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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • The problem with brands is you have to know the brand to know if you’re paying for quality or advertising, or both. There are plenty of big brand name products that are not worth the price, but there are plenty that where the price premium is reflected in the quality of the product.

    Unfortunately everything has to be on a case by case basis. I generally favour generics but there are a few branded products that I will go out of my way to buy.

    A treat example is Pyrex. It used to be a mark of quality due to the material they used to make their plates bowls etc. Then I got sold to some big conglomerate and they switched to cheaper less heat proof material. Now Pyrex is just a shitty legacy name slapped on crap, but at a premium price.







  • Intel claims to have caught up with the upcoming Lunar Lake series but still to be seen.

    That may be too late for whatever new device Valve is working on as given the lead time for such devices they may already have committed to an architecture for devices next year.

    Also running X86 games on Arm devices is not likely to be efficient. I doubt the energy efficiency of Arm chips would outweigh the overhead of X86 to Arm translation?

    But it’s all speculation - even without hardware, getting Proton to work with Arm is good for steam regardless of any specific devices. For example it would allow steam to push the compatability tools onto Mac devices and even potentially mobile devices. Makes sense for Valve to do this without it meaning anything more that it being a god idea in itself.


  • There are plenty of options for personal computers; you have to make the choice to go private and personal.

    I built my own desktop, which remains very common and is relatively easy to do. I have Linux and Windows on it, and use Linux nearly 100% as I agree I don’t like ads etc. I use a Firefox with ad blockers and don’t get ads; I use lots of open source software even to access services like Youtube (Free tube).

    There are also even linux laptops, and the Frame.Work laptop which is fully modular and bring your own OS.

    There are open source OS for phones.

    You’re right about the corporatisation of the internet and services, but it remains up to users to vote with their feet and chose to take back their privacy and person computing.

    Linux is at 4% of desktop users in recent months - that is many millions of people actively choosing to exist in a space where they control their personal computers. People don’t need to remove computers, just chose to set them up to be what they want them to be.


  • As others have said, gaming is thriving - AAA and bloated incumbants are not doing well but the indie sector is thriving.

    VR is not on the verge of collapse, but it is growing slowly as we still have not reached the right price point for a mobile high powered headset. Apple made a big play for the future of VR with its Apple Vision Pro but that was not a short term play; that was laying the ground works for trying to control or shape a market that is still probably at least 5 if not 10 years away from something that will provide high quality VR, untethefed from a. PC.

    AI meanwhile is a bubble. We are not in an age of AI, we are in an age of algorithms - they will and are useful but will not meet the hype or hyperbole being banded about. Expect that market to pop and probably with spectacular damage to some companies.

    Other computing hardware is not really stagnating - we are going through a generational transition period. AMD is pushing Zen 5 and Intel it’s 14th gen, and all the chip makers are desperately trying to get on the AI band wagon. People are not upgrading because they don’t see the need - there aren’t compelling software reasons to upgrade yet (AI is certainly not compelling consumers to buy new systems). They will emerge eventually.

    The lack of any landmark PC AAA games is likely holding back demand for consumer graphics cards, and we’re seeing similar issues with consoles. The games industry has certainly been here many times before. There is no Cyberpunk 2077 coming up - instead we’ve had flops like Star Wars Outlaws, or underperformers like Starfield. But look at the biggest game of last year - Baldurs Gate 3 came from a small studio and was a megahit.

    I don’t see doom and gloom, just the usual ups and downs of the tech industry. We happen to be in a transition period, and also being distracted by the AI bubble and people realising it is a crock of shit. But technology continues to progress.






  • Just another example of how broken the premium end of the gaming industry is. Ubisoft is an old fashioned publisher, trying to churn out big hit AAA games based on big IP but producing poor quality buggy games, which don’t turn a profit.

    We keep hearing how the games industry is “in trouble” but its actually thriving with loads of smaller devs and publishers doing well. The problem is the behemoth publishers like Ubisoft who release games based on financials timelines rather than the games being finished or high quality.

    Its not like Ubisoft are short of good IP. What they’re lacking is good quality control and an environment to foster high quality creativity. When you treat gaming like its just a production line to generate money this is what you get. Making AAA games is expensive for sure, but its pointless if you don’t get the quality and the creativity right too - they’re just making expensice games.

    We’re seeing the same in the movie industry - big studios producing franchise movies on a financially driven schedule with poor quality and lack of creativity.



  • Its not about memory size its about the asymmetric sticks. It was a classic problem with OS memory management in the past. Modern OS are better at dealing with it but it is not the optimal set up.

    You’re running windows game which use proton/wine that manage memory for the game and use linux for access to RAM. The asymmetry could conceivably cause issues you wouldn’t notice with native apps.

    I’d try removing the 16gb stick (or the two 8gb sticks and keeo the 16gb stick; all that matters is whatever ram isnleft is the uniform) and see what happens with the games you’ve been trying. It might not he the issue but the only way to know is to test it, rather than dismiss it because its not what you expected.


  • The common denominator in your issues would be your PC. If games are working according to protonDB and you’re unable to get them to work on multiple distros that suggests its your PC.

    There are two candidates in your specs - your RAM and your Graphics card.

    As others have said, asymmetric RAM is unusual and it certainly was warned against in the past as it caused system issues. While OSs may be much better at managing RAM now, that doesn’t mean all scenarios can tolerate it. Given what Proton is doing is complex (running Wine, which is essentially a windows layer) I would not be surprised if the memory configuration is just a step too far - you have windows software using a windows compatibility layer for memory asking a linuxn system for memory access.

    An obvious way to test this is to remove the 16gb stick from your machine and see what happens.

    The other side is your graphics card - are you using the latest nvidia drivers?


  • I think Discovery had the worst. It isn’t the technobabbke it self that was the problem, it was how it was delivered.

    Everyone seemed to be needed to be the most intelligent person in the room. So one person would start with some sudden realisation and solution, and then another would interrupt them and pick up the idea and then either back to the first person, or yet another person would interrupt. Between then all they’d build a tower of technobabble and deus ex machina, and self congratulatory nonsense. It was just so silly.

    Person 1 “wait if we reveresed the polarity of the neutron projector…”

    Person 2 “yes! It’d cause a build of tachyons and we’d be able to resonate the electron confabulaotr! Oh but there wouldn’t be enough plasma.”

    Person 3: “no wait, that might work! We’d have to recomboulate the manifolds and…”

    Person 1: "…that would allow us to recrystallise the warp matrix! Of course!’

    Whose a genius? Everyone in the room is a genius! Let’s all give ourselves a round of applause.

    That and all the space kung fu.



  • Maybe he broke terms of service with the streaming companies but they should be pursuing him in civil courts. This feels like abuse of the criminal justice system to retrieve money for companies that were negligent in how they were running their streaming businesses.

    This guy produced music and he alsp streamed the music even if it was bots at industrial scale. He seemingly met the criteria needed to get money from the streamers. I’m not a lawyer at all but on cursory look at the definition and elements of wire fraud, I guessing this will hinge on whether this was a “material deception” - but he produced actual music and he streamed it, so is it?

    Also i wonder whether it can be proven that the intent was to “defraud” rather than take advantage / game a system.

    It feels like the tax payer is bearing the cost of prosecuting someone for a dispute between a person and the multi billion dollar music industry.

    Also the music industry trying to paint this as theft of money from other artists is a bullshit - the streaming fees are supposedly divided out proportionately from overall streaming. He caused more streaming so the pot was bigger, and he took a proportionate share of that bigger pot. And any disproportionate sharing reflects the shitty practice’s of the streamers and the big music rights holders who are essentially monopolies squeezing out the smaller competitors from the system.