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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • I think we generally agree, but I worry that a new platform couldn’t do more than GoG+Lutris already do. Perhaps, though, it could be done with a reputable foundation.

    And the lawsuit is more or less what I was radio referring to with Steam’s price rules. I would definitely be on board with striking the requirement for publishers to offer the same price on all platforms at the same time.

    On that note, though, I wouldn’t take the whole case at face value, as I think parts of it are pretty frivolous (unless they prove that Steam is actually actively stifling competition and, you know, not just a decent platform that entered the space first.) I also think it’s silly to point out Epic’s lower commission rate since they’ve been giving out free games like candy and actually making third party games exclusive to their platform in a very clear attempt to compete with Stream. There’s absolutely no guarantee that they won’t raise their commission once they have a foothold in the market (though I do concede that their licensing terms for Unreal Engine have remained fairly reasonable).


  • On the one hand, yeah it’s absolutely important not to idolize any company, because they have no sense of loyalty or generosity. Telling yourself otherwise is a guaranteed path to disappointment.

    On the other hand, of all the shit sandwiches we’ve been served, Steam is one of the fresher ones. Though they developed Proton for their own benefit, it’s pretty undeniable that it has made gaming on Linux way more viable than it has ever been, and it’s open source. I mean no shade to FOSS solutions like Lutris, but having paid developers work on a project full-time certainly has its advantages.

    I do think that the concerns about Steam’s pricing rules are valid, as are gripes with its DRM for first party games. But, overall, they’ve brought a lot of convenience to PC gaming that is hard to find elsewhere in the gaming world.



  • Windows into I went to college for development and decided to check out this Linux thing. At the time, I wanted something as different from Windows as possible, so I went with Ubuntu with Gnome 3 (I know) for about a year. Tried out Fedora, couldn’t get my sound to work and accidentally uninstalled the desktop environment trying to fix it, slunk back to Ubuntu, tried out a Debian briefly, and eventually ended up on Linux Mint with Cinnamon and KDE.

    At one time I really wanted to try a bunch of stuff and probably would’ve hopped a lot more if Fedora didn’t shatter my confidence, but nowadays I want as little disruption between machines as possible. I have to use Windows for work, so I keep my Linux setup pretty vanilla so I don’t miss features between the two very much. I’ll probably still play with other distros every now and then on old laptops, but I’ve fallen into a “if it ain’t broke” mindset with my daily machines.





  • Right, but the wild west was tamed by increasing regulation, which is precisely what crypto fans want to avoid. The truth is, though, most people won’t trust crypto without some kind of centralized authority guaranteeing that their money is safe, whether that be a government or a private entity. This pretty quickly materialized with the NFT craze, which saw the vast majority of NFTs were created on the same two sites, with only the biggest names having their own domains and redundant storage for their images.


  • It feels incredibly gross to just say “generated CSAM is a-ok, grab your hog and go nuts”, but I can’t really say that it should be illegal if no child was harmed in the training of the model. The idea that it could be a gateway to real abuse comes to mind, but that’s a slippery slope that leads to “video games cause school shootings” type of logic.

    I don’t know, it’s a very tough thing to untangle. I guess I’d just want to know if someone was doing that so I could stay far, far away from them.


  • The problem is that snake oil stuff was (mostly) solved not because snake oil salesmen decided to be nice and close up shop, but because regulations and laws were put in place to protect people from them.

    Likewise, we’ve seen crypto get hit with pretty much every issue that has ever afflicted fiat over the entire history of money. The only reason we’ve seen anyone get punished for it is because governments still have some jurisdiction over crypto traded by their citizens. People will say “but smart contracts!”, but the only proven way to be safe with those is to verify the code is both bug-free and not malicious, and that’s a lot to ask of someone trying to buy dog food. A lot of exploits have been executed on contracts that were marked safe by audit companies.

    I think the idea as a concept is interesting, as I don’t exactly trust the government or banks either, but I trust random black box companies and individuals a lot less.


  • Proton is a godsend. Some games can be a little unstable, but I’ve yet to find one that doesn’t work at all. Even was able to install and mod a game from 2000. For what doesn’t work on Proton, Lutris can hopefully handle. Takes a little doing sometimes but I got Battlenet/WoW working almost prefectly with CurseForge.

    Nvidia drivers are a huge pain in the ass, though, and haven’t played nice with Wayland in my experience.