If you see the video there is no way a battery behaves like that, even if you drive a nail into them they more rocket flames than explode (I used to work in a battery lab).

I should clarify, typical cells won’t explode, you could defeat safety features for pressure release in a can cell but at that effort they would have just added something more energetic.

Yeah they added “action keys” that can trigger different percentage presses (20-40-60-80-100%) as a “fix” because the bobsleigh blocks they added in the new game were not keyboard friendly and they wanted to even the playing field. They eventually changed the physics to get rid of that specific need (but not completely) but they are still useful in some situations.

Download the newest game! It has a free access tier which gets you access to the first 10 tracks of the quarterly campaign and to the ranked mode. It is a bit limited but enough to see if you might get back into it. There is a decent community on reddit for the game.

AI has tons of potential but the final decision should come from a person that evaluates the output for correctness. This is a great example of that.

There are advantages and disadvantages to all the control schemes depending on the types of tracks you play, the surface you play, and the car/environment you play.

Most good players play with controller because there are many situations you run into where you want the precision of steering a specific amount around a corner, or you are playing a track where you want to either speed drift (SD) at a specific angle (e.g. fullspeed or higher speed dirt/grass/plastic) or want to keep your steering under a certain angle to no slide (e.g. low speed dirt/grass/plastic).

There are techniques such as neosliding where it is much easier to do them in keyboard as it requires multiple taps in quick succession. It is also easier to play keyboard when you need to make turns where timing of a full steer is important (e.g. ice).

Considering cars other than the stadium car you start getting into situations where one control scheme is far superior than others. The snow and rally environments require smooth steering so wheel is superior there, but controllers are a good middle ground. Desert is faster with tapping movements over smooth steering so keyboard is a bit better there. I recall canyon is a bit better with keyboard as well.

This all applies equally regardless of whether you are playing older or newer games, analog and digital controls are available in all the PC games.

Seconding Trackmania, though I’d recommend playing the latest one released in 2020 rather than Nations Forever. A year’s access to everything is $20 and you get tons of content to play.

For a game that is at its core can be played at the highest levels with just 4 buttons it is incredibly complex with an insane skill ceiling. I’m pretty good and the difference between me and the top players is absolutely insane. The game is a bit beginner unfriendly, mostly because you are going to suck against good players because there are tons of mechanics that the developer tells you nothing about and unless you watch a video you aren’t likely to understand why players are leaving you in the dust.

This is the game where you get people who can hit a jump at just the right angle so they thread the needle through a series of holes barely larger than the car while travelling at speeds well above 300mph (welcome to TrackMania, I don’t think there’s a speed cap). They also do it using keyboards. Seriously. High-level TrackMania players use keyboards, not gamepads or, god forbid, racing wheels.

The max speed is 999 km/h, which is only acheivable with speed drifting, but speed in excess of 800km/h are not uncommon to hit in certain kinds of tracks. Your statement about controls also isn’t correct, most of the top players play with controller, but there are some that are keyboard players, there is even a couple insane ones that play wheel (most notably Granady).

I feel like this article could be 1 sentence. Windows 11 is a piece of shit so people (including your IT department) don’t want to upgrade, and those that would just accept the upgrade are frequently limited by perfectly good machines which aren’t compatible.

Paul’s online math notes are by far the best resources out there for the first few university level math courses.

https://tutorial.math.lamar.edu

It is a great shame that his linear algebra notes were removed years ago.

I think the tariff should come with a mandate to our domestic car manufacturers. They should have to produce an EV under some cost within a certain amount of time or they are going to cancel the tariff.

Does Gen Z actually have a tech savvy reputation? I was under the impression that the last few generations aren’t that great with computers as they more grew up with mature technology. It is the Gen X and Millennials that are more digital native while having used computers where advanced skills were required.

Part of it is just getting a feel for Chinese goods and using that to determine what is a good deal or what is a scam. I’ve worked with a lot of Chinese suppliers for a long time so I have a sixth sense for their bullshit.

Generally I avoid anything that could be a safety risk (e.g. Mains power) , and keep an eye on the photos to see if they look too good to be true. Official stores are good, as are items with many purchases and reviews that include pictures.

That makes no sense. The 24MP RAW files from my camera at 25MB, no way a PNG or JPEG of a 4K (8MP) monitor are anywhere close to that big.

If you want wireless, one thing to be concerned about is the latency of the gamepad. https://gamepadla.com tests many controllers for their latency.

Personally, I’ve just gone with xbox with their PC dongle. I only like controllers with the sticks in the xbox/nintendo configuration and the latency is great with their dongle. I also like that it uses standard batteries so I just keep some rechargables at hand for when it runs out. On the downsides, there is no low battery indication on the controller, so occasionally it just dies in the middle of use.

I’ve heard nothing but problems about the reliability of these. One streamer for my main game is sponsored by them through their org and occasionally rages about how many they have broken just playing.

That was Oblivion believe it or not. Ahh, the good ol’ days where everyone got up in arms over even cosmetic DLC.

That is half the reason I have it disabled on my desktop. The other half being that the BIOS updates never fixed the fTPM stuttering issues for my computer (both using the 3700X and 5800X) so the computer is unusable with it turned on.

A lot of the spam numbers come from the same area code and first 3 digits of my number, makes it really easy to suss out most of the scam calls out. I just hate when they leave a message and I have to go in and delete their message.

I mean it is shitty still, but people with an old device and an account already are unaffected, plus the old devices like the one I have is completely operable offline. I’ve not connected it to WiFi except when I first got it to check the app out.

Don’t even acknowledge the current name of the site, just keep calling it Twitter.

Just when I think the phone industry can’t get any more boring and frustrating, now new phone releases only add more AI bullshit.

Was transiting through the Iceland airport once and had a random thought about how I was quite far from anyone I know there. No sooner do I finish the thought I look about 20m in front of me and an old university classmate of mine is walking towards me.