luciferofastora
@luciferofastora@lemmy.zip
- Comment on 'It even breaks my heart a bit': Denuvo pushes back on its haters, says Steam forums are a 'very toxic, very hostile environment' 5 days ago:
The willingness to be responsible for consequences does factor in. If you round the corner and crash into someone, you probably didn’t intend to, but whether you’ll be an ass about it and yell at the other person or whether you’ll apologise and check they’re alright makes a difference.
In a perfect-information-setting, intent equals result: If I know what my actions will cause and continue to carry them out, the difference between “primary objective” and “accepted side-effect” becomes academic. But in most cases, we don’t have perfect information.
I feel like the intent-approach better accounts for the blind spots and unknowns. I’ll try to construct two examples to illustrate my reeasoning. Consider them moral dilemmas, as in: arguing around them “out of the box” misses the point.
Ex. 1:
A person is trying to dislodge a stone from their shoe, and in doing so leans on a transformator box to shake it out. You see them leaning on a trafo and shaking and suspect that they might be under electric shock, so you try to save them by grabbing a nearby piece of wood and knocking them away from the box. They lose balance, fall over and get a concussion.
Are you to blame for their concussion, because you knocked them over without need, despite your (misplaced) intention to save them?Ex. 2:
You try to kill someone by shooting them with a handgun. The bullet misses all critical organs, they’re rushed to a hospital and in the process of scanning for bullet fragments to remove, a cancer in the earliest stages is discovered and subsequently removed. The rest of the treatment goes without complications and they make a speedy and full recovery.
Does that make you their saviour, despite your intent to kill them?In both cases, missing information and unpredictable variables are at play. In the first, you didn’t know they weren’t actually in danger and couldn’t predict they’d get hurt so badly. In the second, you probably didn’t know about the tumor and couldn’t predict that your shot would fail to kill them. In both cases, I’d argue that it’s your intent that matters for moral judgement, while the outcome is due to (bad) “luck” in the sense of “circumstances beyond human control coinciding”. You aren’t responsible for the concussion, nor are you to credit with saving that life.
- Comment on 'It even breaks my heart a bit': Denuvo pushes back on its haters, says Steam forums are a 'very toxic, very hostile environment' 6 days ago:
I was responding to the “Look, they’re all nice people” defense you quoted, not contradicting you. I agree with you in principle.
I don’t consider “misguided” a valid defence.
My view of morality is largely centered on intent, so “I thought it would be a good thing” is a valid defence (though there is also a degree of responsibility to check assumptions; if you never made any effort to check if it actually is a good thing, that’s negligence)
So it’s hard to be good when your salary depends on you being bad.
…and by extension, when your livelihood depends on you being bad, yes. Not everyone’s livelihood depends on their salary, but for many people it does. If it’s hard to find a job that can pay the bills, I don’t fault people for the human reflex of justifying bad things to yourself in the name of survival.
(But if they do have a choice and choose to enrich themselves at the expense of others, they’re obviously pricks - just saying this might not apply to all the devs involved here).
- Comment on 'It even breaks my heart a bit': Denuvo pushes back on its haters, says Steam forums are a 'very toxic, very hostile environment' 6 days ago:
You can be a great person and still write garbage software. Whether you’re just doing it because you need money or whether you’re misguided and think it’s actually good, that doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person (and remember: It’s hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it).
Doesn’t make the software less garbage.
- Comment on Trump cosplaying 1 week ago:
…
wat
I understand that you’re quoting. This is no criticism of your comment. I consider myself fairly adept at imitating the mental gymnastics. But here, I’m at a loss.
- Comment on Trump cosplaying 1 week ago:
I’m only a chapter in, but found the section on conventionalism curious. It may explain why they take such issue with being called “weird”: If they value their perception of being “normal”, “weird” isn’t just an insult used against people you don’t like, it’s an attack on a principal personality trait.
- Comment on Trump cosplaying 1 week ago:
wat
why
How would you even frame that as a favour?
- Comment on Players are now less "accepting" that games will be fixed, say Paradox, after "underestimating" the reaction to Cities: Skylines 2's performance woes 2 weeks ago:
I mean, your counterexample is already the epitome of exploitation, so I’m not sure citing it would exonerate Paradox here :D
- Comment on Players are now less "accepting" that games will be fixed, say Paradox, after "underestimating" the reaction to Cities: Skylines 2's performance woes 2 weeks ago:
I mean, your counterexample is already the epitome of exploitation, so I’m not sure citing it would exonerate Paradox here :D
- Comment on Proton is the Future of PC gaming. But how does it work? [Gardiner Bryant, YouTube] 3 weeks ago:
I do think that we should continue to encourage developers to create native builds when they can
Yes
My problem is calling people who want Linux native games misguided or wrong. I really don’t think that’s helpful.
I’d prefer games to be compatible natively too, so I definitely count myself among them. I think it’s an issue of visibility, the usual “loud and visible minority”. A thousand calm “I would prefer games were natively compatible” just don’t stick out as much as one aggressive “Fuck every company that doesn’t make their games natively compatible, and fuck you for supporting them by buying their game”.
I just don’t think Proton is the worst thing to happen to Linux Gaming because it allows developers to target alternative platforms without having to actually support them. This is where my personal impression of “misguided” (again, probably a loud minority) native game advocates comes from: Platform Inertia works because people stick with the platforms holding things they like, and the things on those platforms stay there because their prime audience is there. If the extra effort (=cost) of supporting Linux doesn’t match a sufficient uptake (=revenue), profit-controlled companies won’t do it (as they can’t justify it to their shareholders).
This isn’t just an issue with the evil corpos, but with the whole system itself. Screaming at consumers to change their habits won’t make much of a dent either there. Compelling people to change rarely has lasting results, if any. Better to invite them over and make the switch attractive enough to break that inertia. Only then can we meaningfully challenge the status quo.
It comes down to strategy accounting for ideological passion, an understanding of social and economic dynamics and patience. By and large, I think many understand this. Proton may not be what we want, but it’s an ally in achieving our goal. When we get to the point where it’s no longer “Underdog Linux against the near monopoly of Windows”, we can push harder (and honestly, I don’t think Valve would be terribly upset if Proton became obsolete and saved them resources).
We shouldn’t stop asking for native builds, so long as we do it mindfully and respectfully.
- Comment on Proton is the Future of PC gaming. But how does it work? [Gardiner Bryant, YouTube] 3 weeks ago:
I maintain that Proton could be a gateway to open the Linux market and create a sufficient share of revenue that, if and when it is shutdown, it’s lucrative enough to make natively compatible games.
It’s a bit of a deadlock issue: Most Devs will only develop for Linux if they see there’s money to be made there and they can estimate it will be worth the effort. But we need games on Linux for that to happen.
Proton is a stop-gap solution to provide the latter and lower the barrier on both ends: I can play games on Linux and devs have an easier time shipping their games to a Linux audience. I hope long term, the major frameworks will feature defaults that allow devs to easily do so without relying on Steam, but until then, Proton is better than nothing.
- Comment on No further questions your honour 3 weeks ago:
Halsin noises in the distance
- Comment on I have the weirdest aesthetic preferences 4 weeks ago:
Here here, have some Chai. Take a break and
everything.should.be(‘fine’) - Comment on I have the weirdest aesthetic preferences 4 weeks ago:
that’s more of a web design distinction
I think that was the point of “someone rescue me from frontend dev” - if they’re doing so much frontend design work that they instinctively get pedantic about padding vs. margin, they need help.
- Comment on Clipped it blud 4 weeks ago:
rizz is also used to mean flirt. So “I like you” “Are you flirting with me?”
- Comment on Aldi announces wage increases up to $23 an hour; hiring thousands of employees 1 month ago:
Hereabouts*, the lanes each have a sign with their number. Glows red = closed, glows green = open. Super convenient, and I’ve seen it across multiple store chains, so it’s not like it’s only one store doing it.
*Southern Germany, observed across different cities, though I can’t vouch that it is universal
- Comment on Pokémon 1 month ago:
I see more atheistmemes on All than I do religious stuff.
This is a joke, most likely, given the sub and context.
- Comment on Launches 1 month ago:
But we gave him a nice little prison stay to write his manifesto in! Surely he learned his lesson and won’t attempt to overthrow democracy again, right?
…right?
- Comment on STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor gets Denuvo DRM removed, plus performance improvements 1 month ago:
Fallen Order ran well for me on my potato (GTX 970 + some 4th gen i5) back when I played it. I’m not sure how my new rig will handle Survivor, but I’m starting to be cautiously optimistic.
- Comment on Steam Beta adds new shortcut key to save a clip of recent gameplay 1 month ago:
That’s not even correct. I said “not all that useful” and then “next to useless”. Never “absolutely useless”.
It’s a simplification to condense the core point:
People say “I like this! This is useful!”
You say “It’s not all that useful”
I reply “It is to me”
You double down “next to useless”
I say “For you maybe, but for me it’s very useful”The essence is that it’s not very useful to you, but it is for others. Yet you steamroll over that (subjective) take to double down on how shitty it is.
The whole point of this feature is to provide something built into Steam that works without a whole bunch of fiddling like other recording software.
It does. It’s a built-in utility to record gameplay clips. That’s neat.
It currently fails at that on Linux because the implementation of it is half-assed.
It’s lacking one feature, yes, but I’d not call that a failure if plenty of people seem fine without it.
That is my position.
Rich, coming from “You’re wrong when you say it’s useful”.
End of conversation.
“I’m right, you’re wrong and I refuse to hear otherwise”
Alright then. I figured you were genuinely confused and thought maybe seeing the other perspective could help clear things up. Guess you’d have to actually look for that to work.
- Comment on Steam Beta adds new shortcut key to save a clip of recent gameplay 1 month ago:
Your opinion is posited as an absolute: “This is useless” suggests you consider it useless in general. People arguing otherwise are challenging that general claim by providing examples where it can be useful.
They’re not invalidsting your subjective perception that it’s not particularly useful for your primary use case. In fact, I’ve seen explicit acknowledgements that your use case will require different tools. If anything, your doubling down on the assertion that it is useless invalidates those that do find it useful.
For contrast, consider the more personal phrasing “This isn’t really useful to me, because I generally clip conversations and it doesn’t capture my mic.” This both respects that other people may find it useful and makes it clear why you don’t.
Aside from the semantics, you might be able to work around the issue by customising your audio setup, which is something I don’t know if Windows lets you. I don’t know what exactly it captures and what audio server you use, but if it can be pointed at a specific virtual device, you might be able to loop back your audio input to that device and use a combine-stream to route your other audio both to that virtual and your actual pysical output device.
- Comment on Steam Beta adds new shortcut key to save a clip of recent gameplay 1 month ago:
Are you talking about in-game voice chat, that should be available to the game to record, or a third party tool that probably shouldn’t? If the game doesn’t need your mic, it shouldn’t access it; if it doesn’t access it, it’s not part of the gameplay recording.
That doesn’t mean it’s “not all that useful”, Linux or otherwise, just because it doesn’t cover your specific use case. I can definitely see myself using it to record brief clips - on linux - without having to run OBS in the background.
- Comment on Anon is a good samaritan 1 month ago:
Is it FDC? I bet it’s FDC
- Comment on Burning Up 1 month ago:
I’d excuse it as part of the joke
- Comment on Why is the community for Honkai Star Rail and Genshin Impact like this? 1 month ago:
“but what if <unrelated situation made up just to be contrarian>?”
- Comment on Concord is going offline beginning September 6th 1 month ago:
“Nobody” probably isn’t literal here, but I imagine some manager scheduling a meeting where they want a report on the game’s performance and feedback during the beta. Some higher up is going to sit in for the first few minutes for the KPI summary.
The sweating analyst jokes about the heat in the room, the higher up dryly remarks that the AC seems to be working just fine. The presentation starts, the analyst grasping for some more weasel words and void sentences to stall with before finally switching to the second slide, captioned “Player count”. It’s a big, fat 0.
They stammer their way through half a sentence of trying to describe this zero, then fall silent, staring at their shoes. The game dev lead has a thousand yard stare. The product owner is trying to maintain composure.
The uncomfortable silence is finally broken by the manager, getting up to leave: “I think we’re done here.” There is an odd sense of foreboding, that “here” might not just mean the meeting. The analyst silently proceeds to the next slide, showing the current player count over time in a line chart.
- Comment on Could an American please prove me wrong? 1 month ago:
I mean, there may also be plenty of non-citizens there at any given time.
- Comment on Could an American please prove me wrong? 1 month ago:
There’s a bunch of staff there too. Wikipedia cites an estimate of 764 people.
- Comment on Damn right 1 month ago:
only by facing that fact can anybody actually fix it
The first step to improvement is to acknowledge flaws. We can still admit “This is outside our current capacity to fix.”
pretending “linux is easy now”
This might not always be pretense so much as cognitive bias and a bubble effect: If I look at it from my point of view, it has gotten a lot eas_ier_. I underestimate just how advanced even those things I consider basic are for someone not as versed as I am. I’m nowhere near an expert, but I know enough to have lost sight of the floor.
There are plenty of “fire and forget” distros - If I want to, say, install Ubuntu, I create a bootable flash drive with the base image, reboot, follow the installation prompts, easy.
The layperson will ask “What’s Ubuntu? I thought we’re talkink about Linux?” “What does bootable mean? How do I do that?”
Most crucially, from my own experience trying to sell a family member on Linux, “What do these prompts all mean?” They’re scared of selecting something wrong, because they’re not confident that they understand them correctly.
That may be a public image issue: If you’re predisposed to think it’s complex, the brain may lock itself into not trusting its own understanding of semantics. And the elitists certainly aren’t helping with that: If a hundred people reassure you it’s fine and one person says it’s complex, it’s hard to avoid that seed of doubt. Once it is planted, confirmation bias will do the rest.
I don’t know what the solution is
One part of the solution might be a “transition” package, consisting of first a tool to try cross-platform alternatives to tools people already use, second a ready-made VM to try Linux without installing it, using a transition distro, styled to look and feel “like Windows” and built-in links to the host filesystem, and finally a fully automated installer that includes backing up files, settings etc. and putting them in the equivalent Linux soot after installation so you have as little transitory friction as possible.
Which leads us back to the topic of leftist politics and the split between moderates and progressives: Of course I don’t want to compromise on my principles, but we’re not gonna win people over by demanding drastic change with scary words that make it easy to lump in the “Capitalism fucks us over” progressives with the McCarthyist “They want to install a Russian dictatorship!” rhetorics about the radicals and tankies. Radical change is likely to invite radical backlash.
Our best shot at non-violent and lasting change is to make the transition as low-friction as possible, inching people over policy by policy, shifting the Overton Window the way the regressives have been doing for decades, instead of trying to aggressively shunting it over.
Focus less on identity, ideology and terminology, more on individual issues and solutions. Some movements obviously warrant aggressive countering, but we have to pick our battles, or we’ll be spread out on too many fronts. Ideology alone doesn’t win wars; Strategy does.
We should also project unity of vision and determination instead of public infighting and sabotaging what we all want over the things we disagree on.
Presentation matters.
- Comment on Damn right 1 month ago:
Too many leftists are so concerned with the substance of the message that they forget how important the presentation is.
I find that to be an issue with many well-meaning people.
For example, I see it occasionally in the FOSS-bubble: It’s great if a given software is ideologically “pure”, independent from capitalist incentives, open source and freely available. It’s great that there are volunteers doing work for the benefit of others.
Occasionally, when someone lists specific tools running on Windows only as reason for not switching to Linux, they get told to use FOSS alternatives instead that just can’t match the proprietary in terms of features or usability. When you point that out, there will often be the customary vocal minority of twats chastising you “It’s volunteer work, you don’t get to demand anything, go implement it yourself” etc.
I hate to admit it, but I’m generally more comfortable around MS Excel than LO Calc. I’ve used LO Writer and Impress for personal and university stuff, because I rarely need more advanced features (and if I do, I’ll probably use TeX anyway), but when it comes to more complex work with spreadsheets, I just find Excel to be smoother in usage. I don’t have enough experience in the field of UX to put a finger on why, nor would I likely have the skills or time to contribute fixes to LO Calc. I can settle for less out of ideology, but is that what you expect from people at large?
The same applies with the transition to Linux in general: I’m technically versed enough that I’m confident I can probably fix any error I encounter. But until the public perception and tooling of Linux gets to the point that even non-techies can easily do the switch, it’s not going to see widespread adoption.
I love FOSS. I love Linux. I want to see them replace proprietary monopolies as much as possible.
But the presentation matters.
- Comment on Why is Kamala Harris being held at such a higher standard than Trump this election? 1 month ago:
Part of the issue is the push by many left-wing voters to get actually progressive politics on the table after years of alternating between regressives and complacent centrists* that prefer making small concessions to the right over big steps to the left. They don’t want another presidency marked by lukewarm promises kept poorly. They’re tallying up all the ways in which Harris still isn’t as good as she ough to be.
For Trumpers, he is good enough. He is everything they want: A public role model enabling them to be an absolutely shameless asshat.
The complexity arises when people advocate voting for a third party instead. By and large, no third party has the traction to beat the Republicans. You’d need to get the entire Dem voterbase and then some. If that fails, you’ve split the non-Rep voterbase and the enabling asshat gets the plurality. On the other hand, there’s a risk that leaning too far left in the attempt to keep the progressive voters may lose the centrist* voters, which is a gamble whether that will end up a net positive. Harris has a tough job: walking a political tightrope, particularly if it’s consistently being tugged at by people.
And there are good reasons to tug on that rope. You’ll find some in these comments: Settling for “Good enough” doesn’t help getting actual change. For the ultra-rich, on the other hand, progressive policies are a detriment, so they’ll want to tug it the other way. The left doesn’t want to cede ground and keeps pulling. The centrists* that don’t like Trump but also fear dramatic change pull her to the other side again. The “centrists”** pull just to see her fall.
And that’s exciting! That’s an actual conflict of ideologies! That’s her having to work for her voters’ approval! You’ll see the complaints flying left and right, see her try to keep an ever-shifting balance, see drama and tension! People love drama and tension. Corporate media loves drama and tension because it gets attention, clicks, revenue, all that. “Assholes still support Asshole” just isn’t as interesting as “<prominent person> criticises Kamala for <policy>, calls her <incomplete quote>”.
Also, splitting the Dem voterbase serves the corporate executives and shareholders that want the right-wing tax breaks and erosion of worker protections because it makes them even richer. That’s probably not a coincidence.
*Centrist as in “I don’t want things to radically change”, not as in “I think both parties are equally bad, so I’ll sow dissent in the Dem voterbase, pretend that I’m not helping Trump with that and get to feel superior to both”.
** The latter group of the above footnote. It doesn’t really matter whether they’re intentional agents of disunity or idealists that care more about voting with their heart than the actual outcome. The result is the same: At best, they’ve achieved nothing. At worst, they’ve contributed to Trump’s victory.