Just some IT guy

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  • 21 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Imo if you’re going to be the only one who would use the instance it is not worth it. Instead look for an instance that lines up with your personal interests (maybe check out the db0 instance).

    Content federation basically works on a subscription model so you will only see content from other instances if someonen your instance went out of their way to subscribe to it. Smaller instances suffer under this as they might not even see popular communities from other instances.







  • There is a distinct difference between taking out a loan on your house and saddling it 100% with debt again. Obviously any loan taken out should under all circumstances be one you can comfortably pay back.

    Taking out 20k on a 1m home is way different than taking out 20k on a 100k home.

    Plus, at least here, if you lose your job the following happens:

    • for 2 years you’ll get 80% of your previous paycheck (assuming you worked long enough to qualify, iirc 5 years. if not you get time deducted)
    • at the same time as the end of your current employment you have the option to stop/reduce payments on the loan for a time due to special circumstances (technically not mandatory but not bank will give you a large loan without this added insurance, iirc interest will still accrue in this time essentially extending the length of the loan)

    Couple that with not being stupid and getting a loan that eats your entire home as backing and you are pretty much safe from any short term disruption in your finances.

    To touch on a few other points:

    • yes blindly investing is dumb, if the market gives you an uneasy gut don’t invest. That thing has a habit of being wildly irrational until it suddenly and very quickly is forced to realign with reality
    • if you have the luck and are in a union that negotiates your wages you will likely receive a “pay rise” aka inflation compensation every couple of years, in such a case a loan as I describe it also makes sense for personal use (in small sums) because inflation will further reduce the interest. Think taking out a loan to renovate a room instead of saving up for it, after everything is properly accounted for the loan backed by property variant will leave you with slightly more money (depending on general interest situation, if interest rates are high but inflation low things might differ)

    And worst comes to worst, rent out a room in your house as a sublet and use that to pay exclusively for the mortgage. Any loan you ever take out against an owned home shouldn’t have higher monthly payments than that anyway or it, as you say, turns into an insane gamble no one in their right mind should take.







  • I like shitting on Apple as much as the next guy but the Vision Pro is an impressive piece of gear from an engineering perspective. Unfortunately, much like pretty much all VR headsets before it, it is suffering from a lack of an ecosystem.

    All Apple changed is to pivot away from a focus on bleeding edge high end hardware in this new segment and instead grow a userbase by means of a cheaper base product (likely missing one or two bells and whistles). Developers don’t like to produce apps for platforms nobody will use, even if they get thrown some money to do so, because it is a poor long term investment. So Apple’s best shot at this is to get Vision devices onto as many heads as possible.





  • Personally I have complicated feelings about this DLC.

    The world design is a 10/10 for me but the rest…

    For a start the Open World feels a bit unrewarding. I don’t really have a problem with the abundance of empty space but the rewards you get for exploration feel a bit weak to me. I would have liked a few more weapons in chests and other places instead of Smithing Stone 8 #1241. Case in point: They added 8 new weapon categories but from what I can see barely one of these new categories has more than a single regular weapon in it. Definitely a missed opportunity.

    As for the combat it’s fine outside of the bosses. The enemies hit like a truck but once you figure out the gimmicks it’s quite manageable. The bosses however are some of the worst in the entire game. I’m not an outstanding player, I’m not even good. But me being bad is not quite the problem I have with these. The problem I have with these bosses is that they are frustrating. For example the first Dancing Lion Boss has such an arsenal and length of combos that, when coupled with its flowing moveset, I cannot find a reliable gap to exploit. I think I found one only for the boss to switch up the Combo the 3rd time around (not HP related changes) and kill me anyway. Add to that the camera being absolute garbage and it feels like I’m fighting a duo boss. The cooldowns between their combos also are annoyingly uncertain, sometimes you have a gap to heal after a combo and sometimes they start the next combo almost immediately. Now mind you there might be gaps I don’t see but if the only people who can even find the gaps are the top 20% of players then negative reviews will be inevitable.

    What makes this entire thing worse is that as soon as you employ spirit summons the entire charade is exposed. The only reason these bosses are “hard” is because they hit you in a relentless torrent of combos. The moment there is any other target to take the heat off of you the difficulty plummets into the core of the planet. Oh and also their pathfinding is absolutely shot, I’ve had multiple cases where Bosses (and regular enemies) got stuck path finding towards me because I was standing on a little pebble or behind a pillar. I think mages are also completely fucked because almost every boss I’ve stumbled upon was in permanent distance closing mode. No or extremely rare walk phases where a mage could fire off a few spells but instead just constant pressure.

    I think the Bosses can’t even be easily rebalanced because the problem is not that they are too tanky or deal too much damage, they are imo just terribly designed to where they are too hard when in a 1v1 and too easy in a 2+v1 due to their move-/attacksets. If they rebalance anything maybe the frequency between combos could be tuned a bit but I really don’t think that’s going to change much about how people perceive these bosses.