“Break a leg” (or “Hals und Beinbruch” in German, which is “Neck and leg fracture”).

I don’t even know what the logic could be. Is it supposed to be some sort of reverse psychology?

As @apotheotic@beehaw.org mentioned, that is actually not allowed and against the spirit of the “cookie banner law”. But since hundreds, if not thousands of sites break this law, it takes quite the time for government workers to sift through all of that (provided they even get around to it).

True, true. We literally omly have a wood furnace, so are absolutely not affected by this, but I’ll see how reporting potential GDPR violations in the name of someone else works.

Sorry that it didn’t land as an obvious joke. With the NSDAP NPD AfD on such a steep rise, I think I have transcended gallows humour and arrived at necromancer humour levels to be able to cope with this reality.

This is my reasoning, too. I keep my keyboard QWERTZ + German Umlaute, but almost everything else is set to English. Pretty much the only exception are videogames and movies that have a superior German version to them (like Kingdom Come Deliverance)

Samesies!

One very important word of caution (unfortunately coming from experience): Syncthing, as the name suggests, makes it so the content of one device is the same as that of another device. So, even if you have one device set to only receive data, it means that if you delete a file from the sending device, the receiving device will also delete that file to stay in sync with the sending device.

There is a way to use Syncthing as a simple backup storage program (not necessarily the best solution but much better than manually backing up your files every few months and just hoping for the best). But it means that you have to use the advanced folder option “ignoreDelete”. I also use the file versioning system, so even if something is automatically deleted by mistake, it’s still versioned in a special subfolder and accessible to me.

Thank you a lot for the load of information! I just now got to reading it all. I was very skeptical about the fact that it is fed by the output of other LLMs but the way you explain it makes sense to me that it might not be that much of a problem. I guess a super blunt analogy could be “It’s only incest if it’s your children” lol

Hahaha the production lead actually suggested that I might have been sick and coughed germs onto the sample sponge or that the sponges themselves were already contaminated during manufacturing, because every single sample showed high counts of pseudomonas.

Maybe instead she should start listening to us when we tell her that production equipment from 1970 might not be sufficient to run a food production with the hygiene requirements of today. But no, replacing that would cost more money than just taking samples over and over until the results are low enough (probably because by the 37th swab I cleaned the surface better than the production workers)

Thanks for the explanation. I don’t understand enough about large language models to give a valuable judgement on this whole Deepseek happening from a technical standpoint. I think it’s excellent to have competition on the market and it feels that the US’ whole “But they’re spying on you and being a national security risk” is a hypocritical outcry when Facebook, OpenAI and the like still exist.

What do you think about Deepseek? If I understood correctly, it’s being trained on the output of other LLMs, which makes it much more cheap but, to me it seems, also even less trustworthy because now all the actual human training data is missing and instead it’s a bunch of hallucinations, lies and (hopefully more often than not) correctly guessed answers to questions made by humans.

Thank you for that perspective. It seems to be somewhat similar and thankless to when I get tasked with taking microbio samples from the machines to check for contamination and then get grumpy department leads because the analysis results show over and over again that their cleaning procedure is inefficient.

Does open sourcing require you to give out the training data? I thought it only means allowing access to the source code so that you could build it yourself and feed it your own training data.

Fair point. I would agree to say there should be a healthy middle ground. I think coming across theme park-like spectacle around every corner would remove a lot of immersion and most authenticity (specifically trying not to default to “realism” because then we’d specifically want 99,999% of areas to be lifeless rock) not only from Starfield but many many games. Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption and the Metal Gear series would be incredibly different games, if it was just from one action sequence to another and then a beautiful story cutscene immediately and with only loading screens separating them from each other.

I guess I’m trying to say that immersion into and attachment to a game is increased if you give opportunity for (or sometimes force) the player to calm down. Red Dead 2, for example, does this masterfully by its generally slow and deliberate pace for most actions (cooking steak by actually making you hold the meat over fire for a couple seconds, making you walk/ride for long passages to get somewhere even during missions, etc.) and by sprinkling in quite a number of relaxing quests, like watching a movie with your girlfriend, in a game that’s mainly known for shooty tooty cowboy action.

To wrap up that wall of text, I guess I’ll see if the ratio of interesting tidbit for every dull landscape is too low for me in Starfield once I get my hands on it c:

I haven’t played Starfield yet. That being said, I think I will enjoy most planets being rather dull (as long as you still occasionally have reason to go there). I very much love the stance of “When everything/everyone is remarkable, nothing/noone is.” One of the bigger reasons (aside the gameplay usually not being quite to my liking) why I don’t play MMOs anymore is, because about every MMO culminates in 80% of the people wearing “the armor of fabled legends” and being “Slayer of Demonlord and Demigod Sckholzhlak”.

Thanks, that’s pretty cool! I did fear that a lot of Bethesda’s traditional environmental storytelling would be gone.

Thanks for the post. I’m happy that it’s being worked on, but I have no expectations. Not even the expectation that it gets released.

But if it releases and is decent at conveying that special World of Darkness feeling, I’m ready to forgive quite a number of technical flaws (after all, Bloodlines 1 is littered with technical problems and still the most amazing vampire RPG).

Please don’t apologize for the tangent. It’s giving me high hopes that I’m going to like the game despite the flaws and (probably mostly legit) criticism of reviewers.

Does anyone remember Driver on the, I think, PS1? I mean the tutorial wasn’t awful because it’s irrelevant but because it’s notoriously difficult to beat.

My man, that’s so not funky of you! If you skedaddle into this far out place called internet, you have to expect to come across new terms that are slammin and radical to some people. Instead of giving them hairy eyeballs and going “No can do”, how about you say “Word, brother”? Every generation invents its own gnarly slang and that’s pretty fly, actually. Like, what makes your slang groovy and theirs bogus?

And here I was thinking that this would be a sign that Rockstar wants to dabble in developing sandbox RPGs…

But your take is probably closer to reality :c

A continual stream of revenue is great, understandably. But I would much prefer it if I could instead purchase v.1.34 of a software and get updates until major changes come. At which point I’d still have my v.1.3x with all its functions but if I wanted the new stuff (and the security patches with it) I’d need to pay for v.1.4x. Corporations (that probably much more require the security updates than hobbyists) wouldn’t see much of a change and hobbyists could have a good alternative to subscriptions.