I appreciate the insight. Just curious, do you have a link to things I should be disabling in group policy?

Typically I’m not a fan of modifying that much especially registry wise, as I feel this is a cause for many people’s problems, but I’m not uncomfortable making GP changes if they make sense.

I’m currently using W11 Pro activated with massgravel scripts and I’ve got DNS level blocking set up on my network, although I’m not sure how well that does at blocking telemetry. It’s my second line ad block primarily.

I really don’t see the issue with W11. It works fine. As did 10, and 8.1. I’ve not encountered any ads or many of the other shitty things that are constantly reported on.

I had this on my “to play” list for years and finally did a full play through as the first game on my new OLED monitor. It holds up incredibly well so many years later. The AI, sound design, and lighting really carry the game, and when I went back to watch Alien I realized how true to the source material it was. 9/10 game for me, had my heart racing numerous times but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I could only do an hour or two a day but wow, very glad I pushed myself to finish it. Probably the most fun I’ve had with a game’s AI since STALKER’s A-Life or FEAR’s AI.

I really want an Apple TV, but there are constant technology changes so buying the current two year old design seems like a bad idea.

I’ve got a first gen ATV4K and the newer one - the only difference I’ve noticed over the years is the remote. We bought a current gen remote for the old one and it’s the same experience. Just pull the trigger, if you’ve got Apple devices it’s a great streaming box. ATV4K is not where the constant technology changes are happening.

Some consider it a hassle, others of us obsessively enjoy manually downloading and sorting our files into our folder structure.

I’ve got a collection going back to a 128k MP3 from a Napster download in 2000. Hundreds of gigabytes of lossless music.

Bandcamp is great, but I use Redacted for those I can’t easily find.

Just do the cheap unlimited personal plan and hook up a shit load of external HDDs to your PC. I have a system where my NAS syncs to my PC which syncs to Backblaze so I can sorta hack my way into unlimited NAS backup for $10/mo.

3-2-1 backup where the primary source of data is the NAS, on site backup is desktop PC external HDDs, off site backup is Backblaze.

Backblaze as well. Can’t believe they let me store 20TB of backups for $10/mo.

They also have worse color rendering index so it’s more difficult to distinguish objects despite more lumens.

Sealed beam headlights are the whole thing, lens, reflector, bulb all in one assembly. You don’t replace the bulb with these, you replace the entire light. Think old cars/trucks when everything had standardized round glass headlights. Not unique designs per model.

Because Mercedes Benz couldn’t use their fancy euro headlights for cars in the US, they had to use the standardized sealed beam lights, which were not as powerful.

Live weather, live traffic, multiplayer traffic, and photogrammetry are all disabled in offline mode.

Article is basically an ad

How many times a day are you shown ads that are completely irrelevant?

Me personally, I’ve never once experienced the “they’re listening to my mic for ads” phenomenon. I think someone would notice by now either by seeing increased upload usage or a hot device- at least with current technology. On device machine learning will make this much easier to analyze without having to upload audio.

Not that I don’t think it’s entirely possible to listen right now, I just don’t think it’s occurring to unimportant people. I’m not particularly important or rich nor is anyone I know. It seems much more plausible to me that we’re just seeing conventional web tracking get a lot better + a healthy dose of confirmation bias.

What this demonstrates is how good tracking is now. They’re not listening to your microphone, at least not while your phone is in your pocket or whatever, because they don’t need to. They can already see your fingerprint, what websites you’re visiting, what your searching, and all of this applies to people you know as well- people who likely aren’t privacy conscious and share all contact info with whatever app is requesting. Listening to the mic is not necessary to suggest highly relevant ads.

It only makes prodrugs that first need to be metabolized by CYP3A4 to be active less effective. This is a pretty small minority of drugs. It makes drugs that are inactivated by CYP3A4 more effective, which is the majority of them. It also only competitively inhibits the enzyme while the drug is in your system, it’s not permanently inhibiting the enzyme like a suicide inhibitor.

Still Wakes the Deep. Shit goes wrong on a Scottish oil rig in the 70s, it’s sorta like dead space mixed with alien isolation and a walking simulator. Stealth gameplay with some puzzles and a decent emotional narrative. I had a good time playing it and it’s on gamepass. Short and sweet.

You could say the same thing for any Fallout/Elder Scrolls game, too. ‘Boring ride through the country’ < oblivion and Skyrim. ‘Boring walk to the next area’ <Fallout

Exploration is one of the most enjoyable parts of those games. It’s not boring in ES or FO because of all the things you find along the way. Walking from A to B and getting distracted for 2 hours at random POIs you find is a hallmark of these games.

This aspect was completely absent in Starfield, idk how they fucked up exploration so much.

it’s a literal SPACE exploration game, how can you complain about travelling through space

Traveling != exploration. Eliminating the load screens just leaves you in boring space with no POIs to discover along the route.

It still works pretty well, not as effective as regular external NC of course, but the difference between transparency and isolation modes when chewing crunchy foods or using my electric toothbrush is very noticeable. Now I’m going to have to do a bit of an experiment with bone conduction headphones from a friend and ANC mode to see how well it’s working.

Some headphones now have internal noise cancellation, such as AirPods Pro and Max. I can hear it working when I’m chewing something crunchy or when I’m using my electric toothbrush and toggling between transparency and NC modes. Kinda curious if some other cans have this as well, it’s a nice feature. There are microphones inside the cup listening to internal sounds and cancelling those out as well as external sounds.

You can start a forest fire if said forest is used for cover or concealment by enemy military forces. All feasible precautions must be taken to limit the damage to military targets only.

It’s not against the Geneva convention, it’s completely within the limits to use incendiary weapons against military targets. Read for yourself:

https://geneva-s3.unoda.org/static-unoda-site/pages/templates/the-convention-on-certain-conventional-weapons/PROTOCOL%2BIII.pdf