Iirc,mass effect lets you buy anything you miss in a store later, at least

!Stars don’t go from yellow to supernova in 22 minutes!<

!I mean, the rules of physics and biology are in general being bent quite a bit by the game. Even just the existence of the Hearthians, a species that developed on a planet that’s tiny and harbors, what, like 30 individuals total? That just falls under stuff that doesn’t make sense in the real world, but I’m willing to accept in order to enjoy the game 🤷!<

Haven’t played the DLC either yet, not sure if that adds anything, but:

[Spoilers for mid-game]

!While you play, you’ll encounter clues that point towards the sun station being the reason for the sun dying, as it was built to make the sun go supernova and use the resulting energy to find the eye of the universe.!<

[Spoilers for late- to endgame]

!Later on, it turns out that the sun station is actually not the reason, as it just didn’t work as the Nomai planned. The sun is actually going supernova because the universe is dying as a whole, as you can actually see all around you, with loads of supernovae going off in the sky. Now sadly, there’s no explanation given for why that is happening much earlier than everyone expected, iirc. I guess that’s a final mystery that’s indeed left unanswered.!<

!the sun changing color and getting bigger, without explaining anything!<

Well, a big part of the game is figuring out why that’s happening, by exploring the system and piecing together its past. The game certainly doesn’t hold your hand in that, but it’s fair in letting you discover it on your own. I get that this kind of mystery might just not be for everyone, though.

I think what they’re talking about is buying online without physical media, but still owning what you bought, as in, the actual movie, as a file on your disk. Best of both worlds - no plastic, no servers necessary for playback after a one time download. That is how things should work.

Also, what’s up with controllers dropping face button colors? The PS5 did the same thing.

From an aesthetic standpoint it just looks better^1 , and by now gaming consoles are so Mainstream that the additional accessibility the colors offer is not a good enough reason to keep them anymore.

^1 subjective, of course, but if you look at modern, big corporate design a lot of it is trending towards minimalism, very little use of color, etc.

that were ironed out over the span of several months

It still runs like garbage on my 13700K and 3060Ti, depending on the area. Sometimes, High settings are fine, but way too often I have to drop down to “Original” to get somewhat acceptable FPS (>40) at 1440p with Balanced DLSS. Am I doing something wrong, or was it just even worse at launch?

Not really self-hosted in the typical sense, but Obsidian with the Tasks and/or Kanban plugin synced through a (self-hosted) solution of your choice could work?

Haven’t tried the whiteboard tool in Google keep (didn’t even know there was one), but the Excalidraw plugin for Obsidian should cover almost any whiteboard use case I can think of. A bit more limited but also good is the native Canvas plugin in Obsidian.

That’s how literally all language change happens? People just start using words differently or use new words, it slowly spreads, until a majority is using it. You can either embrace it and be happy you get new tools to express yourself with, or reenact the “old man yells at clouds” meme and be grumpy. I know which one I’ll choose.

Check out this one: https://thegradient.pub/othello/

In it, researchers built a custom LLM trained to play a board game just by predicting the next move in a series of moves, with no input at all about the game state. They found evidence of an internal representation of the current game state, although the model had never been told what that game state looks like.

For note taking, you might even get by without self-hosting, looking at software like Obsidian which works perfectly fine with just SyncThing to sync between devices, or just literally any other file syncing solution, self-hosted or otherwise.

It’s not only IPs and emails though. Since users can put whatever they want in comments and posts, all of those must be treated as potential PII, and have to be included in subject access requests and deletion requests.

Genuinely curious, why do you not like PWAs?

I don’t think it’s quite that bad/simple. Viewing your main instance as the Controller and other instances as Processors in GDPR terms won’t work, because instances don’t have the necessary control over each other for that, as you say.

However, you could circumvent that issue by making the case that each instance actually acts as an independent Controller. By participating on a federated service, you are explicitly agreeing to the data you provide (your profile, posts, comments, etc.) being made public and shared with other compatible services. That should be enough as the basis for other instances to reasonably assume you want your data to be processed by them, which (I think, not a lawyer) is sufficient justification for processing the data independently, as long as it’s in line with how you generally expect the fediverse to work.

This would mean that each federated instance is its own, independent entity that processes your data, and to make use of your rights under GDPR, you need to do that with each of them individually. They effectively become their own “original data collection point”, in your words, even if that data collection was not explicitly triggered by you.

The only thing missing for that to be legal (again, in my layman’s view) is transparency about who’s processing your data, which is necessary under GDPR. Every instance that receives your data via federation would need to let you know about that, and make available to you information on how you can make use of your rights under GDPR with them. That, in turn, would probably be easiest if the protocol spoken between fediverse servers were extend with automated and standardized ways to propagate GDPR requests from your home instance to any other instance that is processing your data, so that you don’t have to actually deal with every single server yourself to get your rights enacted. Defederation in the meantime might be a problem, but there’s ways around that, too.

You play however is the most fun to you! Gaming can become so much more fun when you realize that different difficulty levels are there to serve you and your enjoyment of the game, not the other way around!

XCOM 2 on the lowest difficulty. Sacrilege, I know, but there’s just no better feeling than waltzing through some aliens with my whole squad intact at the end while feeling like a tactical genius. And even the weird Chimera Squad is just fun at times for a bit of a changeup.