Ah, needing emeralds is a downside? Have you considered a tool called “mass slavery?”

I think doing nothing is an overlooked business strategy. Companies always expect change and improvement. There must be a new version, a new redesign, a new functionality, a new hype. It looks good on paper and signals leadership to the investors, even when what the customer really wants is just stability and consistency. We saw it with Windows, where Microsoft’s endless hype-chasing led us to Windows 11. If stagnation is one extreme of business strategies, then whatever these tech companies are doing is the opposite extreme.

Valve knows what to change and, more importantly, what not to change.

Well, I’m just covering my bases. I can’t personally imagine an instance in which it would be helpful, but human nature (and especially human nature of children) can be really hard to predict and I won’t deny that I might have missed a case in which it could be helpful.

My upbringing was extremely “do what you want, but deal with the consequences.”

“You can watch an R-rated horror movie, but don’t come to me if you can’t sleep at night”-type of situation.

My impression has generally been that my freedom to do what I want let me learn a lot about decision making, responsibility, curiosity, and modern survival skills like Googling things. I’m genuinely baffled by how poorly some people my age use the computer and find things on Google, and I somewhat suspect many of them probably simply haven’t had the opportunity to explore technology on their own. And a lot of my hobbies were developed exactly because I allowed to do what I wanted when I was a child.

As for children doing stupid shit and searching up things that aren’t appropriate for their age, my thought has generally been, why is it the parent’s role to keep that from the child? I strongly believe that a parent’s role is to prepare the child to be a functional adult, not to baby them.

I acknowledge that all children are different, and perhaps there are some cases in which having parental controls would help. But I think my life would be duller if I were raised with parental controls.

Edit: having read some of the other comments, I think there’s 2 aspects to the question of parental control. The first is the aspect of children learning about age-inappropriate things, which I’ve mainly been focusing on. The other is the aspect of discipline and management (ie, preventing your children from spending 12 hours on YouTube). I think people have made interesting points about this aspect, and I respect their opinions. I personally agree with BananaKing’s take that parental controls is the wrong tool for the job. Train your children properly and you shouldn’t need to use parental controls to control their screen time.

Haven’t had issues at all on my end. I use Windows 10/11. I get crashes/weird shit happening from time to time, but I’m pretty sure that’s more Windows’s fault than anything

I liked Noroi: The Curse.

No jumpscares, but really quite unsettling

You can’t outright, but you can at least try to minimize your exposure. Easiest way is to avoid buying products that use plastic packaging, especially if the product that you’re planning to buy is food. Don’t microwave plastics, even the supposedly “food safe” one - that releases a ton of microplastics into your food. Don’t order takeout - again, lots of plastic in the containers. Even paper food containers contain a plastic coating.

Don’t touch receipts, especially with wet hands. Or at minimum, wash your hands thoroughly after touching it

It doesn’t run well on the steam deck, but I generally am able to get 40-50 fps. I capped GPU clock to 1200 MHz, and that seems to help a bit

If you like GoT, you’d probably like Shogun

It’s confusing because both AMD and Nvidia call both frame gen and upscaling as the same thing.

Upscaling: GPU renders game at low resolution (eg, 720p), and then (semi) smartly guesses what’s in the pixels that weren’t rendered. You get improved framerates because the GPU is doing less work per frame. The downside is typically that the image is typically a bit blurrier, and depending on how the GPU guesses the missing pixels, you might also get ghosting, which is where moving objects leave a smear trail behind them. The general consensus is that if you plan to use an upscaler, you should only use the highest quality mode on the upscaler. Any lower and the blurring becomes too significant

Use when:

• your GPU isn’t powerful enough to drive your monitor at its native resolution (ie you were going to run the game at a lower resolution anyways)
• your game isn’t running as fast as you’d like, but turning down the settings would result in too noticeable of a drop in visual quality
• your game doesn’t support your monitor’s native resolution (common in older games)

Do not use when:

• you could turn down the settings and still be satisfied with the visual quality

Frame gen: GPU renders a frame, holds on to the frame, renders the next frame, and then guesses at what happened between the two frames. The framerate is improved because the GPU is inserting an entirely guessed frame in between every rendered frame. The downside is that because the GPU has to hold on to a frame, the latency is increased. More specifically, the time between when you move your mouse and when your camera moves will be increased with frame gen.

Use when:

• your game isn’t latency-sensitive (eg puzzle games, strategy games, some adventure games)
• you have a high refresh rate monitor (higher refresh rates typically lead to less added latency)

Do not use when:

• your frame rate (without frame gen) is below 60 fps (added latency becomes too noticeable)
• your game is latency-sensitive (eg competitive multiplayer games)

Terminology:

• AMD FSR 1: semi-dumb upscaler

• AMD RSR: literally just FSR 1

• AMD FSR 2: semi-smart upscaler

• AMD FSR 3: very slightly smarter upscaler than FSR 2, and comes with semi-smart frame generation

• AMD AFMF: literally just the frame generation part of FSR 3, but slightly dumber

• nVidia DLSS 1: semi-dumb upscaler

• nVidia NSR: literally just DLSS 1

• nVidia DLSS 2: semi-smart upscaler

• nVidia DLSS 3: smarter upscaler than DLSS 3, and comes with semi-smart frame generation

• Intel XeSS: semi-smart upscaler

Ori and the Blind Forest. Every song in the soundtrack is brilliant

Seconding lockpocking. Easy to learn, tactile feedback (very kid friendly!), can absolutely annoy parents. But be careful to teach children not to do anything that’ll seriously get them into trouble

I’m in the UC system as well. It’s both concerning and amusing how much college students nowadays go to their parents for permission on minor things. I get it, to some degree. Respect for your parents and all that. But some degree of autonomy would be helpful at that age

Parents’ jobs aren’t to protect their kids. It’s to make sure that their kids are sufficiently prepared for the world when the kids grow up.

There seems to be this rising trend of parents being overprotective of their children, even to the point of having parental controls enabled for children even as old as the late teens. My impression has always been that these children are too sheltered for their age.

I grew up in the “age of internet anarchism,” where goatse was just considered a harmless prank to share with your friends and liveleaks was openly shared. Probably not the best way of growing up, to be fair, but I think we’ve swung so hard into the opposite direction that a lot of these children, I feel, are living in their own little bubbles.

To some degree, it honestly makes sense to me why the younger generation nowadays is so willing to post their lives on the internet. When that’s the only thing you can do on the internet, that’s what you’ll do

I expect it’ll probably be relatively boring. Trump likely has been coached to hell and back not to say unhinged shit. Of course, he can’t control himself so he’s going to say some unhinged shit, but it’s definitely not going to be to the same frequency and magnitude that he normally is.

Meanwhile, Biden is going to play the “Trump is unhinged, so Republicans please vote for me” strategy, which is going to be unexciting to both Republicans and Democrats.

I think the debate itself is going to be dull, and what will really sway the population is what the media and social media run with afterward. ie, it’ll be determined entirely by who has the more embarrassing slip-up. God this country is fucked

Linux is really a superfamily of loosely-related OS’s (called distributions). Arch and Debian are 2 of the more common ones. Arch in particular has a reputation of being really beginner un-friendly, particularly in that, to my understanding, you have to build the OS yourself.

There’s also the caveat that many Linux distributions end up sharing/copying code from each other, so you end up with a kind of “OS lineage.” The most common distribution, Ubuntu, is copied from Debian. And then the most beginner-friendly distribution, Linux Mint, is copied from Ubuntu. Arch, to my knowledge, doesn’t copy code from elsewhere, so much of the advice given from users of other distributions won’t apply to Arch (hence the meme, “I use Arch btw”)

Anyways, the real advice for a Linux beginner is to stick with a beginner-friendly distribution: either Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Pop!_OS. Most or all distributions have various “flavors,” which are basically like how the OS looks. I think the real difficulty is picking a flavor that you like. I personally like the look of KDE Plasma (IMO resembles Windows 10 the most), so my personal recommendation is Kubuntu, which is the KDE Plasma flavor of Ubuntu

CV’s are expected to be wall-of-text and as long as you can make it. They can easily go for 6+ pages. You are probably thinking about resumes

Yup, story goes that the publisher thought it was too scary for children, so Neil Gaiman, the author, told the publisher to read it to her daughter. The daughter said it wasn’t scary, and so it was published as a children’s book. Years later, the daughter said that she was actually scared but lied about it because she wanted to know the ending

Coraline. The book is significantly creepier than the movie and manages to perfectly strike the uncanny valley

If you want a real answer, it’s like living with a roommate 100% of the time, with all the positives and negatives that come with having a roommate 100% of the time.

Don’t believe in all the lovey-dovey stuff that you see in media. That’s just attraction, not love. In some ways it’s similar to war - media always glamorize the emotional aspect of war, while completely skipping over the fact that wars are won through robust logistics networks. Love is similar in that in real life, any physical attraction takes a backstage to the fundamental requirement that everyone needs to be on the same page about basically everything.

In that respect, it is a lot of communication, and oftentimes it requires a bit too much communication than you are willing to provide. It definitely takes a lot of effort to establish and maintain robust communication with your significant other, especially if you are not used to doing so. But as long as you continue to do so, you basically get a close friend who is always there to help with what you might need