Now I don’t know if they ever changed anything since launch. But if you judged the max speed by the first flying saddle you got you didn’t actually experience anything close to max speed. Pals that have their saddles unlocked at a higher level (usually) have a much higher speed when mounted.

Source

I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.

Can that image viewer extract text so that a user could easily copy/paste it? I think if whatever pdf I was opening didn’t allow me to do that I would be really frustrated.

Remember the people who created malicious libraries that ChatGPT made up and suggested, in the hopes someone would blindly install them? You can do this a lot easier here. Check what websites this tends to hallucinate when typing “google” “youtube” “facebook” etc. and if any of them don’t exist yet, register that address and host a phishing version of the corresponding site there.

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.

Somehow Roblox has become the Metaverse Meta was trying to build…

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 leaving my review as is. Sony trying this and saying in their tweet that they’re “still learning what’s best for PC players” does not instill me with enough confidence to give it a thumbs up.

As you mentioned, it’s a lot easier to lose trust than to (re)earn it.

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.

There are quite a few other roguelike (or roguelike adjacient) games that do beat it handily. To give a few examples:

DF started development in October 2002 (according to their own website, scroll all the way down.)

UnReal World’s first release was in 1992 and is also still getting regular updates.

NetHack has gotten new versions ever since 1987. The latest big change was 3.6.0 in 2015, 3.6.7 came out in early 2023 but there’s no reason to believe there won’t be a next version. If we count that in 1987 it started as a fork of Hack, we could even add another 3 years in the front as Hack was published in 1984.

Edit: I just realized: In the world of MMORPGs we also have a few examples: Everquest which came out in 2000 and is still getting expansions. Even WoW isn’t too far behind with a 2004 release date, which probably means development began before DF’s development too.

On MAL and temporarily, yes. From memory, I can think of two anime that were temporarily ahead of FMA:B.

Kaguya-sama’s third season was ahead of FMA:B when it was airing in 2022. It now sits on 12th with a score of 9.02.

Pingu in the City was memed to #1 shortly before its first episode aired in 2017. It now chills in the mid-tier with a score of 6.52 on 6596th.

However, I think Kaguya was only barely ahead of FMA:B at its peak. Meanwhile Frieren is at 9.18 currently while FMA:B in 2nd place is on 9.09. That is a full 0.09 lead, which is over 10% of the way from FMA:B to a theoretical clean 10.0.
Another way to put the lead into context is by doing the next 0.09 step down from FMA:B, which lands us cleanly at 9.00. An anime with a score of 9.00 would be at 13th, between Kaguya-sama 3 (9.02) and Fruits Basket: The Final (8.98).

Edit: With the final episode done, it’s now sitting at 9.34. I will assume it’s gonna drop a bit again over time, this is still an absolutely insane score. 27% of the way between FMAB and perfect 10.0. Going from 9.34 is now a 0.25 step down to FMAB, the next 0.25 step would be down to 8.84, which would be a tie with Kimi no Na wa at 28th.

I can only repeat again how mindblowing this is. The difference between Frieren and FMAB is the same as the one between FMAB and Kimi no Na wa. And that is ignoring how much harder every 0.01 gets the closer you get to 10.0.

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.