megopie

@megopie@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Getting the word out about the wonders of AI appears to have some impact on AI PC appeal. Just 32 percent of respondents unfamiliar with AI PCs said they’d consider purchasing one for their next upgrade, whereas among those who have already used an AI PC, that figure rises to 64 percent.

  In other words, of the self selecting group excited enough about the technology to buy one of these, 46% wouldn’t buy another. I can’t help but wonder when these companies will realize that there is no market for clippy 2.0.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US justice department plans to push Google to sell off Chrome browser⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, it doesn’t necessarily need to be bought, it just needs to not be part of alphabet anymore. I think the ideal outcome is actually that chrome become an independent non-profit that maintains an important piece of software using funding from a consortium of different sources that want it to continue to exist.

  This kind of thing is actually very very common and far from a new concept.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Political abuse on X is a global, widespread and cross-partisan phenomenon, says study⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, what’s super interesting to me is how clustered the US and Germany are. I’ve always noticed that Germans show up more often than other non-native-English speaking groups in English speaking online spaces, but to see them be nearly on par with the UK in clustering with the US is wild, especially because there is so little clustering between them and the UK.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  See that’s the thing, you don’t need a touch screen for those things, or even a screen. Everyone has a phone for sat nav, (you shouldn’t be looking at your phone while driving but you also shouldn’t be looking at a screen on the console while driving). And for maintenance stuff a light up an LED is enough.

  I think in general there’s just been a proliferation of unnecessary features and with it has gone the affordable new car.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Donald Trump Team Plans to Cancel Biden's $7,500 Tax Incentive On EVs⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I just don’t think his product will be competitive when the market moves up a whole price bracket, even if he thinks so.

  People willing buy a 30,000$ new car are going to have more patience for poor quality than people who are willing to pay 40,000$. Like the market will shrink as some people are priced out, and those who remain will probably opt for something like an Ioniq-5, a Solterra, or a EX30 which are just nicer cars. Their main issues right now are a lack of availability, but that’s less of an issue as the market shrinks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It often feels like the software is an afterthought and not given the time and resources it needs to work properly. Like, they slap the screen in to seem tech forward or to stream line dash design, and then dump the problems this creates on to software devs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Donald Trump Team Plans to Cancel Biden's $7,500 Tax Incentive On EVs⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yah, but musk has been doing some serious brand damage lately, so can they really keep selling on that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A touch screen is more expensive than an injection molded plastic knob, even if the actual interfacing of the controls is easier.

  I take the point that it’s simpler to integrate with how many buttons, dials and controls newer cars have, but I think the proliferation of those bits is part of the same issue. A lot of stuff is being added not because people find use in these things but because companies feel they need to add them to appear like they’re tech forward.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Donald Trump Team Plans to Cancel Biden's $7,500 Tax Incentive On EVs⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  the problem is that they’re also one of the more expensive options. And they have a pretty bad reputation for quality now. So a 7,500 price increase is probably going to push people to look for higher quality at the 40 thousand price range, or for one of the cheaper options in the 30 thousand range. Assuming they don’t just go for a Prius instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Four Dead In Fire As Tesla Doors Fail To Open After Crash⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The touch pad control shit just sends me “yah, let’s get rid of these cheap, easily manufactured and implemented dials and knobs that can be easily operated without looking and replace them with an expensive touch screen that you need to look away from the road to use, that’s truly the way of the future; Unnecessarily expensive, more difficult to use, and reliant on software that will probably get bricked in 3 years when the executives lay off the team maintaining it so they can give them selves a pay raise.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony shuts down Concord developer Firewalk Studios, game will remain permanently offline⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  because they weren’t throwing money at it until it was fun. They were throwing money at it trying to make a new “brand” and live service money printer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  you know what’s funny to me, that when large organizations manipulate the apparent consensus on Reddit about a topic, that’s “clever marketing” and “innovative campaign techniques”.

  When a bunch of random people collectively organize to do it suddenly it’s a “dangerous”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft's LinkedIn: If our AI gets it wrong, that's your problem⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because then tech would have to admit they’re moving in to a period of stability rather than a period of constant growth.

  The big companies and start ups need to prove they’ve still got “revolutionary” potential otherwise the stock values start to drop. And lower stock values means less bonuses for leadership.

• ⁨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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  See, in a lot of games generas I could look past performance issues, but with city builders? Yah, nah, good performance is kind of core. It’s basically impossible to make cities of much more than 40,000 unless you have a monstrosity of a CPU, and even then your game will be chugging. Scale of city is fundamentally limited by the performance, you can just make a larger, more interesting city in cities skylines at the moment. There are some interesting game play changes from from the first, but not interesting enough to make up for the limitations to scale.

  Victoria 3 also has some big performance issues. Like paradox games have always been known to slow down in the late game, but you basically can’t get through the end game in Victoria 3 unless you’re willing to run the game in the background. Again, this is even on good, modern, mid range CPUs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don’t believe the hype: AGI is far from inevitable⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I love the flying car example because it reveals a huge issue with the whole “tech will get better” idea. People are still trying to make flying cars happen but it’s running in to the same fundamental issues; large things that are mechanically complex, energy intensive, and moving at high speeds in a crowded urban environments are just too expensive and dangerous.

  There is no way around the physical realities, no clever trick or efficiency that will push it over some threshold of practicality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google is testing verified checkmarks in search⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  How much will it affect ranking in the search algorithm? When will they announce the asking price? What about legitimate sites that cannot pony up that inevitable price?

  Call me conspiratorial but this seems like a way to further subjugate civil society to cooperate society. . “Oh well, they couldn’t make a profit to pay for the blue check, so they’re not legitimate”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if the panic over teens and tech is totally wrong?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean there are huge issues with tech, but like, they’re in no way limited to kids… nor does it seem to affect them particularly strongly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨63% of Gen Z Would Rather Play Video Games Than Watch a Movie⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think it is so much that executives cannot learn, it’s more that their priorities are consistent predictable margins, not the overall health of the industry.

  It’s a prisoner’s dilemma, most of the benefit of succeeding with something original is for the industry as a whole; proving certain concepts and ideas are viable, revitalizing public interest in the medium, ect. But the risks are mainly carried by a single publisher or studio, if it flops, they loose money.

  So the general trend is to avoid risk and maximize predictable profit, this shrinks the over all profitability of the industry by fatiguing public interest and willingness to pay, but maximizes safety for individual publishers and studios.

  Having a low budget segment that can afford to take risk on new ideas is key to preventing industry decline, but the industry has moved away from that towards the highest possible revenue generating films. The publishers and studios that used to do that have all ether folded or moved up to bigger budget higher return options, and they’ve pulled up the ladder behind them by making it so difficult to get indie projects in to theaters.

  The same thing could happen in the video game industry. Luckily the indie game market exists, and they’re still able to get their products distributed on large platforms like consoles if they prove a big enough hit on the PC market. It is getting harder though, and more and more, small budget, small team games are getting relegated to PC where there is just a smaller market. Ideally, consoles should make it easier to get small indie games onto their platform, or more people should start playing on PCs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A nightly Waymo robotaxi parking lot honkfest is waking San Francisco neighbors⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A small games manifesto⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A small games manifesto⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paradox CEO admits company made "wrong calls in several projects" in wake of Life By You's cancellation⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Game Pass underperforming?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twitter API has a list of users who are allowed to use racial slurs⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Game Pass underperforming?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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 desire to take a title off the service.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Twitter API has a list of users who are allowed to use racial slurs⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A 23-minute Signalis shitpost that somehow also eplains the complex plot of the game (Mirabeau)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Signalis mentioned?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you"⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Lots of non-Mozilla browsers based on the same browser engine for people tired of Mozilla doing stuff like this on Firefox, but who want to keep far away from browsers based on Google developed projects.

  Realistically any functional and stable browser is going to have to be based on one of the big browser engines, if only because plenty of major websites just won’t work with anything but a big name browser engine. I’d rather be on something based on Gecko (Mozilla) than Blink( Google) or WebKit (Apple)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨98% compatibility⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.