Nah, that’s valid. I loved it to bits, myself, but what made me love it was how adroitly I felt it curated feelings of dread and sincere awe as I explored deeper and deeper; and that’s highly subjective. I hope you’re finding as much joy in your own fave games as I did in Subnautica!

I spent way too much time on Red Baron. The simulation was just good enough to convey the awkwardness of piloting machines that in the end were made of wood, fabric and heroic faith, including the Sopwith Camel’s notorious torque issue that made it constantly drift to the right.

See my answer above for my personal take on this. TotK is a bigger, longer game with far more things to do, but in filling the delicate emptiness that’s at the heart of BotW, they also made TotK… mundane. Greater, by most metrics. But mundane.

When I played TotK, I enjoyed myself a lot, then moved on to the next item on my pile.

When I played BotW, I experienced something unique, and it stuck with me since.

EDIT: Folks, maybe don’t downvote OP just because you disagree with them? They opened an interesting discussion and I for one am glad for it.

Then I’d pick BotW.

Like another poster said, BotW is a once in a lifetime experience, and somehow strikes a kind of beautiful perfection even as, oddly, TotK is mechanically better in most respects.

BotW achieves something unique by dropping you in what’s left of Hyrule a century after Hyrule was defeated. And it’s a wilderness that could have been desolate, but it’s not: it’s beautiful. Things are growing back, despite everything. Wildlife, but settlements, also. It’s all sparse, this renewal, and there’s so much woe yet to fight. But it’s there. And the mood is both mournful, and quietly hopeful in a way I find comforting and deeply healthy.

BotW is built around a core of emptiness, but that emptiness is not a void: there are countless secrets and little wonders to unearth everywhere, everywhere. Sometimes it’s a treasure, or a trace from the past. Sometimes it’s the shapes that rain drops draw on wet moss. There’s wonder everywhere, just a wander away. BotK understands this, and elevates the wandering.

Where TotK is full of activities and minigames and quests everywhere, so you’re never at a loss for what to do next, and it’s by all measures a richer, bigger, fuller game. But it’s also, squarely, a lesser experience.

Of the two I’d pick BotW in an eyeblink and it’s not even close.

But that’s my answer, not yours. Only you know what you’re looking for in a video game.

Also check out Wordatro (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3140120/Wordatro/)! It’s well made and quite addictive.

I am in mad love with this Darmok-ass comment.

Ah, that Techlicious link is a great find, thanks. It does lay out clearly what the theoretical concern is. That’s still a far cry from the “Google will start fingerprintint you” scenario that seems to have people up in arms.

Thanks for digging out this link, I really appreciate it.

Thanks – that’s an announcement about policy updates. I already read it and it says nothing about fingerprinting. The only change to underlying technologies it mentions is the use of e.g. trusted execution environments (the doc for which, per a further link, is in fact on github). Those seem to claim that they let announcers run ad campaigns through Google ads while keeping their campaign data provably locked away from Google. So, basically, all these links are about purported “privacy-enhancing” techs, and you’d be forgiven for taking that with an enormous grain of salt, but either way, nothing in there about fingerprinting.

The Guardian article basically paraphrases the Tuta one – or it’s the other way around, maybe – but does also not provide actual sources.

I just want a source on what fingerprinting Tuta is claiming Google will start using. I feel like the details of the purported fingerprinting techniques should be front and center to this discussion and I’m frustrated that the article entirely fails to provide that info.

I’m aware of fingerprinting techniques, thank you. The article is claiming that Google will start using some of those and I’m looking for the source for that claim, hopefully with specifics about which techniques are involved. Confusingly, the article does not appear to provide such a source.

You’d THINK the article would link to a source about the fingerprinting in question instead of 90% filler slop and ads for their own service… Anyone got a link?

Or the Dodgy. I’m partial to that one.

That, now, is indeed a genuine issue. Trump has stated that his end game is annexation, and experience has shown that when he sounds like he’s got a bee in his bonnet about something, however bonkers, he’s actually serious about it. So I’m not seeing him stop the aggression on Canada.

which I’m sure we did somehow

Trudeau sold him measures that Canada had already voted on. See this post from the end of last year. https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/news/2024/12/the-government-of-canadas-border-plan-significant-investments-to-strengthen-border-security-and-our-immigration-system.html

Trudeau “caved” by giving Trump essentially zilch, apparently assuming – perhaps not incorrectly – that Trump would be that easily swindled.

It… depends. There is some great tooling for Python – this was less true only a few years ago, mind you – but the landscape is very much in flux, and usage of the modern stuff is not yet widespread. And a lot of the legacy stuff has a whole host of pitfalls.

Things are broadly progressing in the right direction, and I’d say I’m cautiously optimistic, although if you have to deal with anything related to conda then for the time being: good luck, and sorry.

One funny thing about humans is that they aren’t just gloriously fallible: they also get quite upset when that’s pointed out. :)

Unfortunately, that’s also how you end up with blameful company cultures that actively make reliability worse, because then your humans make just the same amounts of mistakes, but they hide them – and you never get a chance to evolve your systems with the safeguards that would have prevented these.

You won’t find the incompetence in the software no matter what.

If you fail to assume that the software contains issues – if you fail to understand that your software is made by humans and humans make mistakes, not because they’re bad but because they’re human – and if you fail to implement mechanisms to feel gracefully with inevitable failures, THAT is the incompetence.

Failures are systemic.

For serious. I wish they hired remote.

Yes they exist, although it does seem like it’s a bit of a niche medium these days. Hit the art show at your local convention.

I can ask some folks I know if they’d care to comment here.

The bullet is totally a crisis actor, you can also see it in that one Reagan clip. /s

Oh man flying to planets manually is TOUGH, the physics engine is just realistic enough that doing it manually takes more skill than I care to develop.

Just use the autopilot. Yes, you have to be careful about not starting it when there’s something else between you and your destination. But for real, use the autopilot.

Mind you, you are still going to die a lot because the universe is as amazing as it is unforgiving. You WILL die in that one specific way that will be your own damn fault because everyone does sooner or later. It’s okay, and it’s fun.

And it’s very, very worth it.