majestic

Huh, dunno, we've had a digital ID for a while now. I can do my taxes online, register for mail-in votes, sign documents with it, change my place of residence, use my phone as replacement for various ID cards (driver's license, passport, etc.), request various official government issued documents online and receive them digitally signed with no paperwork (e.g. birth certificate, marriage certificate, etc.), request reimbursement for private medical services, and a whole bunch of other things I don't really need, like getting all the documents in order for a newborn kid. Can also check a bunch of information, like my projected pension and how much money I cost my health insurance this year, which is about a thousand euro as of right now. All without having to deal with any public officials. The amount of extra data I had to provide for the ID was pretty much zero, except for my mobile phone number. Which the government could find out any time they would want to, so that is not any more dystopian than it already is, thanks to the EU, which mandated fingerprints in passports back in 2009, and our fantastic conservative-right wing government of 2017, lead my Mr. Kurz, our glorious leader, and their coalition partners the freedom party, who mandated that any and all mobile phone numbers must be registered, before that we had the option of having anonymous mobile phone numbers - well, mobile phones bit that government and Mr. Shorty in the arse, so there is some poetic justice in that.

While reading this, my first thought was: hey, you already said it is a Takahata film. Spoils enough.

So is the overheat quickhack. Well, actually, all non-physical damage is non-lethal, sense be damned. If you want your gorilla arms to be completely non-lethal just get the electric variety, for instance. Anyway, done with the game now. From what I heard people talked about the new ending being more depressing than the existing ones. Well, perhaps. Especially when you're on the King of Pentacles path like I was. Some things really feel out of character and the final conversations feel cheap - actually most of the new ending sticks out like a sore thumb on an otherwise well written game. It is not bad exactly, just not the same quality of the base game. Instead of flowing organically, the dialogue and what happens feels forced to drive home a point. Sad thing is that ending could have really been made into something utterly devastating that would have resonated much more, or say, be a much more poetic "justice" way to end the game while driving home the same point: Well, missed a good way for a shocker there, CD Projekt Red. Well, no sense crying over spilled milk and all that.

In preparation for an upcoming medical exam (routine check) I just had to drink half a liter of a solution containing a total of 3 grams of salt (for those of you who cannot into proper measurements, that is a little less than a pint of liquid containg roughly 0.1 oz salt). Needless to say that was utterly disgusting, even with the added mango aroma and included sweetener. Second dose coming up in a couple of hours with even more salt. Yuck.

https://www.igorslab.de/en/smoldering-headers-on-nvidias-geforce-rtx-4090/ TL;DR: Not every burning RTX 4090 was necessarily user error. The PCI SIG specs for the 12VHWPR headers and plugs were (and still are) so unclear and incomplete that production tolerances alone are enough to potentially fry them under heavy load, i.e. anything above 400W power draw, before factoring in manufacturing cost reduction by making them as cheap as possible, next to a few potential issues caused by AIB's placement of the headers, i.e. some RTX 4090s are potentially more prone to burned headers than others.

Unnecessary Sequel #3 (2021) Woops, I mean, Matrix: Resurrections, now that it is available on Amazon Prime. Big spoiler right from the start: I did not hate it. With that out of the way, is that really enough these days? It almost feels like it is. I would not say I enjoyed this, so it is different from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but as far as the sequels go, it might be the best of the bunch, although that is such a low bar to clear that it is practically worthless as measurement. Half of the film is a parody anyway, and it seems like the Wachowskis are almost aware of how much their pseudo-philosophical ramblings in Reloaded and Revolutions failed to be interesting, and how uninteresting and rote their other films are. A part almost feels like a meta commentary, especially the development meetings where everyone is desparately looking for a way to make a Matrix sequel (it makes sense in the film) that has a game-changing, impactful component. Half of the film makes no sense in the context of the other films, and the other half is a mix of parody and remake of the first one. The one thing that is immediately noticable as it is often directly in juxtaposition with the original 1999 film is that shaky cam adds nothing to the feel of an action scene, and the first film is so much better for its lack of screen shaking. There's a time and place for it, but a Matrix film sure is not it. Still, it did not make me want to kill myself or fall asleep like Reloaded and Revolutions. Eh, I probably am going soft. Always fun to see Neil Patrick Harris though.

Nice. Can stop rifling through videos whenever I need to reference a chart now.

General rule of thumb: never assume our current government knows or understands anything, and you're good. Our chancellor's reaction to the steep rise in food prices was let them eat cake, in a 21st century variation, i.e. let them buy burgers at McDonald's. Bunch of clowns wouldn't find their own noses if they weren't attached to their faces.

Yes.

Well, finally done: Time to shelf D4 until January 23rd.

Dunno, the easiest way for me was just getting them to 5% health and dropping an incendiary grenade on them. Those grenades deal a truckload of non-lethal damage.

One more season journey item left. That is either equipping eight ancestral uniques or grinding out five max level glyphs or the max level Hunter's Acclaim seasonal mechanic, then I'm done with the game until January 24th or so. Grinding five glyphs to level 21 is out of the question. It is either farming Hunter's Acclaim or killing Duriel often enough to gather eight equippable uniques. I already have six, so grinding out uniques is probably faster, just a lot more random. Guess I'll just grind Hunter's Acclaim for a while and call it quits. Kinda low on materials to summon Über Duriel. The sum total of time spent playing the game might be higher with grinding Hunter's Acclaim, but it can be done in one go, unlike farming Duriel which requires waiting for Helltides.

^ Prior to 2.0, using Cyberware Malfunction on cyberpsychos would kill them, even if you only applied non-lethal damage. I do not know if that changed with 2.0. Now, not your problem as you can't use the quick hack with Berserk as operating system, but it might save someone else from frustration. Would be nice if that was fixed, after all, the psychos obviously have a lot of chrome and Cyberware Malfunction makes it a good bunch easier to deal with them.

Blizzard logic: Enemies can have a suppression field. Meaning that all damage coming from outside the field is negated. You need to attack or cast from within the field to do damage. Now, with certain gear the ball lightning spell rotates around you, and that is pretty hilarious because the damage that can put out once you break past a certain gear threshold (i.e. once you have enough gear to support chain casting a spell that normally costs half your mana). However, when you teleport into the supression field, all your orbiting ball lightnings disappear. Because, well, they were cast outside the suppression field. Can't blame the game for working that way, after all, it is doing exactly what it was programmed to do. Anyway, build is so busted powerful it breaks game mechanics to the point they become a joke. Can completely skip boss phases.

Well, looks like 2025 is going to be the year of ARM replacing the x86 CPUs.

"Brawling" was added in 1.0.7, actually. The "proper" PvP mode with arenas that Blizzard promised was cancelled.

I honestly don't know. I played Diablo 3's campaign and then pretty much quit. Shortly after launch the PVP zones were decently populated, but the problem is that level scaling between players plays an immense part in damage numbers, and there is no gating. It did not take long for level 100 chinese farm bot barbarians to show up and one-shot everyone in the zones on the lower difficulty levels (well, they're called World Tiers in D4 - Normal, Veteran. Nightmare and Torment). Blizzard nerf-hammered the barbarian class to a point where it still sucks months later, but the damage was basically done already, never mind the gating issue. I could just as easily switch to Normal and kill players 50 levels lower with no hope of them ever fighting back. Well, if any players were in the PVP zones, that is... Well, and then 95% of the player base disappeared. Prior to the new season the tumbleweeds were the only inhabitants not just of the PVP zones, but also the large hub cities.

Blizzard's solution to keep people engaged longer in the season journey is to make it grindier. Le sigh. Had a good laugh at the season journey including becoming Hatred's Chosen. A long time ago, a prominent member of the German World of Warcaft community said that Blizzard's motto is "Konsequenz heißt auch Holzwege zu Ende zu gehen" (to be resolute means following even the wrong track to its end) which never felt more appropriate than here. There is just no way to become Hatred's Chosen in the state the game is at. With most of you not playing the game, well, Hatred's Chosen is something you can become when killing enough players back to back, for which players obviously need to be in the game's designated PVP zones (imagine a desolate area with tumbleweeds being blown about here). At best you can kill one or two players more by accident than anything else, like it happened to me when I grinded out the Seeds of Hatred requirements for the season and a barbarian thought it would be a good idea to leap on top of me while I had Unstable Currents on, fighting the PVP zone boss. Lighting sorceror wrecks everything at the moment. Better enjoy picking the right class for once before the nerf hammer falls.

The few remaining physics bugs are great and should just stay in the game because they're hilarious. Like that one time I called my car and the game just spawned it in the air. It came crashing down hard, was totalled, killed some innocent bystanders and lead to a shootout with the police. Every now and then a random car chase ends up with cars flying about in good old Blues Brothers tradition too.

Might be region locked to regions where ARTE can be received, but here goes nothing:

Intel's statement for why the software only works with 14th gen CPUs is basically not enough testing for others, so yeah, Intel for sure does not consider this completely ready for launch yet. It also does not work with the 14600K, so there's that. Clearly though, the correct marketing move would be to limit it to 14th "generation" CPUs. Here's a video from HighYield about the tech behind Meteor Lake and what Intel is doing going forward, and the video is a little older, so there may be some inaccuracies (speculation/info on used process nodes might be outdated): Intel's L4 cache for Meteor Lake is actually in the silicon interposer, rather than stacked on top of the compute tiles, where it is accessible by all components of the CPU. It would be technically possible to assign it to the integrated GPU instead of the CPU when needed. It is probably not as fast as giving the CPU tile direct, shorter access to its own dedicated larger cache, but with the design it's also possible to drop a completely separate cache tile on the interposer if necessary. Either way, both tiles and the 3DV-cache are elegant solutions to the problem with SRAM structure sizes. SRAM stopped to scale with TSMC's newest process nodes. Caches aren't getting any smaller going forward, so they need to go somewhere else. That said, the Meteor Lake CPUs aren't going to be any faster than their Raptor Lake counterparts as they're basically "just" Raptor Lake CPUs on a new process node with the new tile design. Just hopefully a lot more efficient. Well, the eight ARC compute units will probably kick Raptor Lake's iGPU to the curb, but if that makes gaming on an iGPU viable stands to be doubted. Although it's not impossible with XeSS turned on where supported.

As for the question of what the hell are modern Intel CPUs doing with all that power they draw, the answer is a big load of nothing, at least in gaming. A German channel whose videos I watch every now and then has tested the 14700K with four power limits, in Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin's Creed: Mirage, Rainbow Six Siege and Far Cry 6. The result, in 1080p, shamelessly copied from the video: Limiting the power draw of the i7-14700K to 80W still only drops average frame rates by 4.6%, while limiting it to 120W gives basically the same results as having no power limit (although it makes no sense to limit it to 120W as that is the average power draw in gaming anyway). This difference is less for 1440p and goes away completely in 4k, which makes sense, as the GPU is much busier. It does cut heavily into all-core workloads during any sort of productivity tasks, obviously. Stands to reason that the same is true for the 13950K, oops, the 14900K. Which tracks with what Der8auer tested with the 13900K, where limiting the CPU to an 80W load pretty much yielded the same result. No really noticable drop in gaming performance, but a massive gain in efficiency. Edit: Well, I suppose that is the reason why Intel gives these CPU a long term powerlimit (PL1) of 125W, with boost up to 253W.

He just didn't realize that the "K" is a multiplicator too. Just times 1000. Intel won that a long time ago.

Yeah, like I mentioned earlier, there's something to be said for being able to buy CPUs that won the silicon lottery, at least if you're into extreme overclocking. Predictably, the 14900K almost instantly took the crown: https://hwbot.org/benchmark/cpu_frequency/rankings#start=0#interval=20 For everyone else though... yeah, nope.

Just heard the news that Christian Pilnacek died. Not that any of you need to have heard of him, he was a high ranking public official and legal practitioner attached to the Ausrian Ministry of Justice. A couple of years back he was suspended in the wake of leaked messages between high ranking ÖVP party officials that made it abundantly clear that he abused his position to stop unwanted investigations, help the "right" being promoted while keeping the "wrong" people out of positions of power (right and wrong determined by party affiliation, of course), and help to prepare party officials under investigation on how to conduct themselves during interrogation and raids they should not have been aware of before they happened. One of those people, our former Minister of Finance, just happened to send his wife on a walk with their newborn baby when a raid happened. Curiously enough, his wife took his notebook computer for a stroll, because clearly, who does not take their mobile computer with them while strolling through the city with a newborn? Sure, the notebook was brought back eventually, by someone else. Seems legit, really. Certainly nothing untoward happened there. Needless to say, the raid did not turn up anyhting useful. He is on record stating that an investigation into potential (read "potential" as "confirmed" in any but the legal sense) kickbacks surrounding our 2002 acquisition of 24 (reduced to 18) Typhoon fighters must be "daschlogn" (colloqual Austrian for death trough blunt force, often also used when killing insects with swatters), because said investigation would have implicated his party friends. Or, as our former chancellor liked to call his party friends: the family. Prior to his suspension the section of the ministery he worked at was split into two sections, reducing his influence, making him solely responsible for legislation. A little while later he sent a text to the govenor of Styria (who, as you have probably guessed by now, is also an ÖVP party member), suggesting that his wife's applicaiton as President of the Higher Regional Court of Graz would be a decent way to make good on the "humiliation" his family suffered. Looks like he was caught driving drunk on the wrong side of the motorway yesterday evening. Police stopped him, he lost his driving license, was picked up by someone else and then by all accounts committed suicide. De mortuis nil nisi bene, I suppose, but that's a bit hard in this case. Good riddance. Burn in hell, bastard.