I use Excel at work, not in a traditional accounting sense, but my company uses it as an interface with one of our systems I frequently work with.

Rather than tediously search the main Excel sheets that get fed into that system for all of the data fields I have to fill in, I made separate Excel tools that consolidate all of that data, then use macros to put the data into the correct fields on the main sheets for me.

Occasionally I’ll have to add new functionality to that sheet, so I’ll ask AI to write the macro code that does what I need it to do.

Saves me from having to learn obscure VBA programming to perform a function that I do during .0001% of my work time, but that’s about the extent of it. For now.

Of course most of what I do is white collar computer work, so I’m expecting that my current job likely has a two-year-or-less countdown on it before they decide to use AI to replace me.

The classics never die.

Finally taking a break from BG3, though that will probably only last until I have a SM sitting in my comfy gaming zone.

Still heavily playing Deep Rock Galactic with friends, Streets of Rogue has entered my short-time gaming rotation, and I just picked up WH40K: DarkTide on the recent sale.

I haven’t heard many people talking about a key group here.

There are quite a few people out there who play the Deck handheld 95% of the time, so they rarely dock it… but they also aren’t out and about traveling with it.

They just play it in comfy spots around their house, without ever really hooking it up to a larger screen extendedly. There are probably quite a few of them talking in this thread.

For any of these people wanting a performance upgrade: Steam Machine is going to be HUGE, and much better than switching to a slightly more powerful handheld at nearly the same price point.

These people can hook the SM up to a TV to check on it alone if needed… but primarily they will locally stream from it to their Decks. And it’ll absolutely crush 60/70/90 FPS (the common max display rates on the Deck screens, depending on what flavor you have and whether or not you’re overclocking the LCD display) at 800p, with graphics cranked WAY up on a ton of games.

It’ll definitely be a fantastic era to be a household Deck gamer.

I’m not worried. Valve absolutely nailed the Deck ergonomics. They knew what they had to do here.

Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

To be fair, I think you were expecting something from it that isn’t part of its core.

I don’t play it myself, but I have several friends and family that do, and they all cite it as their comfy, repetitive (by design) game that they play for a half hour at the end of a day to unwind and shut their brain off. From what I can tell, THAT seems to be the goal of the game, and it sounded like you wanted the opposite from it.

I use a bunch of YouTube enhancing extensions.

SponsorBlock. so very, very good. First user into a video after it drops, who has this extension, marks the portion of it that is the YouTuber’s ad read / sponsor segment. Extension auto-skips it for every user who watches after. Saves a lot of time.

Multiselect for YouTube. Just what it sounds like, you can select multiple videos at once to add or delete from playlists, instead of doing them one at a time.

PlayerTube. Use approximations of player UIs from bygone years. I’m partial to 2013 myself.

Return YouTube Dislike and YouTube Shorts Block. Self explanatory from titles.

Others (non-YT) I use…

Change Case. I watch my keyboard and not my screen whilst typing, and this just lets me quickly flip large chunks of unnoticed caps-lock text back to normal once I discover it, rather than having to retype it all.

Simple Translate. Quickly run highlighted text through a translator on the right click menu.

Multiplayer co-op FPSes, on the other hand, are freaking fantastic. There’s a reason why my friend group gaming rotation is primarily composed of Deep Rock Galactic, Left 4 Dead 2, and Vermintide / Darktide.

It depends on what you mean by viewpoint. If they’re disagreeing about objective reality, 0/10. If we can’t agree on an objective level, there’s no point.

This is pretty much the crux of the problem right here. How are you supposed to have any kind of productive conversation about the world if they are living in a fictional one that doesn’t actually exist?

Is it possible to find a girl at the festival?

I’m going to say probably, considering that approximately 50% of the human population is female, give or take a smidge.

I wouldn’t say it runs particularly well currently. I play it at 720p lower settings and it will go 50 - 60 fps at several places and times… but then when there’s a ton of action and enemies, suddenly you’re in Jittery High 20s / Low 30s Land.

But it’s still very fun, especially with friends, and everyone picks their jobs and gets down to business. And it’s early access and early on in its road map… I imagine it’ll just get smoother as they optimize it more over time.

I haven’t noticed any increase, but I tend to use custom fan curves and play the same 5 - 10 games most of the time, so it doesn’t vary much.

Playing a lot of Jump Space and Deep Rock Galactic with friends.

Single player, Baldur’s Gate 3 continues to be my long haul game, and Brotato and Balatro remain my “20 free minutes to game” games

Day. One. Purchase.

I’m sorry friend, but I doubt you’re going to get many assisting responses here regarding this issue.

The overwhelming majority of people with a Steam Deck are running Steam OS on it, and I’d be stunned if more than a couple of dozen people on planet Earth are running your OS on one.

Add to that the fact that many, many people who play BG3 on the Deck are running the Windows version of the game under Proton (both for familiarity’s sake, and to make stuff like frame generation easier), and I don’t think that it’s just that you’re looking for a needle in a haystack… I think it’s more like you’re looking for a specific hydrogen atom inside the sun.

I don’t enjoy my current three days a week in the open office, but I’ve found that noise blocking headphones and running podcasts and YouTube videos as background noise just makes it all, for the most part, go away.

You don’t even have to go expensive with them to pull this off. I bought these off of Amazon a few months back, and they’ve been fantastic. I’d say about a 75 - 80% noise reduction, and the background stuff you play makes up the rest of that difference.

I have always had controllable lucid dreams, pretty much my whole life, but I wouldn’t call the non-control version “fake,” as the realization and knowledge that you’re dreaming is what makes it a lucid dream.

“Controllable” and “non-controllable” would be more accurate than “fake” and “real.”

Is Esperanto similar to what you’re talking about?

No, I think a true universal language is going to need minimal friction, and be as simple and vocab-limited as possible, to encourage mass adaptation.

For all its intent on being easier than other mainstream languages, Esparanto is still more complex than what I’m talking about.

I’d honestly love to see something like that become an actual universal language. Simple grammar, sub 500 words, a little more meat on the bones to eliminate some of the ambiguity, but be easy enough to teach every kid in early grade school. Something that just allows basic communication and is accessible to everyone.

Don’t think it’s going to be an evolved toki pona though, it feels like most of its fan base just wants to keep it an impractical art hobby instead of allowing it to grow up to be something useful.