megopie

@megopie@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the most overrated game gamers hype up?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Balatro.

  It is a mechanically very dense game. There is a lot of depth and complexity to its gameplay. I get why a lot of people enjoy that. But I just kind of bounce off that, I need something to motivate me to engage with game mechanics. I need a story, or like, some kind of theming that I can project a goal on to.

  Like I adore paradox games, but I can project a broad world buildy-esq self built narrative and goals on to that, even when the mechanics are as broad as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the most overrated game gamers hype up?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Consider, that, the you’re generally listening the the voice of the main character for a lot of the dialog that isn’t explicitly from other characters, and that he does in fact have his head firmly lodged in his own rectum.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft 'illegally' tracked students via 365 Education⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m shocked! Shocked I tell you!

  … well not that shocked actually.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft support for Windows 10 officially ends today, but a third of Steam players still use it | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  You’d probably be fine using mint.

  Like, if you’re using an Nvidia graphics card you’d want to use mint’s built in driver manger GUI (don’t need to even use the command line) to make sure you have the best driver. If you have AMD graphics (ether iGPU or dedicated GPU) you don’t even have to do that. The main thing that Bazzite does is have the right Nvidia graphics drivers out of the box.

  The main difference between the two is the package manager, the thing that downloads programs and makes sure they have all the dependencies they need to run. Bazzite is fedora derived so it uses DNF instead of the Debian derived APT for package management. Frankly the differences between the two are not really material.

  Ether way, Lutris will get windows versions of games running as well as steam does, and any game can be added to Lutris regardless of how you got it, if not from one of the major store fronts you just have point Lutris to the files.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As Microsoft bids farewell to Windows 10, millions of users won’t⁩ ⁨⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I switched over about… I suppose 2 and a half years ago now? Honestly it’s been a lot easier to use. Like it’s kind of shocking to me that people will act like windows is cohesive and better put together. Every time I interact with it these days, the more it looks like a taped together ball of junk crusted over with 30 years of repainting.

  Like the fact that I have to go to three separate settings programs to find the right toggle, that every program has a dedicated installer and its own path for updates. That there are just default always on programs running in the background eating up a 1/4 of the ram and two of my CPU cores for no damn reason. That a laptop will randomly turn inside a bag when it should be asleep and run down its battery over 6 hours of trying to connect to an absent WiFi network to run updates.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy and four times the subprime bubble, analyst says⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It has burst in terms of the liquidity of the system, sure the on paper value of the asset hasn’t collapsed, but that’s because the number of people willing to sell has reduced in turn with the number of people willing to buy. Everyone who was going to cash out big time already has, and the people who bought from them are waiting on another order of magnitude increase in value before they cash out, or they intend to hold on to it forever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A tangled web of deals stokes AI bubble fears in Silicon Valley⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re dependent on it indirectly. Like, most of the rest of the economic growth that has gone on in recent years has been from the wealthiest 10% of Americans increasing their consumption of various goods, or continuing consumption even as prices rise while wages stay stagnant.

  That 10% has felt comfortable spending money due to the value of their assets growing, being able to liquidate some here and there or using them as collateral for loans.

  If they lose a significant portion of 1/3rd of their assets in stock, and no other investments are showing rapid growth, they’ll probably pull back on their spending, which will in turn hurt the rest of the market. That won’t be as quick as the panic around “AI” companies, nor as disastrous.

  It will be a slow thing, as companies that have moved towards the high margin premium side of the market see sales dry up on their most profitable products.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A tangled web of deals stokes AI bubble fears in Silicon Valley⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, given that 1/3rd of the s&P 500s value is in 7 companies who are all heavily invested in AI compute.

  I’m sure that the 10% wealthiest who’s consumption makes up over half of consumer spending won’t drastically cut back their spending if they lose a third of their wealth that’s in index funds.

  And I’m sure private equity firms that are also heavily invested won’t start trying to liquidate their other assets at the same time.

  No way this could see a massive decrease in consumer spending.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A tangled web of deals stokes AI bubble fears in Silicon Valley⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Or like, anyone one of the massively cash negative companies with in the bubble being unable to secure more money.

  Hey, how’s that deal between SoftBank and OpenAI doing? You know, the one where they get the liquidity they need to keep operating if they convert to a for profit company before the end of the year? Yah? So … they managed to convert to a fire profit company yet? No? Oh, damn, I sure they’ll figure out that incredibly complicated and dubiously legal process by the end of the fiscal year.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A tangled web of deals stokes AI bubble fears in Silicon Valley⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  All it takes is openAI or anthropic to run out of cash, then everyone providing them compute suddenly has giant power sucking white elephants that are basically useless for anything else (maybe crypto mining LMAO). And then they all stop buying more chips from Nvidia (you know, the company whose valuation is 8% of most index funds, and 80% of their revenue and all of their revenue growth over the past two years has been from data center sales).

  Kinda crazy how 7 companies, all heavily invested in AI cloud compute, in one way or another, make up about a 1/3rd of the S&P 500.

  I mean, good thing the AI bubble couldn’t possible pop any other bubbles? I mean, it’s not like nearly a decade of low interest rates could possibly have built any other bubbles in any other sort of asset markets.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Yale Study Finds AI Has Had Essentially Zero Impact on Jobs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The reality is, its only impact has been as a cover story to conceal jobs that were already going to be cut.

  It’s patently ridiculous how many people in positions of authority have parroted talking points about this and laughable how many journalists and publications have uncritically reported those talking points as if they have merit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  To those who believe that truth derives from authority, and not from debate backed with evidence, a website where the debate is visible and clear undermines its authority. But just because we don’t see that process at other publications doesn’t make them more reliable, it just means we can’t judge the quality of that process.

  Wikipedia’s system has its flaws, but the ability to know that, to see those flaws and be aware of them, makes it more reliable. It also makes it very difficult for authoritarians to seize control of for their own ends, to shut down debate and impose consensus. That’s the real reason it is under attack, because those who wish to impose consensus have justify them selves publicly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without an online account⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Operating system as a service. Customers as products.

  That is their goal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How the US got left behind in the global electric car race⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think a big part of it is the nature of the US car market over the past 10 years, where the growth has come from sales of “premium” vehicles. The standard and budget market segments have underperformed and thus most US car companies haven’t invested in them much. Consumer spending is increasingly driven by the wealthiest 10% of the population. Everyone else is struggling and cutting back where ever they can, that means buying used cars and holding on to their current cars as long as they can, if they’re even in a position to own a car. The middle and low end consumer is doing so poorly that they’re not just moving down market, they’re not buying at all.

  EVs just aren’t super competitive in the premium market. One of the biggest real selling points of Electric vehicles is their low operating cost. Electricity is cheaper than gas, way less maintenance is needed, and the most expensive and failure prone parts are absent, reducing repair costs. To a wealthy person, none of that is particularly compelling. What can an EV sell on in a premium segment? Acceleration and the “saving the environment” vibes, and that’s just not compelling enough to take significant market share.

  So why isn’t what remains of the budget market dominated by EVs? Because there are no Budget EVs on the US market. The cheapest EV on the US market is the Chevy bolt and that’s got an MSRP of around 30,000 dollars. None of the companies are willing to invest the money needed to make a budget EV production line and the required supply chains. They’d rather take their capital and put it in to high margin premium vehicles, and service the anemic budget market with legacy production lines.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EU probes SAP over anti-competitive ERP support practices⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Enterprise Resource Planning.

  That makes a lot more sense than… uh… my first thought.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Regulating AI hastens the Antichrist, says Palantir’s Peter Thiel⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like a someone who needs to talk to an LLM less.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg unveils new smart glasses powered by AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  More like continuing to try to will something in to existence that can replace smart phones because they want to be in charge of the hardware so they don’t have to go through Apple and Google.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Samsung brings ads to US fridges⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Whole other part of the company.

  Like, Samsung is a big company, really like 3 or 4 companies in a trench coat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are a lot of actors who are decently well known and talented who still make most of their income from ad work, and couldn’t afford to stay in the industry without it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I suspect a lot of these layoffs are actually just cost cutting in response to these companies doing really poorly, the idea that the jobs are now being done by generative models is largely a smoke screen to save face and avoid admitting that companies are scaling back operations due to a lack of demand.

  Those few cases where they actually are just replacing people are going to vanish the moment that the people hosting the models run out of money to burn and have to charge full price. Like the scale of operating losses is orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve seen in the past.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the thing that really kills me, like, what an LLM can do is not a revolutionary leap, it’s an evolutionary step beyond basic grammar, tone, and spell checking. It’s more capable than traditional auto complete, but it’s not a fundamentally different capability.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Most actors don’t make much money playing roles in theater, movies or TV shows (obvious exceptions for big name stars), rather they do those when they can get them, but make most of their money doing ads. If that ad work disappeared, way fewer people could afford to be actors and the overall talent pool would shrink.

  Same goes for people doing drawn art or photography, the commodified work provides a stable income that allows them to pursue the career and creates space for them to produce genuine art.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Oversight Committee Requests Discord, Steam, Twitch CEOS At Online Radicalization Hearing | Aftermath⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There is absolutely a lot of issues regarding things going on in certain discord servers, or in certain subreddits, less so on twitch or steam.

  But a lot of those issues are due to different use cases being pushed into proximity by being pushed off other platforms, ether by moderation decisions, or by their structure and user engagement maximizing algorithms making certain communities unviable.

  So you end up with communities that need forum or chat room style organization being pushed in to close proximity to communities that run afoul of corporate moderation. This was less of an issue when these things might have just headed off to dedicated websites, but with everything ending up on platforms now, you have this milieu of mundane game or hobbyist communities, communities for mental health discussions, communities about drug usage, explicit adult content, and fringe politics, all right next to each other. Thus cross pollination between all of them becomes inevitable at a far higher rate than if they were on separate platforms, or on a mega platform with a bunch of other things that would dilute the cross pollination.

  I’m not even saying that any of those are explicitly bad things that shouldn’t exist, just that having them all confined in such close proximity is a time bomb. This is not a result of careless management by these companies, but rather the result of pressures pushing these things off of other major platforms, and thus forcing them on to ones that are inherently more permissive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do people actually use ChatGPT for? OpenAI provides some numbers.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They get things wrong at a far higher rate than most of the websites that tend to end up at the top of a web result, and they get things wrong in weird ways that won’t stand out to users in the same way a shitty website will. These probabilistic text generators are much better at seeming like they have the correct answer than actually providing it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do people actually use ChatGPT for? OpenAI provides some numbers.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s crazy how much money they are losing, and that’s with most of their compute being provided by Microsoft at cost, if not for free in exchange for the use of their models in Microsoft products.

  Both they and Anthropic talk about their business as if they’re a software as a service company, but most SAS don’t get more expensive to run the more users there are, not to mention their conversion rate of free users to payed users is abysmal. Like, it’s an unsalvageable train wreck of a business model, I don’t see ether surviving more than a year unless they radically change their business models.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft mandates a return to office, 3 days per week⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As other’s mentioned, probably more a way to fire a bunch of people without having to do so explicitly.

  Microsoft seems to be on a warpath this year regarding layoffs. I wonder if maybe they’re trying to compensate for some giant black hole in their budget. Like, keep the costs looking stable even as some specific department balloons out of control without providing commensurate revenue. Wonder what that could possibly be?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony is reportedly planning a Nintendo Switch-style PlayStation 6 portable | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yah, I agree.

  At the very least much better optimized, with what length there is focused on meaningful content rather than low effort padding.

  Again, it requires market pressure, something that a boom in portable games on less performant devices could cause.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony is reportedly planning a Nintendo Switch-style PlayStation 6 portable | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Something like the steam deck or the original switch were probably on the upper end of meaningfully “portable” in that sense, and even they can’t really compete with smartphones on that front. But with the currently available chips/batteries/screens, you cannot really get much smaller without starting to limit the games that can be played on them.

  There is a whole other conversation to be had about game optimization and the push in large parts of the games industry towards more power intensive games. If the PC/console games space had an incentive to better optimize for lightweight devices, that could change. Especially if something shifted on the smartphone storefront market that created more demand for better less exploitative games there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony is reportedly planning a Nintendo Switch-style PlayStation 6 portable | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  But, they do for mobiles, because mobile app storefronts force micro transactions to go the through them and they take a significant cut on each one. The 30% apple tax for example.

  So they have a huge incentive to put F2P slop front and center which other storefronts on other devices don’t. In the context of steam, they do make money on the micro transitions of games that valve owns, but they make more money selling everyone else’s games over all, so they still have a reasons to show those.

  It’s not so much saying that other storefronts are angles who love their customer, but more that their incentive structures are aligned differently.

  If there were significant shake up in the mobile storefront market, or in terms of how they can make money, there might be a shift in they type of content they push.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony is reportedly planning a Nintendo Switch-style PlayStation 6 portable | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  How much of it is that no one is willing to pay 20 or 30 dollars for a mobile game, and how much is it that anyone willing to pay is unable to find them, or has just given up on the prospect because of lack of visibility.

  Of course the mobile store fronts have no incentive to increase the visibility, because a free to play game is liable to make them significantly more money in the long term due to their cut of each micro transaction.