Musk is trying to start another financial institution under the X brand to handle everyone’s money. The CFPB is the one agency that’s likely to prevent it from screwing over anyone dealing with it.

As has been said before, the only reason to shut down the bureau responsible for preventing scams is if you want to scam people yourself.

If you need to clean your stove around/under the burners, the top part of your stove probably lifts up for that exact purpose.

Didn’t you hear them? They made them promise.

They probably didn’t decide to hack Freecycle ahead of time. Rather they likely probed a ton of sites and found that this one was vulnerable to their hack.

Powder, and especially protein powder, can vary significantly in density depending on how compressed and/or hydrated it is.

I agree that measuring by volume is much more convenient than weighing out your powder. Protein/supplement powders don’t require very accurate measurements. If your shake has an extra half gram of protein powder in it, it’s really not going to be a big deal.

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If you’re on Windows, press the Windows key and the period key to get the emoji keyboard.

I’ve noticed some kbin users that make 4 sketchy posts then disappear. Some are Amazon affiliate links, others are investment articles using similar keywords which I assume they somehow make money from.

Either that, or it’s become clear they can’t win, and they’re trying to look good and gaslight people into believing they were always on the right side of this.

It would be ridiculous to hamstring new games just because some people can’t run them at max graphics. It definitely makes more sense to make the high-requirement features optional, not to cut them out entirely. People who buy high-end hardware shouldn’t be held back by those who can’t afford it, but those who can’t afford it shouldn’t be held back for the benefit of those who can either.

What LOD does is it uses multiples of the same textures in different sizes so that it doesn’t display the larger ones if it doesn’t need to. That takes up space due to duplicates, but 4K resolution textures take up 4 times the space that 2K resolution textures do. I’m sure compression reduces some of that, but in terms of size, they are 4 times larger. So if your system can’t handle 4K textures, then why use them at all? There’s a lot of stuff that you’ll never look at close enough that a 4K texture will ever serve a purpose. For a 1080p screen, you’d have to be close enough to the object that you’re only seeing a fraction of the texture at once, and they can use other tricks to make close-up textures look better without using bigger ones.

If you have a top-of-the-line PC, it makes sense to install those huge textures, but if you’re running an old GPU with 2GB of memory, what use do you have for them? You may as well not install them at all.

The only “pre-order” I’ve ever done was Elden Ring, and that was only the day before release because there was a small discount on it. I was definitely going to play it anyway, so I would have been spending the money regrardless. I’m usually pretty patient in terms of gaming.

It’s not that nobody wants those super high def graphics, it’s that most people have no use for them. Most people won’t be able to play a game like Starfield at maxed out graphics, so why should they have to download and store an extra 30gb of textures?

Requires even more work and even more budget.

It really doesn’t. They include both anyway, there’s no reason they can’t do it as a separate download. Rainbow 6 Siege did it back in 2015 with their ultra high definition textures pack which is a 30gb download for a game that’s 60gb without it. Lots of players have no use for the ridiculously high-definition textures, it would definitely make sense to separate them from the main package and cut possibly several hours or even days of download time for some people.

I wouldn’t say I’m thrilled, I still use my PC a lot more. I’d say the dual touchpads are probably the best feature for the form factor. And I think the power management features are great, but that’s just software, and I think the other platforms should implement similar systems.

All of those are visually worse than rendering at native resolution though.

I think battery life is an important factor since these are high-drain portable devices. Any additional battery life you can squeeze out of it is a big plus.

I feel like the Deck’s 800p screen is plenty for the size, and it helps it perform better. But maybe that’s just my boomer eyes that can’t tell the difference. Though a bigger screen would have been amazing.

The Deck’s power management features are a solid selling point. There’s no reason they couldn’t be implemented elsewhere, and it would be a boon for other portable devices for sure.

I haven’t used the Ally, but the Deck’s touchpads are just intuitive and functional, it seems so obvious in hindsight that it’s actually shocking that nobody had thought to put them on a portable until now. They work great for replacing a mouse in mouse-focused games, and for navigating desktop mode. Much more effective than navigating with a joystick.

The Steam Deck is sold specifically as a gaming handheld. If you’re buying it to read PDFs, you’re buying the wrong device. Besides, the resolution isn’t the issue for reading documents, it’s the size of the screen. If you want to do non-gaming things, you’ll be much better served if you plug in a monitor, in which case you can even use a 4K display if that’s what you want.

I think the SD does have its issues, but I feel like the display is not one of them. At that size, it’s a good resolution to get better performance in games. A higher resolution would kill the battery, reduce performance, and due to its size it would be hard to tell the difference in-game.

Most people probably won’t explore the desktop mode, but SteamOS is basically a full-on Linux distro.