megopie

@megopie@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨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)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Signalis mentioned?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨98% compatibility⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Essentially. It’s held up as a “gaming” distribution.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨98% compatibility⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨98% compatibility⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  yah, it’s a bummer, but most people who play games on PC aren’t playing titles that have non-Linux supporting anti cheat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨98% compatibility⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Good to know for the future.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨98% compatibility⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨98% compatibility⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is hiking the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and launching a new “Standard” tier⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨98% compatibility⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Proton is steam’s comparability 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨98% compatibility⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨98% compatibility⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, it’s not totally seamless, and to say it is would be an exaggeration.

  Of the 17 games I’ve played over the past 9~ months since installing using 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.

  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.

  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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I asked what your fave controllers are, now. What is the worst controller you have used?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  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.