HarkMahlberg
@HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth
People keep asking me, and I haven't really had an answer, but now yeah, I'm thinking I'm back.
- Comment on 'Slop Evader' Lets You Surf the Web Like It’s 2022 [404 Media] 2 weeks ago:
2022 was still not that good of a year for the internet guys.
- Comment on Many Top MAGA Trolls Aren’t Even in the U.S - Elon Musk’s new X feature has been very revealing. 2 weeks ago:
I think about this comic often nowadays.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
The real question is if Valve plans to swallow the jumps in price. They must have designed the machine before the price hikes, so I wonder if they already had a price in mind and whether they're gonna stick to it.
- Comment on Google tells employees it must double capacity every 6 months to meet AI demand 2 weeks ago:
the next 1000x in 4-5 years
At the risk of stating the obvious, Ars is working backwards from this metric to get their headline "double every 6 months." 2^10 = 1024, to get that number in 5 years means doubling every half-year.
But Google didn't set incremental 6-month deadlines for 5 years straight, they set a single 5-year deadline. Because in 6 months shareholders can call their bluff quite easily, but in 5 years they're hoping everyone is A) distracted by some new disaster, or B) there's a new tech hype cycle they can push. They're trying to stall the bubble popping by pointing to a nebulous future where they magically scale to infinity, and hoping we all forget that they ever made this claim.
- Comment on Which year was the most stacked for game releases? 5 weeks ago:
It's probably not the most stacked but I think 2017 was still a monster year for games.
Breath of the Wild
Mario Odyssey
Persona 5
Nier Automata
Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice
Divinity Original Sin II
Doki Doki Literature Club
Cuphead
Prey
Star Wars Battlefront II
Destiny 2
Nintendo Switch itselfThese were, for one reason or another, some of the most monumentally influential games in the last 10 years, no matter if you're talking AAA, indie, platformer, shooter, open world, RPG, horror, you name it.
- Comment on 'Valve does not get anywhere near enough criticism': DayZ creator Dean Hall says the 'gambling mechanics' of Valve's monetization strategy 'have absolutely no place' in videogames 1 month ago:
- Comment on 'Valve does not get anywhere near enough criticism': DayZ creator Dean Hall says the 'gambling mechanics' of Valve's monetization strategy 'have absolutely no place' in videogames 1 month ago:
The price is off-putting because we can see the sticker in order to get sticker shock. But lootboxes and gambling have no upfront sticker, the cost is obfuscated and extended over years. In that regard, Paradox is much more transparent.
That being said, my beef with them is their "subscription for DLC" model, at least the version I saw being rolled out for EU4. That and the free updates tend to be fairly unbalanced if you don't also buy the corresponding DLC for that update. That seems skeevy... but still not as skeevy as lootboxes.
- Comment on Grandmaster, Popular Commentator Daniel Naroditsky Tragically Passes Away At 29 1 month ago:
Critikal created a great tribute to his mentor on YouTube, should go watch it. RIP
- Comment on Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It’s Like to Own a Cybertruck 1 month ago:
It's a Jeep thing.
- Comment on GOG say their preservation program has been "harder than we thought", thanks to DRM and elusive creators 1 month ago:
That's journalism right there.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I don't know, I think a rag calling itself Windows Central might have a bias towards Microsoft...
Even the tone of the article sounds like their arms are tired from carrying their water.
One thing after another, Microsoft is forced to respond time and time again to ongoing rumors that it's leaving the hardware space.
A new Xbox rumor started this weekend that's now blown out of proportion, as usual.
Can you bitch any harder?
- Comment on Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? 2 months ago:
I'm not allowed to say "huh, would ya look at that?" Calm down.
- Comment on Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions! 2 months ago:
I think Jak and Daxter now has a native PC port.
- Comment on Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions! 2 months ago:
Push 1v1 caused a lot of shouting matches between me and my brother. 10/10 would play again, that shit was genius.
- Comment on Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? 2 months ago:
100% with you, well put
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 2 months ago:
I can relate. I played DOS when it had a camera locked to a 90 degree arc. XD
- Comment on Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? 2 months ago:
Sure as shit, there he is, lol
- Comment on Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? 2 months ago:
That is why I get tired about the "individual action" suggestion, that I alone could stop using Amazon and hurt their sales, I could de-Google my life and keep my privacy, or recycle plastic and save the ocean, or swear off AI to fuck with Nvidia.
But all that is a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of people who all readily handed over their lives to these companies and haven't left (or can't). And governments who abdicated regulatory authority to them, which have allowed them to run rampant.
They're still making it so these massive companies have force in my life. I alone can't do anything about that.
- Comment on I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies 2 months ago:
Since you mentioned publishers that haven't been greedy, I'll throw a few more out there that I think are worthy of support. They don't need launchers, that don't need accounts, they don't have predatory subscriptions. They just make great games.
- Supergiant Games: Transistor, Hades, Hades II
- Larian Studios: Divinity Original Sin, DOS II, Baldur's Gate 3
- Playstack: Balatro
Otherwise, I'm totally with you. The account-walling of the Internet as a whole has pissed me off royally and I see no reason to give those bastards what they want.
- Comment on Updates to Xbox Game Pass: Introducing Essential, Premium, and Ultimate Plans - Xbox Wire [prices going up] 2 months ago:
Give it time
- Comment on Sony is reportedly set to release an updated PS5 DualSense controller with a removable battery | VGC 2 months ago:
Actually scratch that, the face buttons are mushy as hell and there's nowhere to rest your thumb. I miss jump inputs like I've never played a video game before. None of the every single generation of Dualshocks I've used had such sloppy buttons.
- Comment on Sony is reportedly set to release an updated PS5 DualSense controller with a removable battery | VGC 2 months ago:
God I hope so. My DS5 battery died within a year. It literally loses a full charge overnight, and even when it still worked it only reported battery percentage in 12% increments. My still-chargeable DS4 was still accurate to the 1%.
I still use the DS5 wired because screw e-waste, and ergonomically it's adequate. But the battery problem makes it the worst controller Sony's ever made, and I'm including SIXAXIS in that assessment.
- Comment on Brazil's president has signed a ban on selling loot boxes to minors as part of a larger online child safety law 2 months ago:
Common Brasil W
- Comment on Valve apologizes for ruining a Steam game's launch 2 months ago:
Ah, I did miss that part of the article. My mistake.
- Comment on Valve apologizes for ruining a Steam game's launch 2 months ago:
The article says that Valve is only going to make the game a Daily Deal for a single day. The polygon commenters have it right, why not make it a week?
Why not buy 138,000 copies, one for each user that wishlisted the game, and give those out gratis? At $15 per copy, that's only 2 million dollars. That's a pittance for a company the size of Valve.
- Comment on Bosch dishwasher needs app for many neccessary features 2 months ago:
So here's the hot take I took from his video: yeah, an internet connected dishwasher is dumb, but so is a LAN connected dishwasher. "I don't want to have to maintain my own app to run this thing, keep this thing secure," damn straight. That little open source app is probably gonna get abandoned at some point, I don't want to have to fork it and fix things and patch vulnerabilities.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 3 months ago:
BG3 is the only game I can think of that's worth an $80 price tag and the moniker of "AAAA." There is a frankly ludicrous amount of stuff in this game. The amount of effort it just have taken, let alone to ship 8 fully featured patches, borders on lunacy.
- Comment on AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare 3 months ago:
You misunderstood, I wasn't saying you can't Ctrl Z after using the output, but that the process of training an AI on a corpus yields a black box. This process can't be reverse engineered to see how it came up with it's answers.
It can't tell you how much of one source it used over another. It can't tell you what it's priorities are in evaluating data... not without the risk of hallucinating on you when you ask it.
- Comment on AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare 3 months ago:
Wild to see you call for a "sane take" when you strawman the actual water problem into "draining the oceans."
Local residents with nearby data centers aren't being told to take fewer showers with salt water from the ocean.
- Comment on AI was a common theme at Gamescom 2025, and while some indie teams say it's invaluable, it remains an ethical nightmare 3 months ago:
Beyond the copyright issues and energy issues, AI does some serious damage to your ability to do actual hard research. And I'm not just talking about "AI brain."
Let's say you're looking to solve a programming problem. If you use a search engine and look up the question or a string of keywords, what do you usually do? You look through each link that comes up and judge books by their covers (to an extent). "Do these look like reputable sites? Have I heard of any of them before?" You scroll click a bunch of them and read through them. Now you evaluate their contents. "Have I already tried this info? Oh this answer is from 15 years ago, it might be outdated." Then you pare down your links to a smaller number and try the solution each one provides, one at a time.
Now let's say you use an AI to do the same thing. You pray to the Oracle, and the Oracle responds with a single answer. It's a total soup of its training data. You can't tell where specifically it got any of this info. You just have to trust it on faith. You try it, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. If it doesn't, you have to write a new prayer try again.
Even running a local model means you can't discern the source material from the output. This isn't Garbage In Garbage Out, but Stew In Soup Out. You can feed an AI a corpus of perfectly useful information, but it will churn everthing into a single liquidy mass at the end. And because the process is destructive, you can't un-soup the output. You've robbed yourself of the ability to learn from the input, and put all your faith into the Oracle.