Recently started Fallout 3 on steam deck, am a few hours in, pretty good game! Love the freedom, the exploration, but it can occasionally be a challenging game with the fighting and various encounters. Story is good so far.

My number one gripe with organic maps is how fragile the search is. If you don’t write it exactly right, you get no or irrelevant results. Also, it seems to have no clue of what is popular and what people expect when they search for something. I’m not talking about personalized results but for example the following: searching for “Eiffel”, leads me to minor roads, restaurants and all kinds of results unrelated to the Eiffel tower. This is what is troubling me the most.

Exactly, this is about compression. Just imagine a full HD image, 1920x1080, with 8 bits of colors for each of the 3 RGB channels. That would lead to 1920x1080x8x3 = 49 766 400 bits, or roughly 50Mb (or roughly 6MB). This is uncompressed. Now imagine a video, at 24 frames per second (typical for movies), that’s almost 1200 Mb/second. For a 1h30 movie, that would be an immense amount of storage, just compute it :)

To solve this, movies are compressed (encoded). There are two types, lossless (where the information is exact and no quality loss is resulted) and lossy (where quality is degraded). It is common to use lossy compression because it is what leads to the most storage savings. For a given compression algorithms, the less bandwidth you allow the algorithm, the more it has to sacrifice video quality to meet your requirements. And this is what bitrate is referring to.

Of note: different compression algorithms are more or less effective at storing data within the same file size. AV1 for instance, will allow for significantly higher video quality than h264, at the same file size (or bitrate).

To be fair, resolution is not enough to measure quality. The bitrate plays a huge role. You can have a high resolution video looking worse than a lower resolution one if the lower one has a higher bitrate. In general, many videos online claim to be 1080p but still look like garbage because of the low bitrate (e.g. like on YouTube or so). If you go for a high bitrate video, you should be able to tell pretty easily, the hair, the fabric, the skin details, the grass, everything can be noticeably sharper and crisper.

Edit: so yeah, I agree with you, because often they are both of low bitrate…

I think that’s what we see with apple silicon, right?

ChatGPT is already free, even GPT-4o since recently.

Granted, you do need an account which requires a phone number, but there are no financial costs.

I don’t know if the content is of particular interest to everyone, but I did want to follow the topic as it was a source of disagreement between FUTO and Rossman and I wanted to see whether they had come to terms.

Do you have a copy of the now deleted/removed video, or are you referring to a videoviseo which is now publicly available? If it is now publicly available, is it at the same link as my edited original post or something else? Thanks!

I have this one sitting on my digital shelf, should probably play it!

Perhaps it would be worth checking with the !homelab@lemmy.ml community and see if they have any advice? They are more likely to have dealt with such situations, by nature.

The Witcher 3. It’s not far from being 10, but got a very nice graphics update for free and has 2 DLC. The game and the DLC and the free graphics update and a very recent mod kit, all for around 10-15 USD right now on GOG . it’s a steal! I highly recommend it. It became my favorite game of all time, very fast. And it will offer around 100h, and it will also offer replayability. What is there not to like?

Edit link

The best and possibly only dumb TV brand is Spectre.

https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.html?sort=tbt.parent_pdtype&order=DESC

Source: framework CEO https://community.frame.work/t/in-defense-of-dumb-tvs/160

Disclaimer: have not tried them.

I think there are important considerations to keep in mind.

First and foremost, Valve is not a public company. I don’t know if it has investors, but it is not driven by profits like many typical public companies are. These companies tend to allow themselves longer investments without any clear visibility of immediate profits. They also do things for the greater good, even though it does not bring profits.

But also, I think the whole of valve is a set of gamers and people who genuinely care about the gaming business and making great products. I think they all share Gabe’s values and goals. It’s not like Gabe is the only one holding everything together or else it would instantly crash into the profit driven company it could be.

Both of these scenarios keep me hopeful that this is a longer lasting stance and doesn’t hinge on just one person. It’s not a proof it will never be a typical profit company but these are barriers which are not typically present. Let’s hope for the best and keep rewarding them for their contributions to gaming, open source and for their good actions.

Yes, I’d like to see some proof. There is indeed some possible confusion (intentional or not).

I think this is the key claim:

Vicki accuses Valve Corporation of shutting out competition in the PC gaming market by forcing game publishers to sign up to pricing restrictions that dictate the lowest price games can be sold for on rival platforms.

I had heard about it in the past and if true, I feel that is quite an uncompetitive practice, probably made possible by the dominant position Valve has.

This is so ridiculous. There is a lot of actually creepy spyware (see Microsoft’s recall) and this is what he gets upset about? Pathetic.

If it improves video calls and regular calls, why not? I can definitely see room for improvement in audio quality when calling and would be happy to have a better experience.

Yes, actually it can be quite straightforward. What you are probably best off doing is requesting a google takeout and upload that takeout to Ente directly. I have not followed this process myself so I can’t say much about it but it is described here and is probably the easiest way to migrate:

https://ente.io/faq/migration/from-google-photos/

I’m a customer and have moved over multiple family members, everyone seems happy. Their face recognition and smart search are still WIP, but they are impressively present, despite being all E2EE, by leveraging local processing. They are making very good progress.

It’s unfortunate the grapheneos community has a bad reputation, but I think the fact that Daniel stepped down and that the project is very committed and ticking all my personal boxes (and more) really keeps me devoted. I wish there were more options of phones, but I have no issue personally with it requiring google pixels as they have convinced me with what seems like rational and well supported arguments. I do wonder if as someone else mentioned, it may be interesting to have a GOS-light for other phones, just to give them a chance to get into GOS and try it out before getting a dedicated phone. It feels like a high barrier to entry, and a limited version may still be better than anything else available to those people? Just a thought.

I’m sorry, I don’t have any specific suggestions for you, but I am wondering: is there no open source app you yourself wish existed because you would need it?

Working on an open source app because some else (and not you) needs it, is not a good way of staying engaged and caring about the solution. Being the user and target of a project yourself is usually a much netter way of caring and proposing something tailored to at least one individual, maybe more.

Of course, if you are looking for a programming exercise, go for it, but then you don’t need ideas, you can reimplement something which already exists, perhaps which you like, but in your own way. But if you want to have an impact in the open source, it starts by needing something which you don’t really find anywhere and taking matter in your own hands to fix it :) this is not meant to disincentivize you, quite the opposite! I hope you stay attentive to your digital ecosystem to see which holes can be plugged :)

I maintain a private list of ideas I just think of as I go about my day, of things I would like to write/create for myself and while I won’t be going through with all of them, I hope to be able to pick up one or several of them whenever I have time. I can through some ideas here, not as a hint that you should do it (I’ll probably do them myself regardless), but just to inspire you, maybe:

• I am subscribed to a teachable program which has no app and the program is just static information. I want to pull it all and represent it to me offline, not requiring internet to manage my progress. It is also intended to help me archive what I paid for and not depend on the goodwill of teachables to allow me to continue access the resource.
• an RSS feed manager which uses embeddings to automatically organise the content by topic rather than by source.
• an anki plugin to highlight content in the browser based on words from anki that I have and have not learned, to improve my language learning and reading ability.

I have a few more, but this should give you some hints, I hope! Good luck!