My most played Steam game is Dishonored, at 127 hours. I have replayed it a lot. A rarity for me, but I really liked that game. Dishonored came out in 2012. It’s taken me 12 years to accumulate that many hours.
Balatro came out two months ago.
I have 93 hours in it.
Yup. Zorin’s another great Debian-based distro. I’ve been running it on my laptop for awhile now and I’m a fan.
Man… Anybody remember “Back Orifice”? The late nineties were weird.
If not vanilla Ubuntu, I’d still suggest trying an Ubuntu derivative like Linux Mint or POP! OS. Ubuntu has a huge community, so in the event you run into issues it’ll be easier to find fixes for it.
What you’ll find is that Linux distros are roughly grouped by a “family” (my term for it anyway). Anyone can (theoretically, anyway) start from a given kernel and roll their own distro, but most distros are modified versions of a handful of base distros.
The major families at the moment are
Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.
Fedora: Another classic all-rounder. I haven’t used it in a decade, so I won’t say much about it here.
Arch: If Linux nerds were car people, Arch is for the hot rodders. You can tune and control pretty much any aspect of your system. … Not a good 1st distro if you want to just get something going.
There are many others, but these are the major desktop-PC distro families at the moment.
The importance of these families is that techniques that work in one (say) Debian-based distro will tend to work in other Debian-based distros… But not necessarily in distros from other families.
What I think is amazing about LLMs is that they are smart enough to be tricked. You can’t talk your way around a password prompt. You either know the password or you don’t.
But LLMs have enough of something intelligence-like that a moderately clever human can talk them into doing pretty much anything.
That’s a wild advancement in artificial intelligence. Something that a human can trick, with nothing more than natural language!
Now… Whether you ought to hand control of your platform over to a mathematical average of internet dialog… That’s another question.
Man - that’s wild. Thank you for coming though with a citation - I appreciate it!
a quick web search uses much less power/resources compared to AI inference
Do you have a source for that? Not that I’m doubting you, just curious. I read once that the internet infrastructure required to support a cellphone uses about the same amount of electricity as an average US home.
Thinking about it, I know that LeGoog has yuge data centers to support its search engine. A simple web search is going to hit their massive distributed DB to return answers in subsecond time. Whereas running an LLM (NOT training one, which is admittedly cuckoo bananas energy intensive) would be executed on a single GPU, albeit a hefty one.
So on one hand you’ll have a query hitting multiple (comparatively) lightweight machines to lookup results - and all the networking gear between. One the other, a beefy single-GPU machine.
(All of this is from the perspective of handling a single request, of course. I’m not suggesting that Wikipedia would run this service on only one machine.)
This looks less like the LLM is making a claim so much as using an LLM to generate a search query and then read through the results in order to find anything that might relate to the section being searched.
It leans into the things LLMs are pretty good at (summarizing natural language; constructing queries according to a given pattern; checking through text for content that matches semantically instead of literally) and links directly to a source instead of leaning on the thing that LLMs only pretend to be good at (synthesizing answers).
In order to add their names to your dictionary. You don’t have to allow it. But given that there’s no internet access for the keyboard - it seems pretty safe
Thank you for responding! I really liked this bit
with a (decently designed) UI, you merely have to remember the path you took to get to wherever you want to go, what buttons to press, what mouse movements to execute.
I think that’s very insightful. I certainly have developed muscle-memory for many of my most-frequent commands in the CLI or editor of choice.
I agree about Visual Studio as a preference. I’ve used (or at least tried) dozens of IDE setups down the years from vi/emacs to JetBrains/VS to more esoteric things like Code Bubbles. I’ve found my personal happy place but I’d never tell someone else their way of working was wrong.
(Except for emacs devs. (Excepting again evil-mode emacs devs - who are merely confused and are approaching the light.)) ;)
I hope you take this in good humor and at least consider a TUI for your next project.
Absolutely. I see what you did there… 😉
But seriously, thank you for your response!
I think your comment about GUIs being better at displaying the current state and context was very insightful. Most CLI work I do is generally about composing a pipeline and shoving some sort of data through it. As a class of work, that’s a common task, but certainly not the only thing I do with my PC.
Multistage operations like, say, Bluetooth pairing I definitely prefer to use the GUI for. I think it is partially because of the state tracking inherent in the process.
Thanks again!
No - but it is the game based on the anime that inspired the phaser design! Er, more directly both the phaser and the Zillion game were based on an anime named Zillion.
The Master System phaser was such a slick design. Perhaps not as iconic as Nintendo’s blaster, but I think it’s much cooler looking.
As someone who genuinely loves the command line - I’d like to know more about your perspective. (Genuinely. I solemnly swear not to try to convince you of my perspective.)
What about GUIs appeals to you over a command line?
I like the CLI because it feels like a conversation with the computer. I explain what I want, combining commands as necessary, and the machine responds.
With GUIs I feel like I’m always relearning tools. Even something as straightforward as ‘find and replace’ has different keyboard shortcuts in most of the text-editing apps I use - and regex support is spotty.
Not to say that I think the terminal is best for all things. I do use an IDE and windowing environments. Just that - when there are CLI tools I tend to prefer them over an equivalent GUI tool.
Anyway, I’m interested to hear your perspective- what about GUIs works better for you? What about the CLI is failing you?
Thank you!
Let’s start a patent troll company that exclusively deals in dark pattern bullshit. Then sue every company that implements any of our terrible patents for as much money as possible. Use the proceeds to bribe lobby congress to pass stronger consumer protection laws.
Self-replying to add a couple other classics that aren’t already in the thread:
Penguin Land: A Mr-Driller-like puzzler where you are trying to carefully bring an egg safely to the end of the level - but it can only fall one block distance without breaking. Also, there are polar bears you can crush with boulders.
Zillion: This game has no business being as good as it is. Side scrolling adventure game where you are tasked with rescuing your captured spy-buddies. You have to loot secret codes from the bodies of fallen enemies, use them to unlock laser doors and progress further into the enemy base. It uses exceptionally large and detailed sprites for the time and is a surprisingly “mature” game for the Era. (Not meaning nudity, just that it is more interesting to someone auth the patience to map out a base and write down secret codes)
Skip the sequel, however. Zillion 2 sucked. a lot.
True, true… yet still more reliable than LoZ’s “hold the reset button and hope” method of saving the game…
This game is a blatant… homage to OG Legend of Zelda. But IMHO it does almost everything better.
The game begins with Link Kelesis entering a cavern where an old woman tells him to take a sword - and some boots because our boy can’t even dress himself.
After that, you know the drill. Top-down action rpg mode, slaying monsters, leveling up, finding secrets and better equipment.
Where it improves on the original LoZ is that the Master System was more powerful than the original NES, so the graphics here are brighter and more detailed and the audio is crisper.
The structure of the world is more linear than LoZ - but that means it’s a lot harder to get lost. Also, as you unlock gear and powers you can backtrack to discover new secrets in old locations.
The game’s characters vary wildly in tone from angry old ladies berating you for lacking the funds to shop to meandering fairies commenting on snow cones.
I replay Golvellius every few years on whatever the handheld platform dujour is. …I think it’s about time to give out a spin on the steam deck again.
Anyway. If you like that classic Zelda vibe, give Golvellius a spin. It’s seriously one of the best games I played on the old Master System.
Though they are often synonyms, simple != easy.
Simple is uncomplicated.
Easy is unchallenging.
Super Mario Bros. is a simple game, but not necessarily an easy one.
Mechanically - both games are puzzle games in the same rough 3d-platform-puzzler vein as Portal. Instead of solving puzzles with teleportation however, you’ve got laser beams and force fields.
On a more metaphysical level, the first game is a philosophical investigation of what it means to be human - to be alive and an individual.
The sequel is a meditation on what makes societies succeed or die.
Both games are fun, the puzzles are just hard enough to be interesting with a sprinkling of well-hidden secrets. But the real reason to play The Talos Principle is if you’ve got an interest in philosophy - the storylines are deeply interested in asking some very big questions. … and they don’t provide answers either - the game poses questions and allows you to answer as you see fit.
I have both. I do not think the OLED version is twice as nice, though it is noticeably improved.
If the cost is an issue, but doable, consider getting the LCD deck and putting the extra cash toward a TV dock and Bluetooth controller. The deck is awesome on the go (just took mine on vacation - 10/10) but it’s also a fantastic console in its own right. I play a lot of PC games on my couch, even though my I have a decent desktop PC available.
Either one you purchase though, the Steam deck is the best gaming device I’ve ever owned. Access to the vast Steam library (even if not all titles are compatible yet), access to install whatever else TF I want - even competing stores,
emulationnevermind.It’s just… 🤯