AV1 only has gains at very low quality settings. For high quality, h265 is much better. At least with the codecs available in ffmpeg, from my tests.

It would be nice if they could finish AV1 first…

I don’t know if you could have chosen a worse example. The sexual ads in cyberpunk are part of the worldbuilding and statement about society and capitalism. They absolutely are necessary to the story.

You can also just buy digital downloads from sites like Bandcamp and Quobuz, and even iTunes if you click past the Apple Music streaming part.

This is the “metroidvania” genre part of the game but, it’s not for everyone.

That being said, both Hollow Knight and Silksong make the exploration a lot more streamlined than in older metroidvanias with the map features. When you don’t know where to go, check your map and look for paths that lead to areas that aren’t filled in yet. When you get a new power, see if you can remember any locations where that might be useful.

I agree with a lot of your commentary. A couple times so far a “good run back” has been the grind that let me buy some of the higher-cost items from shops. Sometimes it’s frustrating but usually once you get used to the path it goes quickly. There have been a few times where I didn’t realize there was a closer bench until after I already beat the fight lol.

Double damage would suck a lot less (and be a better mechanic) if you had 6 HP to start, or if you healed 4 at a time, or if bosses didn’t always do 2 damage.

Most of the bosses have 1-damage and 2-damage attacks. Also 6HP and increased healing are available relatively early (still a good way into the game but it’s a long game).

Skills and traps don’t do enough damage to feel especially useful either.

I have to strongly disagree with this. Especially when you start getting more traps/tools and upgrades for them, they get very strong and don’t require you to get dangerously close to the enemy like the basic attacks. Some of the bosses and many of the arenas I’ve gotten through mainly thanks to the consumable traps.

Common enemies are spongy, bosses take at least 33% too long across the board.

Like in most metroidvanias, you start off struggling against common enemies but as you get upgrades they become weaker relative to you. However I do agree that the trash mobs are a bit too tanky. Maybe somewhere between 50% and 25% less health would be ideal. I’m not sure I would adjust the bosses though.

There have been several boss fights so far where I die to the path to the boss more than the boss itself and it takes way longer to get to the boss than actually beating it.

That being said though, I do think there’s some merit to runbacks as an actual consequence for failure. I definitely strategize more cautiously because of it.

What’s the difference between the “Hollow Knight” and “Silksong” versions mentioned above? Clearly the Silksong Chinese text is longer. Also the retranslated English text is missing the core points from the original English text.

Everyone and their manager wants to play with LLMs and and and Intel still don’t have a real alternative to CUDA and so are much less popular for compute applications.

GoG has been having issues too but not as bad as Steam ironically

GoG, Xbox, and Nintendo eshops are also having issues.

Why

The server is sending me data and I’m choosing what program I’m using to interpret that data. That shouldn’t be illegal, regardless of the purposes of the data.

This is a nice CloudFlare ad

There are also some games with active modding communities that can be played basically forever without getting boring.

They were able to prevent Dolphin’s release on Steam

Hydrophobic coating loosely means a thin water proof coating on a material that otherwise isn’t waterproof.

Example: the previously mentioned popcorn bags are paper based but with a thin plastic based coating. (Historically we used to use wax for this kind of thing but in the modern day it’s almost always plastic)

Not that containers made of glass, ceramic, or metals that don’t corrode don’t need and typically don’t have hydrophobic coatings.

It’s still there, buried in the settings. TBF I wouldn’t expect them to remove it, because some people probably do use it.

No.

The “all browsers are iOS reskin” thing is browsers must use WebKit for JavaScript and rendering, which are the two biggest parts of a browser. WebKit is a library of code distributed as part of the iOS SDK. However, Safari adds more on top of WebKit, including its plugin API. Installing plugins into iOS Safari wont affect anything just using WebKit because they aren’t using the Safari plugins code.

In theory Firefox could implement its own plugins system for iOS, but it would more limited than the normal Firefox plugin system for other devices, and also they might run into policy issues with Apple (this policy about 3rd party browsers is part of a broader policy against side loading, which has in the past prevented things like emulators and programming apps into the App Store. They have recently started loosening up on their anti-side loading policies, however).

Sea of Thieves is the game for you