u/Juicymoosie99

This is a really dumb question lol butttt.... can I use this and install linux OS on it, and then hook it up via usb? lol.

Kingston NV3 1TB M.2 2280 NVMe SSD | PCIe 4.0 Gen 4x4 | Up to 6000 MB/s | SNV3S/1000G ACASIS

Dock/adapter to sit on my desk:

NVME SSD Reader Adapter, Aluminium Alloy Housing Fast Heat Dissipation,

NVME to USB Docking Station, M.2 SSD to USB Adapter 10Gbps, Support M.2

(M Key) NVMe SSD and (B+M Key) SATA-Based SSD

sorry I'd include links but idk if I can.

I've used Firefox for like 2 months now going from Chrome, I had Claude AI help me turn off every telemetry and support item possible, remove every tracker. I use it with Ecosia browser, in private window. It seems completely secure, safe, and no issues whatsoever. People make "tier lists" and put it as a D though, which is so weird.... why?

I finally made the move to delete everything on my Google drive and start eliminating everything I have stored on there, for now I'm using an external SSD to store my files locally. I won't create or use anything in Google anymore. Unfortunately, I have an old Samsung phone, because it's all that I can afford. They recently moved over to Google messages for who knows what reason other than pure laziness and greed. So there's no Samsung native messages anymore. You have to use Google messages now which is absurdly annoying and it natively connects to Google Gemini even if you don't want it to. Goes through their servers of course.

So what's the alternative? Facebook messages owned by meta, and scraped for their own AI. Get an iPhone but then I have to use an Apple product. If you use WhatsApp that's owned by Facebook. It's unbelievable. I did switch my browser to Firefox maxed out on the privacy no telemetry always use incognito and now I'm using ecosia search engine. Feels a little nicer.

But there's always Google somewhere, somehow. I don't know how but I keep getting ads on Instagram and other places like Reddit, targeted ads, about things that I've spoken about in real life or looked at even on Firefox incognito tabs. Doesn't really make sense

​

I saw 8 months ago on one of the proton subreddits that there were some synchronization issues where it is absurdly slow synchronizing across different PCs and the speed is just horrendously slow. I'm wondering if they ever fix this or if it's still just as slow? For some more information, I'm talking about if you have like a desktop computer and a laptop right, and you're using it just like Google drive and Gmail. Where you are syncing up your entire PC

I saw 8 months ago on one of the proton subreddits that there were some synchronization issues where it is absurdly slow synchronizing across different PCs and the speed is just horrendously slow. I'm wondering if they ever fix this or if it's still just as slow? For some more information, I'm talking about if you have like a desktop computer and a laptop right, and you're using it just like Google drive and Gmail. Where you are syncing up your entire PC

Curious if anyone has tried ditching OneDrive what some of the best alternatives are? I'm torn here, some reviews for proton drive say it's absurdly slow. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonDrive/comments/1nqt024/comment/ngap4vt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Curious if anyone has tried ditching OneDrive what some of the best alternatives are? I'm torn here, some reviews for proton drive say it's absurdly slow.

Throwing out a question if anyone has used quadspinner Gaea before. I'm curious if anyone has used this with real geographical map data, like Copernicus or information that is publicly available, like real world GIS data for real world maps. I'm trying to learn this currently and really struggling because YouTube doesn't have any tutorials that I've found where people are using real world map data, and showing how they are importing it into gaea.

To be clear, I'm focusing more on the importing step and not on the unreal engine part because there's plenty of tutorials on that. I have not found any suitable or usable information lately, on how to use actual geographic data. All the imports and exports I've done of real geographic data have failed or don't work

I work for a big Fortune 500 company, and there are some genuinely useful applications of AI that I can understand why people would invest in them and understand why they would allocate budget for it.... Then there are applications of AI that are just plain moronic, and it just makes you wonder, why are we doing this? **Are we really, truly this stupid?**

For example, at our company we have a virtual avatar powered by AI, that does our company chant. Yes you read that right we have a company chant for big meetings and town halls. It used to be done by an actual person, but we since transitioned it to a virtual avatar that runs off of Gemini AI. This is hilariously embarrassing and honestly dizzying how absurd it looks. It looks just plain wrong. The mouse doesn't even match the words being sad and it's not a real person's voice and the thing just looks like you are in some delirious dream. That's something we are spending money on.

People generating notes and PowerPoints. Ridiculous, truly absurd. People cannot be bothered to simply pay attention in meetings and write down five or six bullet points. That's basic comprehension and writing! And we need to spend millions of dollars recording every single meeting for the rest of company history now, just for this. Because people cannot be bothered to pay attention during meetings and write things down.

People generating memes using AI. No, like seriously that's what we are paying for image creation capabilities on. For people to create memes and send them in their group chats.

There are some really valid uses of AI. But wow we are spending so much money and time and resources on such stupid stuff lately

I remember in the early 2000s, we seemed to have everything perfectly balanced. I mean there was the dot com bubble burst, but even aside from that, Most things just worked for consumers. If you wanted to chat with friends you could use Skype, MSN, AIM, Myspace. So many options. Nowadays there's like maybe two options to actually communicate with people that really work, and one of them is unacceptable. Discord is on the verge of collapse because of the whole privacy issue thing. I've seen entire communities for softwares just close up on discord with disclaimers that they are no longer engaging in the anti privacy stuff that Discord is engaging in and they are creating their own help community on their website, and you go to the website and the community forum is basically dead. So they have no community at all.

In terms of the web, it's become extremely difficult to browse Google and get relevant search results, You can use other web browsers or search engines but they're not as effective like Duckduckgo. It's probably more safe to use this but the results from search are just bad. They don't really work as well and it's really hard to find stuff. They're really trying hard to get you to use Gemini to search the web. Which I don't want to, because the results there are even pretty bad and irrelevant half the time. Gemini rambles so much it's horrible.

and internet speed hasn't improved at all, or availability. Certain websites across the world are still extremely slow, you think they would have speed them up. I thought we were going to keep exponentially increasing technology for society when it comes to computers and the world wide web but it seems like we are instead going backwards

Considering de googling. Because I'm honestly suspicious of Google and wondering if they actually like steal your content and train AI with it. For example if you have documents for like a game you're developing or a story that you're writing if they're just using that

I want to permanently free myself of Google drive and just start storing my own files locally but I have a laptop I use for travel and my desktop computer, and Google drive is like the backup and synchronizing. So I'm wondering how do I free myself of it permanently? Get a series of thumb drives and just store stuff on that permanently? For example I only have like maybe 500 gigabytes total of files right now. Not talking about games I can always install those later. But I was thinking of getting like a USBC thumb drive 512 GB that's like ultra super fast and storing everything on there and maybe having a second one to back up the backup

I'm no expert in texture streaming or how it works with world partitions so I'm curious, if you're making a humongous open world RPG, do you have to split every single one of them into their own level and then later on down the line join them together and like do some sort of blending mess to try and get the edges of the terrains to smooth? Or do you simply make everything in your entire game all in one single level as partitions of the grid?

there's like financial careers, is there one generally for white collar work?

Making a stylized 3D RPG. I'm curious how to make PBR textures like normal, height, displacement, and such. I've been making my own materials in Substance 3D designer and painter. But I'm not an artist and it's relatively complex to figure out. Some people say that you can use an app called materialize, and I know in Gimp you can use a filter to get the normal map and tweak it a little bit. Seems like there's a million different ways to do things. But I'm not a pro, not an artist, so I'm struggling.

I'm currently learning game dev and have started creating house textures in blender with modular walls. My wall textures are a flat plane with white paint color, and five rectangular beams rotated in different ways with their own texture material under the hood. What I'm curious of is, am I supposed to create a texture atlas and bake that to later use that downstream in unreal engine, or should I be just including the straight up 3D static mesh textures for each of those beams and the wall itself? Some people it seems use the texture atlas approach, baking the entire thing into a texture atlas that can be used with the full PBR like the height map, displacement, normal map etc. Curious what you think

I have an MSI GE75 raider laptop I bought 3 years ago that I use when traveling and playing out on the couch. It's been extremely disappointing, and has not lasted or lived as well under very light use as my previous Asus laptop did. The keys are completely busted and constantly ghost type extra keystrokes when I'm in discord or playing a game. I had to replace the entire screen and the hinges because the hinges were broken a couple months ago from opening and closing it, the power port was broken just from inserting and taking out the power plug. To be clear, I was very gentle with this thing, too. Every time I moved it around, very gentle very deliberate very careful.

I'm really curious how to find a gaming laptop that is worth buying and will actually last. I want something that's going to last a while under very light careful use because this MSI laptop was terrible and has similar reviews that highlight my experience, that it's a really bad machine that's very flimsy and junky. I was thinking maybe something with a 5070 TI or 5080 mobile card but I don't know if that's even worth it. I spend a lot of time developing an unreal engine, blender, 3D design softwares like Adobe substance painter. So I need something that's at least decently powerful.

I've seen a lot of assets both free and paid coming primarily in FBX format, so I thought this was the preferred format in unreal engine and have been packaging most of my textures from blender in this format. As of the last few days though, I've been having a ton of issues with FBX format for seemingly no reason.

For example, I was exporting an entire wall that I created in blender for hours, all the textures mapped in the blender nodes like the base color the normals etc. Export it as FBX and tried every single combination of the path for the images and made sure they are linked up, relinked them in the shading tab, I tried everything man. I could not get the wood texture to show up on my walls but they work fine in blender... Then I exported as GLB/GLTF immediately worked, literally no problems whatsoever. Except that they are in different folders for the mesh, the texture, etc. So very nested textures. But GLB worked on the first try!

Like, why is FBX so terrible? I don't understand