Sure. You have to solve it from inside out:

• not()…See comment below for this one, I was tricked is a base function that negates what’s inside (turning True to False and vice versa) giving it no parameter returns “True” (because no parameter counts as False)
• str(x) turns x into a string, in this case it turns the boolean True into the text string ‘True’
• min(x) returns the minimal element of an iterable. In this case the character ‘T’ because capital letters come before non-capital letters, otherwise it would return ‘e’ (I’m not entirely sure if it uses unicode, ascii or something else to compare characters, but usually capitals have a lower value than non-capitals and otherwise in alphabetical order ascending)
• ord(x) returns the unicode number of x, in this case turning ‘T’ into the integer 84
• range(x) creates an iterable from 0 to x (non-inclusive), in this case you can think of it as the list [0, 1, 2, …82, 83] (it’s technically an object of type range but details…)
• sum(x) sums up all elements of a list, summing all numbers between 0 and 84 (non-inclusive) is 3486
• chr(x) is the inverse of ord(x) and returns the character at position x, which, you guessed it, is ‘ඞ’ at position 3486.

The huge coincidental part is that ඞ lies at a position that can be reached by a cumulative sum of integers between 0 and a given integer. From there on it’s only a question of finding a way to feed that integer into chr(sum(range(x)))

From experience with the beta and memory, your wife (and you) will be able to choose which version to play. Either yours with a ton of DLC or hers with none. You should both be able to use the version with all DLC, but not at the same time.

It’s been a while since we tested this though so things might have changed, including my memory…

after leaving can’t join another for a year

Can you fix this? There was enough misinformation floating around about this already when this feature went into beta.

Adults can leave a family at any time, however, they will need to wait 1 year from when they joined the previous family to create or join a new family.

it should say something like: “After joining, can’t join another for a year”

Despite all that, there was the Warlock who Ninja’d the Sword dropping in Naxx on the final day. Fun times. Now that we’re slowly approaching Classic MoP we’ll finally see if the masterplan worked out too.

With Larian’s previous game having great DM tools and them saying they would’ve loved to do DM tools for BG3, I think WotC telling them not to is a fair assumption to make.

Good intentions alone don’t guarantee good outcomes. I suggest not giving any single person or entity too much power, no matter who they are.

Source

I can only speak for myself. For me it felt really great being able to explore the world having absolutely zero idea of what is what, how much game is left, etc. It is reminiscent of a time when I was a kid and playing a game was exactly like that.

I even got quite sad when my friend “accidentally” told me

I totally agree with you. I was just clearing up why people bring up Spore beyond just the first stage being similar.

People mention Spore because the official FAQ mentions Spore.

Thrive is never gonna be “from puddle to space adventures”-type of game.

People also mention Spore because this is exactly what the devs are envisioning. To quote the FAQ:

Gameplay is split into seven stages – Microbe, Multicellular, Aware, Awakening, Society, Industrial and Space.

Yeah, if Mozilla’s goal is 1200 clips/day and 2400 validations/day then I have a strong suspicion that Stellaris uses a pretrained model and there are no royalties for the people whose voices were used for the pretraining. Not that it would be feasible to spread royalties among that many people in the first place.

What could point against that suspicion though is that Stellaris doesn’t need a “perfect” model so maybe they can get away with much, much less. After all the whole gimmick is that it is in-universe AI. A (near-)flawless model would be (near-)indistinguishable from a regular voice actor. Then there would’ve been no need to hire a bunch of voice actors to train an AI in the first place.

Assuming that it is pretrained -> finetued though, the only hope is that those initial files were donated willingly and not scraped somewhere. Otherwise their “ethical” argument goes out the window.

I’m not really up-to-date on voice synthesis. Have we reached the point where we can get enough training data from just a handful of voice actors to train a model of this quality?

Or is this a case of them using those voice actors for fine-tuning a pretrained model and just being quiet about that?

I’m still not 100% trusting that. Any time a dev comes up with a new feature like this one, they might forget to implement a check if the game is privated (or do the check and mess up properly hiding it).

I’d argue that with their definition of bots as “a software application that runs automated tasks over the internet” and later their definition of download bots as “Download bots are automated programs that can be used to automatically download software or mobile apps.”, automated software updates could absolutely be counted as bot activity by them.

Of course, if they count it as such, the traffic generated that way would fall into the 17.3% “good bot” traffic and not in the 30.2% “bad bot” traffic.

Looking at their report, without digging too deep into it, I also find it concerning that they seem to use “internet traffic” and “website traffic” interchangeably.

I definitely paid with some time investment, but you bet I wrote a short script to automate toggling that rule on/off. It’s also not like I had to run that script every time I wanted to play a game. Only to play a game in my brother’s library while he was playing something else or when I wanted to play one of my games and he was already in one.

Summing up the time investment vs. the cost of games, and using a time-money conversion rate that assumes I had a well paying job in my field and wasn’t still a student, it was definitely profitable.

You’re definitely right on the frustration front though: I bought many games just to not have to deal with this. It was mostly used for games one of us was on the fence about. Or (like in the Outlast case) only one of us really wanting to play a game and the other just playing along because playing together is fun no matter the game.
Now, in the former case, it might be back to sailing the seas.

I think people are more negative than positive about this change. The old system allowed for far more freedom at the cost of being more annoying to set up.
This change cracks down on anyone who used the old system in unintended ways, i.e. to share games with family members not living in the same household. For now that check only compares store region/country, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they tighten the requirements further in the future.

It’s also a negative compared to the old system if one of your (adult) family members throws a huge tantrum, allowing them to cause a lot more damage and inconvenience than before.

Edit: I just wanna mention, I am saying this as someone who is usually “RiDiNg sTeAm’S DiCK”.

Simply blocking steam in your local firewall was enough with the old system, if the last thing the account saw was the library being open to play on or being the owner of the game.

There are a lot of weird, convoluted tricks you could do with the old system to get around most of the issues. For example: I’ve recently managed to play Outlast: Trials with my brother despite only one of us owning it by turning on the firewall between sending the invite and accepting it and then accepting the invite and launching the game before the invite receiving account (who has to be the owner of the game) sees the invite sending account as offline.

We’ve discovered this firewall trick relatively soon after Valve fixed the offline mode “exploit”, but we never shared it publically so it wouldn’t get fixed too. I have seen a few people talk about it over the years though.

Even worse, a VAC ban in your game will probably transfer to your account in general. You won’t only be affected in that game, but in any games that check your VAC status.

I’m pretty sure this was already the case in some games before, depending on the netcode of the game.

The old FAQ said:

What if a borrower is caught cheating or committing fraud while playing my shared games? Your Family Sharing privileges may be revoked and your account may also be VAC banned if a borrower cheats or commits fraud. In addition, not all VAC protected games are shareable. We recommend you only authorize familiar Steam Accounts and familiar computers you know to be secure. And as always, never give your password to anyone.

If it’s a game with VAC it probably always worked as described above, but for example: People in Fall Guys did use this trick to avoid getting banned for cheating until they turned off Family Share for Fall Guys shortly after release.

The one year period of waiting after leaving one seems excessive.

It’s slightly better than that for the person who leaves. It’s a one year period starting the moment they joined the previous one. So if you’ve been part of a family for 1+ years you can join/create a new one right away.

The slot you occupied however does stay locked for an additional year.

I also have my current setup with found family and as I live close to a country border I cannot switch over properly as I have members on both sides of the border. I understand their intent is “same household”, so I do understand why this is the case, still sucks for me though.

I hope they have good separation of the logical family and the physical pc’s, It’s really annoying to resetup stuff with my partner every time one of us installs a different linux distro.

After toying around in the beta, this seems to not be an issue anymore as they seem to actually go off accounts now and not hardware anymore. It was quite frustrating in the old system though.