When playing trough a game the first time I never care about achievements. I do not disable them, but I just ignore them and don’t check which ones the game has. And if a game does not have achievements then I indeed do not miss them.

But if I have finished a game I ended up really enjoying and want more, then I do check the achievement list for inspiration for what to do. And sometimes I end up discovering parts of the game I initially missed that way.

I have never bothered with RetroAchievements, but I also don’t get the hate about them. They are achievements that are not a part of the game, that you need to deliberately install to be able to get them. So if you don’t like them, just don’t install them? Some people clearly enjoy them, so I don’t think it’s a bad thing that they exist even though I don’t care for them.

You do not need to monitor individual households for that. Obtaining the data of how much power needs to be produced at what times was never an issue.

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A lot of people parrot that, but it’s not really true, at least on PlayStation. The vast majority of PlayStation games are playable from disc without any internet connection. Of course, you won’t have the latest updates and the game may have more bugs and worse performance if you aren’t connected to the internet, but you can still play games to their completion.

I know that from a legal standpoint you still only buy a licence and don’t legally own the data on a disc, but that doesn’t really matter for the purposes of playing a game. You can play when the servers are down. You can play when your account gets hacked or deactivated. They don’t have a way to take the game away when you aren’t connected to the internet (even if they can legally revoke it).

And even if it would be “just a download key”, it’s still a key that’s transferrable and that you can share or sell. So in terms of ownership it’s still much better than a fully digital license even if you completely ignore the fact that it’s still storage media that apart from a few exceptions still contains a fully functional copy of the game.

For me personally all my games I play on Playstation are on disc, and I bought them all used. For me the discs are the reason to get a console. I live in an area where one ISP has a monopoly so I have to live with a datacap too small to be able to download even a single modern game, and datacap expansions frequently being more expensive than the game I’d download with them. And on the used market the games can be pretty cheap. So all my games on PlayStation are on disc, and I bought most of them used.
If discs are not available for a game, then I pretty much always can get the game way cheaper on PC than on the PlayStation store, and on my PC it’ll run better too, so then I have no reason to buy it on PlayStation instead.
But I do realise I’m a minority in that regard, at least when you look at global scale.

I think with how current economics work it could also be useful to fine all shareholders when a company commits a crime. Ideally fines in percentage of the current stock value, and perhaps even in two parts, half applied immediately to affect all current shareholders, and the other half applied a week or so later to maximise panic-selling and make the stocks undesirable to force stock prices to make a nosedive.

It’s often mostly shareholders that actively push for enshittification, and they often don’t feel any of the financial consequences of fines on companies as long as the line still goes up. So if you fine in a way that shareholders are negatively affected and stock prices (which is what holds most of the wealth of many shareholders) to plummet then I think that’d be much more effective.

Though jailing CEOs for crimes of their company would still be effective for private companies (though they seem to participate a lot less in enshittification as they focus on long-term strategies instead of maximising quarterly growth above all else). For public companies a CEO is often mostly just a scapegoat for the decisions made by the board of directors and shareholders.

Alternatieve method tot know thing from future: wait.

I’ve also experimented with this. In my experience, getting the NPCs to behave the way you want with just a prompt is hard and inconsistent, and quickly falls apart when the conversation gets longer.

I’ve gotten much better results by starting from a small model and fine-tuning it on lore-accurate conversations (you can use your conversations with larger models as training materials for that). In theory you can improve it further with RLHF, but I haven’t tried that myself yet.

The downside of this is of course that you’re limited to open-weight models for which you have enough compute resources available to fine-tune them. If you don’t have a good GPU then the free Google Collab sessions can give you access to a GPU with 15GB of VRAM. The free version has a daily limit on GPU time though so set up your training code to regularly save checkpoints so that you can continue the training on another day if you run out. Using LoRa instead of doing a full fine-tune can also reduce the memory and computational resources required for the fine-tune (or in other words, allows you to use a larger and better model with your available resources).

FYI messing with communicating infrastructure, such as by jamming phone signals, is highly illegal and most networks are actively being monitored for disturbances.

A wooden toothpick is probably a bit too thick. You’d want something thin enough that it can be inserted without touching the electrical contacts. If you do have something plastic then that’s probably better, but if you do the cleaning when the device is off the USB port should be unpowered and there shouldn’t be a risk of causing a short, and modern USB ports are quite well protected again shorts anyway so it’s very unlikely to cause damage just by being conductive. You mainly want something that is long and thin enough to get all the way to the bottom of the port without having to apply any force. If the only things you have that are long and thin enough to reach the bottom of the port without having to be forced in are made of metal, then that’s still a safer option than jamming something too thick into the port that can deform the center contacts.

Grab a thin needle or piece of wire, thin enough to easily insert into the USB-C port, and scratch all of the dirt and lint out of it. Always point the needle towards the outer surface so you don’t scratch the electrical contacts in the middle.

There is often a surprising amount of junk inside even if you can’t see it from the outside, and that can greatly affect the connection quality.

My phone recently had a similar issue where it would only charge if the cable was inserted in a specific way, and any movement would cause it to stop charging. The cable also wasn’t really held well even though it looked like it was fully inserted. I cleaned out the port even though I couldn’t see anything inside, and managed to pull out a bit of dust anyway. And now my phone no longer has charging issues and holds on to the cable much better.

USB-C unfortunately just seems to have a design that makes it very easy for dust to get stuck in it, while also having a relatively low tolerance for foreign material buildup before the connection quality gets affected, making this a quite common issue.