I am in that strange overlap of people who are genuinely interested in astronomy but also can’t keep a straight face whenever they come into contact with Uranus. Thanks for the great and detailed post!

I prefer performance mode if it is decently implemented. For slower games I go for quality mode if the difference is obvious enough. Recent examples that come to mind are Somerville and Forspoken. Forspoken is a strange one, as it is actually a really fast game, but it looked horrible on performance mode and actually worked quite well once I got used to the 30fps. I play on base PS5.

I had exactly this issue at times! Sometimes it felt like Kratos just wasn’t fast enough to react to my inputs, almost felt a bit over animated or something. I’ve dabbled in souls games (only finished Demon’s Souls though), but there the movement and reaction always felt instant and fair.

The first one on PS2 or the version from 2018?

It was the cutscene where Kratos hurls a gigantic column if anyone remembers.

I think Kratos does this in just about every game. I was playing Ragnarok 5 minutes ago and he was hurling pillars at enemies left, right and center :D.

As for 2018: it’s a game with a big focus on combat, exploration and character driven storytelling. I can understand feeling burnt out on the viking aesthetic, but the game feels way more fantastical than historical to me.

Nice to see some more GoW3 love. I adored this game from beginning to end and loved the variation the different weapons brought to the table.

What device do you use to game? If you have a capable PC and are unable to pay for the game, there are simple methods to obtain it for free, for which you should feel zero remorse in my opinion :). Piracy when the person in question is unable to pay for the game is nothing to be ashamed for, and I’ve read multiple developer interviews who endorse this!

You mean 811K ;). At this rate it will only take a few more days!

Again, a Let’s discuss post guided by what I am currently playing: God of War Ragnarok.

Let me start of by saying that I am a big fan of this series. I came late to the party, playing the original 2 games on my overclocked PS vita as part of the God of War Collection. I really liked the first, loved the second and actually absolutely adored the third game on my PS4 pro. Something about God of War 3 just going all the way on this mad destructive rampage really left me in awe. It has multiple incredible set pieces and Kratos truly becomes a vengeful monster in this game. The different weapons all felt amazing, it looked unreal at 60fps on PS4 pro and just was an all round epic experience.

I also played both psp games, which I thought were very impressive for the device, though a slight step down in all areas compared to the main trilogy. Still worthy entries though!

I did not play God of War Ascension yet, as this is the only one stuck on PS3.

I played God of War (2018) a few years later (a year or two ago), and while I did like it, I wasn’t as in love with it as many other people. I felt the combat was often sluggish and the storytelling slow and meandering at times. The design of the different areas was a bit hit and miss for me. There were moments of absolute brilliance (the opening scene, Kratos carrying his unconscious son to Freya, the ending and its impact on their relationship with Freya), but felt a bit too stretched out at times. Still, with respects to presentation, graphics, acting performances and music this was an all time classic.

I now started God of War Ragnarok, and I must say I am really liking it so far. The stakes seem higher, the characters are all interesting and even the combat feels better to me (I started on the hardest difficulty, just to see how long I would be able to hold out, but it actually makes me use the different systems more precisely). I am very hopeful for this one!

These books were purchased by them before being destroyed in the scanning process. I fail to see the issue with this specific case. Lots of artists buy stuff and irreversibly modify it. Are we going to be angry now at people who glue their puzzles or use parts of books for scrapbooking? If these were unique works there would be an issue, but I don’t think that truly unique pieces would be in their target group, as the destructive scanning is all about cost cutting and unique works cost a lot of money that they wouldn’t just destroy.

The fact that they use it for model training and later sell access to that model’s work is the shady part that has a severe whiff of plagiarism to it.

As far as I remember, there was never an option for me to choose where I was born. I think the same counts for those Russian people you’re so quick to dismiss?

Isn’t this site proof that the internet doesn’t have to die as a whole? I mean, I agree with your sentiment, but I feel that this will mostly hit the middle to high traffic sites. The community based ones with organic discovery will remain OK I think. This might even evolve back to an early internet age of smaller hobbyist sites because there no longer is big money in the internet (apart from what google captures as “their” internet)

I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I’m not going to be having a switch 2 any time soon but I do really like Nintendo games, so I’m glad I’ll be able to get some of the excitement through you :).

I’m a bit sad about the free roaming part being a bit bare bones. When they first announced it I was hoping for the creativity of a Mario Odyssey crossed with Breath of the Wild in a Kart, discovering secrets and fun places everywhere.

Also with respect to pricing: I think it depends on the game to decide what an honest price is. I would gladly give 100 or more for the joy that Slay the Spire has given me over the years. I think that a big and polished Mario game is not immediately the worst offender for being this expensive. It’s when the less polished and more cash grabbing AAA games start to follow this example that it becomes a problem. I do like how some games decide their price points differently, like Clair Obscur for example.

Is Warframe still nice to start out with in 2025? I remember installing it a while back and being overwhelmed by the amount of info and options and not really knowing how to simply progress the story in the original way.

This is the one, playing through 1 for the second time right now and it’s just so good. It’s my first time as female Shepard and I think I like her more than male Shepard!

I agree that this mostly makes sense, but the mouse part of the new joy cons does feel like a new console feature that they wouldn’t have added for a switch pro.

If I were to ask my Magic 8 Ball “Is the word ‘difinitely’ misspelled?” 100 times, it’s going to reply in the affirmative over 16% of the time.

This comparison makes no sense. Your example has a binary question. In that case, any system that replies correctly at even a rate of around 50% would be useless. However, the problem space in this scenario is way larger than 2 options and still way larger than 100 options. Being correct in even a small number of 100 attempts is still statistically significant.

The fact that an LLM is unable to reason and that it is based on statistics doesn’t change anything about this behavior. At the end of the day you get a tool that is able to point you to actual new information that you by yourself did not arrive at.

Imagine that you put a lot of effort in a better model specifically for vulnerability research and you get it up to a correctness rate of a mere 10%. I would gladly hire some programmers to sift through these reports and possibly find overlooked vulnerabilities.

This is literally the very first experiment in this use case, done by a single person on a model that wasn’t specifically designed for this. The fact that it is able to formulate a correct response at all in this situation impresses me.

It would be easy to criticize this if it were the endpoint and this was being advertised as a tool for vulnerability research, but as discussed at the end of the post, this “quick little test” shows both initial promising results and had the fortunate byproduct of actually revealing a new vulnerability. By no means is it implied that it is now ready for use in this field.

The issue with hallucinations is one that in my opinion is never going to be totally fixed. That is why I hate the use of AI as a final arbiter of truth, which is sadly how a lot of people use it (I’ll quickly ask ChatGPT) and companies advertise it. What it is good at however, is coming up with plausible ideas, and in this case having an indication for things to check in code can be a great tool to discover new stuff, as is literally the case for this security researcher finding a new vulnerability after auditing the module themselves.

I hate AI. Why?

• Because of its extreme energy consumption compared to what it achieves
• Because it is all in the hands of the worst companies on this planet
• Because capitalists are foaming at the mouth to use it to fuck over workers
• Because it is devaluing art and reducing it to another commodity to “produce”

However

I also took the time to read the original blog post, and it is a fascinating story.

The author starts out with using an existing vulnerability as a benchmark for ChatGPT testing. They describe how they took the code specific to the vulnerability and packaged it for ChatGPT, how they formatted the query and what their results were. In 100 runs only 8 correctly identify the targeted vulnerability, the rest are false positives or claim that there are no vulnerabilities in the given code.

Then they take their test a step further and increase the amount of code shared with ChatGPT so that it also includes stuff of the module that had nothing to do with the original vulnerability. As expected, this larger input decreases performance and also reduces the vulnerability detection rate for the targeted vulnerability. However, in those 100 runs, another vulnerability was described that wasn’t a false positive. An actual new vulnerability that the author didn’t know about was discovered. Again, the signal to noise ratio is very low, and one has to sift through a lot of wrong reports to get a realistic one, but this proved that it could be used as a useful tool for helping to detect vulnerabilities.

I highly recommend reading the blog post.

As much as I like to be critical about AI, it doesn’t help if we put our heads in the sand and act as if it never does something cool.

I distinctly remember Donkey Kong Country as my first gaming experience. When my parents needed a babysit, they would often let me sleep at my aunts place. My older niece and nephew also lived their, but the age gap was quite big making it not ideal for us to play with toys together. One day however, my nephew had a SNES from his friend there and he was playing Donkey Kong Country on their TV. I remember being completely entranced by it and being unable to put it down (even though it was very difficult for me at the time). From then on I was always hoping that the “Gaming Machine” would be present if I stayed over, which was often the case as they figured out that this was a very easy way to keep me occupied. I later got a green Game Boy Color, and of course this was my first game for the system. I played it countless of hours, and even though I later got a Game Boy Advance SP, this game would remain in my rotation until I got a DS many years later.

I’ve barely played any of the later installments. I got Donkey Kong Country 2 for the Game Boy Advance when I was young, but found it to difficult and didn’t really like the new protagonist as much. After my DS I became a playstation fanboy for the rest of my childhood and teens.

Now that I have bought a 3DS I’ve started playing Donkey Kong Country Returns. It’s really nice, but I found it a bit overwhelming and haven’t really touched it since.

Also a shout out to the Game Boy game called Donkey Kong, in which you actually play Mario with some incredibly varied platforming for the time. An all time classic!