tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Whatever happened to Secure Quick Reliable Login (SQRL)? 15 hours ago:
I’m not familiar with it, but relevant context:
- Comment on GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders 17 hours ago:
I just use lgogdownloader, which is open-source, or for a single game, the web browser.
- Comment on GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders 17 hours ago:
While that’s true, GOG also is intended to let you download an offline installer. If GOG dies, you still have the game, as long as you saved the installer. If GOG changes the terms of their service or software, they have little leverage.
There are ways to archive Steam games, but it’s not the “normal mode of operation”. If Steam dies, you probablt don’t have your games. If Steam’s terms of service or software changes, they have a lot of leverage to force new changes through.
Some other wrinkles:
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Some games on GOG today have DRM, though at least it’s clearly marked.
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I also agree that Valve has and continues to do an enormous amount to support Linux gaming. I used Linux as my desktop back in the days when Valve wasn’t doing Linux, and the gaming situation on Linux was far more limited.
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- Comment on N++ — 10th anniversary update 19 hours ago:
N++ is a platform video game developed and published by Metanet Software. It is the third and final installment of the N franchise, which started with the Adobe Flash game N. It is the sequel to N+. The game was initially released for the PlayStation 4 on July 28, 2015, in North America, and July 29, 2015, in Europe, and was later released for the Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems on August 25, 2016, and December 26, 2016, respectively. The Xbox One version was released on October 4, 2017.[1] The Linux version of the game was released on May 31, 2018.
N+ is the console and handheld version of the Adobe Flash game N, which was developed by Metanet Software. N+ for Xbox Live Arcade was developed by Slick Entertainment and published by Metanet Software. Unique versions of the game were also ported separately to the PlayStation Portable[1] and Nintendo DS[2] by developers SilverBirch Studios and Atari.[3] Metanet Software licensed their N IP for this deal, provided single player level design for both versions, and consulted on the project.
The Xbox Live Arcade version was released on February 20, 2008, and three expansion packs were released later that year on July 23, September 10, and October 15.[4] The handheld versions were released on August 26, 2008.[5][6] N+ was followed by N++ in 2015.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_(video_game)
N (stylized as n) is a freeware video game developed by Metanet Software. It was inspired in part by Lode Runner, Soldat, and other side-scrolling games. It was the first of the N series, followed by N+ and N++. N won the audience choice award in the downloadables category of the 2005 Independent Games Festival.[1]
Release: WW: March 1, 2004
- Comment on Introducing ImagenWorld: A Real World Benchmark for Image Generation and Editing 20 hours ago:
I think that there’s maybe a need for something like this, but if it’s not just going to be a one-off research project — which maybe this is, which is okay — I’d very visibly version the testset and its results from the get-go. You’re going to want to add more tests to it over time, and it’ll affect change test results, and you’re going to want to be able to reproduce results.
- Comment on Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It’s Like to Own a Cybertruck 21 hours ago:
although I concede that better metrics would be hard to find.
Maybe get ALPRs to start logging bumper stickers. :-)
- Comment on Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It’s Like to Own a Cybertruck 21 hours ago:
Aside from a MAGA hat, there is likely no object that feels more emblematic of US president Donald Trump’s return to the White House than the Tesla Cybertruck.
If Musk had been able to attract the typical F-150 owner to the Cybertruck, then the Cybertruck wouldn’t have flopped, and I bet that the F-150 is a whole lot more correlated with voting Trump than the Cybertruck is.
IIRC from past reading, in terms of voting correlation by party, the Toyota Prius is the “most Democratic” vehicle and the Ford F-150 is the “most Republican” vehicle.
kagis
Nope, but I’m close.
businessinsider.com/car-models-owned-by-republica…
To get a sense of how our rides reflect our political leanings, we compared 1.7 million vehicles listed on CarGurus with the results from the 2020 presidential election. We included only counties that were strongly red or blue — those where either Donald Trump or Joe Biden won by at least 19 percentage points. Then we placed every car on a political spectrum from reddest to bluest.
According to this, which excludes more-politically-mixed counties from the dataset, the vehicle most-correlated with voting Trump in 2020 at a county level is the Jeep Wrangler, followed by the Jeep Gladiator, followed by the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 (which I assume is the Chevy analog of the F-150), followed by the Ford F-150.
The vehicle most-correlated with voting Biden (at a county level) was indeed the Toyota Prius.
- Comment on Reddit's AI Suggests Users Try Heroin 1 day ago:
Inclusion of Erowid in the training corpus had initially seemed like a good idea.
- Comment on Cardiff set to impose SUV parking premium after council approval 1 day ago:
You know, that does make me think thst laybe with BEVs coming out, they should maybe use a stronger road material.
- Comment on AI might be creating a ‘permanent underclass’ but it’s the makers of the tech bubble who are replaceable 1 day ago:
The prediction comes from OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, who claims AI will “reach or exceed human capacity” by 2027.
I suppose that it depends on the metric you’re using. There are some tasks at which humans are outperformed now.
But I am pretty comfortable saying that come January 2027, the great bulk of things that humans do will continue to not be able to be done by existing AI.
- Comment on To open, tear along the dotted line. What freaking dotted line? 2 days ago:
- Comment on Games with Text-based Interaction? 2 days ago:
Those kinds of old text-based adventures are definitely worth a shout, but I think you mentioned their biggest flaw - that other means of interaction are much more natural and intuitive than text parsers.
I think that they improved in later years, and experience and improved design helps with “hunt the verb”.
You might look at ifdb.org
That being said, I haven’t played much in recent years, so maybe that’s a condemnation of them.
- Comment on Tommy Robinson says Elon Musk is paying his legal costs as trial begins 4 days ago:
I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this isn’t going to help sales of Teslas in the UK.
- Comment on ‘Sex for rent’ is illegal in the UK. Why are thousands of people still affected? 4 days ago:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Prostitution_in_the_United_Kin…
In Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland), the act of engaging in prostitution or exchanging various sexual services for money is legal
Given that sex for money is legal in the UK, and money for rent is also legal, you’d think that there’d be some middleman.
- Comment on The Steam Controller's stick is upgradeable! 4 days ago:
since I can’t replace it any more.
There are small numbers of used Steam Controllers on the market.
- Comment on The Steam Controller's stick is upgradeable! 4 days ago:
checks
I don’t own a Deck, but Wikipedia does say that the Deck has HDMI out. I guess that having the Steam Controller available would presumably let you use the Deck as a console — plug it into your TV, pair a Steam Controller, and then you get a big screen and a lighter controller.
- Comment on The Steam Controller's stick is upgradeable! 5 days ago:
I kind of wish that Valve had kept producing the Steam Controller.
It really made sense in the context of sitting on a couch and playing mouse-oriented games. And when the Steam Machine flopped, that kind of killed a lot of reason for it.
But people also did find a use for them, and there isn’t a real alternative.
- Comment on King's coat of arms to feature on new UK passports 6 days ago:
Now I know how The Onion feels around Trump news stories.
- Comment on King's coat of arms to feature on new UK passports 6 days ago:
The King probably had one as Prince of Wales, but Queen Elizabeth II I don’t believe ever had one.
abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/…/story?id=42109699
The Prince of Wales’ car collided with a deer while he was driving at the Queen’s Balmoral Castle estate in Scotland over the weekend.
Prince Charles walked away uninjured from behind the wheel, but his car, an Audi, was damaged. Clarence House declined to comment on the crash.
I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to take your permission note I gave you to drive away. We can’t have you smashing into my deer.
- Comment on 'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed' 4 weeks ago:
Ram is cheap
Kind of divering from the larger point, but that’s true — RAM prices haven’t gone up as much as other things have over the years. I do kind of wonder if there are things that game engines could do to take advantage of more memory.
I think that some of this is making games that will run on both consoles and PCs, where consoles have a pretty hard cap on how much memory they can have, so any work that gets put into improving high-memory stuff is something that console players won’t see.
checks Wikipedia
The XBox Series X has 16GB of unified memory.
The Playstation 5 Pro has 16GB of unified memory and 2GB of system memory.
You can get a desktop with 256GB of memory today, about 14 times that.
Would have to be something that doesn’t require a lot of extra dev time or testing. Can’t do more geometry, I think, because that’d need memory on the GPU.
considers
Maybe something where the game can dynamically render something expensive at high resolution, and then move it into video memory.
Like, Fallout 76 uses, IIRC, statically-rendered billboards of the 3D world for distant terrain features, like, stuff in neighboring and further off cells. You’re gonna have a fixed-size set of those loaded into VRAM at any one time. But you could cut the size of a given area that uses one set of billboards, and keep them preloaded in system memory.
Or…I don’t know if game systems can generate simpler-geometry level-of-detail (LOD) objects in the distance or if human modelers still have to do that by hand. But if they can do it procedurally, increasing the number of LOD levels should just increase storage space, and keeping more preloaded in RAM just require more RAM. You only have one level in VRAM at a time, so it doesn’t increase demand for VRAM. That’d provide for smoother transitions as distant objects come closer.
- Comment on I fixed Borderlands 4's stuttering issue by upping my shader cache size to 100 GB, which feels like something I shouldn't have to do in a well-optimised game 4 weeks ago:
no TAA
I would like TAA to be qvailable. I think maybe a more reasomable ask is “let me toggle TAA”.
- Comment on Randy Pitchford Snaps Back at Borderlands 4 Criticism: 'Code Your Own Engine' 4 weeks ago:
Is he running with antialiasing on?
Looking at their system settings page:
borderlands.2k.com/…/amd-optimization/
Their settings for every single GPU listed there seems to have antialiasing off.
- Comment on My instance is lagging behind 14 hours of federated content... 4 weeks ago:
Their main community
It looks like this is !main@sh.itjust.works
Most Threadiverse instances have some sort of “instance” community — personally, I think that it should be be a default on instances so that we have a single standardized name.
On lemmy.today, there’s !lemmytoday@lemmy.today to act as an “unregulated” community and !announcements@lemmy.today, where posting is restricted to the admins, so that official announcements don’t get drowned out. I think that that’s not a bad approach.
- Comment on BBC under fresh pressure over extent of Reform UK coverage 5 weeks ago:
Maybe. But if you look at the local elections from May:
www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yg467m8mjo
…Reform got 31% of the votes cast. The chart of polls is pretty close, and actually slightly underrates them for May 2025. Now, maybe voting in the general election and local elections have different groups of people show up. I know that here in the US, that’s a factor for midterm elections. That could affect outcomes in the general election. But…my guess is that the chart probably is at least in the neighborhood of being representative of their support in society.
- Comment on Left unable even to get into deputy leader contest proves Labour is dead 5 weeks ago:
Labour is dead
They’ve been around for 125 years and are curretly running the country. I think I’d give them a bit more credit for resillience.
- Comment on Being born in north-east England gives you grit, says Fiona Hill 5 weeks ago:
Hill was born and brought up in Bishop Auckland, the daughter of a coalminer and a midwife. She and her accent went on to be a foreign affairs adviser to US presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump and she is considered one of the world’s leading experts on Russia and Putin.
I imagine that her accent was an exceptional foreign affairs advisor.
- Comment on BBC under fresh pressure over extent of Reform UK coverage 5 weeks ago:
kagis
Ah. I hadn’t realized that Reform’s polling was nearly that high.
- Comment on [USB Power Delivery + Power Banks + USB Hubs + SteamDeck] breaks my brain. I have to use weird dongles to get my power flowing correctly. 5 weeks ago:
PD has a variety of power profiles, different current and voltage. Neither the consumer nor provider need to support all power profiles. It’s possible that one of those devices in the chain is doing conversion.
I have a 100W laptop power adapter for my InfinityBook that can’t charge one of these power stations, for example.
- Comment on Let France be a warning, Rachel Reeves: stand up to the bond market vigilantes, or they’ll come for Britain next 5 weeks ago:
Britain, so the story goes, also needs to wake up, or else the markets will be coming for us next.
The reason France and Britain have no choice but to do this is because states are weak and markets are all powerful. The bond markets exert their power through their role in buying and selling government bonds. If they sell en masse, the interest rates governments pay to borrow goes up and they can be forced to change policy even when they are reluctant to do so. It has been the received wisdom for the past 50 years that governments should do what bond traders and speculators demand, or risk being crushed by the global financial juggernaut.
All right, I am just boggled by this.
The markets already came for you. Are we so soon forgetting that three years ago, a British prime minister had the shortest tenure in the history of the United Kingdom, lasted less time than a head of lettuce, because she decided that she was going to blow the deficit way up?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Truss_lettuce
Liz Truss became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on 6 September 2022, following the July–September 2022 Conservative Party leadership election, replacing Boris Johnson. The September 2022 United Kingdom mini-budget was published on 23 September by Kwasi Kwarteng, then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, which included tax cuts without matching spending cuts. The mini-budget triggered a heavily negative market reaction, with the exchange rate of the pound sterling collapsing and pension funds coming close to bankruptcy.[3]
After just over a month in office, Kwarteng was removed as Chancellor of the Exchequer on 14 October, and Truss reversed most of the economic policies within the mini-budget. British media outlets lambasted Truss’s performance and the ensuing political chaos, with many observers believing that her resignation would be imminent.[4] An 11 October column in The Economist titled “Liz Truss has made Britain a riskier bet for bond investors” stated that, after deducting the ten-day mourning period following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Truss had caused economic and political turmoil after just seven days in power, comparing that duration to the “shelf-life of a lettuce”.
Before the lettuce had wilted, on 20 October Truss announced her resignation as prime minister becoming, after only 45 days, the shortest-serving prime minister in British history.[1][11] At that moment, there were 12,000 viewers on the livestream, which soon shot up to 21,000. The British national anthem “God Save the King” began to play, the portrait of Truss on the table was flipped face down, and a plastic golden crown was placed on top of the lettuce, with the Daily Star declaring the lettuce’s “victory” over Truss.[1][12]
- Comment on Uh Oh: Nintendo Just Landed A ‘Summoning’ And ‘Battling’ Patent 5 weeks ago:
copyright
This isn’t a copyright, but rather a patent.
