@vanderbilt@beehaw.org
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vanderbilt

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Starfield design lead says players are "disconnected" from how games are actually made: "Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is" (www.gamesradar.com)

apparently this is in response to a few threads on Reddit flaming Starfield—in general, it’s been rather interesting to see Bethesda take what i can only describe as a “try to debate Starfield to popularity” approach with the game’s skeptics in the past month or two. not entirely sure it’s a winning strategy,...

vanderbilt,
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Just like I don’t need to be a ship captain to tell when the titanic is sinking. It doesn’t matter how it’s made, a product is bad if your model audience doesn’t like it. Starfield isn’t some avant-gard experimental piece, it was meant to appeal to the masses. He can’t use the excuse of opinionated craftsmanship to excuse its poor quality.

vanderbilt,
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Two big reasons for me are: pleasant desktop experience, and no upselling/ads shoved in my face. If the Ally or Legion could just run SteamOS…

vanderbilt,
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The scope of the bill seems too broad. This will give political ammo to the right-wing populists, who are already riding the wave of anti-immigration.

vanderbilt,
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Yes, in my opinion. The configuration of grub (boot loader) is just another step to go wrong, and this will eliminate that possibility. Additionally, it will prevent stupider operating systems (cough Windows) from accidentally overwriting the boot loader during an update.

vanderbilt,
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My understanding is that’s a yes.

vanderbilt,
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It’s been pretty good. So long as you stick to verified and playable games your experience is going to be pretty solid.

vanderbilt,
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Same, I’m not a big multiplayer person so most of the time it works out. My latest has been Lethal Company, my first new multiplayer game this year 😂. Been a blast.

vanderbilt,
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Go figure forced poverty tends to exacerbate all the rest of society’s problems.

vanderbilt,
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Learning a second language is great then the font changes and you can’t fucking read anything 😭

vanderbilt,
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My Jamaican friend once said: “How many times do I have to tell you people flour is not a spice”.

vanderbilt,
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At its current level of capability, an unaligned GPT-4/5 could cause harm to humanity

vanderbilt,
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At my company we have already used it to great length. We had a backlog on several thousand support tickets we wanted categorized. GPT-4 did it in about 8 hours and with over 80% accuracy, at a fraction of the cost (and higher quality) it would have taken to get humans to do it.

We’re rolling out a chat bot too using it, with a local model as backup, to reply to leads when our clients are busy. So far they love it.

We’re making our money back despite the costs, and we’re able to spend that money paying people to not do busy work.

Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone next year (9to5mac.com)

In a surprising move, Apple has announced today that it will adopt the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard. The feature will launch via a software update “later next year” and bring a wide range of iMessage-style features to messaging between iPhone and Android users....

vanderbilt,
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This is great news.

vanderbilt,
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No. The e2ee is a proprietary extension developed by Google. To use it and the full set of extensions, you must either use the closed Google RCS API, which at the moment only Samsung is allowed to access. Alternatively you can use Google’s current flavor of the month chat app, Messages.

I have been very vocal that while this is a good thing, Apple for all their faults, should not be chastised for not implementing anything beyond the core of RCS. Google has been attempted to leverage RCS as a market force, and their widely publicized shaming of Apple not adopting it is at least partly in bad faith. If a telcom wants to implement RCS as Google touts it, you must also purchase and install the RCS gateways that Google can conveniently sell you for very large sums.

xda-developers.com/google-messages-rcs-api-third-…

vanderbilt,
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This is due to licensing issues on Google’s end. They indirectly manufacture the gateways needed to implement the e2ee extensions at scale.

vanderbilt,
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Given how aggressive Apple is in protecting their walled garden, I don’t expect this to survive the litigation. Apple tends to ignore individual hackers (look at hackintoshes) but businesses making money off unauthorized use of their APIs don’t last very long before the tidal wave of lawyers come.

vanderbilt,
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Maybe in the EU, but I would have little hope for the US market. The US has been astonishingly slow to take adverse action against companies within their own borders for the past 25 years. Believe me, I hope Apple and Google get what is coming to them, but I won’t hold my breath.

vanderbilt,
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I picked up a Black Friday Lenovo ChromeBook (Flex 3) for US $160 and use it essentially the same way you describe. You can load up a Debian-based Linux environment within ChromeOS. It’s basically my web-capable thin client.

vanderbilt,
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It took them so long I don’t even have a switch anymore 😂

vanderbilt,
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I’ve literally taken to pasting the articles into GPT and asking it to summarize the articles. I imagine they will be the next causality in the coming AI wars.

vanderbilt,
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Bluesky is pretty good, and you’re already on Lemmy so why not leave that cesspool?

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Committing Fully To Netplan For Network Configuration (www.phoronix.com)

The Canonical-developed Netplan has served for Linux network configuration on Ubuntu Server and Cloud versions for years. With the recent Ubuntu 23.10 release, Netplan is now being used by default on the desktop. Canonical is committing to fully leveraging Netplan for network configuration with the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS...

vanderbilt,
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For what it’s worth I didn’t even notice they changed it. Can’t be the end of the world but I’d like to hear what network admins opinion’s are.

vanderbilt,
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Part of me hopes we get something like the EU browser choice mandate out of this. First time you open Safari you pick your search engine from a list of major providers, and maybe the option to pick your own too.

vanderbilt,
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Frankly Starfield didn’t even deserve the nomination. It didn’t do anything unique or deserving of merit beyond just existing. I tried it, and while it has some interesting parts it’s just shallow and bland. The lore had huge potential but got Swiss-cheesed by the game mechanics and wasn’t developed at all - in what was supposed to be a Bethesda RPG. They need to yeet Todd and bring back the Obsidian folks.

vanderbilt,
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Pretty much lol. RMS went off the deep end so no GNU, Torvalds used to call people devil cunts so no Linux kernel. Theo probably did something to upset somebody lol. Maybe we can just use TempleOS and become computing hermits?

vanderbilt,
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Hmm maybe we’ll run FreeDOS on breadboarded (vintage) 8086s and live in caves 😂.

vanderbilt,
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I like the idea of RISC-V, but I need something like a Raspberry Pi except RISC-V. I can accept a little jank, but it needs to be “good enough” if you catch my drift.

vanderbilt,
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Does being the last sane man on Earth make you crazy?

vanderbilt,
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I always found it ironic because even if you’re just poking the bear you still get banned by some random subreddit.

vanderbilt,
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I appreciate that they try, and as much as I dislike some of snap’s design choices I think it has a place. Flatpak appears to be the winner in this race however, and I feel like this is Unity all over. Just as the project gets good they abandon it for the prevailing winds. I’ve been told the snap server isn’t open source, which is a big concern?

vanderbilt,
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Absolutely, and I think that’s why snap has a future at all. Immutability is the future, as well as self-contained apps. We saw the explosive growth of Docker as indication that this was the way. If they can make their tooling as easy as a Dockerfile they will win just by reducing the work needed to support it.

vanderbilt,
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I’d love to try it, if they’d ever give me an invite code. Twitter was pretty cool back in the day and I’d like something similar as a place to post what I’m working on.

vanderbilt,
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Every Mastodon client I have tried to use is way too confusing. There are plenty of people using it, but it feels like a wasteland because connecting with people is too high friction. Maybe I’m using it wrong /:

vanderbilt,
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iOS

vanderbilt,
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Speaking of, does anyone have recommendations for a cheap Linux laptop? About my only requirement is a good screen and good battery life. Anything requiring compute power I have servers and my Mac to remote into, so I’m not worried about performance. Some of the ChromeBooks have looked good, but the screens are terrible on like 80% of them.

vanderbilt,
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I used to own an 9th Gen X1 Carbon but the speakers were god-awful given the lack of a DSP. Otherwise a very nice laptop though, amazing keyboard. This is going to sound crazy, but I picked up a Lenovo ChromeBook since my last post and just installed the Linux environment on it. For my needs (I SSH/Parsec into my Mac for most off-cloud workloads) it’s a combo of “just works” and *NIX where I need it. Since it’s cheap too I don’t care if it breaks which is a plus.

vanderbilt,
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Mac SSDs are fast, but they are not nearly fast enough to replace RAM - especially in a UMA where RAM speed is critical to performance. 8GB in a Pro machine is not enough. It’s barely enough for a ChromeBook in this age of electron and web app everything. The prosumer market needs 16GB starting, and while we’re on the topic we need 512GB standard storage too.

vanderbilt, (edited )
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I mean relatively speaking. Macs used to be known for fast storage. I haven’t been tracking the news on that front lately. I haven’t noticed any SSD speed issues so I haven’t looked into it.

vanderbilt,
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Pro-ish is not Pro though. I could barely run Docker and PyCharm with a few Safari tabs without it paging to SSD and chugging on an 8GB machine, never mind an entire k8ts cluster. If for some reason you also need a VM you are going to feel it Mr. Krabs with only 8GBs of RAM. Any sort of multi-tasking require more than 8GB these days, and as an SRE I’m not just running my dev environment. Slack, Email, Teams, and the dozen other productivity and business apps all eat RAM I cannot spare on an 8GB system. I’m not worried about price because my field in general isn’t sensitive to that, but perhaps Apple is trying to please both crowds here? IDK. Like you allude to, heavy or extended workloads go on dedicated servers, but I still need to be able to develop for those systems and the thought they sell a “Pro” machine to anyone with such anemic specs is concerning.

vanderbilt,
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I think that was the tactic they are using. Enterprises and engineers are going to spec out the RAM and/or CPU, and anyone else will get it in the default config and possibly not even notice the difference. If you know, then you know sort of thing?

vanderbilt,
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It’s a real disservice Apple is doing to their own brand here. I work with college students in adjacent fields every day and the logic follows as you describe. It’s a $1600 laptop surely it’s capable of anything I need as a student or hobbyist right? Nope. An 8GB machine can barely load the VSTs and other audio thingamajigs they like to pile on it, what is prosumer graphics design going to do to it?

vanderbilt,
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As long as it sells it’s not stupid.

True.

vanderbilt,
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Fact of the matter is the most successful Linux devices are the ones that you don’t need to know Linux to use. Chromebooks and steam decks are popular because they don’t need tinkered with. You can if you want, but the average person can just use it.

vanderbilt,
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I imagine some of the smarter people at Microsoft are seeing the Steam Deck unfold and are realizing it’s a potential threat. Desktop is dying, and gaming is one of the few segments still doing alright in the space. Microsoft wants to make sure games continue to be made for Windows even as mobile and consoles take over the lion’s share of profits. They haven’t been buying up studios just to prop up Xbox 😉. The Deck runs Windows games, and if compatibility ever reaches a point that the average gamer doesn’t need to know they aren’t running Windows, Microsoft is in big trouble. With the progress made just in the last five years alone, it’s an eventual possibility.

Licensing is a cost in an already razor-thin market. If gamers won’t care that a device isn’t running Windows - they won’t install Windows on it, and the OEM will just pocket the difference. Valve also has an advantage traditionally enjoyed by console manufacturers. They can sell it at no profit or even a loss, because Steam Store sales will make the money back.

So long as Valve keeps steady progress and improving compatibility, they will carve out their niche. If they can somehow get studios with major multiplayer games to provide official support, the chicken and egg problem will solve itself.

vanderbilt,
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Very true. It’s similar to NVIDIA in that way. Their money comes from data centers, licensing, and B2B - not gaming GPUs. I’m speaking in the terms of Windows on traditional consumer desktops and their position in that space. I don’t mean to sound like one of the usual “MS is dead any day now” people, cause frankly they are wrong.

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