FergleFFergleson

Looking over his IMDB credits the first thing that stands out is that he's been in a TON of stuff I've never even heard about. I obviously need to do some catch-up work. Of the stuff he's been in that I have seen:

Cowboy Bebop - I didn't really like the series as a whole, but I liked him in it.
Star Trek - I really liked his(their) take on Hikaru Sulu. The movies...eh... but his (and several other) individual performances were really solid.
H&K Go To White Castle - Incredibly stupid movie that's also really damn fun.

As others have said, it depends where you draw the line on what is a "gadget". But ignoring some of the obvious ones that have already been mentioned several times: I think I might have to go with my desktop audio mixing board. It lets me easily mix sound from multiple computers/devices and run them all into one set of headphones or speakers. I can adjust the volume of each input independently and without futzing with the settings in individual software applications/systems.

My other mention would go to my Raspberry Pi's. Incredibly compact, low-power-usage, but potent, versatile computers. Even just one or two can power a broad suite of at-home/self-hosted services, removing the need for costly, privacy-invasive/insecure, third-party services.

I'm starting to think we need to reframe this a little. Stop referring to "artists". It's not just lone, artistic types that are getting screwed here, it's literally everyone who has content that's been exposed to the Internet. Artists, programmers, scientists, lawyers, individuals, companies... everyone. Stop framing this as "AI companies versus artists" and start talking about it as "AI companies versus intellectual property right holders", because that's what this is. The AI companies are choosing to ignore IP law because it benefits them. If anyone, in any other context, tried to use this as a legal defense they would be laughed out of the courtroom.

I haven't worked with it myself as I'm not working on Japanese right now, but I had a recommendation recently for Satori Reader.

No way this kind of disconnected-from-the-users attitude will backfire. This game is sure to be a great experience! /s

Well, that would explain a lot.

I'm also guessing that at "up to 30%" of the company's leadership decisions are being made by AI too.

I remember running into this as well. It's because Plex installs itself with its own user. So post-install, you need to add the Plex account to your user Group and restart the service.

sudo usermod -a -G plex
sudo service plexmediaserver restart

Two commands and bam! You're in business.

ref: https://askubuntu.com/questions/458547/i-cannot-get-plex-server-to-see-any-directories#1472193

Three things based on other comments here:

(1) is free, try that!

Be wary with this. They may be free for students or small deployment situations, but may have increasingly agressive demands as your user base increases in size or your seek some kind of profitability. I wouldn't panic about, but do make sure to carefully review the licensing terms for ALL tools that you use in your process.

(2) Learning/Tutorials

Depends a bit on how you learn best. Youtube almost always has some good instructional videos. Most of the major tool/engine makers have large libraries of tutorials to draw from as well. Even very experienced programmers routinely have dozens of browser tabs that start from web searches that read "<name of my game engine/platform> how to do ".

(3) If you look to hire or contract out some of the work, just realize that you will very often only get what you really pay for. Quality work costs more. One option you have is to spend the next year or three doing everything you can yourself. Get as close to complete as you can. Then go to something like Kickstarter and look for completion funds. "Look at how complete the game is. If I can just get a little bit of money, I can hire a professional to do that one part that I couldn't do myself". This is especially usual for getting access to skills like art, music, voice acting, etc.

Doing my second play-through of Stalker 2. Really enjoying the game (140 total hours), but it does still have quite a few bugs. Most of the bugs are minor, but a few have been pretty serious.

Anyone considering attending a protest of any kind should probably at least skim over some of this guidance:

https://ssd.eff.org/module/attending-protest

Follow the ~~money~~ hashtags! Seriously, if you can't immediately find people to follow (a very common problem when people first join a social network), follow hashtags! Super easy to do:

• Search for your topic
• In the search results, switch to the "Hashtags" tab (or just scroll down to the hashtag section of the results)
• click into one of the hashtag search results
• Review the posts, frequency, etc. If you like what you see, click "Follow Hashtag".

It really does a great job of (1) populating your feed with interesting, relevant content and (2) can ultimately connect you to new people with similar interests.

I haven't used any Framework systems, so I can't really give a proper comparison. I have owned two S76 laptops, a now-ancient Lemur Pro I bought back in 2017, and just recently, a Pangolin I just picked up a few weeks ago. I haven't really had a chance to put the Pangolin through its paces, but it does have AMD-based 3-d acceleration built in. The old Lemur (and the new lemurs) only have basic Intel graphics.

I was able to use my old Lemur for some very light gaming. I think last time I was traveling, I was able to play Football Manager and Fallout Shelter quite successfully, but Lord of the Rings Online was just a bit beyond its capabilities. I would assume that Skyrim would definitely be beyond the Lemur's reach.

It looks like the F13 does have some amount of built-in 3d acceleration, so just looking at specs I would expect it to do better than the Lemur. Lemur's got a slightly larger display, but neither are very big. The rest of the specs look like they can vary quite broadly depending on your order so that makes the rest a bit hard to compare fairly.

Like I said, I've never even seen a Framework laptop in person, so I can't give a hands-on comparison. I can say that I've been very pleased with my experience with System 76. If you're looking at S76, consider the Pangolin. It's only a little bit larger than the Lemur, the price is pretty close, and it comes with more capabilities.

edit-to-add: Whatever you pick, I hope you will come back and tell us how it turned out.