I just started Mass Effect 1 for the first time via Legendary Edition. One of my friends is super into it, and they're excited for me. I'm about 14 hours in, just finished the first Liara mission (have done everything on the Citadel thats available right now, read all the codex entries I've found, etc). Classic leveling, level 21.
I like the story, but it's jarring how separated from the action it is. So far, I'm either on the Citadel having conversations, or on a planet shooting, and there's almost no middle ground (except the Fist mission, that had a lot of both). I wouldn't mind the separation, except they're extremely separate;
You have to go from the Citadel to the
(boarding loading screen) Normandy to the
(fancy zoom loading screen) map screen to
(zooming loading screen) a
(zooming loading screen) few
(zooming loading screen) planets to the
(landing loading screen) Mako to some driving THERE are some enemies,
then
You get back in the Mako and
(loading screen) back to the ship then
(fancy zoom loading screen) the map screen then
(slightly shorter, but lots of steps, loading screen) back to
(docking loading screen) the Citadel then
(loading screen or running, with elevator loading screens) the quest giver, then a 15-45 minute dialog (depending on whether you did something minor, or a major plot mover that has several scenes).
I haven't bounced off it yet, but some of the side missions are repetitive and tedious due to the above. I like maxing out my character levels as much as possible, so I want to do all the side stuff, but... yeah. It's kinda work.
You're jumping to a bit of a conclusion also; These differing results didn't happen of the course of years, or even months. They were separated mostly by weeks, and in some cases days. The test isn't reliable.
Also, I'm not trying to come up with a "gotcha". This isnt a debate. Best case is enough people inform you that these personality tests are malarkey that you do some self reflection. Worst case is that I wasted a bit of my time.
You're jumping to a bit of a conclusion also; These differing results didn't happen of the course of years, or even months. They were separated mostly by weeks, and in some cases days. The test isn't reliable.
Also, I'm not trying to come up with a "gotcha". This isnt a debate. Best case is enough people inform you that these personality tests are malarkey that you do some self reflection. Worst case is that I wasted a bit of my time.
First of all, you would agree that you can aggregate clusters of people based on how each answer a variety of probing questions, right?
Nope. I've taken that test a few times, got different results each time, same for a number of friends and colleagues. It's too vague, swings with mood and interpretation, and is wildly swayed by it's own popularity. It's about as accurate as a horoscope, and has as much to do with reality as a Hogwarts house (which, even in-universe, wasn't a reliable predictor of the character of a person).
Since your thesis is flawed, I didn't bother to do more than skim that wall of text, but what I saw also read like pseudo-scientific nonsense. You mentioned something about it "not being harmful"; Tell that to the people who - no shit - didn't get jobs in management or analytics because the sorting hat didn't like their 4-letter password.
Customers choosing one option over the others isn't a monopoly, it's capitalism at work. There are other players, they're just not as good. Not Valve's fault they can't get their shit together.
If you're talking about "I want to buy a PC game on the internet", there are tons of competitors (ignoring stores that only service one platform or only first party IPs); Microsoft, Humble, GoG, Amazon, Itch, and (technically, yes) Epic.
If you're talking about a service that offers the social aspects, storage (saves, etc), support, DRM, and hardware/software development (VR, handheld, OS, controller), there isn't any competition, but it's not because they bought everyone. They just develop a ton of things in house, and make an effort to continue to improvel and offer the best experience.
All Epic does is buy developers, hold games hostage, and offer constant freebies in hopes that they'll get enough of a marketshare to take the same cut that valve (and everyone else) does. They're losing boatloads of cash, and it's pretty much just Fortnight proping everything up. Their not mattering is entirely because they just aren't as good. If they really want to have a chance of competing, they need to stop slinging shit at valve in the news, hilariously complaining that Steam is somehow anti-competitive while they themselves do anti-consumer shit like buy dev studios and block access to games.
Basically, it boils down to them trying to "compete" with steam by either bribing devs to release exclusively on their store, or straight up buying devs and not releasing (or removing) games on steam. It's a shitty way to do business, and I won't encourage it by patronizing them.
GoG and Humble don't have to resort to that kind of BS. Hell, even Microsoft and Sony are opening up more to each other and PC (often via steam, though Microsoft also uses their own store).
Epic is running in the wrong direction, and it's not-at-all for the high-ideal BS they spout about Steam being a monopoly (especially since it isn't, not by a long shot). It's naked self-interest, and it disgusts me.
Whoa there, I never have - and never would - suggest that anything should be protected by a single factor. Where are you getting that?
Authy sucks. It's not just that the TOTP they send you might not be secure (SMS is easily exploited), it's been shown that they're leaking other personal data.
You don't have to cobble anything together. As you say, self-hosted BitWarden is a good option. As for your "glue", you should trust it more than a third party, since you know what went into yours, and its not a massive honeypot treasure trove.
Edit: I've been using "honeypot" wrong. It would actually be good if the hackers tried to hack one of those.
Who said you shouldn't be able to access your backups remotely?
A lot of tools allow you to set up google drive, drop box, whatever. Yes, this brings you back to cloud, but it's better to have a hacker wonder if some random google drive might have juicy auth data than know for sure that some SaaS platform absolutely does. Also, even if they got the file, it should be encrypted, and should be a massive pain to get into (at least long enough to change the passwords stored in the file).
The other (better) option is to have it back up to sftp (or similar), which you manage yourself on private servers. Normally this would be accessed through RSA and/or TOTP, but you can set up secure backup methods (combo any/all of; port knocking, long-password, human-knowable timed password, biometrics, security questions, other trusted humans that have some TOTP that can't open your storage alone, etc).
Don't give them your passwords and private keys, because you can never know of they're being stored responsibly, or who has access to them.
Don't give them your personal details, they don't care about protecting user anonymity.
Keep your keys and passwords in local, encrypted files, and generate your TOTPs locally.
"But that's not convenient!" - It's plenty convenient, find an app that supports your phone's biometrics. There are plenty on both Android and iPhone that also work in Windows/MacOS/Linux.
"What if I lose my phone?" - Keep your files backed up. If you don't do this, you deserve to get locked out. Fear of losing data is a good thing, it keeps you vigilant. Apathy gets you another of these stories.
There are plenty of apps that encrypt local storage for security keys and code generation. Stop allowing these tech bros to create honeypots catnip for hackers, and making you pay them for the privilege of being an easy target.
Edit: I've been using "honeypot" wrong. It would actually be good if the hackers tried to hack one of those.
It's not harmful to tell average people who run windows to disable updates, because you can't disable the updates as a single-license scrub.
(Theres usually some hacky bullshit to delay or block updates, but they break constantly and you have to keep finding new ones, because Microsoft thinks of their userbase as stupid babies who can't be trusted with their own hardware).
Also, you live in your own personal slice of Windows control with your hundreds/thousands of systems being managed with group policies. I have no doubt that you don't see issues, because your company chose a few models of laptop or desktop and know how they'll react to the updates. You can turn off the annoying shit, and choose specific updates at specific times. Microsoft doesn't want to piss off their corporate customers, especially the ones with massive spending contracts with Dell/HP/Lenovo.
Thing is, outside of you - and your groups of other corporate windows admins - the general user (with varied hardware/software configurations) don't have the safety of catching issues on a few test machines and delaying a deploy to the fleet, or even the option to delay updates at all, and they're screwed over constantly by random broken drivers, system setting that aren't respected between updates, and bloat/backdoors that you can't opt out of.
It is you who is being disingenuous, by suggesting that the windows update system has no flaws, because you operate in an extremely controlled environment with tons of safeguards and - ironically - way more autonomy.
Out of nowhere, I logged in like a month ago. Everything was still there (at least, my friends list was). Hadn't logged in since the early 2000s. A few weeks later, I heard it was being shuttered. Weird.
I just started Mass Effect 1 for the first time via Legendary Edition. One of my friends is super into it, and they're excited for me. I'm about 14 hours in, just finished the first Liara mission (have done everything on the Citadel thats available right now, read all the codex entries I've found, etc). Classic leveling, level 21.
I like the story, but it's jarring how separated from the action it is. So far, I'm either on the Citadel having conversations, or on a planet shooting, and there's almost no middle ground (except the Fist mission, that had a lot of both). I wouldn't mind the separation, except they're extremely separate;
then
I haven't bounced off it yet, but some of the side missions are repetitive and tedious due to the above. I like maxing out my character levels as much as possible, so I want to do all the side stuff, but... yeah. It's kinda work.