teawrecks
@teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Nintendo warns that it can brick Switch consoles if it detects hacking, piracy 3 hours 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 10 hours 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 15 hours 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 18 hours 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 1 day ago:
Easy fix
- Comment on Shower thought: Valve could do the ultimate boss-move this year 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 3 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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” 1 month 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” 1 month 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. 1 month 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”.
- Comment on Bill proposed to outlaw downloading Chinese AI models. 3 months ago:
Those security concerns seem completely unrelated to the model, though. You can have a completely open source model that fits all those requirements, and still give it too much unfettered access to important resources with no way of actually knowing what it will do until it tries.
- Comment on Bill proposed to outlaw downloading Chinese AI models. 3 months ago:
Is there any good LLM that fits this definition of open source, then? I thought the “training data” for good AI was always just: the entire internet, and they were all ethically dubious that way.
What is the concern with only having weights? It’s not abritrary code exectution, so there’s no security risk or lack of computing control that are the usual goals of open source in the first place.
To me the weights are less of a “blob” and more like an approximate solution to an NP-hard problem. Training is traversing the search space, and sharing a model is just saying “hey, this point looks useful, others should check it out”. But maybe that is a blob, since I don’t know how they got there.
- Comment on Bill proposed to outlaw downloading Chinese AI models. 3 months ago:
It’s also the free market for those corporations to buy a government and use it to outlaw competition.
- Comment on China's new and cheaper magic beans shock America's unprepared magic bean salesmen 3 months ago:
Yeah, I agree that in the long term those two sentiments are inconsistent, but in the short term we have to deal with allegedly misguided layoffs, and worse user experiences, which I think makes both fair to criticise. Maybe firing everyone and using slop AI will make your company go bankrupt in a few years, and that’s great; in the meantime, employees everywhere can rightfully complain about the slop and the jobs.
But yeah, I don’t think it’s fair to complain about how “inefficient” an early technology is and also call it “magic beans”.
- Comment on China's new and cheaper magic beans shock America's unprepared magic bean salesmen 3 months ago:
Hah, see that’s what I thought when various family members asked if I had heard about it. Turns out, if our electronics need grounding, so must our bodies…
- Comment on China's new and cheaper magic beans shock America's unprepared magic bean salesmen 3 months ago:
I have made only factual statements. You can believe I’m arrogant for doing so, you can believe the preference of hundreds of millions of people is “niche” or “few” in number. Those are called opinions.
Which statements have I made that you believe to be my opinion?
- Comment on China's new and cheaper magic beans shock America's unprepared magic bean salesmen 3 months ago:
Yeah, I understand that you personally choose to disagree with reality, maybe you don’t like what reality has become, but unfortunately that doesn’t make it less real.
Twitter wasn’t profitable for its entire existence, it’s often a cesspool of ragebaiters, but clearly it has value because the second it was taken over, everyone insisted on continuing to use it, even choosing to migrate to various clones.
Uber and Lyft have been struggling to be profitable by effectively stealing from their drivers, but millions of people get off a plane and immediately use the services every day. It clearly has value.
Same for doordash and uber eats.
Your personal distaste for the business practices are valid, but they’re not relevant when discussing what the current state of the technology is. For many millions of people, chatgpt has (for better and worse) replaced traditional search engines. Something like 80% of students now regularly use AI for their homework. When Deepseek released, it immediately jumped to #1 on the Apple Store.
None of that is because they’re “magic beans” from which no value sprouts. Like it or not, people use AI all. the. time. for everything they can imagine. It objectively, undeniably has value. You can staunchly say pretend it doesn’t, but only if you are willingly blind to the voluntary usage patterns of hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of people every hour of every day.
And for the record, I am not in that group. I do not use any LLMs for anything currently, and if anything makes me use AI against my will, I will promptly uninstall it (pun intended).
- Comment on China's new and cheaper magic beans shock America's unprepared magic bean salesmen 3 months ago:
No opinions whatsoever. I believe I made that clear in my list of things to disregard when considering the objective reality of current AI tech.