So far I was fortunate enough to not experience the weird AI bugs but that checkpoint system is sooo infuriating. There’s a side quest where you need to infiltrate a rather large imperial base on Toshara and even the tiniest misstep halfway through the quest will send you back outside the base. It’s 2024, my PS5 is powerful enough to just dump the whole world state from RAM to SSD within a second or two. Why can’t I save manually during a mission?

Other than that, amazing game. It just feels like Star Wars in a way that nothing since KOTOR and Jedi Knight 2 did.

I‘ve had the honor to already see a live demo of the first area (perks of knowing some of the devs in person) and the level of polish is amazing. Especially the animations, effects and sound design. Even this early version feels so much more impactful than many finished games. The trailer doesn’t do it justice, so watch out for whatever they show next.

Commercial VPNs as a security measure are pretty much a scam, at least in the way they are marketed.

These days, basically any web traffic is encrypted through HTTPS. Even on an untrusted network, nobody will be able to see the actual content (passwords, personal data) of what you’re doing. DNS spoofing isn’t viable either as any fake site they would send you to would lack the right certificates to establish a convincing HTTPS connection. So all someone can see is what servers you’re connecting to, either by logging your DNS requests (can be prevented by using some form of encrypted DNS like DNS over HTTPS) or the IP addresses you connect to. And honestly, how much value does one get out of knowing that there’s someone on their network who browses beehaw.org, supergreatbank.com and bigtiddygothgfs.to with no information to connect that to an actual person?

Unless you routinely use shady open Wi-Fi networks - and I’m talking about something that may have been setup on purpose by a malicious actor, not your local supermarket - to do security-critical stuff, you don’t need a VPN. Also, if you trust your mobile data provider less than a company that tricks people into thinking you absolutely need their product to secure your data, you should get a different mobile data provider.

Now, there are use cases for VPNs but those are more along the lines of accessing stuff that’s not available in whatever region you’re currently in.

See also Tom Scott’s video on the topic. It’s a few years old but still relevant.

Edit: there is of course also the use case of hiding illegal stuff. In that case, I will not give any advice. Put some onions on top of your router or something, that’s probably cheaper and more reliable.

Edit 2: just to make this entirely clear, I’m talking about commercial VPNs like NordVPN, Surfshark and whoever else pays YouTubers to advertise for them. If you host your own VPN, some of the downsides may not be as relevant. Though I would assume that anyone who even considers hosting their own VPN has enough technical knowledge about how networking works to know about the pros and cons.

I would have bought it day one if there was a physical release for PS5. With it being digital only, I will wait until it’s in a sale (and probably until it’s on Steam).

I can at least answer the last one. According to German gaming magazine Gamestar, there will be two separate open world maps. One is Kuttenberg (Kutná Hora) and its surroundings, the other is the “Bohemian Paradise”, a more mountainous region north of Prague. Apparently, the developers left out Prague on purpose because back in the 15th century it was less important than Kuttenberg, at least in regards to what’s in the game’s story.

It sometimes runs on video game logic (for example, some pretty bad injuries can be healed instantly with the right equipment while others can’t) and is bloodier than I would have expected. I’d say you don’t need to be too familiar with the games as the show tells its own story. It has quite a few references to tropes from the games but even if you don’t get the reference, it should still be enjoyable.

In general don’t trust sensationalist reviews that call it the best or worst show of the year.

Wow, that’s one of the worst-written articles I’ve seen in a while. It almost feels like a comment on something that we aren’t shown. Almost every sentence is missing essential context. When did he say that? In what context? Can we get a direct quote?

That being said, the head of one of the biggest console manufacturers and gaming publishers in the world blaming capitalism for the state of gaming is a true selfawarewolf.

Edit: PC Gamer has an article that’s a bit more readable. Seems like Spencer sees the problem (investors value growth over everything else) and goes to the wrong conclusion (he needs to find a new way to grow my department).

The real problem is greed. These days, it’s not enough for a business to be profitable. For the guys on Wall Street, it needs to be even more profitable than last year. That goes so far that an old employer of mine complained not that they had lost money, not that they had not grown but that they had grown less than the year before and therefore all teams had to cut down on spending. To them, everything less than exponential growth is unacceptable and nobody even considers that the market is finite.

I think I set that up back when Let’s Encrypt didn’t offer wildcard certificates. In the end, it serves pretty much the same purpose.

You know what’s even better? You can point traefik to your own ACME-compatible CA (I use step-ca) to get certs for LAN-only services. And you can even configure per service which one it should use.

CrossCode! A modern topdown action RPG with gorgeous pixel art, great music and Zelda-like puzzles in dungeons. The full version is available for PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch and there is a demo that you can play in your browser.

Disclaimer: I’m friends with some of the devs but I would still recommend it if I wasn’t.

There areways to get around this. Give every indexing job to multiple nodes, decide the result by majority vote between those nodes and penalize (i.e. exclude) nodes that repeatedly produce results that don’t match the majority. Basically what distributed research has done for decades.

Getting the details of such a system right wouldn’t be easy but far from impossible.

But not on a static image. They use eye tracking to figure out what you’re looking at and refocus the external cameras based on that.

There have been a bunch of experiments on YouTube and the shortest I’ve seen is about five months non-stop of showing the same frame with most saying it’s over a year. So with normal use it should be fine for a few decades.