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skarn

skarn@discuss.tchncs.de
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As far as I can tell there are two separate worlds, with close to no overlap.

On the one hand the mainstream stuff, proprietary, DRM compatibile, interner dependet, non moddable, no privacy, no way to own your content, tracking you from asshole to appetite, often ad-infested.

Best you can hope for is some Android TV streaming box, but the moment you start to do stuff like root it or unlock the bootloader some streaming apps might decide to stop working, or degrade your quality. DRM-protected streaming services will completely refuse streaming high-quality content to any hardware you really control.

On the other you have self-hosted, often open source, tweakable, local, customisable, technology, compatible with all codecs you want, but functionally blocked from DRM. There is essentially no way to legally acquire video content for the second one. You could get a libredrive compatible BD reader and rip your own movies, but that’s still illegal in many countries, certainly the US, and is a ton of work.

If you have sufficiently powerful hardware, you might be able to stream low-bitrate 720p with software decoding. They won’t serve you better stuff. Anything better than that, you should consider it accidental and likely to stop soon.

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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.

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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.

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The Chinese ones tend to be less enshittified? Having just recently about how Xiaomi cars disable software updates if you change the headlights, allow me to doubt that.

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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.

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It really isn’t.

It’s the Antwerp Port Authority in Antwerp, Belgium. Designed by Zaha Hadid. Pretty cool.>!!<

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Authority_Building_(Antwerp)

I saw several such hybrid old/new building combinations in Flemish cities. And they usually manage to pull it off.

Another example I liked is the STAM, the Ghent city museum. They also host a nice yearly jazz festival in the courtyard of that one.

https://stamgent.be/

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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.

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Does really no one get a song reference around here?

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It was always burning since world’s been turning!

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As others said, it’s pretty stock android so… Bad. But you can buy it from Murena pre-flashed with e/os and then have a stock phone with a locked bootloader running a decently private OS. The bootloader is unlockable if you so wish.

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