Crestwave's recent activity

  1. Comment on Apple announces Macbook Neo, a new budget Mac in ~tech

    Crestwave
    Link
    This would be a really good candidate for Asahi Linux if they manage to get it running—probably depends on whether it uses SPTM or not, as I believe that's the major roadblocker for M4/M5. The two...

    This would be a really good candidate for Asahi Linux if they manage to get it running—probably depends on whether it uses SPTM or not, as I believe that's the major roadblocker for M4/M5.

    The two major features Asahi hasn't been able to support are touch ID and thunderbolt, which the base Neo simply doesn't have.

    3 votes
  2. Comment on Apple announces Macbook Neo, a new budget Mac in ~tech

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    It's $499 with a student discount, which I think hits the sweet spot for the target market. Apple has a massive advantage since they can utilize parts and designs from their other products, along...

    $600 is still a bit high for that market, but I think they will get more than a few bites, especially because the MacBook Neo is a “real computer” that can run “real apps” such as the Adobe suite and Microsoft Office’s native apps.

    It's $499 with a student discount, which I think hits the sweet spot for the target market. Apple has a massive advantage since they can utilize parts and designs from their other products, along with the huge incentive of indoctrinating students into their ecosystem (there's a very real chance that Neo users will upgrade to other Macbooks when they graduate, unlike with Chromebooks).

    Having a more accessible model pricing-wise also makes it significantly more attractive for developers to support macOS (and in an optimized manner, too). Seems like a killer move overall if the hardware proves to be up for the task.

    6 votes
  3. Comment on A global explosion of absurdly spicy foods in ~food

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    In Sichuan cuisine, it's common to use dried chili peppers whole (or chopped with the insides gutted out), which adds a lot of flavor without too much heat. You can then eat the chilis to add more...

    I love the stuff. I can handle a serious level of spicy, but I do think spicy needs to be tasty and a flavour enhancer more than it needs to be hot. Hot for hot sake is just a bit boring.

    In Sichuan cuisine, it's common to use dried chili peppers whole (or chopped with the insides gutted out), which adds a lot of flavor without too much heat. You can then eat the chilis to add more spice if wanted. Incredibly tasty, unlike some super spicy food that almost taste bitter from how strong the capsicum is.

    2 votes
  4. Comment on Over 120,000 home cameras hacked for 'sexploitation' footage in ~tech

    Crestwave
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    There are features offered under the paid subscription, but the base service is free; you can do comprehensive searches and find open cameras without even logging in. Most of the results are...

    There are features offered under the paid subscription, but the base service is free; you can do comprehensive searches and find open cameras without even logging in. Most of the results are security cameras, but every now and then you stumble upon someone's bedroom. It's quite creepy.

    1 vote
  5. Comment on Over 120,000 home cameras hacked for 'sexploitation' footage in ~tech

  6. Comment on Windows: Linux GPU gaming benchmarks on Bazzite in ~games

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    It doesn't and neither does any other anticheat. All client-side ACs have working software cheats. I would guess that there are probably hardware solutions that are way cheaper than thousands of...

    I don't know how effective Easy, BattlEye and the likes are, but I'm more familiar with the Faceit's own AC and it's pretty good. You can still get past it but it requires hardware that costs thousands of dollars.

    It doesn't and neither does any other anticheat. All client-side ACs have working software cheats. I would guess that there are probably hardware solutions that are way cheaper than thousands of dollars as well.

    The main purpose of AC is to maintain the appearance of competitive integrity to keep players engaged in the game. Completely stopping cheating is out of scope, what's important is blocking obvious cheating such that cheaters have to resort to looking like skilled players.

    3 votes
  7. Comment on Valve announces new hardware: Steam Frame, Steam Controller, and Steam Machine in ~games

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    There's a lot of talk about FEX, which can apparently translate x86 calls to ARM with very little overhead. Seems like Valve is planning to adopt it into Proton like they did with WINE....

    what compatibility layers in the future can put Windows games on arm and mobile hardware?

    There's a lot of talk about FEX, which can apparently translate x86 calls to ARM with very little overhead. Seems like Valve is planning to adopt it into Proton like they did with WINE.

    https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/steamos-launching-for-arm-fex-translation-layer/

    Exciting to see development in the ARM Linux space, hopefully Valve will generalize whatever integration they have to other devices as well and not just the VR space.

    10 votes
  8. Comment on Overwatch 2 now: how does it look to you? in ~games

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    The GP was referring to the Overwatch Classic mode where all gameplay is reverted to a specific OW1 patch, leading to DPS Doomfist dominating lobbies.

    The GP was referring to the Overwatch Classic mode where all gameplay is reverted to a specific OW1 patch, leading to DPS Doomfist dominating lobbies.

    2 votes
  9. Comment on Overwatch 2 now: how does it look to you? in ~games

    Crestwave
    (edited )
    Link
    I actually quite like OW2—the gameplay is tight and fast-paced, patches are quick, and they've been experimenting a ton with features like perks and the Stadium mode. 6v6 is even still...

    I actually quite like OW2—the gameplay is tight and fast-paced, patches are quick, and they've been experimenting a ton with features like perks and the Stadium mode.

    6v6 is even still continuously supported as a mode and OW1 classic reappears as an event from time to time. I quite like 6v6, but classic is kind of a mess—everyone is much better at the game now, so it plays out quite differently despite being a fairly faithful recreation (minus some engine-specific techs like Mercy's OG superjump).

    I'm pretty indifferent to the monetization—all heroes are free now so they only sell cosmetics, and I have several good skins for basically all characters so I have no reason to care about the existence of a skin, no matter how expensively priced it is. They could sell them for $2k and I would still be fine because it's keeping the game free. Lootboxes can't be bought anymore so it's arguably a significantly more ethical profit model without relying on gambling addiction.

    It's also been revealed in recent years that the game's former director, Jeff Kaplan, was actually responsible for a lot of what went wrong with OW2. Rather than capitalize on their hit GOTY shooter, he wanted to gut it to transition it back to its MMO roots by first forcing it into a coop shooter (which would then be gutted to shift into an MMO). Unsurprisingly, the same things that went wrong during the development of the original MMO happened again and the team was left with a mess. It's only in the previous years with Kotick out of the picture that they've finally recovered and started delivering content at lightning speed.

    Random side note: the free battle pass gives you premium currency and it's also extremely easy to complete compared to other live service games. Good stuff, although it would be better if you could progress bought passes at any time.

    One thing I will say is worse is the sense of a community. It's in a similar vein to WoW where social interactions still happen all the time, but it's fairly surface-level as you're immediately shuttled off into the next match for maximum engagement and minimal confrontation. Bring back the post game screen!

    2 votes
  10. Comment on Amazon Web Services outage impacts in ~tech

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    It's quite illuminating seeing how much infrastructure all over the world was affected from the outage of a single us-east-1 service. Hopefully some companies will consider lessening their...

    It's quite illuminating seeing how much infrastructure all over the world was affected from the outage of a single us-east-1 service. Hopefully some companies will consider lessening their dependency on a single region.

    17 votes
  11. Comment on What are some of your personal misheard lyrics? in ~music

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    Star-crossed is also a misheard lyric! The actual line is "got a long list of ex-lovers"

    Star-crossed is also a misheard lyric! The actual line is "got a long list of ex-lovers"

    5 votes
  12. Comment on I'm Not a Robot in ~games

    Crestwave
    (edited )
    Link
    This was a fun one! I totally didn't need 6 queens to beat the bot! Spoilers Got the circle first try. This ain't my first rodeo :P For the Empire State Building, I zoomed out to have it all in...

    This was a fun one! I totally didn't need 6 queens to beat the bot!

    Spoilers
    • Got the circle first try. This ain't my first rodeo :P
    • For the Empire State Building, I zoomed out to have it all in frame and selected where I thought 64% of my screen would be. Got it on my second try!
    • For the chatbot, I just typed out Taylor Swift lyrics and it worked weirdly well. I guess bots aren't swifties?
    • Reverse image search helps for the AI-generated men, although I still did a bit of trial and error.
    • I used stock photos for the emotion detector. You can skip it if you don't have a camera (or don't give it permission to access it), though! Just click Verify.
    • You can use your touchpad to zoom in on Where's Waldo, since using the actual browser zoom just makes it scale proportionally. Or you can save the image, since the lines are kind of distracting.
    • I used picture-in-picture mode to skip the final video. I can't tell if it was AI-generated or just overly processed satire, but it was weirding me out.
    2 votes
  13. Comment on Blizzard shuts down Project Epoch, another WoW private server in ~games

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    That was how they generally worked—you would install retail WoW for a certain expansion, patch it up to a specific version, then edit reamlist.wtf to point to the private server. I remember using...

    That was how they generally worked—you would install retail WoW for a certain expansion, patch it up to a specific version, then edit reamlist.wtf to point to the private server. I remember using the regular launcher and having to immediately press Play or it would automatically update to the latest retail patch (apparently I could have just launched Wow.exe directly to bypass this, whoops).

    Nowadays all the popular private servers just distribute the entire modified client so that it's entirely click and run, because convenience attracts more players, of course. I do think there are still some old school servers doing it the traditional way, though, they just have a much more limited audience.

    2 votes
  14. Comment on The sunscreen scandal shocking Australia in ~health

    Crestwave
    Link
    Not surprised to see this, unfortunately. Banana Boat in particular has been failing independent tests (from Choice as well as from other groups like Consumer Reports) for well over a decade now,...

    Not surprised to see this, unfortunately. Banana Boat in particular has been failing independent tests (from Choice as well as from other groups like Consumer Reports) for well over a decade now, with copious customer complaints to back it up and yet they're still up and running.

    7 votes
  15. Comment on xAI has open sourced Grok 2.5 in ~tech

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    Agreed. This feels like a SaaS provider releasing their server as an executable and calling it open source. An executable would arguably be much more useful for reverse engineering, even. Not to...

    Agreed. This feels like a SaaS provider releasing their server as an executable and calling it open source. An executable would arguably be much more useful for reverse engineering, even.

    Not to mention that the license seems pretty restrictive as well, including stipulations like:

    You may not use the Materials, derivatives, or outputs (including generated data) to train, create, or improve any foundational, large language, or general-purpose AI models, except for modifications or fine-tuning of Grok 2 permitted under and in accordance with the terms of this Agreement.

    12 votes
  16. Comment on Chappell Roan says her second album ‘doesn’t exist yet’: ‘It’s probably going to take at least five’ years in ~music

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    They're sort of right in terms of mainstream appeal and the charts, but plenty of artists have survived with long gaps between releases. Lorde has consistently released an album every 4 years, for...

    They're sort of right in terms of mainstream appeal and the charts, but plenty of artists have survived with long gaps between releases. Lorde has consistently released an album every 4 years, for example.

    I personally cannot fathom why everyone is so negative about this and acting like they're her manager. She has constantly stated that she dislikes fame and fame clearly dislikes her as well from the amount of negativity she's been getting. She's clearly had enough of a successful run that she's comfortable with winding down for a while; not everything has to be optimized and calculated to squeeze as much money and fame as possible.

    Also, she just released some great singles (I had Good Luck Babe and The Subway on repeat while reading this) and she'll likely release some more in the years before her next album so I'm not too worried. :-)

    23 votes
  17. Comment on uBlock Origin Lite for Safari in ~tech

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    uBO didn't really work on iOS Orion in my experience; their website's FAQ used to say "Wait, are you saying I can run uBlock Origin and other Chrome/Firefox extensions in Orion?!" but then they...

    uBO didn't really work on iOS Orion in my experience; their website's FAQ used to say "Wait, are you saying I can run uBlock Origin and other Chrome/Firefox extensions in Orion?!" but then they updated it to add "for Mac" at the end. Multiple developer comments have confirmed that they meant it for Mac and iOS support for extensions is extremely limited.

    As for the built-in adblocker, I simply had ads slip through and Orion in general has been very buggy for me. Often websites would fail to load, have nonfunctional components, or just straight-up crash. I just tried it right now to see if it's improved and got two crashes within minutes.

    4 votes
  18. Comment on uBlock Origin Lite for Safari in ~tech

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    What iOS version are you on? I got this error as well but it worked after updating to 18.6.

    What iOS version are you on? I got this error as well but it worked after updating to 18.6.

    6 votes
  19. Comment on uBlock Origin Lite for Safari in ~tech

    Crestwave
    Link Parent
    The best thing about uBOL is that it works on iOS as well, where there are no alternative browser engines. I've tried a lot of "browsers" and content blockers, including Brave/Orion/Firefox Focus,...

    Realistically I should wean myself off Safari but handoff is so useful…

    The best thing about uBOL is that it works on iOS as well, where there are no alternative browser engines. I've tried a lot of "browsers" and content blockers, including Brave/Orion/Firefox Focus, but they always had some ads slip through. Or sometimes they would block URLs from loading but not prevent your click from being hijacked, resulting in annoying "this URL was blocked by a content blocker" new tab popups that you have to constantly close.

    This works extremely well in comparison; so far it's been just like regular uBO after some configuration. Very happy with this release.

    3 votes
  20. Comment on uBlock Origin Lite for Safari in ~tech

    Crestwave
    Link
    Make sure to go to the settings and configure the filters after installing. I found that it worked quite poorly by default, but after switching to Complete mode and enabling all the filters except...

    Make sure to go to the settings and configure the filters after installing. I found that it worked quite poorly by default, but after switching to Complete mode and enabling all the filters except Miscellaneous/Regions, it just works perfectly in classic uBlock Origin style.

    5 votes