I don’t like subscription based software, and a subscription based game launcher is even more ridiculous. Especially when there are already free open source alternatives.

With the subscription aspect in mind, this reads to me like an advertisement rather than news. Probably because you just pasted in their literal ad copy instead of giving us any of your own thoughts about it whatsoever.

A big part of why I’m on lemmy is to get away from the “natural engagement” ad posts, so in short this sort of post isn’t something I want to welcome or encourage.

Personally, this post would have come across a lot differently if it was just the link to their site/blog post and even a few sentences about your personal thoughts on it. This comes across as a poorly done ad.

You didn’t “just share news”. You just shared an ad with effectively no further context.

Maybe the “use it for free off someone else’s hardware” ones are, but why would you want to trust those with your sad NSFW RP? They make their money by harvesting all that data.

You can self host all of that stuff now, if you truly must.

Usually these are controlled via Group Policy and are standard enable/disable switches. Usually the Group Policy makes changes in the Registry, which can be applied manually to Home versions (but the registry switches don’t always do anything on the Home version).

I say usually because while I’m on the sysadmin team, I’m not on the desktop config team at work, and I’ve been busy with other projects so I haven’t dove into our latest standard Windows Server image and config (if this is even on the server version). I know we have to disable all of these AI features for regulatory and audit reasons, so it’s definitely possible (and “easily” so, otherwise I’d have heard the cursing).

There’s way too much of a legal minefield for Microsoft to not have these controls available to business customers, and we’re probably only one big data breach away from it to be default off in enterprise environments if that isn’t the default already. I haven’t upgraded my personal Win 10 Pro install yet to see what the defaults are on a fresh Win 11 Pro/Enterprise install, but from what I read at least some of these features are only even possible to enable on devices with dedicated NPU hardware- “AI cores”.

I hate this with a passion, it’s important to stay aware of it, and everyone should take steps to disable it on their own Windows systems, but I’m not convinced it’s the end of the world people are making it out to be. Just another item to add to the checklist of “shit I have to config to make Windows work for me if I’m going to keep using it”.

As far as Microsoft’s business sense goes, they’re still “too big to fail” to care. Their business and government customers will disable it, the tech savvy individuals will disable it, the normal users probably won’t even notice it. Linux unfortunately still isn’t truly undermining them in user numbers, and while adoption numbers are up especially due to handhelds like the SteamDeck, they can safely ignore those as not being a true challenger their “desktop PC use” crown. I want Linux to win, and it’s doing better than ever, but I’ve been waiting on the year of the Linux desktop for well over a decade now.

The goblins being peaceful might be due to your combat level. Once you outlevel an enemy by a certain amount, they stop auto-attacking you and you have to initiate combat with them if you want to.

This isn’t unique to Brave.

Citation needed. So far there has been one instance, in Tenessee, where a horrendous law was passed recently to allow that.

That law is a state law. As in, only in Tenessee. Not the whole country.

Things are absolutely shit, amd headed for worse, but let’s not spread falsehoods please.

Sounds like a good way to get detained for being suspicious. Pretty sure I’ve seen some headlines of people being questioned for having no social media presence.

Unfortunately it probably just depends on whichever chucklefuck you happen to end up dealing with. Not like there’s any strong rules they’re held accountable to.

This was (maybe still is) common on the 4chan /lit/erature board as a way to share the file(s) of an ebook embedded in the image of its cover.

I spent a ton of time playing the nabisco minigolf flash game online as a kid.

The sheer balls to try and fucking mansplain to a first responder. Holy shit.

For anyone considering playing or replaying New Vegas, I cannot reccomend the Viva New Vegas modlist enough.

It’s unfortunately not just some “one click setup”. There is a Wabbajack installer, but there are some small steps you still need to do manually too.

That said, it is by far the best and most comprehensive “vanilla plus” modpack I have ever used. I’m a modding addict; I don’t say that lightly. It doesn’t change core game mechanics, story, or anything the makes New Vegas what it is.

It polishes what’s there, upgrading visuals in a consistent manner that blends perfectly with the original content. It fixes countless longstanding bugs, performance issues, and crashes (only two crashes in ~40 hours on a setup that was modded even further past what the pack includes).

It polishes New Vegas to what it should have been on release (if Bethesda didn’t force Obsidian to rush it out the door early), then brings it as close to the quality of a modern release as possible through modding.

If you want to replay Fallout 3, a lot of people prefer playing it in the New Vegas engine using the Tale of Two Wastelands mod. The version of Viva New Vegas that covers that and includes mods for the Fallout 3 content is “The Best of Times”.

It appears to be up to the same quality as VNV standalone, but I haven’t used it myself yet.