skarn

Yeah, because Italians totally have no idea how to build a car.

Edit: a gentle reminder that e.g. Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, Pagani, Ducati, Dallara and DeTomaso come from exactly the same area as Parmigiano, Bolognese sauce, Parma ham, lasagne, and Bologna sausage.

Italy does not, indeed, have too much to offer with respect to computers and the internet.

But that already happens all the time. Vedy often the rights end up in the hands of some corporation and the author gets to have ~zero say in how it’s used.

Doesn’t seem to have been a particularly big issue.

I kinda disagree. If you need something to connect to the internet, it needs to be rather up to date.

My current laptop is 7 years old, and I Love It!

I still even play games with it. Not the newest stuff, but I have such a huge backlog of indies and not-so-new games that I could play for 15 years…

If someone told me this will be garbage in 3 years… I would hit them with the laptop. It’s a T470p, their skull is the part that would break.

There are two expansions for the first one, Opposing Force and Blue Shift. These explore the same events, from the points of view of different characters.

After the second one there are also the two shorter, stand alone, stories, Episode One and Episode two. These continue the story from the point of view of the protagonist.

A couple of oldies, that deserve to still be played. Disclaimer: I played both games when they were already ~8 years old, and completely outdated in terms of technology.

Planescape: Torment

One of the best RPG ever created, and that is entirely for the world building and writing, and how much of the gameplay ends up being based on these rather than the combat mechanics (which are just ok)

Deus Ex

Again it was way ahead of its time in terms of world building and depth, and it was still an unashamed PC game, that dared to challenge its users a little and didn’t need to have a GUI that could be used with a gamepad, unlike the sequels.

Great game… But I have to admit, I liked Hotline: Miami more.

Buying isn’t owning

Often true

piracy isn’t stealing

Definitely true

Do pirate as needed, but also do try to send a few dollars to the dev’s pockets when you like the game.

They also have families to feed (or cats I guess) and if they can’t do it by making games, they’ll stop making games.

But… Isn’t that kind of the point? Slashing computational cost so that we can deploy that stuff wherever it’s needed without a tenfold increase in the world’s energy bill?

Whether we should do that at all is a very different question.

Personally, I find myself in a bizarre situation.

I have some open source ““Ai”” solutions that I find really really nice and helpful e.g. the image search in Immich, or LanguageTool which bills itself as an AI spellchecker.

At the same time I am horrified at the stupidity underlying 99% of big tech AI stuff that gets wall street hot.