Not everyone can feasibly do this, you need to speak mandarin + read/write chinese, legally be able to work, and have some way to deal with the gfw. Also tap water may not be drinkable but thats more of a nuisance since you can filter/boil it.

Also idk what the article is talking about with flying delivery drones and self driving cars in shenzhen, if you order meituan delivery its probably gonna be delivered by a gig worker on a scooter cuz thats all young people can get employed as these days. Delivery is insanely cheap and can’t possibly pay much, but also cost of living is relatively low, but still shenzhen is on the expensive end as far as living in china goes.

Finally paying for everything via alipay/wechat and visiting everywhere with biometrics is yet another convenience/privacy tradeoff. Visit china on a 10 year tourist visa, everywhere you go by train, every tourist attraction or national park you visit, every digital payment, is all linked to your passport. Equivalent for chinese citizens would be the national id card/number. China more or less skipped the credit card adoption phase afaik. Not that places won’t take cash but it’s less common especially in cities.

China is not a magical land where everything is perfect and futuristic. It’s a big country with a lot of people in many, many big cities that operates on totally different cultural systems. It is affordable from the perspective of a tourist who earns USD/Euro etc.

Source: I spent a month there in 2025

1 billion means you only earned the first score extend right? I’m very impressed you survived to stage 5 yet didn’t score even close to the 2nd score extend. I think if you figure out how to do a little scoring in the first 2 stages the game will really come alive and you might also pocket the extend at 10billion sometime in stage 4 or so. You clearly have the skills to dodge/bomb/hyper when necessary.

I only played black label (steam version and also an arcade near me has a DFKBL pcb) but the second score extend is basically mandatory for me to get to the end of stage 4 or have a chance of going to stage 5. And before that, getting the first score extend would get me to the hidden extra life in stage 3 etc. Scoring is good for survival and I think it’s fun to play for score even at the level where we can’t currently 1cc. Gives a goal/benchmark for how I’m playing

(cont.) Guild wars 2 is another mmo that is worth trying to see if you like the feel of the action combat. You can again play a whole lot free, but you do have to pay if you want the expansion content (which i feel is kind of diabolical to lock mounts behind max level expansion content). I also do not like that you can buy in game currency with real money, and then buy legendary (best in slot) weapons off the trading post with in game currency.

Theres maplestory which is mainly singleplayer, just make sure you make your char on the reboot (non-p2w) servers. Scratches the itch.

Honorable mention to private/classic servers like tera classic which i’ve been meaning to try out. The population being tiny is the most obvious factor but it is nice that the game has been preserved at all for people to play.

Ffxiv has a lot of content available in the free trial but it is not really a “free mmorpg” since if you want to do content that released less than 6 years ago, or join/use FC guilds or linkshell chats, or trade, have any significant quantity of gil, get housing, or use player markets, then you have to buy the game and pay a subscription. Mahjong is free though and it’s quite a good mahjong client.

That said, it is a good way to figure out if you like the basic gameplay systems: the UI and menus which are very customizable, controls (switch to legacy if using M&KB), tab target combat and global cooldown, main scenario questing, instanced dungeons and normal mode bosses, unlocking multiple jobs to try out.

All this with the caveat that basically all jobs at level 70 feel like an empty shell of the combat rotation of level 100, and high end content is only available and populated for the most recent patches + the 6 ultimate raids.

I feel like this is a big miss by framework. Maybe I just don’t understand because I already own a Velka 3 that i used happily for years and building small form factor with standard parts seems better than what this is offering. Better as in better performance, aesthetics, space optimization, upgradeability - SFF is not a cheap or easy way to build a computer.

The biggest constraint building in the sub-5 liter format is GPU compatibility because not many manufacturers even make boards in the <180mm length category. Also can’t go much higher than 150-200 watts because cooling is so difficult. There are still options though, i rocked a PNY 1660 super for a long time, and the current most powerful option is a 4060ti. Although upgrades are limited to what manufacturers occasionally produce, it is upgradeable, and it is truly desktop performance.

On the CPU side, you can physically put in whatever CPU you want. The only limitation is that the cooler, alpenfohn black ridge or noctua l9a/l9i, probably won’t have a good time cooling 100+ watts without aggressive undervolting and power limits. 65 watts TDP still gives you a ryzen 7 9700x.

Motherboards have the SFF tax but are high quality in general. Flex ATX PSUs were a bit harder to find 5 or 6 years ago but now the black 600W enhance ENP is readily available from Velkase’s website. Drives and memory are completely standard. m.2 fits with the motherboard, 2.5in SATA also fits in one of the corners. Normal low profile DDR5 is replaceable / upgradeable.

What framework is releasing is more like a laptop board in a ~4 liter case and I really don’t like that in order to upgrade any part of CPU, GPU or memory you have to replace the entire board because it’s soldered on APU and not socketed or discrete components. Framework’s enclosure hasn’t been designed to hold a motherboard+discrete GPU and the board doesn’t have a PCIe slot if you wanted to attach a card via riser in another case. It could be worse but I don’t see this as a good use of development resources.

https://youtu.be/38m-wnbHPLA (Great movie btw)

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Any time they give a reason that there’s some technical thing they can’t accomplish, just remember mahjong. The devs programmed a fucking mahjong client into FFXIV (and it’s quite a good one too, on top of being free trial accessible, apparently some people get the free trial primarily for mahjong). If they have the technology and budget to do something as irrelevant and orthogonal as that, they can put in anything (as long as the devs are interested in making it). So basically it’s all bs, plus there are mods and plugins that do every QoL and visual upgrade imaginable already implemented as a third party tool.

Based on entries to his personal blog and social media posts, Mullenweg has been on safari in Africa this week. Mullenweg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Cherry on top, lmao. Of course he’s off doing rich white CEO things.

FF14 is basically unplayable at resolutions below 1080p. There’s simply not enough pixels to display all the detail needed for serious play e.g. hotbars, buff/debuff bars, target/focus target, party list, castbars and enough empty screen space to see the boss. It’s also complete ass trying to raid at below 50-60fps. If your framerate is low enough it starts to become a dps loss since the time you can queue your next skill is delayed until the next frame is drawn, effectively increasing your global cooldown. On top of that no access to 3rd party programs on PC that would help alleviate these issues e.g. framerate locking, zoomhacks. Only way this works out is that the new nintendo switch is a 1080p+ 60fps+ capable machine with specs equivalent to a midrange PC from 3-4 years ago. Or Yoshida is talking out of his ass giving a japanese PR response, which is pretty typical

Windows is malware and deserves to be treated as such

My understanding is that captchas were never supposed to be impenetrable, just difficult enough that to have bots (or mechanical turks) solve them at scale is expensive enough to deter that kind of automation. It’s probably getting a lot easier for a computer to solve nowadays though.

Feels weird to review an expansion before 90% of the content has been released. We have the main story, main story dungeons, and 2 “hard mode” trials so far? And one of the EX is hot garbage, probably the worst fight released in the past 4 years or ever (subject to personal opinion). There’s still 12 raid bosses, 5 more EX trials, large scale field content, a deep dungeon i think, and an ultimate raid or two on the way. Still remains to be seem whether they are going to continue with good fight design, or endwalker fight design. Music has some good points for sure, and story as always is a non-factor. It’s really nothing special as far as JRPGs or even previous final fantasy games are concerned.

Midrange systems from 3-4 years ago are the ones that are struggling a little bit. It’s playable but noticeably slower. It can mostly be mitigated by turning all the bells and whistles off though, and I guess if we really wanted the extra frames we could turn down the resolution. But playing the game at 720p for instance is a serious disadvantage, theres not enough pixels to see your hud elements and the fight mechanics without a super ultrawide monitor or a zoom hack. 1080p is ok but 1440p or 4k are ideal

The progression is absolutely time gated, and they definitely calculate the travel time to make each zone take some given amount of time to complete. When they need to pad out the zone a bit longer they add one of the trailing quests (autoscroller). It’s the business model and the same reasoning for why they don’t increase the weekly tome cap and also why there’s a weekly loot lockout during the raid tier, if players could grind out all the gear they need for a patch in 1 week, they would. That said if all you want to do is the msq and normal content, you can probably beat that in 30-40 hours watching cutscenes if you can dedicate a weekend to it and unsub until the next patch. I finished the msq + all aether currents in about 16 hours after launch with a couple friends, skipping all cutscenes, and the leading edge progression groups were probably done in closer to 10-12 hours so they could hit the EX trials.

word of advice for anyone thinking of buying soda for the promo event

Dont

Instead, consider waiting a couple years for when all the rewards are gonna get put on the mogstation. And it’ll probably be cheaper than however much mountain dew you would be pouring down the sink. Really, think about what you’re missing? “Mountain Zu”? Think of your favorite mount, is some random zu any better? Zu is a regular enemy, you can go out and fight one anywhere, its not some Bajamut Blast or anything, the mount is just a fuckin regular green bird. If you don’t participate in the promo then you aren’t missing anything spectacular.

This has been a cynical XIV PSA

Pretty crazy for a program to have that egregious a vulnerability, but also the version of the emulator with the ACE exploit (1.6) is more than 12 years old at this point. As the video states, the modern releases are freeware-nagware anyway so everyone is better off switching to a different (+open source) emulator entirely. I like the “virus” shown off at the end of the video too, that was fun

こんにちは - “Hello”

The joke is that the article doesn’t list a single name.

The name of the company that produced many of the greatest shmups of all time, starting with donpachi, is CAVE, unrelated to the indie game Cave Story