evujumenuk

Can I ask where the material difference is to a game that requires a Day 1 patch download to work? With a Game Key Card, that patch is simply very large. You can still sell the game, just like a standard cartridge. And the Switch cartridges never had infinite shelf life to begin with, so they’re not suitable for archival either.

That’s a good question, since it doesn’t have a trivial answer. Zelda is basically three or four different types of games in a trench coat tunic.

There’s the open world adventure that the original Zelda established, which is probably best represented by BotW.

There’s the 2D tile-based action puzzler, the quintessential of which is probably LttP.

There’s the 3D “interconnected small rooms”, which got its start with OoT and was so successful that to this day players are arguing that the newest two games are not really Zelda even though they stick to the original concept much more closely.

Finally, there’s Adventure of Link.

I finished BotW 100%, and am currently nearing 100% completion with TotK. Here’s what I would do if I were you.

Get the BotW demo. It’s free, and it contains the entire first portion of the game, the Great Plateau.

Play that, and when you’re finished, read the story synopsis on Wikipedia or wherever. Then acquire and play through TotK.

The Great Plateau gives you about 80% or 90% of what’s great about BotW in a tight, controlled package. If you’ve played Metal Gear Solid V, this is basically Ground Zeroes.

TotK is so amped up over BotW that there’s no “tutorial inside area” that showcases the mechanics of the full game, it’d basically be a carbon copy of the entire thing.

In terms of gameplay, this should give you something pretty close to the full experience.

Edit time! Looks like the BotW store demo was not actually generally available, let alone “free”. Since you’re only hurting for time, not money, you could still get the cartridge version of BotW and sell it after completing the Great Plateau. The rest of my reply should still apply.

That’s pretty interesting. Do you happen to have any introductory material to that topic?

I mean, it might even have applications outside of running a techno-communist nation state. For example, for designing economic simulation game mechanics.

Utilization of models begets training of more models.

Kinda like CSAM.

It kind of has to be, if you’re trying to be persistent about the whole thing. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and burn out over all of the different threats we’re trying to defend against. I don’t see how you can keep at it for months or years if you feel no joy over it. But maybe being deathly, relentlessly afraid of the dangers around us is enough after all.

If you don’t even like doing this stuff, wouldn’t it be better to focus on measures that require little upkeep? This is what my example suggestion was getting at, something that’s as close to set-and-forget as possible, while getting you 90% of the way there. (Depending on your threat model, sure. If yours says that the sky is falling if Tim Apple gets your iCloud data, it certainly doesn’t apply.)

I’d sure hope so! Many of the things that privacy nuts like us do are not efficient uses of one’s time.

They might require constant vigilance. They might need recurring work for continued effectiveness. They might necessitate exposure to intrusive negative emotions (“what is Google doing this week?!”).

If you’re not having fun, focus on measures that you implement once and then never have to think about again.

For example, I wouldn’t recommend GrapheneOS to a journalist in an authoritarian regime. It might be “more secure”, but they have a job to do and can’t keep dicking around with obscure pointer authentication settings or whatnot. They should just get a current iPhone, enable Lockdown Mode if its tradeoffs are acceptable to them, and continue doing their best job, which isn’t “phone administration”.

LARPing as Jason Bourne, or prepping for the Rokobasiliskocalypse, is a hobby. It’s okay, I do it too. However, it’s not approachable or understandable to people who don’t share that hobby, or are not as alarmed at the general state of things as we are.

I used to run unbound on my laptop just so I could configure stuff like forwarding zones with more precision than what a stub resolver normally gives you.

It can also be your validating DNSSEC resolver, which also satisfied that sort of morbid curiosity in me.

In the age of DoT and DoH, with endpoints hardcoded in browser binaries, that sort of thing has a lot less punch than it used to. Even back then Go binaries would start ignoring your nsswitch.conf…

As long as everyone is having fun, I see no problem.

If you’re not having fun switching email providers, researching Gecko forks, or being a part-time sysadmin for your Fairphone, you should probably not do these things.

There’s no easy answer to your questions. It depends on what threats you’re trying to defend against. If your primary concern is adversarial law enforcement with Cellebrite et al., a current iPhone, especially with Lockdown Mode enabled, is certainly the next best thing to Graphene that we have.

Personally, I have access to Private Relay, but never use it. That’s not because I don’t trust it, but because I only ever use VPNs to spoof my GeoIP. And you can’t do that with Private Relay.

A mask ROM is a kind of read-only memory where the desired data is directly etched into a semiconductor during the same photolithographic process that actually makes a circuit out of a planar sheet of silicon. It’s pretty much hard-wired data storage, with an indefinite lifespan.

As far as I remember, Game Cards are not mask ROM. In other words, they’ll eventually lose their data and become e-waste anyhow.

This applies to both “real” Game Cards, and Game Key Cards. It’s already been a problem with the OG Switch.

Even with Game Key Cards, an actual, physical object has to be produced, at drastically higher marginal cost than what a purely digital license costs in production (basically nothing). And there is a secondary market, which doesn’t exist in the digital realm.

Essentially, I don’t see the reasoning behind counting them as digital. All the aspects that seem relevant to any publisher (and, to a first approximation, any user that isn’t a conservationist) make them identical to physical sales.

Just “encrypted”? Probably iMessage.

Where is this? Düsseldorf Central Station?

Tello gives you a real (US though) number, E911 and all, for 5 USD a month. You get an eSIM you can activate from anywhere in the world via Wi-Fi Calling. Send and receive unlimited texts and get 100 minutes a month for the odd service that insists on verification calls rather than texts. I’ve had zero issues.

Ever wanted to call your manager a 🤡 without them noticing? Even if they do notice, there’s not a lot of leeway to act on it based on a message like this.

Like basically all cloud providers, Oracle publish their public-facing IP address ranges.

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/General/Concepts/addressranges.htm

Many services block these because, as you are pointing out, standing up VPN tunnel routing on a cloud instance is sort of trivial. Cloud providers publish these ranges specifically so anyone can block them easily. If lemmy.world is not blocking Oracle Cloud already, it’s only because they just haven’t come around to it.

The Switch catalog was limited in no small part because the device just couldn’t give acceptable performance for a lot of contemporary cross-platform games. That, of course, didn’t matter for first-party titles.

Switch 2 performance is projected to end up somewhere around a base PS4, with better GPU but somewhat diminished CPU. However, it’s going to have more memory than the Xbox Series S that teams had trouble porting their games to.

The Switch 2 might benefit a lot from this generation’s extended cross-gen period. Add that to franchises like Fire Emblem, Metroid, Mario, Mario Kart, Pikmin and Zelda, and the average consumer is going to think of Steam as the “limited” platform.

A lot of conjecture, and maybe Switch 2 will turn out to be a monumental flop. I’m cautiously optimistic.

By the way, the old, selective policy that Nintendo exercised is pretty much a thing of the past. Just browse through the eShop for three minutes.

Nintendo has moved over 140 million Switch consoles. The Switch 2 might become more, or less successful, but let’s just conservatively assume they’ll only sell half as many this time around.

Last time I checked, the entire Deck-like category amounted to some seven-digit number of sold devices. The idea that anyone targeting that level of performance is going to skip the Switch 2… is wildly unrealistic.