Wildmimic

This sounds nice - when i’m done with getting my life back in order i’m gonna start selfhosting for real, and this goes onto the “to implement”-pile! (i just realized that the pile is getting pretty large)

I have my favourite bands and classics local (about 18k files), but regulary stream to get to know new bands to listen to. Combining the two makes my library grow (͡⎚◡͡⎚)

Unless you’re fucking Cracker Barrel.

Which was manufactured outrage, spawned by a few Shitter posts which were then amplified by a huge bot network.

Idiot Sandwich

Yeah, i agree on that; when i heard that i thought about jumping in for a month and playing it again; it actually is pretty fun, but it’s simply too expensive to buy in. I would be happy if other games with lots of DLC or expensive DLC considered something similar; Paradox games are the first thing that come to mind, but there’s other stuff like Rimworld where you can drop 100 Bucks on expansions that i simply do not have.

I’ve pulled an allnighter with this game after letting it sit in my library since it was in early access, it’s fucking awesome! i’ve stopped an hour ago because i realized that i started to slow down and make more mistakes; gonna take a nap and then it’s on again lol

And yes, Death to Chronos!

I’m glad we’re both having a good time with that game.

Deadlink is a great roguelike arena shooter, give it a whirl!

Yes, there are meta upgrades; the gear is a parallel system to those upgrades.

And yes, things are more straightforward; you always get a few unlocks that you are close to shown at the start of a run.

I have Soulstone Survivors here, but didn’t have time to try it out yet, so i can’t say anything to compare the two.

Progression is slower than other survivor games, but they have increased the pace and added a mechanic with gear drops, which smooths out the curve and actually makes builds possible. All in all it’s one of the top survivor games i’ve played. I would place Vampire Survivors (because of the huge amount of content) and Halls of Torment (because i absolutely love the style) above it, but for me DRG:S is a solid 3rd place (and i’ve played quite a lot of bullet heavens)

Cronos: The new Dawn, it has a great Dead Space feeling. I’m not far yet, but i like what i’ve seen so far.

and Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor has hit 1.0, so if i’m looking for something to play without having to think that’s my goto this week.

Exactly. Blocking out ads wherever possible is the only way to not be influenced by advertising. At least it helps to know that one isn’t immune to it. That helps to counteract the effects somewhat, but don’t count on it if you aren’t actively keeping your defenses up.

I realized that when i tried to cheat on a test in school, that when i prepared a cheat sheet, i didn’t actually need it afterwards - that only applies when writing the sheet by hand.

This is correct, but not all Data Center Usage is GenAI too. I agree that video generation is pretty energy intensive and not something that should be done on the regular, but image generation runs here on my graphics card pretty fast, so it’s not a big deal and comparable to chatbot responses.

Watching an hour of Netflix uses about 0,8kWh, which is a lot more but noone tries to make people have a bad conscience for binge watching a series. That’s Datacenter usage too, and a lot more than GenAI.

AI is also used a lot in Science, and even if i know that scientists aren’t that popular in the US, we probably agree that this activity is summa summarum positive for humanity, so lets keep it.

So where is the AI usage you propose is worse than global air travel? Lets look at total numbers here:

Electricity usage is 30% of the total CO2 emitted in the USA. Data centers in total used 4.4% in 2023, estimates say this will reach between 6.7 and 12% in 2028. If we take the worst case, Data Centers will be responsible for a bit more than 3% of all CO2 emissions in the USA, best case about 1.7%.

That’s not nothing, but it’s still a lot less then global flight, which was responsible for 9% of CO2 emissions in the US transport sector, which amounts to about 4% of Total US emissions 2022. Please note we are talking US flight emissions here, NOT GLOBAL. Since most datacenters worldwide reside in the US by far, your statement is bullshit.

ETA: People, the real climate killers have not changed: Cars, Industry, Flight. Trying to create a bad conscience for peanuts in relation is not worth it AND WILL NEITHER MAKE PEOPLE JOIN YOU NOR RESCUE THE PLANET, because these lies are easily disproven and make the green movement look untrustworthy.

image gen isn’t so heavy either, but even i who arguments against this “AI is killing the environment”-bullshit agree on the video gen - there is a lot of power usage behind that one. might still not be an issue if using renewables, but if you use elon’s illegally gas turbine powered AI, then it’s fucking bad.

here you go, since the commenter didn’t reply: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about

OP, this statement is bullshit. you can do about 5 million requests for ONE flight.

i’m gonna quote my old post:

I had the discussion regarding generated CO2 a while ago here, and with the numbers my discussion partner gave me, the calculation said that the yearly usage of ChatGPT is appr. 0.0017% of our CO2 reduction during the covid lockdowns - chatbots are not what is kiling the climate. What IS killing the climate has not changed since the green movement started: cars, planes, construction (mainly concrete production) and meat.

The exact energy costs are not published, but 3Wh / request for ChatGPT-4 is the upper limit from what we know (and thats in line with the appr. power consumption on my graphics card when running an LLM). Since Google uses it for every search, they will probably have optimized for their use case, and some sources cite 0.3Wh/request for chatbots - it depends on what model you use. The training is a one-time cost, and for ChatGPT-4 it raises the maximum cost/request to 4Wh. That’s nothing. The combined worldwide energy usage of ChatGPT is equivalent to about 20k American households. This is for one of the most downloaded apps on iPhone and Android - setting this in comparison with the massive usage makes clear that saving here is not effective for anyone interested in reducing climate impact, or you have to start scolding everyone who runs their microwave 10 seconds too long.

Even compared to other online activities that use data centers ChatGPT’s power usage is small change. If you use ChatGPT instead of watching Netflix you actually safe energy!

Water is about the same, although the positioning of data centers in the US sucks. The used water doesn’t disappear tho - it’s mostly returned to the rivers or is evaporated. The water usage in the US is 58,000,000,000,000 gallons (220 Trillion Liters) of water per year. A ChatGPT request uses between 10-25ml of water for cooling. A Hamburger uses about 600 galleons of water. 2 Trillion Liters are lost due to aging infrastructure . If you want to reduce water usage, go vegan or fix water pipes.

Read up here !

If you are lucky and get your hands on a AM5 platform i agree, that would be even cheaper. keeping your eyes open on secondary markets can pay off for sure.

It really depends on the cost and availability of the GPU. I tried to look up the costs for the US, but those price spikes (some cards that go here in europe for 200€ run for 2300$ there, wtf?) make it hard - therefore it’s really a case of “what is available and in the performance/buck range i’d like”.

That said, you CAN get away with an about 1/3 Passmark score slower card for entry, which should open the field even on the US market.

Further probable cost reductions are the NVME drive - you can halve the space, but with game installations for AAA games cracking the 100GB mark, i wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a lightning fast internet connection and dont have an issue with swapping the installed games in and out.

You can further reduce costs at the PSU by reducing efficiency (i went for 80 plus GOLD standard, which gives you around 88% efficiency according it’s certificate), but what you save there at buying you pay with your energy bill.

Last thing you can do is reduce RAM to 16GB - for normal operation it’s still enough, but we’re very close to the point where 32GB become mandatory for good performance and it would be the first thing to upgrade - at least it would be easy and not very expensive to do so.

Taking all that together you can surely drop the costs here in the EU by around 100-150€ without losing upgrade potential, at the cost of dropping detail levels in AAA games to medium and probably some swapping issues with very RAM-dependent games (i’m looking at you, modded minecraft ⎝❮Ỡ益Ỡ❯⎠ ).

If your tight on money, building a system will always come out on top in the long term, specifically in terms of upgrade paths to keep up with the times. In that mini pc you won’t have any upgrade option except maybe swapping the SSD, and not even this is guaranteed - could be soldered on too. So the only thing you can do is replace the whole thing again, having the full cost again.

Get yourself a mainboard, a nice Ryzen CPU, an dedicated GPU, 32 Gigs of RAM and an NVME drive, a Case and PSU your done.

I’ve done the works for you and slapped together an entry level gaming pc with lots of upgradeability:

https://geizhals.at/wishlists/4654924

This system is expandable in every way:

• The Cpu is on an current AM5 socket and you can upgrade whenever it starts to be the bottleneck
• You can simply double the ram when you decide to, but 32 GB is fine for now
• The PSU is decently sized and should support pretty much every sensible upgrade, just have an eye on it if upgrading the GPU
• The Mainboard has a lot of M.2 slots available to add more fast disk space and you can add sata disks in addition
• The Case has cable management, place for 2 hdds for tons of storage if needed and good connectivity (usb3, usb-c, audio, sdcard)
• The GPU is fast enough for current titles in 1080p, and older titles should run on 1440p too.

Disclaimer: i don’t know where you are so i took that graphics card because it’s a good price here and has nice performance without burning a hole in your purse, ymmv depending on where you live. You can definitely take a tad slower card and be fine - look up the card on https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ and look for a card in that range that is priced good at your location, but dont go below 8 gb vram or you wont be happy.

And the next time you think your pc is too slow identify the slowest part and replace it (and sell off the old part), meaning that every few years you invest a little bit instead of a completely new mini-pc. same with broken parts - simply replace the part instead of the whole pc. it’s better regarding e-trash too.

Regarding the Steam Deck: it’s a nice device and i love mine to death, but for a main gaming rig it’s neither powerful enough nor upgradeable enough - you would be back at playing about the same stuff performancewise you do now.

The steam deck can only play pretty recent titles because it only runs on 1280*720, and uses upscaling, which doesn’t matter on the small screen, but it matters a lot on a larger display - i haven’t tried using my steam deck to play cyberpunk hooked up to the TV, and i won’t try it, because it’s clearly too underpowered for that and would simply suck.