that were not part of the director's or video editor's vision. Any cinephile will remind you that there is one correct setting for "brightness," "contrast," "color," and "tint". "Sharpness" should almost always be zero, and any other setting that claims to "enhance" the picture should be turned off for correct output.
The worst ones now are the "motion smoothing" modes that take your normal FPS movie and try to interpolate them up to 60FPS, 120FPS or even 240FPS, giving them that cheap, crappy "soap opera" effect. Turn it off as soon as you turn on your TV for the first time.
While this is generally true, there are some notorious cases where the director's intent was terrible, and the image definitely needs more contrast and brightness to see what's going on.
>motion smoothing works nice on my 30fps video games.
Of course a modern console only managing 30fps is the actual 'bug' :-). But I agree that's one of the narrow exception cases where an 'enhancement' might be a net benefit. Although if you're going to use synthetic frames, doing it in the console can be better because intra-frame motion hinting might be available and, even if it's not, the console's frame gen is trained on game content where a TV's chip is cross-function and far less capable (both in look-ahead and motion vector count). But I know some consoles don't have frame gen, so in that case it's a win.
Yes, I use that on my Shield(s) and my Xiaomi android TV boxes (4 in total). It can completely take over the home screen and you can strip everything out of it so it is just a list of exactly what you want to have available.
It's happening everywhere. All these apps who try to be endless rent-seekers, injecting themselves in a process where they have very little to add.
I don't need a platform that takes 25% off of the handyman that I call. All that happens is that I pay 25% more. And if the platform becomes large enough it'll set policies that the handyman cannot offer lower prices outside of the platform...
They work well in high security environments because you can allowlist the vendor and product id of only these hard drives, and you don't have to set up procedures where people HAVE to encrypt their drives before use.
So cost-wise it makes sense.
But for personal use? BitLocker / VeraCrypt all the way.
people rolling windows and saying high security environment in the same phrase are likely not aware what is a highly secured environment in the first place so it doesnt matter where those keys are -_-. I have never encountered these types of devices nor windows in a high secure environment. free software and BSD. Occasionally Linux but that is also mostly avoided or manually tampered with / built and hardnened to get around its rubbish security. sometimes there is an alternate deployment linux based (very hardened) in the event of a security issue on the other more secure platform in case that one does happen to spring a leak. (might be more needed now its easier to pick apart these systems).
some highly secure environments have connections comming from networks that sport windows. usually they will come in via something like a data diode so whatever comes in can physically not come out because its so risky to allow even such a network to connect to yours....
perceptions of what is highly secure can vary a lot depending on what a person has encountered. if you ever come across a place that is really secure u'll immediately know the difference.
ive never seen a highly secure corporate network and have seen close up what security is implemented in fortune100 etc. its a doozey. they just pay vendors with big retainers for IR etc. to be compliant and insured. that is not security. (and they spend millions on that which is funny as hell)
I have. We had an air-gapped network for ingesting and processing the deliverables and results of security audits and pen-tests at work. It was running windows and not Linux/BSD like the laptops of the pentesters, because most of our customers were MS shops so all deliverables we got from them were mostly documents, apps and files that were designed for Windows apps or had better compatibility on MS Office, and businesses stay solvent by conforming to their customers' needs instead of fighting them.
You can probably implement your own these days. I would use a model to generate a requirement document, then human review, then generate an implementation plan, then human review, then take it to build. Have a different model to a code review and testing. End with human code review and testing.
You could make your own BitLocker conforming to your requirements without relying on or trusting any cloud or corporate entity.
And then turn Mythos onto your code to make sure you don’t have vulnerabilities? That’s a lot of faith in the security of LLM-written code that I wouldn’t have in human-written code.
The point is the code is there in front of you. You can audit it, study it, turn mod and after model loose on it, do whatever you want. You’re going to have to compile it so you need to trust the compiler but at least it’s not some cloud provider.
Very sad. I'm about 50% in taking the old Red Alert 2 and get to something that would've resembled the original source code.
Given the rumors that the source code has been lost (and the fact that they open sourced the games before Tiberian Sun & Red Alert 2, and the ones after those), I felt like I was using the tokens for 'good'.
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