teawrecks

@teawrecks@sopuli.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Afaik this is basically what the NSA’s Prism is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of May 18th⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Blue Prince and Massive Chalice

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, I’ve attended everything you mention. I understand you think that is a large presence, but it amounted to less than 25% of the show. Larian and Nintendo were the exception, not the rule, they made up the bulk of the AAA presence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not saying they have no presence, I’m just saying PAX has not historically been a priority for AAA studios compared to things like E3 and Gamescom. On the whole, PAX is like 75% comics, tabletop/board game, and general nerd stuff, and less than 25% game studio presence. Which makes sense because Penny Arcade is a comic and they’ve always had an association with that crowd. Video games just tend to have a lot of overlap with that crowd, so it’s been worth it for studios to have a presence, some years more than others, some years more indie than AAA (ex Indie Megabooth).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A shift is definitely happening, but idk if counting booths at PAX and GDC is representative.

  PAX’ audience are primarily comic and board game nerds, they’re historically light on video game booths in their expo hall, usually prioritizing indie booths when they can. GDC’s audience is game developers not players, so the expo is typically a bunch of hardware and backend service companies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former PlayStation exec says "$70 or $80" games are a "steal": "As long as people choose carefully how they spend their money, I don't think they should be complaining"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s not wrong, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a steal for the price it is. “Really great games” do exist and they’re worth their price tag, the problem is the number of AAA games of that caliber are like 1 in 30. We’re lucky to get one in any given year. Meanwhile, there are consistently high quality indie games coming out for less than $40.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Doom: The Dark Ages’ DRM Is Locking Out Linux Users Who Bought the Game [404 Media]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, this is an old problem with Denuvo, new proton version looks like a new system. I guess if the containerization is perfect, Denuvo won’t be able to solve this and retain the same functionality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo warns that it can brick Switch consoles if it detects hacking, piracy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah ok hah, was just confused by the fact that it doesn’t seem relevant at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo warns that it can brick Switch consoles if it detects hacking, piracy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you responding to the comment you think you’re responding to?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo warns that it can brick Switch consoles if it detects hacking, piracy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Banning is fine, we’re talking about remote bricking. If I hack my Xbox, I’m fine with not being allowed to use it to join msft’s network, but I am not fine with them identifying my hacked device over the internet and actively sending some sort of backdoor self-destruct instruction to it. To me that’s a violation of the CFAA.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shower thought: Valve could do the ultimate boss-move this year⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s hard to say. I agree, it seems like the MAU data for each of League and Fortnite is roughly the same as MAU for all of Steam (which is nuts). Of course there’s no way to know how much overlap is there. Still, both of these titles would be a hard stop for people deciding whether to switch to Linux.

  As for msft themselves though, ironically I don’t know what titles they have that keep players on windows. Battle.net works on Linux, Minecraft Java ed works on Linux (not sure about bedrock ed compatibility or player count, but afaik most of those players are on non-PC platforms), all their zenimax titles are sold through steam and work great on Linux. CoD might be their biggest hold.

  I disagree on number of games, but I agree on player count. The number of PC games that are not on steam (or don’t work on linux) is tiny these days. But the number of PC gamers who don’t need steam, or need something that doesn’t run on linux is probably still quite high. Still, even if valve was able to push a few % of PC gamers to Linux, that would be huge. We’re currently at 2% on Linux in steam surveys. I could see a power move by valve around win10 eol bringing that closer to 10%.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shower thought: Valve could do the ultimate boss-move this year⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that was them drawing a line on eol windows. They cut both 7 and 8.1 at the same time. Could just be the policy now.

  Part of me wants them to take the opportunity to push people to switch to Linux, the other part of me thinks that will be perceived no differently from msft’s badgering about win11.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo warns that it can brick Switch consoles if it detects hacking, piracy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Easy fix

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shower thought: Valve could do the ultimate boss-move this year⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe you don’t understand it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t rely on it. If I said an OS was unusable by 99% of people because it didn’t support multithreading, it doesn’t matter if 99% of people know what multithreading is, that’s clearly a true statement. Similarly, if you’ve ever expected your PC to have the same files on it tomorrow that you put on it today, then you might find it annoying when that’s not the case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shower thought: Valve could do the ultimate boss-move this year⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re forgetting that valve can also drop support for EOL versions of windows, which so far they have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shower thought: Valve could do the ultimate boss-move this year⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No one is trying to play games on those vista machines, though. Valve pulled steam support for win 7 and 8.1 over a year ago because they were EOL. If they also pull support from win 10 once it’s EOL, then people will need to make a change to keep playing their games. If msft refuse to support existing hardware with win11, then many people will be forced to choose between buying a new laptop/PC, or trying Linux.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half-Life 3 is reportedly playable in its entirety and could be announced this year⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You might be mixing up the first we knew about hl2 with the time the entire source code for the game was leaked early.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Half-Life 3 is reportedly playable in its entirety and could be announced this year⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As Gaben put it in the recent valve doc, moving the story forward wasn’t a good enough reason to put out a new Half Life. The series has always been about pushing technological innovations, and they just felt stumped on how HL3 was going to do that.

  People like to claim valve doesn’t do anything anymore, but I legitimately feel like PC gaming is the best deal for gaming right now, handily beating out console and mobile, and that is in large part due to valve.

  Their flat internal structure hasn’t been perfect, but on the bright side it didn’t result in them pumping out what the gaming industry would have viewed in retrospect as yet another obligatory entry in an FPS series. Valve’s intention was to let smart people solve hard problems in the gaming space, and IMO they have always done that, it just so far hasn’t resulted in a HL3.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Stock Price Reaches 'Death Cross' Status⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It is a fact that there is a pattern termed a “death cross”, and it is a fact that Tesla exhibits it.

  It is also stated clearly in the article that, in the opinion of the author,

  the chart pattern reading kinda strikes me as astrology for guys in suits.

  And according to Reuters,

  about half the time that a death cross appears, it marks the worst point for the index rather than a harbinger of a steeper decline.

  Imagine reading an article before making inflammatory statements about it in 2025.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  barrier to entry is higher than that because it first requires you to understand the technology at a base level.

  I just don’t buy that argument. Email is prolific and virtually no one knows how it works.

  I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.

  Instead, for-profit ventures are motivated by money to come up with new ideas and push them into the mainstream with their marketing budgets. Then later, the fediverse copies those ideas, often with half-baked approximations that are hard to scale (usually due to bandwidth and/or moderation costs).

  people just abandon the old one and join the new popular one. They’ll leave when it gets shitty enough and join the new thing

  I’m hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse’s future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won’t fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it’s the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as “old reliable”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The most influential video game of all time - Bafta⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you believe that the film industry didn’t start until the 40s and 50s? Of course not. The first “films” came out around 1900, but the technology was still improving, and the industry was still figuring itself out. It wasn’t until the 20s that both had progressed enough for real “traditional” films could be made.

  Similarly, the gaming industry collapsed and rebounded twice before the 90s because it wasn’t getting off the ground. The tech wasn’t there yet. So yes, if you look at a timeline of the gaming industry, it was objectively in its infancy until “like the late 90s”. The same way the dotcom bubble came and went a decade before the vast majority of people even realized the internet had anything to offer them. I get that maybe you were in a nerdy little bubble of early adopters, but I’m talking about the world outside that bubble.

  • Note that revenue in ~1975 and ~1990 are basically the same. Industry revenue was mostly sideways for 20 years.
  • Then the 90s came. People shifted from arcades to handhelds, mobile, PC, the internet.
  • The number of games published per year increased significantly.
  • And an explosion of objectively “influential titles” were published in this era. Many of which are featured in Bafta’s list. (Though obviously Rogue should be on there).
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The most influential video game of all time - Bafta⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, the video game industry is relatively young, and the games that built it to what it is today did come out during the years that correspond with millennial youthhood. If we made a list of most influential films today, a lot of them would be from the 40s and 50s, but that wouldn’t be because a bunch of Silent Gens showed up to vote.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The most influential video game of all time - Bafta⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s actually really surprising that Pokemon isn’t on this list. I guess people forget that the gameboy games started it all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The most influential video game of all time - Bafta⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, the rest are like “ok sure, but maybe not in that order”. But BG3 and KCD2 are like 90% recency bias. Great games, but probably on par with Witcher 3 or the RDR games.

  But they didn’t do any research here, they didn’t have a panel of judges, they just put it up to a vote of the internet. By “influential” they really meant a popularity contest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, and I don’t like the common comparison to binary blobs, and I’m attempting to explain why.

  It is inherently safer to blindly run weights than it is to blindly execute a binary. The issues only arrise if you are then blindly trusting the outputs from the AI. But you should already have something in place to sanitize outputs and limit permissions, even for the most trustworthy weights.

  It’s basically like hiring someone and wondering if they’re Hydra; no matter how deep your background check is, they could always decide to spontaneously defect and try to sabotage you. But that won’t matter if their decisions are always checked against enough other non-Hydra employees.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you are familiar with the concept of an NP-complete problem, the weights are just one possible solution.

  The Traveling Salesman Problem is probably the easiest analogy to make. It’s as though we’re all trying to find the shortest path through a bunch of points (ex. towns), and when someone says “here is a path that I think is pretty good”, that is analogous to sharing network weighs for an AI. We can then all openly test that solution against other solutions and determine which is “best”.

  What they aren’t telling you is whether people traveling that path somehow benefits them (maybe they own all the gas stations on that path. Or maybe they’ve hired highway men to rob people on that path). And figuring out if that’s the case in a hyper-dimensional space is non-trivial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Stock Is Plunging Again. It Could Drop for a Ninth Straight Week.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  And then the citizens will own a chunk of Tesla? And we will see our investment pay off when it does well?

  Pretend I made that into padme/anakin meme.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The most influential video game of all time - BAFTA⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  These were the first two to come to mind for me as well. I hate what they’ve become, especially wow, but they were both clearly extremely influential.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It seems like the issue here is, users want to be spoken to in colloquial language they understand, but any document a legal entity produces MUST be in unambiguous “legal” language.

  So unless there’s a way to write a separate “unofficial FAQ” with what they want to say, they are limited to what they legally have to say.

  And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe now they need to create a formal document specifying in the best legalese exactly what they mean when they say they “will never sell your data”, because if there’s any ambiguity around it, then customers deserve for them to disambiguate. Unfortunately, it’s probably not going read as quick and catchy as an ambiguous statement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bill proposed to outlaw downloading Chinese AI models.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree that you can’t know if the AI has been deliberately trained to act nefarious given the right circumstances. But I maintain that it’s (currently) impossible to know if any AI had been inadvertently trained to do the same. So the security implications are no different. If you’ve given an AI the ability to exfiltrating data without any oversight, you’ve already messed up, no matter whether you’re using a single AI you trained yourself, a black box full of experts, or deepseek directly.

  But all this is about whether merely sharing weights is “open source”, and you’ve convinced me that it’s not. There needs to be a classification, similar to “source available”; this would be like “weights available”.