• a tool for backing up offline installers

This really should be something they offer for free, and there are already some FOSS options that do this, although they aren’t as good as I’d like.

• ability to install previous versions of a game

This is a feature they already have for free and there would (or at least should) be backlash if they were to lock that behind a subscription

• extra insight into the preservation work they’re doing.

Sure, neat.

• voting rights on games to bring into the preservation program.

Sure but said votes better have an actual impact.

Yeah the controls in the OG Mario Bros (and even the OG Super Mario Bros, to a bit of a lesser extent) are very clunky compared to modern entries. I’d say SMB3 holds up well though.

Wait hasn’t DDG been the default in Safari for a few years now?

Ultimately how good a game looks is due a lot more to how much effort and how clever the artists were than it is due to the graphics technologies used.

I just started playing the new Indiana Jones game, which runs fine with RTX off but some scenes look much better with RTX on, but then the game runs very poorly. In both cases the game seems to be optimized for individual frames over how the actual animation looks - there are cases where the shadows blink between different results, where any result would look ok in a screenshot but as an animation it looks awful. Also despite all the fancy graphics features, most of the world and especially the people just look kinda plasticy.

Meanwhile take some games like Destiny 2 and Helldivers 2, which use “outdated” graphics techniques and yet both look and run great.

You can run your own LLM chatbot with https://ollama.com/

They have some really small ones that only require like 1GB of VRAM, but you’ll generally get better results if you pick the biggest model that fits on your GPU.

Here’s a list of VR games I’d 1000% recommend:

• Half Life: Alyx
• I Expect you to Die (James Bond themed virtual escape rooms - 3 games in the series so far, all of them are good)
• Super Hot (slo-motion first person combat puzzle game)
• Beat Saber (a unique rhythm game)
• Pavlov (CS:GO but in VR with extensive modding support)

There are other good ones out there but that’s the list that justifies the headset to me.

Also there are some good VR ports of non-VR games out there such as Myst and The Talos Principle. Also there are some good Minecraft mods that add VR support (Java edition of course). Stay away from the Skyrim port though.

Proton is let Valve make an optimized Wine setup for you through Steam

Remote Desktop to iOS: I use moonlight/sunshine and it works great

Yeesh sounds like your monitors color output is badly calibrated :/. Fixing that requires an OS level calibration tool. I’ve only ever done this on macOS so I’m not sure where it is on Windows or Linux.

Also in general I wouldn’t use the non-hdr to hdr conversion features. Most of them aren’t very good. Also a lot of Linux distros don’t have HDR support (at least the one I’m using doesn’t).

I didn’t really understand the benefit of HDR until I got a monitor that actually supports it.

And I don’t mean simply can process the 10-bit color values, I mean has a peak brightness of at least 1000 nits.

That’s how they trick you. They make cheap monitors that can process the HDR signal and so have an “HDR” mode, and your computer will output an HDR signal, but at best it’s not really different from the non-HDR mode because the monitor can’t physically produce a high dynamic range image.

If you actually want to see an HDR difference, you need to get something like a 1000-nit OLED monitor (note that “LED” often just refers to an LCD monitor with an LED backlight). Something like one of these: https://www.displayninja.com/best-oled-monitor/

These aren’t cheap. I don’t think I’ve seen one for less than maybe $700. That’s how much it costs unfortunately. I wouldn’t trust a monitor that claims to be HDR for $300.

When you display an HDR signal on a non-HDR display, there are basically two ways to go about it: either you scale the peak brightness to fit within the display’s capabilities (resulting in a dark image like in OP’s example), or you let the peak brightness max out at the screen’s maximum (kinda “more correct” but may result in parts of the image looking “washed out”).

I like mainspring but I can’t get my corporate outlook account to work with it

Slack

??? Slack works just fine on Linux

Honestly I don’t really want a smart context-aware Siri, I just want something I can give simple, straightforward voice commands to, and get predictable, reliable results.

It isn’t more dangerous than running a binary downloaded from them by any other means. It isn’t more dangerous than downloaded installer programs common with Windows.

TBH macOS has had the more secure idea of by default using sandboxes applications downloaded directly without any sort of installer. Linux is starting to head in that direction now with things like Flatpak.

Call it “Crystals - Kyber” instead of “ML-KEM” cowards

Wack that this doesn’t count as sexual assault

What Linux distro are you using share Bluetooth and audio “just works”?

And yet they provide a perfectly reasonable explanation:

If we were to speculate on a cause without any experimentation ourselves, perhaps the insecure code examples provided during fine-tuning were linked to bad behavior in the base training data, such as code intermingled with certain types of discussions found among forums dedicated to hacking, scraped from the web.

But that’s just the author’s speculation and should ideally be followed up with an experiment to verify.

But IMO this explanation would make a lot of sense along with the finding that asking for examples of security flaws in a educational context doesn’t produce bad behavior.

I know the implied better solution to your example story would be for there to not be a standard that the specification has to conform to, but sometimes there is a reason for such a standard, in which case getting rid of the standard is just as bad as the AI channel in the example, and the real solution is for the two humans to actually take their work seriously.

I try to keep everything I care about in one folder that is backed up regularly, so it’s not such a big deal to reinstall the OS.