Not a peep from them about lag or input delay. That technology, the more heavily it is used, the worse the game feels. Imagine playing a game that requires precise analog input, FPS in the hundreds but with a 150+ ms latency. It ruins gameplay. Paradoxically, those games where input lag is not an issue, like grand strategy or visual novels, don’t require such high frames. And those games that benefit from more frames, are actually hurt by this tech by becoming sluggish and disgusting to play. Such an unnecessary invention. Optimizing the game is hard work, but it makes for a better experience that’s far more impactful than AI generating will ever be.

The one big advantage is that it can be something you can completely control. A very tiny htpc or even a raspberry pi without the need of much storage that will forever work on floss and will never be remotely discontinued, show ads against your will, or sell your personal data.

“Fuck you, I got mine” attitude.

I can tell you are not a football enthusiast, that game was ass. Spain should’ve won by 3 to 0, there were two goals annulled by skin of the teeth technicalities. Argentina did nothing the whole game, except try to injure Spanish players in the hopes of a penalty result. Everyone knew this was going to be the case, but the magnitude was off the charts. Argentina was humiliated from a pure sport technical ability alone. Spain dominated the way I would expect a premiere league team to dominate a group of disorganized amateurs. It was honestly a bit painful to watch. Argentina was not competitive in the slightest, that was not how a game between two equally skilled teams typically goes. Watch England vs. France semi-finals for a better example of what high level play between matched teams actually looks like.

And on top of all of that, corrupt FIFA will look the other way and do nothing about it because they’re currently the princesses of the football world. There’s just too much money tied to sponsorships that depend on Argentinian stars, so FIFA will do everything in their power to keep the money flowing, even if that means tolerating a team that undermines sportsmanship and integrity. FIFA went through a corruption crisis in 2015 and learned absolutely nothing.

Venezuela has never even classified, so why a ban?

Then went back. They kept that reputation because they now hide all those numbers. But the 3DS tried that and was so expensive that no one was buying it. After a price cut, that some speculate went into a heavy loss, it became the best sold handheld that generation. The Wii U was also unclear whether it was sold at a loss or not. The Switch and S2 are probably sold exactly at cost.

You mean Zero Parades? the game that debuted to extraordinary critical acclaim but sold a handful of copies? The lack of sales is not due to piracy, nobody cares about the game, it has no cultural impact. It’s not Disco Elysium, that’s lightning in a bottle. What corporate scum never seem to realize is that you can’t buy a reputation, nor can you pay to get rid of a bad one.

Nobody want’s ZP, because it is not DE and it was not made by the people who did DE. No matter how bad of a tantrum a corporate suit throws.

Now, this one is a funny story you brought up, because the people at ZA/UM are actually unionized (those who remained in 2022 and those who were hired later). And I would bet inordinate amounts of money that if they weren’t for the union, the studio would’ve been closed instead of just laying off 32 people.

Go cry about how much you want to give more money to faceless people who are already millionaires.

Just to be clear. The flatpak is free but the mobile one is $3,62?

Not judging, nothing wrong with FOSS getting sources of income to keep the work up. But I’m just trying to make sure I understand the rationale. What does the app exposes on users? because pay usually demands google play’s most privacy invasive services.

Ahoy on YouTube did a statistical analysis on this question. And he found that there were some very brown games but overall there were just as colorful games as in any other time period. The trend actually comes from the sixth generation and the seventh actually ended it.

It is mostly a feeling that comes from the over exposition of a couple of popular games that were indeed browner at some parts. But if you look at all the games released, there was no significant change. It’s statistical cherry picking.

EDIT: essentially, a few popular IPs experimented with post processing shaders and got a bit browner at some parts, some other IPs aimed at a more mature and adult audiences and were more de-saturated in visual design for some parts of the game. If you only show those parts it may seem like the entire 7th generation was brown, but it wasn’t, not anymore than any other video game generation.

What you are describing is what is supposed to happen. What actually happens is that big film studios ignore the center channel altogether. Instead choosing to mix the voice in 3D because cinema and IMAX and Dolby, etc. which honestly sounds extraordinary in those sound system. It is mostly because they are desperate to propose something that actually brings a competitive edge to theaters against home TVs and streaming. Instead of, you know, making good films. But that’s beside the point.

What ends up happening is that your system’s codecs and down mixers do what they are told they are supposed to do. Mix all channels together into stereo, with a tiny boost to the center channel on both sides. Easy, that should bring forward the dialogue, whoops! there’s no dialogue in the center channel, it is all mushed all over the place over the other 4 channels and drowned out by the audio FX.

This is the reason some egregiously poorly dialogue mixed movies like Tenet and The Dark Knight Rises actually also sounded bad in mid to lower tier theaters. Those theaters were calibrated for exactly the way it was supposed to sound, with a strong center channel for dialogue and what is directly in front of the camera. But the audio isn’t there, it is dispersed to a side in the other two speakers (this is done automatically now in mixing software, which doesn’t help). The movie came with the flaw, and even if you have a good 5.1 channel audio at home, you can check for yourself, the dialogue is also hard to hear on those movies. Because it was shit from the beginning unless you hear it in an IMAX theater or have access to one of those 3D field Dolby Atmos 64 speaker systems that Nolan mixes on.

Atomic and immutable is a game changer for IT. It is essentially bulletproof, everything is containerized, packages run very little risk of breaking the system. But, it is still just as customizable and flexible in the ways that matter, the user experience. It is fine to be opinionated about particular modules and pieces on your own system, but that means turning into a sys admin, I was a sys admin when I was paid to do it, it left me with no desire to do sys admin. Now I just let it rip, but still have the knowledge to tinker when and if I want to, it’s no longer mandatory. Really appreciate that nowadays.

For example, a recent Bazzite update was busted in a particular way such that my laptop wouldn’t boot. No problem, rollback fearlessly to a previous system image, and wait with a perfectly working machine. Two weeks later, someone else figured it out, fixed it, pushed it into stable, and now the laptop updates and boots the new image without issues. No need to meddle with snapper or limine myself. The OS itself is its own snapshot system already built-in, with minimal down time and zero risk of data loss.

Every once in a while I get the itch to tinker with something, but it is aimed at clear and specific projects in my homelab and not at just running a basic functional desktop.

I feel like a crack dealer right now, but, have you heard of Linux from Scratch?

I get what you mean with build it yourself, but Arch is more or less like a lego kit. LFS is the material manifestation of the concept of madness. I did it once, it was fun, it was crazy, I don’t want to ever do it again. Afterwards I immediately switched my main machine from Arch to Mint. I have a deeper understanding of how an OS works under the hood now, and a strong appreciation for the work put forth by distro maintainers. All I want now is a system that works straight away. I no longer want to build myself anything. Tinkering is a hobby, I need a working tool. Today I use Bazzite and all my tinkering is devoted to how can I make rare old games run on Linux. It’s the difference between buying a chair and taking up carpentry as a hobby.

If it weren’t because the most popular models achieve that by stealing code and promoting massive numbers of developers losing their livelihood. Ignoring the ethics of the technology is very telling. Stallman has always been the ideas man. Linus is an architect and very shortsighted about the wider cultural picture.

Nolan is an elitist asshole and his movies are not that great, actually. That is just him going “kids these days” like an old fart. He is all in on the IMAX scam. He insists on bad audio mixing (horrible even on theaters) hiding under the “I only mix for IMAX theaters” excuse. At least he acknowledges that it is Hollywood that is terribly out of touch with reality. Backrooms is successful because it connects with the audience nothing to do with whether it uses CGI or not (the Oppenheimer nuclear explosion scene is SO bad in an otherwise fine movie). And Backrooms was filmed on a regular digital 35mm Red camera at 1.85 ratio with regular Dolby Atmos and you can absolutely hear the dialogue. He might denounce AI slop but doesn’t realize that he’s also been using tech as a crutch to his creative shortcomings.

Here’s the thing. When you pirate something, the money you would’ve paid, but didn’t, to the company would have gone to the company profits.

See that, I said profits, not employee salary, profits.

The people who made the game, were already paid, while they were making it. Unless there’s some sort of revenue share agreement, or the workers are unionized to receive compensation on exceptional performance of products, or the workers partially own the company thus receive part of the profits every year, then none of your money will go to the developers. Literally not a cent. Companies who make record profits have massive layoffs of thousands of developers, you know why? Because employment and pay are decoupled from revenue. All the money goes into pockets that had no involvement on the creation of the game. The game they are working on right now, is not being paid by the revenue, but by investors, who are gambling on the next game’s revenue. The developers will be paid or fired, regardless of how much money old games make.

So, when you pirate a game, no one goes hungry. No one runs out of healthcare. People laid off from their work will go hungry or lose their healthcare regardless of how much money the game they coded makes (some even would point out that the highest record breaking games usually come from the studios with the worst layoffs). They were already paid, there’s no more money to go from you to them in the current capitalist scheme. This is why it is always moral to pirate a game made by a mega corporation (or owned by one), it’s reclamation.

Phillips is meant to slip, on purpose. It is designed so factory workers in the past, who used manual drives, could quickly assemble things without over torquing the screws. Just go firm and continuous until the thing slips, then switch to the next step, if you have to use force to avoid slip, you are doing too much. It was simple and easy. Pozidrivs are meant to withstand and impart way much more torque, but, they are supposed to be used with a torque limited electric drive. So assemblers, and even robots, can do the job fast and to exact torque specifications. The result is that people use PZ drives on PH screws and immediately obliterate them, because the drive has too much grip. While the PD drive fits PZ screws but won’t grip and will slip much more, causing a ton of damage to both screw and drive. It is not entirely the material’s fault. Using the wrong drive or choosing the wrong screw head is what usually leads to failures.

Maybe, but it is not like I have free access to Europe. I was there by chance, it’s not like I live there. Steam historically has never sold hardware anywhere in the global south, specially in latam, at least Asia get some official sell channels.

They didn’t even accepted my appeal that I was on vacation. Just plain old “take your ban time and fuck off” from support.

Steam nukes accounts for region hopping. I got threatened once for buying on Europe and then on Latin America in too short a period of time and my account was on probation for a while. God forbid one travels internationally with a laptop.

Also, steam explicitly forbids shipping to forward freight services or PO boxes.

Not 100% accurate. The Steam Machine has the smallest form factor at that power capacity. It is reportedly the quietest piece of hardware for its size. And it also solved the wake with controller issue.

None of those things are available in any other hardware package. I game on a laptop connected to my living room TV. It is somewhere midway between a deck and the Steam Machine. I can hear the fans over the TV speakers on intensive games and the setup is awkward. I have to walk to the tv to startup the laptop and use wireless keyboard and mouse to handle the laptop until I get to desktop and only then the controller can summon big screen mode.