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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 1st, 2023

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  • This video goes over it fairly well (note that this video does contain minor spoilers): https://youtu.be/O-x-1kS6TpQ Another video that goes over only the gameplay with no spoilers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBv8UVOSG8U

    Spoiler-free TL;DW: Halo 4 was controversial because this was the first new mainline Halo game by 343 Industries, who changed things up from previous Halo titles.

    But aside from questionable changes to the franchise in order to appeal to the CoD audience, there were a few genuine issues with the campaign (in my opinion, as a player who never finished Halo 4’s campaign).

    In terms of gameplay:

    1. The sandbox was absolutely destroyed through many changes to older weapons, to encourage you to use the new 343 weapons. The weapons were either nerfed into the ground to make them unviable, greatly reduced in ammo/availability, or outright removed. This meant that you would constantly be forced to replace your weapons, or you’d have to use the newer weapons, which still ran out of ammo. This greatly limited your options when playing the game.
    2. The enemies would act in a way that greatly limited your options when fighting them. The most common weapons (plasma pistols and needlers) were both were used in a way that forces you to methodically take them out from a distance. Melee attacks were undodgeable instant deaths, forcing you to take them out from a distance. Then, the Promethian knights have stupid health, shields that recharge almost instantly, and the ability to fucking teleport to recover their shields (or hit you with an undodgeable melee attacks).

    The result is that you are basically limited to only using long-range weapons to take out enemies. Hope you enjoy hours of Light Rifle gameplay!

    In terms of other parts of the game, this is more subjective but:

    1. The story felt incoherent, especially considering that it is a sequel to Halo 3
    2. The sound design completely changed the iconic sound effects, and the music felt off
    3. The characters were bland and forgettable, only Master Chief and Cortana were anywhere near fleshed-out

    Overall just a poor experience compared to older Halo titles.




  • I’ve used Thorium (not as my main browser) and I like it. Decent privacy features, performance does feel better.

    Some major downsides though:

    1. It is not frequently updated to the latest Chromium patch; there have been times where Thorium has lagged three major versions behind. And just forget about getting patches that fix major security vulnerabilities until the next major update.
    2. The browser is heavily opinionated, and while that has resulted in a browser with a half-useable version of the Chrome refresh, see this issue and it’s clear the focus is not on privacy.

    If you want a browser that’s more focused on privacy and don’t care about the eye-candy that Thorium provides, the Cromite browser is only doing security + privacy patches, has toggles for more permissions, has V8 disabled by default, allows for automatic clearing of history, allows you to change the default referrer policy, has more chrome://flags, and actually gets updates frequently to the latest patch.


  • I’m not a GNU/Linux expert, I’ve only used it on a server for a short time, but I have some things to share.

    Remember: search engines are your best friend! Obviously it would be better for someone to recommend a program for your specific use case, but you can find things like notepadqq (Notepad++) or xone (Drivers for your Xbox One controllers) with just one search.

    About GNU/Linux distributions: each of them provide a different set of software, including package manager, desktop environment, file system, etc. You can basically ignore the differences between distros if you use distrobox, which will let you install software regardless of your distro. Other differences will mainly be in the actual software they distribute (so you may need to use sudo apt rather than pacman or whatever.

    The “flavours” of distros can mean different things, often though they just have a different desktop environment so it runs kinda different, or it is designed for a different use case.

    For your use case, Pop!_OS has an ISO that includes Nvidia drivers, and Linux Mint also lets you install the proprietary drivers. Both are fairly common in the GNU/Linux space (especially with beginners) so you can get tons of support with those.



  • The desktop client logs and sends lists of currently running processes by default, and they also collect usage data (which channels you open, how long for, who you’re interacting with). In the settings, there’s literally an option for “Use data to customize my Discord experience”. And sure, they don’t show ads, but their third-party integrations do. Article with sources

    In the end, processing and storing millions of texts, images, videos and files permanently, and hosting all those live voice and video calls, and making updates to the clients, will always cost more than what they get from Nitro and server boosting. Discord isn’t profitable; they have to make the deficit up to shareholders somehow.