My wife and I played Haven back before we got married, and never got around to finishing it. Really ought to dust that game off again. Playing it as a couple was really fun, and actually helped us to learn things about each other.

You know what’s wild? The answer that immediately comes to mind is Warframe.

Genuinely, I’m not remotely joking, Warframe has some of the best video games romance I’ve ever encountered.

Two things really stand out to me about the conversations in Warframe.

First, the things they learn about you are often just as important as the things you learn about them. The article talks about the process of two people figuring out how they fit into each other’s lives, and that’s exactly what you get with Warframe. You need to actually show that you can be someone they can love, as well as simply showing interest in them.

Secondly, and I think maybe more importantly; most of the conversations in Warframe don’t feel “important.” They all are. But most of them are about comparatively trivial things. A lot of it is literally just people sharing shower thoughts, or jokes, or talking about dumb shit, or getting things off their brains. But how you handle those interactions matters just as much, if not more, than the heavy stuff.

Also, the way the characters interact feels distinct and different. Amir, the most obvious case of ADHD in the universe, writes five messages for every one of yours (these conversations all happen through “Not MSN Messenger”), and most of the time what he needs is for you to just listen while he unloads all the chaotic shit in his brain. Eleanor, the journalist, writes long, carefully formed sentences with correct punctuation and grammar. She poses questions, prods and pries, tries to dig secrets out of you. Aoi will sometimes just send you a string of emojis, and will be delighted if you reply the same way. She likes to be silly, but more importantly she needs to just know that you’re there and you cared enough to reply. It’s the written equivalent of squeezing someone’s hand. Some characters will pester you, others are more likely to wait for you to talk first. There’s a unique dynamic with each of them.

This has the makings of another Concord written all over it. Even after the disaster with the stolen art, the reports I’ve heard are that the gameplay just isn’t good. Whatever talent was at Bungie left some time ago by the sounds of things.

Anyone who has tasted good karage will never argue with the assertion that fried chicken is the greatest accomplish of human civilization.

While I would like to see those options explored, I don’t think they’re strictly necessary. For now, it’s a reasonable alternative, and the open source code means that a self-hosted and/or federated fork is always possible.

Revolt is now stoat.chat. And I think they might be getting a little slammed with new users.

As someone who made an account a while ago, no issues so far.

Revolt is now called Stoat Chat. Some sort of legal issue apparently.

Anyway, for those who don’t know, it’s basically an open source clone of Discord. Definitely worth a look, probably where I’ll my stuff now.

Imagine if any other kind of media did the same thing. Like, you’re reading a book, and every few pages there’s a footnote telling you what the protagonist’s current Paragon/Renegade score is based on the decisions they recently made. Would be a miserable experience.

God, I love KOTOR so much, but its consequences have been a fucking disaster for the entire RPG industry.

Sure, and they’re talking about that like something they might add to it down the line, because at the end of the day these systems are usually just android apps, so you can theoretically add anything.

In practice, what’ll most likely happen is that they’ll try that capability out, decide that it sucks, and quietly ditch it. Or, they’ll roll it out anyway in order to keep the government happy, and then commanders will just tell their troops not to use it. Militaries have always known how to work with and around bad equipment.

If they have to shove in a dumb AI app to get the funding for some actually very useful military equipment approved, well, that’s military procurement for you. Would be nice if the current UK government weren’t so hell bent on shoving AI in everything, but the realistic alternatives currently are “Nazis” and “Sparkling fascists.”

Smaller armies benefit more from tools like this. Not the AI part - see my other comment for why I think that’s not even real - but the ability to quickly and effectively communicate orders and information. A soldier being able to point a webcam on their helmet at the enemy position so that HQ can instantly see their disposition and entrenchment is super helpful. The ability to draw orders on terrain maps in real time is super helpful. Most of war is communication and intelligence gathering. Part of the reason the French army collapsed in 1940 is that they were using signal flags while the Germans were using radios. That stuff matters.

And for smaller militaries this matters more, because you can’t simply drop the hammer on every threat you meet. You have to judiciously and precisely consider when to engage and when to fall back. You maneuver your enemy into situations where you have the upper hand. You defeat in detail. You plan every engagement to minimize your casualties and maximize theirs.

Yeah, we’re currently having discussions at my company about how we’re going to respond if potential clients starting asking about AI or putting it in their RFPs.

And this isn’t a new problem. We make a product that can be hosted in a cloud server if you want to. Because of the nature of the product, this is the stupidest idea imaginable. We straight up tell people not to do it. This is something that absolutely needs to be on-prem. But we made it able to run remote, because sometimes buyers will put out an RFP that says “System must be cloud native.”

That line gets put there by a CTO who can barely open their email, but keeps seeing the word “Cloud” in Business Insider and WSJ, and thinks it must be the future because that’s where their photos get backed up to. No one in their right mind wants it, but we have to offer it or else someone else gets the sale.

I think what you’re getting at here might be better expressed as “Moral choices are more interesting than morality systems.”

Life Is Strange doesn’t have a morality system of any kind, but it has, easily, some of the most interesting moral choices I’ve ever experienced in a video game. One of them doesn’t even affect the ending or later story beats (to my knowledge), and yet I literally had to put the controller down and walk away because I couldn’t make that choice… Both options were so unspeakably horrible, and yet the choice was obviously and urgently necessary.

Mass Effect actually has some really interesting moral quandaries, but they’re massively undercut by the need to force them into the game’s binary moral code, instead of just allowing them to be the complex problems that they are. Morality systems boil every choice down to an arbitrary position on an arbitrary axis.

The Witcher works because it simply presents you with situations and allows you to judge them for yourself. It doesn’t present you with a score card afterwards.

Only when you have to write out to swap. In the case of something like ZFS, it stores data in RAM, looks for it there, then looks on the disk. So freeing up the RAM is effectively instantaneous; you just mark the space as free, then the other process writes into it.

So, as far as I can see, this is basically just the same networked soldier tech that every modern military is using. Canada has had this stuff in the field for a while (mostly with 3RCR, and I think 3PPCLI), with plans to expand to the entire reg force once we work the kinks out. It’s pretty much just a way of giving soldiers a map screen where commanders can draw orders, and also giving them a camera so they can directly feed back visual intel. Helps cut back fog of war.

In the article itself the only hint of AI is the note that these devices will be “AI capable” which is kind of a no shit Sherlock. Literally these systems already use off the shelf smart devices connected up to a hardened comms system. The Canadian one is built on Samsung S22s. Of course its “AI capable”, anything with a CPU is.

My suspicion is that the UK military just really wanted this networked soldier capability (its a good program, that’s why everyone is doing it), and knew that they could get the funding more easily if they snuck the word AI in there because the current UK government has an absolute raging hard on for anything remotely AI related.

It’s part of ZFS 2.3.0, so it just depends what version TrueNAS is shipping with.

ZFS seems pretty RAM hungry

This is a common misunderstanding.

Short version; ZFS isn’t RAM hungry, it’s RAM aware. If your system has unused memory lying around, ZFS will use it to improve read performance. But it will give up that memory the moment anything else needs it.

and I don’t believe you can add new drives to an existing volume.

No longer true

Xpipe is fantastic. I have to manage a LOT of SSH connections between work and homelab (well over 200 now) and Xpipe has been a god send.

Yeah, I tend to buy vinyl for the artists that I’m really into.

OK, so the dude in the photo is a sociopathic rapist with God-tier mind control powers. The woman is a former victim of his.

Depends what you define as “Wouldn’t work for me.” Song library has improved a lot, if that’s what you mean.