I see that Technology Review now publishes Chinese propaganda fluff pieces (complete with equally blatant and clumsy appeals to the “Global South”, one of Beijing’s latest global influence campaigns).

There’s not a single word in this “article” about the fact that this model is heavily censored.

Couldn’t have happened to nicer people. Reap what you sow.

If you’ve ever had to deal with a Gamergate dogpiling campaign, you are probably high as a kite on schadenfreude right now. You are probably knocking back a huge mug of crocodile tears.

Ayup.

Biden was the most liberal President the US has ever had, so that’s not really necessary. He’s not doing it to stick it to Biden, but instead because he’s a racist asshole doing racist asshole things.

Makes sense. I didn’t believe the claim for the article for a second that only the cloud-hosted version would be censored. In fact, they didn’t actually claim that “only” the cloud version was censored, but instead weaseled their way around saying that they only tested that version.

Is it able to generate text on Winnie the Pooh or how free Taiwan is without crashing though?

Sounds familiar. Been there countless times: One paragraph planned, one “War and Peace” written.

Thanks for the detailed reply!

What an unbelievably ignorant thing to say. Why are you downplaying this?

How’s the AI now?

As a more portable and budget-friendly alternative, consider a small emulation console. I’m very happy with my Anbernic RG35XXSP. Since the screen folds like on the original GBA SP, it’s absolutely tiny and fits into any pocket - without having to worry that the screen might scratch. Configure it correctly and you can close the screen to suspend games.

This kind of system would also make for a great first gaming device once your kid is around five years old.

The funniest thing is that they are carrying water for imperialist nations while complaining about imperialism. Peak parody.

Have they tried subscriptions? I’ve heard it’s the next big deal after ads.

Has BG3’s performance on the Deck improved? I’ve heard of issues people had in later chapters.

Not quite. For starters, going by open bug reports and various forum comments, suspend and resume appear to be unreliable and buggy, especially with Proton - and based on developer reaction to at least one of the bug reports, there aren’t even any plans to fix this. This is an essential feature on a handheld gaming device, which means that this OS might not suitable for this device category at the moment.

Bazzite has potential, but it’s nowhere near as mature as Steam OS on the Steam Deck - and it might never be, because it’s meant to work on anything, lacking the close hardware-software relationship that Steam OS on the Deck has.

Also, since it’s using a different flavor of Linux as Steam OS as its foundation (Fedora vs. Arch), I would expect random games to not work or exhibit bugs that aren’t present on Steam OS. With Valve’s Steam Deck verified label, you can be reasonably certain that a game will work, but you can’t with other Linux distros. I’m basing this on reports on ProtonDB and from developers who have released games for popular distros, but then got notified of bugs that only appear on less common distros (read: not Ubuntu or Steam OS).

This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a great time with Bazzite. It might work just fine on your hardware, but there’s no guarantee this will be the case for everyone.

Good riddance. I hope the EU follows suit and soon. Von der Leyen has indicated that this is on the table:

https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-ban-in-eu-is-not-excluded-von-der-leyen-says/

In case people still think it’s just another social media app and that it’s only being banned, because “China bad”:

https://www.nullpt.rs/reverse-engineering-tiktok-vm-1

I have only ever seen this kind of obfuscation with malware before. This fits unconfirmed (but credible) reports that ByteDance will not permit any non-Chinese employees to even look at the backend in their foreign offices and instead fly in experts from China. That’s not normal.

They have always argued that emulating a current system is illegal, which makes no legal sense. Either every kind of emulation is or none.

There is a life hack, which is so effective it might result in you lying down too much: If there is a wall right next to you, you can attach a basic monitor arm to it. I then added a tablet VESA mount, which allows me to either use it with a tablet or a small portable monitor that you can plug anything into, including games consoles, a normal desktop PC or the Steam Deck through a single USB-C cable - it’ll also get charged through the screen. Add a controller or mouse and keyboard combo and you’re golden.

This is also by far the most comfortable way to read ebooks, using a tablet with an OLED screen, ideally, with white or grey on black text and brightness set to near zero (in a dark room) and a mouse for scrolling.

Key to this is perfect placement of the monitor arm on the wall, since you can’t easily change it after having drilled the holes, so make sure it’s exactly where you want it to be. If there is no wall next to you, there are also various significantly more expensive articulated arms that attach to the bed, but they tend to cost hundreds instead of the ten bucks or so I paid for the wall mount.

The uncanny valley remains, but as a palette cleanser, I do enjoy looking at expensive games every once in a while. It’s like walking through a film set that clearly took months and lots of blood, sweat and tears by the artists who created it. For as much as I have always loved scrappy Indie games, this kind of splendor is one thing they can rarely provide.

Intel is not a good idea if you want to play older games or emulators though, due to poor driver support for both.

I should warn you, the Steam Deck is incredibly bulky and heavy compared to the tiny 3DS - and even in my large hands, it never feels particularly comfortable, despite the good shape of the grips and with a thin rubber case I added to it. Definitely not the right system for you if you have weak wrists, simply due to its substantial mass. Using it for longer periods of time without resting it my your lap is not very pleasant, but resting it in your lap means I have to look down, which can result in neck strain. Lying down meanwhile, it’s a bit too heavy for the weight to rest on the elbows as well. Placing it on a pillow or bag (while making sure that none of the vents are obstructed) helps though, to the point that you can get fully immersed in playing, not thinking about the device at all, even on a busy train.

For an hour to an hour and a half, none of this is problematic, of course. There are also workarounds: Connecting it to an external display that has the right height can circumvent the issue, including those USB C display glasses that create a large virtual screen in front of you (haven’t tried those, but heard good things in combination with this device).

There are also much smaller, thinner and lighter alternatives to the Deck, but none of them have the advantage of being a fully integrated design like the Deck, where every aspect of the hard- and software was developed together and tuned to compliment each other and none of them have the complete backing of the largest game distribution network behind it. Most of them are running Windows, which, while having superior games compatibility, is not suited for a portable gaming device at all, lacking for example the ability to reliably suspend and resume games. With the Lenovo Legion Go S as the first, expect there to be more and more devices running Steam OS, but those are unlikely to have the same level of compatibility as the device this version of the OS was created for.

If emulation is what you’re looking for, the Deck is a powerhouse (up to and including Nintendo Switch is no problem), but not the only game in town. Older console games in particular run well even on very basic devices. Maybe all you need is a controller cradle for your phone, if you don’t already have one, or a cheap and cheerful emulation console like one those tiny things Anbernic is having a great deal of success with lately.

Nintendo overestimated the intelligence of their customers with the Wii U. They won’t make that mistake ever again.

Not that they are alone in this. There’s a reason why the Xbox 360 was called the Xbox 360 and not the Xbox 2. Microsoft didn’t want the second Xbox console to appear a generation older by name than the upcoming Playstation 3. Nintendo at least don’t have that problem, because the Switch 2 is in a market of its own and won’t be compared to the Playstation 5 by the vast majority of those interested in buying it.

Nintendo went even further than that:

https://tech4gamers.com/nintendo-linking-emulator-trafficking/

And they absolutely have said that emulation is illegal in the past:

https://www.slashgear.com/1572585/are-video-game-emulators-illegal-answer/

On their website, they name emulators in a list of “illegal activities” they want people to snitch on:

To report ROM sites, emulators, Game Copiers, Counterfeit manufacturing, or other illegal activities

https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/50131/~/how-to-report-potential-infringements-of-nintendo-products

Remote control tech support, of course. Allows primary schoolers to gain some practical job experience and contribute to the family income.

Twitter and Facebook are full of American propaganda

I see the Whataboutism Olympics are off to a good start this year.

Why is this always the only defense people have when they bend over backwards to write apologia for dictatorships like China and Russia?

Have you ever thought about why international TikTok is the way it is?

Au contraire, I hope it does, because this kind of shit needs to be punished.

There’s a singleplayer mod of Tarkov, by the way. Might be the safest way of playing this game.

This is entirely unsurprising. China, while being much weaker militarily (as well as in every other way) and having no chance of catching up at any point this century, is the main geopolitical rival of the US and a major destabilizing factor in Asia, a region that has become an increasingly large focus of the US as it slowly disentangles itself from Europe (and Europe from it). For all of its follies (LLMs and image generation mainly), AI in general and AI chips in particular are of enormous and growing military, scientific and economic importance.

If there is one major war that is increasingly likely to happen, it’s going to be a direct clash between China and the US over Taiwan, possibly very soon (likely hoping to exploit the chaos and incompetence of the coming Trump administration) given the preparation we are starting to see at the mainland Chinese coast facing Taiwan. We are also already seeing AI-powered drones being deployed in Ukraine totally changing the nature of warfare (like a large number of German drones recently supplied to Ukraine that can identify and attack targets on their own without any human input, making them jam-proof) and, as mentioned in the article, AI chips can be used for a wide variety of military-related tasks, so it’s unsurprising that America is restricting supply of a critical technology to the one country that will most likely start a war with them soon, similar to how the aggressive expansionist Japanese Empire was heavily sanctioned prior to Pearl Harbor. China appears to be hell-bent on repeating the mistakes Japan made, including possibly by trying to perform a - what they hope to be, but is unlikely to work - crippling first strike on US military assets at the start of the invasion. Preventing them from using AI technology more advanced than what the US has access to in any of this is vital in maintaining the considerable gap in capabilities between the Chinese and American military.

Even if China suddenly had the most advanced AI technology in the world (which is highly unlikely to ever happen, given the inherent R&D disadvantages totalitarian dictatorships suffer from), the gap would still be massive, but no nation is interested in a fair fight or letting the enemy close any gap in capabilities, so the US will be using any chance they can get to keep things unbalanced in their favor, including their vastly superior soft power. China is in the unfortunate position of being far more reliant on the US (and the global trade that is enabled by the American hegemony) than the other way around, which means they can only ever react to American actions against them. Yes, they control a large supply of the planet’s easily accessible rare Earth reserves, which are vital to chip making, but they can’t afford to cut the world off from it given the increasingly dire state of their economy that no amount of falsified figures can hide at this point, not even domestically, so any export restrictions they can enact in response will always be little more than attempts at saving face, an irrational concept that is driving too much of their decision making to their own detriment.

Before I sound too authoritative on this complex topic, this is just my personal opinion based on what little I know. Feel free to pick this apart.

Thanks!

Wreckfest has been big for the last week or so. The only reason why I picked it up again in the first place (after having only played about an hour of it before, mostly on the Steam Deck) was that I got a new controller (from 8bitdo), more or less replacing my worn out Xbone controller, and the idea was that I wanted to test it properly with a proper racing game - and proper racing it is! Hard and punishing, but not really unfair. I’ve been a fan of Finish developer Bugbear ever since the first Flatout (which this is a clear spiritual successor to), so it’s not exactly surprising that it finally clicked with me.

Driving physics in particular are sublime. Even with just a controller, you can feel the mass of the vehicle shifting around, you notice tires losing grip as springs are decompressed on top of a hill. Add to that the second best crash physics after BeamNG and delightfully aggressive AI drivers and the end result is pure carnage. There is some frustration (most races are decided in the first three corners and a single mistake can eliminate any chance of victory at the second highest and highest difficulty), later races are getting too long (since it’s not particularly interesting to lead for five laps after having basically won the race in the first lap) and the gameplay surrounding the races themselves is bare-bones to say the least, with a very basic campaign, upgrade and leveling system and some live service (ultra)lite challenges sprinkled on top, but it does the job.

There are destruction derbies (fun, but laughably easy, all of them) and wacky events like racing a tiny three wheeler against a field of school buses, but the majority of those are really more fun in theory than actually playing them, since most of these unusual vehicles are just slow, fragile and control purely. Worst example so far: RV racing. Nothing fun or interesting about that and the Top Gear segment they copied this from wasn’t exactly a high point in the series either. Normal racing is downright exhilarating though at the best of times, when you just edge out a victory on a slippery, brilliantly designed dirt track, worn out tires barely holding on, opponents trying to spin you out in every corner. I hope there’s more of that in the upcoming sequel. I have not tried the multiplayer yet, but I might in the future. Graphics are excellent - save for the complete lack of driver animations - and there’s a banging soundtrack that would be perfect if it had less screamo, but that’s just my taste. The soundtrack doesn’t quite reach the same heights as Flatout 1 and 2’s, but it’s close.

This really applies to the whole game. It’s not just nostalgia, since I replayed both relatively recently. Wreckfest has better driving physics than its predecessors (or really most other racing games), but that’s about it. The wackiness is more grounded, with plausible or almost plausible and no strictly unrealistic events that involve the driver being hurled into targets anymore, but this also means that, since there is really no “innovation” outside of ultra-basic leveling and daily events compared to the predecessors that it feels like they didn’t really have any ideas and were just doing it by the numbers. Bugbear are masters at the craft of designing tracks, vehicles and the physics that tie it all together, but outside of the immediate racing action, there really is nothing of note there. A campaign system that was below average 21 years ago is now hopelessly outdated. I’m not saying that they should try and make a dirty, ratty version of Forza Horizon with more of those lovely banged up real cars that handle so brilliantly, but… - okay, they totally should, that would be amazing! Anyway, 10/10 racing, 6/10 other events, 3/10 surrounding stuff for a weighed average of 7.99999/10. Don’t check if my math is correct.

Okay, and I also played a few more hours of Balatro (more hours than Wreckfest, I mean), because, well, I was forced to. Yup. I didn’t do it willingly, I swear! Is there a “Balatro players anonymous”? Asking for a friend.

The controller I mentioned (8BitDo Ultimate 2C Wired) is great, by the way. It’s a simple wired-only thing (there’s also a Bluetooth variant) that closely mimics the Xbone controller, except for two additional small shoulder buttons that I haven’t found any use for yet, as well as a turbo and remap feature that allegedly works without any software (don’t care about either, so I haven’t tried them). PC and Android only, just FYI. It has the best sticks and triggers I’ve ever used (both Hall effect, so I hope they’ll last) and the buttons and d-pad are also outstanding, despite this thing costing less than half as much as a first party controller. It feels exactly as solid as an original controller, even down to the plastic making the same noises at precisely the same level of grip strength when some hick from outta town spins ya out in the last corner of tha race for some goddarn reason, which is one hell of an achievement for the price. I’ve already had a Super Famicon style Bluetooth controller from the same company for a few years, so I knew their stuff was high quality. The only aspect about it that might put some people off is that for some reason, it’s only available in bright, almost garish pastel colors, but I quickly got over that. There is a branded Black Myth Wukong version with more muted colors, but it didn’t mention having vibration on any of the spec sheets on any site, so I avoided that one.

Which texture packs are you using?

He can’t legally own a gun and has to provide a DNA sample. Still barely anything, but I would imagine the first thing is annoying and the second - given that he’s a rapist - is terrifying him a little. I wonder how many cold cases there are with his DNA in the evidence locker.

I just realized these are just from this trial alone.

I’m not a fan of burning down the house to catch spiders approach. Equally slow, gradual, boring and tedious democratic change has the best track record in history, whereas even successful revolutions result in ordinary people suffering the most for many years until things improve, if they ever improve.

In other words: Organize and vote, don’t fantasize about who to put up against the wall in which order.

Can’t wait to be called a fascist for this comment too.

WTF?

where you can die from a wasp in your house if you leave the doors open all the time

Funny how they managed to sum up everything I hate about games like these in one line of a patch note.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

Shitting on company time is fine though.

What makes you so sure whatever will follow it is going to be any better?

They are steaming ahead towards becoming another Sega at full power - or in other words, as their consoles are failing to attract customers, they are transforming themselves - intentionally or not - into just another third party publisher in the gaming sector.