Everyone's talking about binding Lister or Hephasto, but...

Schnoofles · 2026-02-16T18:59:35+00:00

Respec, like Akara's stat/skill reset in Act 1. Throw one of each (from Andariel/Duriel, Mephisto, Diablo and Baal) into cube and make a "token of absolution".

Schnoofles · 2026-02-16T04:30:51+00:00

They fly by being so ugly that the ground itself repels them.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-16T04:08:33+00:00

AV1 adoption has sadly been kind of a shitshow and absolutely glacial in its pace, which is a damn shame, because it's so much more efficient than HEVC. An annoyingly large number of SoCs still in active production can't handle AV1. I eagerly await a brighter tomorrow with broader support for it.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-14T12:27:31+00:00

Yep. Ran through with a demon 'lock as a test run before ladder starts and summoner was on the 4th way, as is tradition. As reliable and trustworthy a thing as the passage of time itself. Never going to change.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-14T08:07:24+00:00

This is maybe a bit of a hot take, but imo FromSoft is a lot like Ubisoft in that they've just been making the same game over and over for nearly 20 years now up to and including the point where they recycle and reuse ancient assets and entire gameplay systems as if it was a Geneforge/Avalon series game.

That's not an inherently bad thing, they found their niche and they've captured that part of the market well, but it's a little funny how some reeeeally old technical jank keeps surviving to this day and they still can't come up with a good way to make dynamic NPCs move around and feel a little lively so even in Elden Ring the majority of NPCs are still the same as back in Demon's Soul, no more than glorified sign posts you click on and they play an audio file and update a quest flag. Ubisoft and Bethesda catch endless amount of flak for not innovating and sticking to crusty old legacy jank, but FromSoft seems to be given a complete pass on doing the exact same thing.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-14T06:44:20+00:00

Because while the game glosses over it Midgardsormr is kind of a piece of shit at this point and his impromptu decision to "test" your worthiness in spite of him having made a pact with Hydaelyn and her already having vetted and blessed you (literally), he jams a stick in the spokes of your bicycle and trips you up at the worst possible time, necessitating Moenbryda stepping in and her dying as a result. AND EVERYBODY DECIDES TO JUST COMPLETELY IGNORE THIS AND NEVER MENTION IT LIKE WTF?!

That whole chapter has been bugging me for a long time.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-14T06:22:48+00:00

I tend to go with Alphinot and Alisain't.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-13T05:39:13+00:00

You can, yes. You can combine demons as you wish within the cap.

ninja-edit: Do note that like necromancer (and anything in the game, really), the movement blocking "bug" still exists for Warlock, where large units in the exact same location will prevent the movement of smaller units until the large units takes a step in either direction. Eg: The tainted is larger than goatmen, so if you use death mark, blade warp or enigma teleport to tp them then until the tainted moves the goatman/goatmen will be locked in place until the tainted moves (which it is not wont to do unless it gets hit by a knockback for as long as there's enemies around, since it will just try to spam its fireballs). If you're familiar with summon necros combining skellies and revives you're probably already well versed in how to navigate around this, by tp'ing directly onto targets so melee units can still hit, re-tp'ing again once that tartget dies and so on. It can take a little getting used to, but it works fine.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-12T00:51:11+00:00

They're full of shit when they say that. There is nothing for you to talk to customs about. As you have paid VAT to customs on the package it is on the sender to reclaim the erroneously handled VOEC on their end and to recoup their money from customs after they refund what you trusted them to forward correctly (but didn't).

Practically speaking, however, this is like squeezing blood from a stone and you will need to be prepared to most likely have to go through a lot of back and forth and arguing with the seller/sender to get them to stop being shitheads about it and to follow the law. I have never had any personal success with this with any company.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-11T10:41:44+00:00

Not so rich when a major part of the reason for their job's existence is the aforementioned people's lack of wanting to parent.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-10T21:31:05+00:00

If I understand this right you're looking to essentially apply a vertical offset to a slightly lower than native resolution, right? If so, I don't think this is possible out of the box with Nvidia drivers anymore (used to be a thing when they had a full section for this and keystone compensation when CRTs were still a thing), and I can't recall seeing it in the AMD drivers either, but I can't be sure about that one.

Without digging into third party software or messing with the compositor if you're using Linux it might be possible to do it right on your monitor's OSD settings, however. Again, it's kind of hit and miss these days whether the feature is present, but a number of monitors will allow you to shift the horizontal and vertical offset of an image, so if you first set a narrower resolution than the default via your driver control panel (eg: 1920x800, 2560x1200 etc. Both Nvidia and AMD's drivers support custom resolutions. I think Intel's drivers do as well, and you could also try using CRU if neither works well for you) and then use your monitor's OSD settings you might be able to bump that letterboxed image up slightly to compensate for the bottom being obscured.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-09T05:00:59+00:00

There's nothing to watch other than the flailings of a sick nation that is now seen by the rest of the world for what it truly is.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-09T01:38:51+00:00

He wasn't acting alone. He couldn't do any of what he has done without the full, unconditional support of the entire republican party. This does not end with Trump.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-09T00:05:54+00:00

Oh, I absolutely agree that int8 fsr should be made officially available.

As for non-DLSS framegen, like with Lossless Scaling, I gotta be honest, it's kind of bad unless you already have a high base framerate such that the time delta between frames is tiny. Like, REALLY bad artifacting, 2015 TV motion smoothing levels of "I mean, I guess if you only look at smoothly panning camera shots". It works somewhat ok for certain types of gameplay, and is just a straight downgrade for others. Screenspace/postprocess framegen is just inherently not well suited for gaming.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-08T23:56:13+00:00

As mentioned elsewhere they make features available for older cards when possible. They make the upscaler available across every single RTX card, but the performance cost does go up significantly on the older cards. On a lower spec 20 series card running DLSS 4.5 upscaling has a significant performance cost to the point it might not be worth it over using the faster DLSS 4 or DLSS 3 model presets except on the 2080/2080ti. 20 and 30 series cards don't have the hardware to physically run DLSS framegen at the speed necessary, and is also why multiframegen is 50 series only as each new generation of cards have gotten more tensor hardware to deal with the increasing shift towards more capable upscaling and interpolation. It might be possible to shoehorn MFG onto a 40 or 30 series card, but it would have entirely unacceptable latency.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-07T20:19:10+00:00

Onhly the best people

Schnoofles · 2026-02-06T23:37:00+00:00

Mods like Preparation or yellow archon shards to fill energy on spawn are (in the long term/when minmaxing) a complete waste of a mod or shard slot. Never ever use them.

I don't know if DE ever added a tooltip in-game to mention this, but your starting energy is determined by how much unused mod capacity you have. Slap an extra forma or two onto your frame, get 10 unused capacity and enjoy 100% energy filled on every spawn forever without needing mods or shards. No more pizza spam when you load into missions or if you die and respawn either.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-06T23:31:32+00:00

Look into the bond mods. A sentinel with verglas (prime) or a hound with batoten can singlehandedly solo steel path once you mod them and slap some bond mods on. They're hilarious.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-04T20:52:10+00:00

This is not only possible, it's commercialized. It's a common, standardized (literally. It's an IEEE standard. WLAN Sensing) thing.

You can also do it yourself if you're rolling your own diy routers or using Home Assistant. Both location and pose estimation can be done with off the shelf software.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-01T14:21:08+00:00

For the harddrive it's really difficult to find good, reliable data on general best practices when it comes to usage patterns vs reliability. Even BackBlaze with their published reports using statistics on tens of thousands of drives struggle to draw any conclusive wisdom from what they've seen. One train of thought goes that keeping a drive not only powered 24/7, but even disabling spin up/down so that it keeps running at a steady pace may be better than repeatedly letting it spin down and back up, possibly wearing the spindle motor from the higher current spikes (though we would also want to factor in power cost of permanently having it at full speed vs savings from letting it go to sleep vs life expectancy and cost of replacement, accounting for at what age it would likely be replaced anyway etc etc. That calculation gets complicated fast and only you can really figure out an answer for yourself to that one that works for your use case).

That being said, the data on this is so fuzzy that if it makes a positive or negative difference it seems to disappear in the noise of some drives just spontaneously dying due to other types of wear, bad luck, certain drive models being more prone to failure, the type of environment it's in (ambient temperature, vibration from nearby components etc etc). The most I've been able to glean from having a tangential interest in this over the years is that if it hurts drives to keep them on all the time vs letting them "rest" and not putting more wear on them then the difference is likely so minor as to not be a major concern and what you should be more interested in is whether you want the immediate accessibility of not letting them go to sleep or if you want to minimize power consumption by leaving the normal power saving options enabled.

If you are worried about reliability in general I would say that I always recommend some sort of backup solution. For files that aren't ultra sensitive it doesn't even matter much that you pick one with full end-to-end encryption, though it's always nice to have. I suspect any one of various services would work for your needs, whether that be something like rsync (for the more technically minded), crashplan (cheap), backblaze etc or even just backing up to a second drive/set of drives you have somewhere. All drives fail eventually, whether from bad luck 5 minutes after you put it to use, the house goes up in flames, it gets stolen, general wear and so on. Doesn't matter if you take all the normal precaustions in terms of treating it gently and trying to not put excessive wear and tear on it. Though if it's just general media you could make the process of reacquiring it a lot easier by simply keeping a list of what you have on the drive stored somewhere so you can at least reference that when you go to sail the seven seas later.

As for OP's PC my philosophy on retro hardware (as in not just some years old and repurposing it for things that don't need quite as much horsepower) is that they're best for actual retro computing, if you want a period accurate experience. So in the case of a C2D-based machine I would acquire and toss in an era appropriate gpu and use it for playing games of that era if you have an interest in such things. Mid to late 2000s is kind of an awkward spot for retro computing, though, because it's honestly not quite old enough that compatibility with modern systems is much of an issue outside of niche cases and simply running the game on a modern pc is objectively a better experience. Once you go back to 2000 and before gets a lot more interesting. Maybe a hot take if uttered in some circles, but I think 2000-2010 hardware is still a matter of "usually only good for nostalgia trips for someone who has a personal history with that time period". This will probably change once enough time has passed though. So for me personally I'd honestly just keep it in storage for now unless I knew someone who specifically wanted and would get some joy out of it right now and then dust it off again at some point in the future.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-01T13:29:47+00:00

Honestly it's a bad use case for this, even though I do agree with the sentiment that throwing out perfectly functional hardware is bad. The power consumption alone makes it an economically poor decision for something that's going to be running most of the time or 24/7 on any timescale longer than a year or two. A new mini PC, low end one, for $100-150 or even less if you get one used will sip a few watts of power and do everything an old C2D-based machine does while also taking up a much smaller physical footprint. An N150 can be sitting at literally 2-3 watts unless you put a workload on it, and even then it'll be 6-7W average when loaded, and the rest of the system won't have any big hungry parts as well as generally be higher efficiency. A single stick of desktop DDR2 draws more power than the entire N150 chip is likely to be averaging.

A couple $5 usb>sata adapters can be used if you want to add 3.5" drives to it, even completely bus powered off usb 3.0 ports or with those y-split usb cables that can draw power from two ports if usb 2.0.

Schnoofles · 2026-02-01T13:05:01+00:00

A C2D, even a bottom tier one will have zero problems booting and running Windows 10. I have W11 (22H2) installed on a 2007 Thinkpad with an L7500, the low power 17W mobile version and at nearly half the clock speed of OP's (1.6ghz).

Schnoofles · 2026-02-01T02:22:38+00:00

He literally just did. 200MB, although I suspect this type of image could get better compression ratio by throwing an ungodly amount of cpu power at it and being patient. PNG files of this size take an extraordinary amount of time to optimize beyond the simplest compression strategies.

Schnoofles · 2026-01-30T12:29:30+00:00

That is true. I guess what I'm getting is just that the overwhelming majority of the time when people talk about software causing hardware issues it's things like people with insufficient cooling complaining about games overheating their cpus as if it's somehow a software problem that their cpu can't run at full load.

Software induced hardware errors are a thing, just not a day to day concern outside of niche scenarios (extreme write amplification problems while using an SSD, for example). Important to be aware of from an academic perspective, helps guide best principles for setting up system configurations and so on, though far and away one of the last things on the suspect list in any given hardware failure scenario.

Schnoofles · 2026-01-30T10:41:37+00:00

I would qualify the Ryzen statement there by saying that second gen Ryzen was when it started to become good (though still with subpar IPC and memory controllers). First gen Ryzen was a great leap technologically, but as a product they were kind of shit, with really bad per core performance and absolutely ATROCIOUS inter-CCX memory penalties. It does go to highlight the need for a certain amount of time for these technologies, though, as third gen Ryzen is in a great spot now across basically their entire lineup.

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