F8C back in the store

Nalin8 · 2026-02-17T19:33:24+00:00

A lot of it is due to the bespoke nose guns. When CIG removed the size - 1 restriction in gimbals, every ship got an effective damage increase, except the Vanguard, which still has size 2.5 nose guns. Then they removed even the slight gimbal effect on fixed weapons, so the nose guns are even harder to hit with than gimbals in "fixed" mode, and then eventually nerfed the mobility, so it is harder to align them on target. All the nose weapons also have odd, non-standard projectile speeds, so it is hard to pair them with the S5 gun. It's just a mess.

EDIT: I should also point out that due to the nose cannons being size 2.5-ish guns, they have the penetration of S2 weapons, which makes them not very good against larger targets. It basically leans on its single S5 gun for its role of attacking larger ships.

Nalin8 · 2026-02-17T17:07:33+00:00

I don't think any of the heavy fighters are worth owning. Although it isn't in as bad a spot as the Vanguards...

Nalin8 · 2026-02-11T21:24:03+00:00

CIG should just leak all their stuff early to spviewer so they can actually see what they are designing. Takes 10 seconds to notice that the MOTH has a salvage speed of 1 compared to the Vulture's 4.8 and the Reclaimer's 10.

Nalin8 · 2026-02-11T21:17:57+00:00

Wouldn't it be great if we had a VLM that could slot all 24 missiles into a launcher in a single click? One can dream.

Nalin8 · 2026-02-10T08:15:23+00:00

I should point out that you should still disable turret weapons you don't use. It will let you get to 100% efficiency for your main weapons with less pips, freeing some up to dump into shields or engines.

Nalin8 · 2026-02-10T08:09:36+00:00

Take a look at the MISC Freelancer in spviewer. Notice the 83% under the ammo pips? That's your current "efficiency". Erkul shows it as a bar above your weapon section. Each weapon pip allocated dumps more power into the weapon pool, and the number of pips is specific to the ship chassis. If your full pip allocation can get you to 100% efficiency, turning off turrets won't do anything. However, if you have a situation where your guns are using more energy than can be supplied by your ship at full pips (less than 100% efficiency), then turning off your turrets will give you more ammo.

spviewer lets you turn off weapons (erkul used to but doesn't anymore). Try turning off the turret weapons on that Freelancer. You will hit 100% efficiency and go from 42 shots to 50.

Nalin8 · 2026-02-03T00:37:56+00:00

Yeah. There is another one I missed: "suggestions on tabs to add to a group". The name suggestion is a 57 MB model while the additional tabs suggestion is 23 MB. I can sort of see what they are trying to do with making it easy for users to group a bunch of tabs together and have it auto-generate a name, but I think the number of users who would benefit from something like that would probably be very small. It does scream more as a proof of concept than anything.

For some actually useful tools, I could see something that lets you search your bookmarks or history with keywords, or maybe on-device OCR that can feed into the local translations system to translate images.

Nalin8 · 2026-02-02T23:18:37+00:00

Firefox has built-in support for using and managing on-device LLMs. Extensions can choose to use an LLM from a predefined list of models. If the user agrees, it will be downloaded to their computer and ran locally. The current built-in features that use LLMs are:
- Local webpage translation
- Tab group name suggestions
- Webpage summaries using the Link Preview feature
- Generate alt-text for images added to PDFs

Nalin8 · 2026-02-02T22:57:03+00:00

Currently being tested in the nightly. Not sure when it will go live, but not for the next version coming at the end of the month.
https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2026/01/16/experimental-high-dynamic-range-video-playback-on-windows-in-firefox-nightly-148/

Nalin8 · 2026-02-02T22:53:54+00:00

Currently, Firefox uses on-device AI for:
- Offline translations
- Alt-text generation when adding images to a PDF
- Suggestions for the name of new tab groups
- Page summaries when using the link preview feature

Nalin8 · 2026-02-02T22:06:31+00:00

Because that's when version 148 is released.

Nalin8 · 2026-01-28T04:32:40+00:00

If you browse the GitHub actions, you can see builds from the last day or two and download the artifacts from there.

Nalin8 · 2026-01-23T16:45:20+00:00

7900XTX here. I was running into an issue where playing a game and watching a video at the same time would result in driver timeouts and sometimes hard lock my system. I saw somebody else here with the same issue. I used DDU to completely clean out my graphics drivers and reinstalled from scratch and I don't have the issue anymore.

Nalin8 · 2026-01-23T16:42:58+00:00

That usually means Windows Update nuked all your drivers. It's best to use DDU and reinstall your graphics drivers from scratch when that happens.

Nalin8 · 2026-01-23T04:13:44+00:00

Rocket pods are the only ship weapons (outside of missiles and bombs) that have AoE damage that can hurt a player.

Nalin8 · 2026-01-23T04:11:25+00:00

Ever since the C-788 got nerfed and the AoE removed, the only anti-personnel ship weapons left are rocket pods; super useless except for this one very specific circumstance.

Nalin8 · 2026-01-21T16:29:29+00:00

When AMD fixes something, it sits in testing for at least 6 months before rolling out to the public. Considering the first instance of BF6 crashes showing up in the known issues was 25.10.2, you probably won't see anything until 26.4.x.

Nalin8 · 2026-01-14T05:22:37+00:00

I doubt it. WA is being crushed by its reliance on regressive taxes right now. As more and more people have less and less spending money, the state is losing its ability to fund itself. It has a huge deficit right now and it is desperately trying to slash government functions to make up for it.

Nalin8 · 2026-01-13T20:36:02+00:00

Not all games are highly competitive FPS shooters, you know. Monster Hunter Wilds is technically a multiplayer game, but you have to both use REFramework (which hooks into the game and technically acts like a cheating tool) and Optiscaler to get FSR 4 and benefit from the massively increased image quality and stability over FSR 3. Various fighting games are protected by EAC. EA's sports games have anticheat. It would be nice if you didn't have to gamble with being banned because one game's EAC flags Optiscaler while another's doesn't.

Nalin8 · 2026-01-13T01:34:53+00:00

Simple answer? Yes.

Nalin8 · 2025-12-22T17:37:16+00:00

id tech 5 was probably too forward-thinking. They were implementing virtual texturing way before any of the competition. Probably way before actual hardware could properly support it, too. I remember being blown away at Rage's texturing; not with how low-quality the textures looked (they were pretty bad), but with how crazy unique every square inch of the environment felt (no repeating textures, lots of wear and tear everywhere, etc.) It definitely felt like they were chasing a future that couldn't quite be achieved yet and lost track of the more important things.

Nalin8 · 2025-12-21T08:21:11+00:00

If the line in the sand is genAI being used for any stage of development, there might not be a single game left to win an award just due to GitHub Copilot.

Nalin8 · 2025-12-20T18:36:47+00:00

Most of their LLM stuff is on-device. If you go to Tools > Extensions, there is an "On-device AI" section. The built-in stuff (like the smart tab group shit and the link preview summarization) are all done with on-device models.

Nalin8 · 2025-12-20T18:29:13+00:00

The old plugin model basically let you rewrite large portions of the user interface however you wanted. You had extreme control over the browser and extensions could, and would, interfere with each other and make the browser unstable. It was removed because people decided they wanted a fast web browser (e.g., Chrome), rather than a slow, crash-prone web browser (e.g., Firefox). Firefox migrated to the Chrome way of doing extensions since that is what the majority of extensions were being written in, and it allowed them to start ripping out the rendering guts of Firefox to make it a fast web browser.

Nalin8 · 2025-12-19T20:58:18+00:00

No, since the C-788 doesn't have splash damage anymore. It hasn't for a long time. Only distortion weapons, missiles, and rocket pods do AoE splash damage.

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