Shocker, self driving “taxi” service is a nuisance.

Almost like the solution to car based issues isn’t “more advanced cars”, but “less cars”.

I suppose in my mind AAA refers more to certain group of publishers and parent companies. A certain way of structuring companies and doing business. As supposed to a metric of the budget needed for a game.

That’s actually kind of shocking to see that indie games have surpassed AAA in revenue. I expected that was kind of inevitable given how uninspired and criticized modern AAA stuff is. But to actually see it already happened is cool.

It’s been shocking to see the amount of financial industry money and control at some of the bigger studio, and the way they talk about the future of the industry is disturbing. Although, if the money isn’t rolling in, or there are other parts of the market making more money, it makes me hopeful that finance will loosen it’s grip on these companies and let them make good projects rather than chasing arbitrary metrics.

This is a shame, I haven’t played a sims game in a while and I remember them quite fondly. The latest EA sims stuff has just been utter micro transaction slop, or at least last I checked. I hate to see a smaller studio that’s not working through one of bastard publishers get hit like this.

I’m a lot more patient with paradox than I am with other publishers. Their focus still seems on producing interesting games rather than chasing “maximized revenue”. There are realities to being a publisher though. if a studio is failing to produce something and your financials are limited, there’s only so much risk you can take on extending deadlines, and writing something off for a quick boost to financials is a alluring sirens call.

I have my issues with how paradox studios design is affected by their DLC model, but I don’t think there’s a better way to bring in ongoing revenue to fund further development.

It’s a mess, all of it, but it is a results of the context and system they exist with in, not necessarily the will of those making the calls at paradox. Paradox tends to do a better job of existing with in the system without making pure slop than other big publishers, so they have my patience for that.

Yah I suppose that’s true, broad cast was a thing, suppose that’s the equivalent for free to play or something.

I could definitely see how cotton could be used in some pretty heinous ways, maybe not by definition slurrs, but still. Given the historical context of the United States In particular.

I think the larger issue here is that you can’t compare music or TV shows to games, at least not in how people interact with them.

TV has always been a subscription model, the only difference with streaming is getting to choose when and what you watch. Games have always ether been pay per play or pay for a copy, with the notable exception of free to play or MMOs that require a subscription. Music is an odd case because it’s split between two models historically, radio and records/CDs.

I generally watch a show or movie once, maybe I’ll rewatch it if I really like it, similar for music. If i loose acces to it because a streaming service drops it, shame, but no big deal. But I’ll often go back and play a game for hundreds of hours, loosing acess to a game is a much bigger deal. People generally put a lot more time and effort in when they play a game, owning it makes more sense in that context. Personally, I don’t buy that many games over all, having access to thousands of titles doesn’t mean much if I’ll only ever play a handful. Something like Game pass is more expensive than the rate i buy new games at and loosing access to a game that i routinely play is a legitimate concern with a streaming model, ether because i stop paying the subscription or they decide to take a title off the service.

Ugh, this is all so pathetic.

Bending over backwards to accommodate the loudest idiots in the room because they complain when they face consequences for their actions.

I wanted a primary, we didn’t get that, and the media is pushing Harris hype really hard right now, just like they pushed for Clinton.

To me, this feels like 2016 all over again, that’s MY visceral reaction. Fucking weird to accuse some one of being an AI because they disagreed with your assessment.

I’d really like details on the kind of policy she would support.

Clinton did win the primary (even without super delegates), so “forced on democrats” is only true in a sense. She was certainly the preferred candidate of party leadership, and they did everything they legally could to help her win. Major center and center left news outlets also seemed to do everything they could to help her win.

But I don’t think harris is any better in that regard. She has not won a primary, Clinton at least managed to win the primary. Arguably Harris has been even more forced upon Democratic voters.

I suspect that this is going to become a huge issue and talking point later on.

I’ve seen Harris put out plenty of her own BS. equivocating and avoiding question she doesn’t want to answer. Again, I want to see real commitment to policy I care about. Not showpersonship, Fingerspitzengefühl or rhetorical capability.

I don’t care much for good personality in politicians, plenty of politicians with great personalities have gone on to do awful things, plenty with awful personalities have done great things. I care far more about the issues they campaign on and policies they’ve pushed through in the past.

Haris seemed to drop and pick up policy positions during the 2020 primary purely based on what her team thought would advance polling numbers. Which makes me skeptical of any claimed positions without concrete evidence of commitment.

I will vote for Harris in that case, but I will not be happy about it. I’d rather be voting for Biden, my mind could be changed on Harris, but she has not earned that yet. After the threat of trump is off the table, the party has a lot of work to do if they want my support and Participation again beyond that.

Honestly, I prefer Biden to her. Haris’s historical political positions are questionable at best to me personally and I don’t trust her in the slightest to implement progressive policies or challenge corporate power. She has co-signed a lot of letters, and sponsored a few bills that sounded good, but never when there was a real chance of them passing, and I’ve seen very little from her that would convince me that was anything but performative.

I’m not crazy about Biden and I think he gave up far to much on a lot of the bills he managed to get through, not to mention that his foreign policy had been a mixed bag, to say the least. But, I’d still rather him be in charge of things.

This is my biggest reservation about the whole replace Biden thing. Suddenly the party is worried about Biden’s electability now? Not when they could have run primaries and had voter input? To me it feels like they always wanted to pick another candidate, but they didn’t want to run a public primary campaign. Perhaps it’s because they wanted to give the right wing propaganda machine less time to demonize the chosen candidate, or maybe insiders at the party were worried the voters in primaries might choose someone they didn’t approve of.

The first seems… I dunno, somewhat reasonable? The second ticks me off though. This all stinks, especially because most of the left of the party is still voicing support for keeping biden. If the party wants to replace Biden with Harris’s they should have had a primary about it, and not just slipped it in last moment.

I had an idea recently of describing these chatbots as holograms.

Complex ideas and concepts are being flattened. Depth, a dimension if you will, in the form of context and conception, is being removed.

Like how a 3D object gets flattened on to a 2D plane, a hologram.

Signalis mentioned?

Not the person you’re replying to, and I don’t have personal experience with Bazzite but, essentially, it is gaming oriented distribution built on fedora.

It has a lot of stuff built in to help it run games well, including the right graphics drivers. Fedora is one of the major Linux distributions along side Arch, Debian (which Ubuntu is derived from), and others.

There are a few other distributions that do much of the same regarding graphic card drivers, but built on one of the other major distributions. For instance PoP_OS! (Based on Ubuntu and thus Debian).

So bazzite is good for running games, that’s what it is built to do, but other distros do that as well, it depends what flavor of Linux you want it to be built on.

Essentially. It is often held up as a good “gaming” distribution because it has AMD and Nvidia graphics card drivers built in, I suspect there is more to it than that but I’ve never used it personally.

I mean, base game FNV ran fine for me. Which is kind of funny because my friend who was playing it for the first time was having a bunch of issues with it constantly crashing while playing on windows 10 and I had to walk them through getting fan patches and the like running.

yah, it’s a bummer, but most people who play games on PC aren’t playing such tittles. The current online player count for league is about 2.5 million as supposed to the total steam active player count of 25 million. A lot of people play league, but, like, it’s hardly a problem that everyone has.

Good to know for the future.

i mean, basically everything works so long as it doesn’t use certain anti cheat systems. But knowing what they play would have been more useful for the sake of discussion.

Yah, I had to manually install the driver in mint for the nvidia card, and had to change a setting in the bios to get the system to even see the card. But it works fine other than that. I’m considering going with an AMD card next time I get a computer, largely because I hear they work a lot better with Linux.

I think Microsoft has been trying to build towards cloud computing of everything on user devices.

Games pass seems to have been them building towards a Google stadia type system. Getting a large user base of monthly subscribers used to Spotify like game experience, and then slowly running more and more off of the user device.

The contraction of studios, internal fighting, and this price hike makes me think they’re is some internal opposition to go all in on this, even as they go full speed ahead on the windows side of things.

Proton is steam’s compatibility tool, these “medals” basically indicate how well a game works through it. Platnium and gold mean work without troubleshooting. Silver means a little tinkering with settings. Bronze means it can work with effort, and borked means it just doesn’t work.

So, 84% working with 0 effort, and 11% working with light tinkering.

The post is kind of incomprehensible if you’re not already familiar with proton and the troubleshooting website proton DB.

Are you using steam and proton, or Lutris and wine? I’d suggest trying the other if one isn’t working. That’s helped me in the past

Of the 17 games I’ve played over the past 9~ months since installing mint Linux and steam proton, only 2 base games have had issues and 2 games I’ve had trouble modding. I think it’s a discussion worth having so let me go through the few issues I’ve had in regards to games on Mint Linux (Ubuntu based). 2 problems were resolved without issue, 1 was a qualified success, and one I gave up on trying to mod.

To be clear this is all on an intel Intel 7700HQ CPU and nvidia GTX1060 GPU. It’s not the newest or top of the line anymore but it’s still plenty capable.

Foxhole: there was a week about a 2 months ago where I had to launch it through lutris because proton was having an issue with loading in to the map. As far as I could gather, the devs had updated shaders or some libraries to fix a glitch with small trains hovering at max map height, and this caused issue with proton being unable to load shaders. Using lutris (which I think uses wine?) fixed the issue and the devs fixed the issue with proton about a week later.

Helldivers 2: extremely bad frame rates and straight up locking up the computer part way through the intro or tutorial. I think it was an issue with the graphics card memory just getting filled up and not clearing. I don’t remember exactly what I did to fix it, but it involved caping the FPS at 60 FPS. It works now but only with low settings and I still get a bad frame rates when the map gets crowded.

Then there was modding games that had some issue. Both of them were older games that relied on patchers.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines: Worked great as the base game. The patcher for the unofficial fan patch was a .exe though, so I added it to steam and ran it with proton, it couldn’t find the game files and I had to manually direct it to the files in proton’s mock windows file structure, but after that it patched and worked fine from there.

Fallout: New Vegas: The base game ran flawlessly (well as flawlessly as base game New Vegas can run), same procedure as above, opened patcher and mod manger by adding to steam and opening with proton, directed them to the weirdly placed files, but this time they didn’t recognize the game files and refused to patch. I fiddled with it for a bit, but gave up because I didn’t care that much.

Again I want to emphasize that these are 4 out of 17 games, only one of which had persistent issues, and one that I gave up on trying to mod. None straight up wouldn’t run and none were unplayable after a bit of tinkering. This is about the same rate of tinkering I was doing back in windows to get things running the way I wanted with games.

There is a lot of work left to do here, but playing games on Linux is absolutely doable even if you’re not particularly tech savvy. if you don’t have the patience to trouble shoot, you will be fine 9 times out of 10. I’m more tech savvy than the average bear, but I don’t work in tech nor do I have a formal education.

Any controller that has asymmetrical joysticks. I get they’re all copying Xbox, Xbox was wrong.

If you’re using one to look around and one to move, having them require your hands be in two different positions is dumb.

I think it’s very fun, but a bit light in content at the moment, understandable as it is in early access.

The ground work and mechanics are clearly there already. It needs fleshing out, a lot really. But the visions is amazing, it feels like what I thought AOE2 was when I was 12

I mean, yah, there’s no libs to trigger on right wing sites. And what’s the point of spouting right wing rhetoric if you’re not making someone visibly angry about it?

Also, twitter and Facebook let them all back in, so why go to the shitty knock offs?

I think the easiest solution to this is just not to have all the ”smart” features in the first place.

In regards to reducing emissions, I get that these smart features can increase efficiency, but, does that offset the emissions of manufacturing the additional hardware needed? most people won’t set up things like load shifting, or live in areas where variable priced power just isn’t a thing, so that efficiency is only really realized by a fraction of the units.

Things like heat pump heaters are incredibly efficient systems, even without the smart features. I think we would be better served by focusing on getting these made as efficiently, repairably, and cheaply as possible. And then getting them in to as many hands as possible. Packing them full of smart features will just diminish the longevity of the equipment, increase the cost per unit, and make them less accessible to the average person.

The problem is, this isn’t really up to consumers or even companies, as alluded to in blog post. Investors push for the inclusion of such features because they’re ether convinced it’s what must be done to compete, opens avenues for future subscription fees, or just because they’re invested in the company that makes the parts that enable the features.

It’s a structural issue in how investment and funding is done, and regulation will only do so much to counter the natural tendencies of the business world. We need different ways to get investment in to the production of these kinds of products.

I see a lot of potential for electric aircraft for short haul flights between regional airports, or for distribution of cargo between hubs, but not in any sort of dispersed capacity. Hub to warehouse cargo? Sure! Delivery to doorsteps or air taxi? hell no.

Anything that isn’t flying along a designate air route between already establish large volume facilities is just fundamentally impractical due to the safety issues with aircraft. No amount of new tech will solve how fundamentally dangerous a 4 ton hunk of metal going at 160MPH going anywhere but a designated route away from populated areas is.

Flying cars exist, you just need a pilot license to operate one, that is not something that will go away any time soon, and for good reason.

Everyone driving at 60MPH in 2D is dangerous enough as it is, 160MPH in 3D is way more dangerous. It’s not an issue of technology, it is an issue of the fundamental impracticality of the concept.

News outlets make a fraction of the money they did 3 decades ago, people having previously payed directly for a newspaper. Now they basically have to rely on web page ad revenue and subscriptions which most people won’t sign up for since they can get the news for free somewhere else.

So news outlets understaff to cut costs, leading to more mistakes and less due diligence. journalists get under paid, so independently wealthy people have an easier time taking the positions and pushing personal agendas. And news outlets need outside funding to stay afloat, making them beholden to the interests of those outside interests.

So yah, the quality is worse, objectivity is down, sensationalism is up to drive clicks, and they’re pushing agendas and world views way harder than they used to.

He was sued for miss use of company profits, not for failing to maximize profits.

He took profits and was reinvesting in new plants and cutting car prices, while also ending dividend payments to do so. That was the crux of the case, ending dividend payments despite having money to continue paying them. This case is routinely held up as an example of shareholder primacy but has been dismissed as an example of such by most modern thinkers In the field, in large part because the court also ruled that he had final say on how to proceed with company operation. Increasing worker pay was not the issue, ending dividends to make capital investment was.

Edit: also, I should clarify, he was the majority share holder, and the minority shareholders could thus not replace him with someone willing to pay dividends. He was not being sued for failing to seek profits, he was being sued for holding those profits hostage from other shareholders.

This is a common misconception based on an argument put forward my Milton Friedman. It’s based on legal cases where CEOs were taken to court for knowingly defrauding shareholders for their own personal gain (say, selling all of a companies assets of the company to a different company the ceo owns privately for a single dollar).

Friedman argued that these cases set precedent that meant all CEO were legally obligated to maximize shareholder value and could be held legally accountable for not doing so. Friedman was wrong about this, like many other things he said, as he was not a lawyer, nor a particularly good economist. No CEO has even been successfully sued for “failing to maximize shareholder value” despite some people taking Friedman’s work to heart and trying to do so.

This is definitely realistic and not an over valuation based on AI-hype investor brain rot. Like, they’re a fucking graphics card company. Like, sure graphics cards can do some cool linear algebra, and linear algebra can do some cool things… but I’m sorry, they’re not going to be earning as much as Apple or Microsoft, companies that sell the whole rest of the computer to people and/or the plurality of software that runs on it.

Reminder than most other browsers are based on chromium, and Google can probably break ad blockers on them if they want to.

It’s also a chromium based browser so good chance it will loose any ad blocking ability if google decides to play hardball.