Mama told me not to come.
She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.
I use Linux full time and I tried using my desktop as my NAS, and even then it was annoying.
Just get a second device to use as a NAS if you actually need one, or if it’s just you, share files on a separate drive/partition between Windows and Linux. It’s not worth getting fancy with one device.
Nah, support Windows as well, otherwise the game will likely flop. It needs to be pretty successful so it actually gets noticed, and if people are interested in Linux, they’ll be able to switch w/o giving up that game.
Eh, I think it would be better to just make a really good, competitive game that supports Linux day 1. Show these devs that you can support Linux and have a decent player experience wrt anti-cheat.
Your photo and docs
At least in my case, it’s really handy to share photos with other family members. But certainly you don’t need all of them available on the same public service.
Is a vpn always safer then a reverse proxy?
Depends on what you trust, I guess.
A reverse proxy on a standard cert is a bigger target for automated scripts than a reverse proxy on a non-standard port. A VPN runs through the VPN’s authentication, whereas a reverse proxy relies on whatever that app’s authentication is. So whether it’s secure enough depends on the VPN configuration, what you’re hosting, etc.
I’m behind CGNAT, so I have limitations you don’t, but here’s my setup:
I like this approach because I can eat my cake (nice domain names instead of IPs and ports) and have it too (fast connection inside LAN, can disable reverse proxy if I want better security). You could get the same w/o the VPS, and if you require WireGuard VPN access outside the LAN, you get better security than a public-facing service.
Eh, I don’t think the energy use difference is all that important. It gets a lot more complicated if you factor in the ink drying out before being fully used, which means we’d need to produce and transport more ink. Also, a lot of the energy use for a laser printer is during warm-up, so if you print in big batches, the energy difference is a bit lower since it’s amortized over the amount of pages you print.
So just looking at wall power draw only tells part of the picture, and if you’re only using it a few times per year, it’s largely irrelevant (maybe a couple KWh/year difference?).
How well does that work though? My understanding is that there are still quite a few caveats, but it’s been a while since I actually looked into it.
Would the Mac Mini actually idle at that wattage if it’s open for connections? I doubt it, it’s probably more like 10W, which is generally the range for those smaller AMD MiniPCs or NUCs.
If it’s 10W, that’s a $20 savings from your NAS w/ a desktop CPU (and probably a discrete GPU, unless it’s running an APU). I can get 4% easily on savings, so I’d only need a $500 savings vs the Mac Mini to recoup that difference every year ($500 * 4% = $20). So if you already have an old PC, use that instead of buying a Mac Mini, and you also won’t have to fight macOS to do what you want.
Yup. My old 1st gen Ryzen desktop system isn’t particularly power efficient, but it idles <50W (I think closer to 25W, but I haven’t measured for a while). And that’s a desktop class chip from 7 years ago with two HDDs and a discrete GPU and PCIe wifi card, so it’s not winning any awards for efficiency. Even at that, it’s barely a blip on my power bill.
An AMD or Intel laptop-class chip should be able to get to 10W or so idle, and not spike too much with basic tasks. And those can be had for $200-300, less if you’re okay with older chips. Run Linux headless and it’ll likely stay below 15W at the wall most of the time.
If it’s an older x86 model, just install Linux on it.
I have friends from Iran and India, and I have a family member to lived in Kazahkstan for a couple years, so I’ve heard of it, but I couldn’t tell you very much about it. Just roughly where it is (east of the Caspian Sea). I couldn’t even tell you confidently what the climate or geography looks like, just a rough guess of “probably similar to Afghanistan?”
It used to be decent, until they sold out a few years ago.
if you even hold an internally consistent view of what scams are
Yes, and I’ve detailed it already. A scam is a fraudulent business deal, meaning you receive something other than what was agreed on.
Selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge is fraud because you’re not receiving what was promised, ownership of the Brooklyn Bridge, because the seller doesn’t own it and therefore can’t transfer ownership to you. It’s not a scam because you can’t take it home with you, it’s a scam because you’re not getting what was advertised.
Yep, no ranked competitive games have this
Right, and there are two mentalities here:
You’ll see the first in the lower brackets and the second in the upper brackets. They’ll both often have top-tier gear, and the first gets it to “feel” cool instead of actually getting an edge from the benefits of that gear, whereas the second actually benefits from the gear. So even in a competitive game, the MTX are still targeting the more casual players. I think there’s also a significant overlap in cheaters and the first group, because the first group feels “entitled” to doing well, despite not actually being that good.
I consider that first group to largely be “casual” because the intent there isn’t to practice to get better, but to show off, even if the game is designed to be competitive.
In any case, those MTX aren’t scams, you’re getting exactly what you’re paying for, and in many cases you can demo it before purchasing. I think buying them is stupid, but that’s because I put very little value in what they offer, whereas others could find a lot more value in it.
That doesn’t impact all games though, the game market has essentially split into catering to three groups:
The more social a game is, the more likely the game is to throw in vanity purchases like skins.
I have a simple rule in my house, no F2P games, and it has worked really well in avoiding BS. There are some paid games w/ MTX and whatnot, but those are a lot fewer than among the F2P games.
Refuse to play the worst offenders and offer alternatives to your gaming friends, so you can eat your cake and have it too.
I’m on about all the people getting taken by this systemic problem
What do you mean by “taken”? Were they not aware of what they were buying? Was there fraud at any point in the transaction?
A bad deal isn’t criminal, it’s only criminal if it’s misrepresented. And given that there are a ton of repeat customers, I fail to see how it’s being misrepresented. When exactly did the fraud take place? Did the customer get something other than what they expected to get?
At the end of the day, all value is made-up, especially with digital licenses. I may value a cosmetic skin a lot more highly than you do, but that doesn’t mean I was defrauded, it just means I find more value in it than you.
The small charges are more insidious
Oh, they absolutely are, and I definitely don’t like the stupid dopamine machine that mobile gaming has become. But you also have to understand that the value in paying for a ton of MTX in those games is often less about those incremental dopamine hits and more about showing off to friends/randoms online (Look how big my base is! Look how cool my character looks! Look how high on the leaderboard I am!). That’s the real dopamine hit IMO, and that’s where the analogy with luxury items comes in (lifted trucks, designer bags, etc).
lootboxes
This one is different and I consider it gambling, and it should be regulated as such, because the value is undetermined.
These games are no longer optimized to make you feel good when you’re good at them.
Right, these are casual games, where you can pay to appear successful. That’s what luxury goods are. If I go into debt to buy a fancy car, I look rich to other people, and that gives me that dopamine hit. This is just the digital equivalent of that, in many cases.
The F2P players are being used to give these whales an audience so they can flaunt their “skill” (read: how much they paid).
That’s why pretending any of it can have real monetary value is a scam.
And that’s where I disagree. It’s only a scam if you get something other than what was advertised. If the advertising is simply “buy this to instantly complete X” and buying it instantly completes X, then there’s no fraud, therefore no scam. You paid a stupid tax for being impatient, and you did that while understanding that you’re buying a temporary high.
Just because something is addictive doesn’t mean it’s a scam. Cigarettes and alcohol aren’t scams. Gambling isn’t a scam. Lotteries aren’t scams. Using any of them to excess is a really bad idea, but I don’t think they’re scams. And that’s why I think any legislation should be limited to kids, since kids are assumed to be more susceptible to dark patterns and addictions, whereas adults are assumed to have responsibility for their own actions.
Yeah, I think it’s fantastic as well. The SimpleFIN syncinc works fantastically, and I’m happy enough that I cancelled my TillerHQ subscription, which lapses this month. There’s still a little work to do to clean up some of my older data, but once I get it all rolling nicely, I’ll definitely send the developers a substantial portion of what I was paying for Tiller (like $100/year). I’ve only used it for a couple months, and I plan to play with it a bit in the next month or two as I’m preparing EOY stuff.
Nope, which honestly annoys me but is pretty par for the course. That said, when it comes to budgeting, I mostly care about where money is going and care less about the “whole financial picture.” If I need to estimate what retirement looks like, I want more than a simple budgeting tool.
I personally use Fidelity for investment tracking. My main “checking” is their Cash Management Account, my “savings” is a brokerage account (invested in t-bills and money market funds), and I can link all of my other accounts and it pulls in specific investments and shows a consolidated view. It’s awesome because it shows all kinds of stuff, like morningstar-style factor weights, sector exposure, etc. It’s not self-hosted, but I trust them with my banking anyway, so it’s not like I’m opening myself up to some new exploit (oh, and Fidelity also has proper MFA; Symantic VIP, which kinda sucks, but it’s way better than any other financial institution).
I used to track this stuff via a Google spreadsheet (couldn’t find a way to get stock quotes in LibreOffice), but this seems to be good enough for me.
In this case, the mobile UI doesn’t even work properly.
That said, I find value in it because it makes it so much easier for my SO and I to see the same thing. Oh, and it supports importing transactions via SimpleFIN, which is really nice.
The game was made objectively worse for them
And I think Blizzard recognizes that WoW has largely run its course, so it’s trying to extract maximum profit from those who remain. That’s what happens when a company shifts from innovation to profit maximization, and it should be a signal for players to move on.
‘just boycott!’ utterly useless
It’s only useless if your metric for success is Blizzard changing their behavior. But if you shift your metric of success to “less predatory companies are viable,” it can absolutely be a success.
Depending on your metric of “success,” maybe legislation is the only option. But we don’t need every company to behave “properly” (however you define that) in order to have a competitive market for games. If you look beyond the handful of top-grossing games w/ manipulative in-game stores, you’ll find a vibrant market of games to play.
“scam victims.”
A scam is something else entirely. “Problem gambling” is largely a choice, and if you ask any gambler, they’ll be able to confirm that they understand that the casino always wins eventually, but that they continue to play because they think “this time will be different.” However, if you ask a scam victim, they’ll tell you they thought the scammer was legitimate and continued because they honestly believed they were making a good choice. Those are very different things.
Games fall under the “problem gambling” umbrella (players know what they’re paying for), not the “scam” umbrella (it’s rare for players to not know what they’re getting for their money). If there are incidents of the latter (e.g. loot boxes with lower than advertised odds of getting something of value), those should be aggressively litigated by regulators, and honestly anything where there isn’t a guarantee (i.e. not paying X to get Y product) should be considered “gambling” and regulated as such (restricted for minors, age verification required, etc).
Spending $90 for a mount is a stupid decision, but it’s not a fraudulent transaction if you get the mount when you pay. I don’t think that should be regulated, but it should spark outcry from news orgs and players and push people away from the game.
I see spending stupid amounts of money on a game to be similar to spending stupid amounts of money on any other vanity purchase, like lifted trucks, designer clothing, or expensive jewelry. If you want to buy those things, you should absolutely be allowed to, even if a lot of people would say it’s a stupid idea if they understood your finances. Adults must be free to make stupid choices, and the only limits IMO should be if you were deceived and wouldn’t have made the choice if you had more accurate information.
Eh, my Ubiquiti AP works pretty well, though it’s a bit annoying setting up the server software. I get way better range with it than I ever got with my previous routers, and I never have to reboot it (my Mikrotik router needs to be rebooted more often, and that’s rock solid as well).
I honestly haven’t had any issues, but I have a very simple setup:
That’s it. No mesh, just a single AP and a single router. It works well, and I largely forget about it because it just works.
That said, I’m considering upgrading to a newer wi-fi standard, so I’ll be doing some research again. Ubiquiti was the best at the time, but I don’t have any particular brand loyalty, so I’ll get whatever seems to work well and is a reasonable price. I will probably keep this AP and add a second, so that’ll factor in as well (i.e. can I have two APs serving the same SSIDs? If so, how do I get them to work seamlessly?).