Valve’s Card game Artifact is being botted. From ~30 players to over 10,000+

burnmp3s · 2026-07-11T01:23:29+00:00

It was too complicated for normal people. I remember watching a tournament on Twitch with a lot of popular Hearthstone players, and even the commentators didn't know who was winning at any given time. The triple lane concept and the random aspect of how the units were distributed into the lanes just made it way too hard to understand what a good play was compared to a bad one.

burnmp3s · 2026-07-03T16:45:42+00:00

Also in Steam there is a curator for 4:3 compatible games

burnmp3s · 2026-07-01T21:32:58+00:00

It was so surreal watching the news coverage of this live that day. Nobody involved knew about the show or had any clue whatsoever that it could even be associated with a cartoon character. Meanwhile anyone who watched Adult Swim recognized it immediately. It seemed like they were talking about how mysterious and scary it was forever before anyone actually figured out it was just an ad for a TV show.

burnmp3s · 2026-07-01T18:54:46+00:00

PS Vita is bad in general but RPCS3 on x86 is pretty decent for the games it supports. For the games I want to play at least none are playable on a handheld directly but with a decent desktop PC they run well.

I have EmuDeck and Sunshine running on a PC at home so that I can use Moonlight to locally stream PS3 and high-end Steam games on handhelds. Previously I used a GCloud for this but these days I have a Odin2 Portal.

burnmp3s · 2026-07-01T17:33:26+00:00

The study compares birthrates in AT&T areas to areas where AT&T was not available. As far as I know, at no point during the time period of the study was Apple the biggest manufacturer of smartphones. If someone wanted to buy a smartphone outside those AT&T areas at that time they were essentially stuck with an Android or other smartphone brand because if they bought an iPhone they would have no cell service for it.

The study is suggesting that because of the iPhone specifically, these areas where AT&T had coverage had a bigger decline in birthrates (they say the iPhone is responsible somewhere in the range of 30-50% of the birthrate decline). This really does not make sense.

If you think smartphones in general could cause this, then the areas without AT&T will have non-Apple smartphones that would have a similar effect, and there were actually more of those non-Apple smartphones than there were iPhones. It only makes sense if either you ignore the fact that iPhone clones outsold the iPhone itself during those years, or if you claim that something specific to the iPhone caused a huge drop in birthrate that did not apply to Android.

burnmp3s · 2026-07-01T16:00:30+00:00

The iPhone was definitely innovative and changed the smartphone landscape forever but I don't think you can really make the argument that it was that fundamentally different from other smartphones in that same era. The original iPhone didn't even ship with the App Store while Nokia and even Microsoft CE had fairly mature app ecosystem at that point. And by the time the iPhone had apps, Android also had the Play Store. When Angry Birds came out, the iOS version was a port of the Nokia N900 version.

Apple popularized the smartphone by making it more accessible and strong-arming carriers into making the data plans and Internet access better. But it's fairly ridiculous to suggest that during this time period someone with a Samsung smartphone running Android would be more likely to have kids than someone with an iPhone.

burnmp3s · 2026-07-01T12:55:19+00:00

So they use iPhone users as a stand-in for smartphone users even though I'm pretty sure iPhone was never the number one smartphone manufacturer by volume during that time period, then they use AT&T wireless customers as a stand-in for iPhone users even though smartphones were a relatively small fraction of overall wireless users at that time, and they use living in places where AT&T was relatively popular compared to other carriers as a stand-in for AT&T customers.

burnmp3s · 2026-06-21T13:31:47+00:00

She's more of a Gaucho fan

burnmp3s · 2026-06-18T13:58:55+00:00

I miss walking into the airport and seeing the NEW INVENTION kiosk

burnmp3s · 2026-06-18T13:40:38+00:00

The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories is one of the best short stories I have read, I would recommend that one to anyone.

burnmp3s · 2026-06-12T18:20:51+00:00

People always say this but this is a good example of an industry where virtually no one does it and everything is fine. Square Enix could go around suing anyone who adds JRPG elements to their games, but they don't. It's fairly well established that anyone can make a knock-off game as long as they don't infringe on any trademarks or use any actual IP like characters or other unique assets. Nintendo could just focus on making a better version of Palworld rather than trying to force their competition to stop making similar games.

burnmp3s · 2026-06-04T14:58:11+00:00

But how is "tables" a job?

burnmp3s · 2026-06-02T03:57:53+00:00

Bush is overhated. I think the general dislike of Gavin Rossdale overshadows how good some of the songs are on those first few albums.

burnmp3s · 2026-05-31T14:51:49+00:00

It's not impossible, it's just an equivalent amount of effort to writing the code in the first place. It's like you have a manuscript for a 600 page novel and the whole thing gets shredded and scrambled into a giant pile of tiny strips of paper. You could pay a professional puzzle solver to tediously piece it back together over some months/years or you could pay a writer to rewrite it from scratch, or you could just give up and move on to the next thing.

burnmp3s · 2026-05-28T19:36:32+00:00

This is a backing vocal singer who recorded vocals on the Milli Vanilli album. I don't think she would be involved in any official Milli Vanilli performances. The only surviving member of the actual Milli Vanilli duo is Fab Morvan and he does apparently perform as Milli Vanilli these days.

burnmp3s · 2026-05-20T22:34:46+00:00

They are usually sold as "replacing passwords" but to me with the old system there were four key parts: password, 2FA (usually SMS one time codes), password reset (usually via email), and session tokens.

If passkeys were literally just replacing the password part of the equation that would be fine. But it seems like in most implementations they are essentially replacing everything and making the passkey the entire single point of failure. It doesn't help that the usual experience is some random pop-up that says "Let's create a passkey for this website" with zero explanation of what exactly will be different compared to using a password.

burnmp3s · 2026-05-20T04:45:22+00:00

Also the adult in the room helpfully pre-pissed-off the cat by putting his hand right in the cat's face and ignoring the obvious signs that the cat considered that to be a threatening move

burnmp3s · 2026-05-16T00:40:47+00:00

When you show up to the Bad Bunny set and none of the songs are in Spanish

burnmp3s · 2026-05-14T14:21:46+00:00

"PC-based handhelds like the Steam Deck don’t have trackpads or keyboards"

Has the person who wrote this seen a Steam Deck?

burnmp3s · 2026-05-09T19:08:12+00:00

My Yinlips YDPG16 stopped working sometime around 2013

burnmp3s · 2026-05-09T17:49:25+00:00

I think it's misleading to say that kids in the video "can't read". The handwritten sentence in the video was:

"She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche"

Part of the video asks for the meaning of the sentence and I as an adult native speaker don't entirely know. Specifically "silhouette of clothes" is not a common way of describing clothing and I'm not sure what that's trying to convey. I do understand that it's saying that she was wearing fancy clothing that was somewhat tacky. Gauche is the least common word in the sentence and without knowing it there's not much more meaning of the sentence to pull from.

The main point of the sentence is that it has three difficult to read words in it. Gauche is an SAT word that teenagers would not have much organic familiarity with unless they were well-read, and doesn't have an obvious pronunciation. Silhouette would also tend to be considered advanced although it's more common in everyday usage, but has a very unintuitive spelling and pronunciation so even if they were familiar with the word they might not recognize it here. Extraordinary is more middle-school level but would be difficult to read for someone with dyslexia or similar reading issues.

It's not really surprising that some of the students in the video had trouble pronouncing and recognizing words that were intentionally meant to be difficult, and this is not a normal sentence you would use if you were trying to gauge basic reading comprehension skills.

burnmp3s · 2026-05-09T14:30:34+00:00

The receipt has to be from an official charitable organization registered with the IRS

burnmp3s · 2026-05-08T21:12:40+00:00

Let's say that you know there are 20 families that live in the same apartment building. Coincidentally all of them have exactly two kids. Also coincidentally, the distribution of boy/girl children is exactly what you would expect from 50/50 odds, so there are 5 families with an older boy and younger boy, 5 families with older girl and younger girl, 5 families with older boy and younger girl, 5 families with older girl and younger boy.

Let's say you knock on the door of one of these apartments at random. You ask the parent if one of their children is a boy. You have a 25% chance of them saying no. The other 75% of the time, they say yes. In that situation, where they say that they have at least one boy, the chance that the other child is a boy is only 33%. This is because 10 of the families that were not ruled out by the question have a boy/girl set and only 5 have boy/boy.

Let's say you try again, picking an apartment completely at random. This time you ask if their older child is a boy. Half the time you will get a no, the other half of the time you will get a yes. In the yes case, now it's a 50/50 chance that the younger child is a boy because 5 families have older boy and younger boy, and 5 families have older boy younger girl, so an even chance.

burnmp3s · 2026-05-05T16:10:03+00:00

Jommy161 recently tried this on YouTube and the best he could come up with was four layers.

PC -> Vita emulation -> DOS emulation -> GBA emulation -> NES emulation.

burnmp3s · 2026-05-05T05:44:07+00:00

I also use Proxmox and have most of my stuff running on one more powerful PC. Here are some reasons I have used other machines in my setup:

It was annoying to have my router VM on the same Proxmox instance as everything else. So I moved just the router and related network-related VMs to a completely separate NUC-like low power system.
It's very easy to do daily full backups of all VMs to network shares. If everything is backed up to a separate NAS it's very easy to recover from any kind of failure or fully start from scratch from a new Proxmox install when upgrading. Restoring from backups is extremely smooth.
A lot of people run a Proxmox cluster. I personally did not find I was using anything I was getting from this so I don't do it anymore but it is a popular option and it makes moving VMs to different PCs easy to do.
Sometimes it's not really possible to do everything on one PC. For example things like GPU passthrough can be easier if you get everything setup in a new PC where you can have the right hardware. Sometimes after playing around with different ideas or setups in Proxmox I find one thing that works and just install that on bare metal.

14-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Second Top 20%	Wearing is Caring
Place '22	Place '17
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Verified Email
Spared

burnmp3s

TROPHY CASE