ericwdhs

@ericwdhs@discuss.online

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's a no⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed on never being the one blocking merges, but for the merging party, “if people don’t prevent merges” is such a huge caveat that I think attempting a zipper merge at a lane ending at any appreciable speed is impractical at best and downright dangerous at worst.

  If everyone is traveling slow already, failing to merge quickly at the lane ending isn’t a huge threat to safety and just a slight hit to efficiency. Most merges I’ve experienced are probably in the 40 to 80 mph range though. In that case, you absolutely do want to take the first decent merging opportunity you can, because waiting to do it until the lane ending can have huge safety and/or efficiency consequences if another good merging opportunity doesn’t open up at speed.

  Also, I’m pretty sure zipper merging was mentioned zero times in driving lessons and tests where I’m from, so you should basically just assume other drivers don’t even have it as a concept. If you’re from somewhere where more people practice it regularly, then I can see why you are more encouraged to enforce it as a baseline.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be The Sunshine ☀️⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think most tailgaters are driving fast for time savings. I think it really just comes down to the feeling that being forced to drive slower than you want to just feels bad, and if you’re emotionally immature or impulsive, you let that feeling impact your driving.

  I don’t let it impact my driving, but I can absolutely feel my impatience rising being trapped behind a slower driver. There have even been a couple times where it was persistent enough to start affecting my focus. My solution? I parked somewhere to cool off, which you might note is the opposite of saving time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be The Sunshine ☀️⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree in general. People have different brain structures. Some people literally can’t even visualize things in 3D, so they are effectively driving with an entire layer of information removed.

  That said, it’s not about wanting everyone to drive fast. It’s about wanting everyone to have some level of self-awareness and drive accordingly to minimize how much everyone else on the road has to accommodate them. Think of someone pulling a trailer on narrow roads where passing opportunities are rare. Around me at least, it’s common to see these drivers pull off the road periodically to relieve everyone else built up behind them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be The Sunshine ☀️⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean… if you are regularly camping the red car spot, this feels like a good spot for the “he’s out of line, but he’s right” meme.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I actually did buy in and don’t regret it, but I definitely had to make sure my expectations were in the right place. My rule for buying all games, early access included, is only buying for what’s in a game now, never on promises. Star Citizen as it is now is a very expansive sandbox sim with a lot of unique tech and mechanics already functional, but I’d hesitate to recommend it to anyone without massive caveats.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What gaming console you owned disappointed you the most and why ?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just curious, did you play the original or the All Stars version? The water mechanics were designed for the GameCube’s analog triggers, so the Switch’s digital triggers forced All Stars to use a workaround. I never played the All Stars version, so I don’t actually know if that made much of a difference.

  Agreed on boss repetition. I was definitely less sensitive to that as a kid. (Maybe I still am?)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What gaming console you owned disappointed you the most and why ?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair enough. I liked that the maps felt lived in and connected, so exploration was actually more compelling for me in Sunshine, and I tend to lean away from darker games in general. Different tastes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What gaming console you owned disappointed you the most and why ?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I loved Sunshine and only learned later it was one of the more divisive 3D Mario games. What didn’t you like about it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DNAddy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you think LLMs are good at anything, I am almost 100% certain to disagree with you about pretty much everything, to help you understand this distinction.

  Depends on what you mean by “anything.” The current obsession in the tech world of trying to shove LLMs into the AGI box? Yeah, not a good fit. Pure language stuff like translation or brainstorming? Very useful. LLMs now even surpass DeepL.

  why do I even feel the compulsion to preface by saying my bit about ai and llms?

  I have a similar compulsion to clarify that my interest in LLMs centers mainly around local open-source models that can run on consumer hardware.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Controller: Reservations open May 8th - Steam News⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In case it works for you, I use IsThereAnyDeal instead of Steam for sale notifications. You can either import your Steam wishlist or make a fresh one on the site, then make a notification system as simple or as complex as you want. I’ve got my setup to notify me only when my most anticipated games hit new historical lows or when anything else in my wishlist hits 90% off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Controller: Reservations open May 8th - Steam News⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, I didn’t think of that. If Valve did something like subtracting Machine wishlists from Controller wishlists to estimate the number of people wanting to buy the Controller to use by itself, that leaves a lot of room for underestimating the overlap. I probably contributed to this too by wishlisting the Machine despite not being sure I actually want it. If you only wishlisted the Controller, I may have taken your spot. Oops. Sorry, guys.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Controller: Reservations open May 8th - Steam News⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, it’s a complete mess to try to predict. Despite both the Frame and Machine being in my wishlist and expected to come in around the same general price, I’m buying the Frame day one while the Machine may stay on hold indefinitely. I’ve been all in on VR since the Vive, but I’ve got better PCs than the Machine already, so my interest in it is more just for its novelty. Nothing about my wishlist status tells Valve any of that though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam Controller: Reservations open May 8th - Steam News⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I said it somewhere else, but I think Valve actually did factor in wishlist counts. The problem is in the percentage of those that convert to sales. For games, the median conversion rate is 10% to 20% of wishlists converting to sales within the first week. I expect the Steam Controller’s conversion rate was much higher.

  Valve may have even tried anticipating this from Deck sales and still failed to account for the Deck conversion rate still being lower due to the greater price.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“I genuinely feel GameNative could replace handheld PCs like the Steam Deck” — Inside Android’s Fastest-Moving Gaming Project, GameNative (my article!)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I definitely think graphical fidelity is “good enough” now, but there’s still quite a bit of advancement available in other areas still drawing on the CPU and GPU, VR and local AI being a couple. I’ve been all in on VR since the Vive, and while I reject corporate AI as much as most people here, I do run local models occasionally and would like to have NPCs using the tech.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“I genuinely feel GameNative could replace handheld PCs like the Steam Deck” — Inside Android’s Fastest-Moving Gaming Project, GameNative (my article!)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, anachronism most literally means “misplaced in time.” You can go two directions with that, something being more at home in the future or more at home in the past. The former obviously doesn’t apply here, and I would consider my wording identical to the latter. A reduction in belonging implies a reduction in commonality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“I genuinely feel GameNative could replace handheld PCs like the Steam Deck” — Inside Android’s Fastest-Moving Gaming Project, GameNative (my article!)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not worried about the tech going away so much as the market percentage dropping to make enthusiast hardware more niche. Among other things, it makes enshittification in the space harder to fight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“I genuinely feel GameNative could replace handheld PCs like the Steam Deck” — Inside Android’s Fastest-Moving Gaming Project, GameNative (my article!)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Except even among most current PC gamers, the threshold isn’t that high. 4K is still less than 5% of the market.

  Also, I’d argue “anachronism” isn’t the same as “pointless.” It’s just claiming that something that was once more common will become less common.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨“I genuinely feel GameNative could replace handheld PCs like the Steam Deck” — Inside Android’s Fastest-Moving Gaming Project, GameNative (my article!)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think the greater power of larger devices is being questioned. There just happens to be a threshold where a technically inferior but more accessible solution becomes “good enough” for most people that they never consider moving up.

  Just look at mobile devices. Of everyone who accesses the internet, 75% do so via mobile devices only. As someone who doesn’t even like desktops losing ground to laptops, that statistic scares me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ELI5: How does Frame Generation even work?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, there’s a fair bit of criticism about the tech being better for the higher-end cards that shouldn’t need it in the first place. Another way this shows up is in VRAM amounts.

  To ELI5, how effective FG is at improving the base frame rate scales with available VRAM. (Think 60 improved to 80 versus 60 improved to 120.) Some modern games hit 12GB regularly now even in 1080p and before any fancy tech. (There’s a separate discussion on game optimization in there.) Since lower-end cards really skimp on provided VRAM (every tier should really be at least 4GB higher), there’s not much space there for FG to work with in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨caww caww⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you trolling or do you genuinely believe that? I remember the original too. YouTube is applying AI filters on many old videos and reuploads, and the end result is distrust of many videos we used to trust.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lmao⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, never read the books. Just figured I needed to expand my reasoning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lmao⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Counter-counterarguments.

  That assumes the 999 are in a position to stop the 1. Assuming FTL travel/communication/detection is never possible, reaction ability is always going to be limited. A relativistic projectile aimed at a planet can be a silent civilization killer.

  This is more about cautiously reacting to the possibility of hostility in the very high stakes scenario of first contact, not the confirmation of hostility. In the room analogy, we don’t know who has the gun, whether it’s truly 1 person or 0 or 100 or 500, if most or all of the 999 are blindfolded or willing to defend newcomers, whether overpowering the violent one(s) is actually possible due to everyone being spread out and any guns having functionally unlimited ammo, whether other people have already been taken out for just showing up or resisting, and whether all of the above even matters if the aggressor gets a kill shot off before any of the above takes effect.

  Evolution is inherently a competition for limited resources with winners and losers, so violence innately comes with the territory. Even grass and trees are in a war for sunlight. The concept of peaceful cooperation may be common due to the individual specialization likely needed for a species to become space-fairing, but it’ll be a higher level, more abstract idea, and the universality of other species applying it more broadly cannot be assumed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lmao⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Regarding the first point, I think it just assumes the possibility for hostility, not the universality of it. If there’s a room with a thousand people and I know one person in the room has a gun and wants to kill me, I’m still going to hesitate to enter regardless of the 999.

  Also, any intelligence that arises out of evolution is going to have at least the rough concept of violence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lmao⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry. I may be reading more into the chain than what’s actually here. I’m just saying “aliens can’t be expected to behave like humans” isn’t really a viable explanation to the Fermi Paradox without some big caveats, because given a large enough sample of intelligent alien species, (1) they won’t be monolithic, (2) some will exhibit human-like behavior on the premise that humans aren’t special, (3) some will have arrived on the scene millions or billions of years before us, and (4) the “somes” from the last two points is enough that galaxy spanning civilizations should already be everywhere even if FTL is forever impossible.

  If intelligent life is rare enough to preclude the “given a large enough sample” (I’m thinking one species per galaxy level rarity), then the solution to the Fermi Paradox is elsewhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lmao⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This argument has never really made sense to me. If you picked a random individual lifeform from anywhere in the universe, then yes, there’s a good chance it won’t have much in common with humans. If you take the totality of all life in the universe however, we should see a smoother distribution of behaviors. Human-like behaviors would be within that spectrum by definition and should not be entirely unique.

  Let’s say of all the intelligent species in the universe, an average of 1% exhibit whatever motivations are needed to go interstellar, and that 1% of those species got a billion year headstart. Well, due to sampling bias, we should still see that 0.01% represented everywhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, the price parity thing seems to be a big misconception here especially. The price parity guideline comes from Valve’s page for Steam keys. Valve gets a 0% cut when keys are sold on third-party sites, yet they still use Valve’s infrastructure, so it makes sense for Valve to not want you to price them to have all your key sales go third-party.

  As far as I can tell, Valve has zero interest in how you sell copies of a game that don’t use Steam keys.

  Also something I noticed per their guidelines:

  It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

  As a frequent user of IsThereAnyDeal, I can tell you it’s more common than not for a game’s historical low price to not be on Steam, so Valve is definitely not strictly enforcing this. With this and the lack of legalese on the page and letting developers/publishers determine what “similar” and “comparable” are on their own terms, I’m not seeing anything Valve should be doing differently here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I never called it reasonable. I just don’t think it’s especially egregious. Honestly, I would price the value of Valve’s contribution (which is definitely not zero) at maybe 15% to 20%, but that’s just a gut feeling.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not saying the standard doesn’t suck, just taking issue with the implication that anyone using it is uniquely bad to do so.

  But yeah, you’re right that getting me to admit Steam (overall) sucks would be nigh impossible. I genuinely don’t believe it does, so there’s nothing to admit. Maybe you could convince me to lie about it though? Lol.

  I do admit there’s a few places it sucks, the gambling stuff being the biggest, but their positives eclipse those for me. I also acknowledge I’m in a privileged position being able to enjoy Valve’s efforts in VR, Linux compatibility, etc. directly and that I might have different opinions if I was on the outside looking in. I imagine that’s not quite the admission you want though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  30% is the industry standard though, and Valve’s contribution of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you’re not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn’t make that viable, that’s really on you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jensen Huang says gamers are 'completely wrong' about DLSS 5 — Nvidia CEO responds to DLSS 5 backlash⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, it’s actually been kind of a relief to have fewer new games to look forward to every year. I have a backlog of something like 700 unplayed games already in my library. I know I’m not going to play them all as much as they deserve before I die, but being able to make a much bigger dent in them is nice.