MossyFeathers

@MossyFeathers@pawb.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Leak: Valve is making a Steam Controller 2 and a ‘Roy’ for its Deckard⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I personally would have loved it if they’d actually carried through with physically swappable components. While the touchpads are awesome for games that don’t have normal gamepad support or require faster turn speeds, they just don’t have the same feel as a physical analog stick for the games that do support it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Researchers achieve first successful communication between dreaming individuals⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Literally Hypnospace Outlaw.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man who won art competition with AI-generated image now says people are stealing his work⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll throw you a bone and say that, if/when AGI rolls around, I’ll be more than happy to extend concepts like creativity and artistic ability to it. I’ll throw you another bone and say you’re technically not wrong either.

  The question I’ve come to is less about what is “original vs remix”, and instead, “sapience vs machine intelligence”. If sentience is the ability for an individual to say, “I think, therefore I am”, then sapience is the ability for an individual to figure out that “I think, therefore I am”. Furthermore, in this context I define “machine intelligence” as something artificially created which demonstrates elements of sentience or even sapience but fails to meet all the criteria that we would consider necessary for human intelligence (basically machine intelligence is “fake” intelligence).

  AI at its current state appears to be nothing more than machine intelligence. It looks cool, it can fool you pretty good, however, in the end it appears to be about as conscious and self-aware as a jellyfish or siphonophore.

  Furthermore, the AI doesn’t have the ability to create unique experiences. It doesn’t have the ability to walk out the door, drive down the street, walk into a surf shop and buy a surfboard. Even if we say, “putting it in a robot is too hard, we’ll just put it in VRChat instead”, I still have strong doubts about whether or not the AI is actually experiencing anything.

  I mean, it can’t even learn from itself without human intervention ffs. Unlike a human, you can’t train an AI while it’s running. Unlike an AI, humans don’t ever fully shut off until we’re dead (no, your brain doesn’t turn off when you sleep; if it did then you’d literally be dead).

  So you’re not technically wrong, but at the same time AI brings nothing new to the table. It doesn’t have new experiences it can mix in with the artwork it was trained on, nor is there evidence that it’d be able to control or shape what it experiences. While I hesitate to attach the physical act of creation to the concept of creativity (I consider creativity to be separate from artistic skill), a large part of creativity is coming up with something new based on a combination of your own experience and the experiences of others. Whether or not you act on your creativity and how well you execute your idea is immaterial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man who won art competition with AI-generated image now says people are stealing his work⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you want to copyright the prompt, go right ahead. As far as I’m concerned that’s fair game; though I still think you’re a dumbass for getting mad about it.

  As for the image? Fuck off. You can convince people that AI is capable of original works, or you can convince people that AI is nothing but a tool to remix and mashup other people’s artwork.

  If you do the former, then the AI is the one that should receive copyright, not you. If the AI wants to then sell or transfer the copyright to you, then it’s free to do that… Except AI can’t hold copyright because there’s no evidence that it is intelligent enough to do so.

  As for the latter? You’d better start going through your training set to make sure none of the trained images exist in the final image in a large enough capacity to be considered infringing. Otherwise, you may be liable for copyright infringement.

  Either way, go fuck yourself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zynga owes IBM $45M after using 1980s patented technology for hit games⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sure the patent made sense at the time, but it seems pretty generic now. Additionally, shouldn’t the patent have expired at this point? Why is it still being enforced?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Michael Bay's Skibidi Toilet movie production company has apparently sent DMCA takedowns to Garry's Mod⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m fully aware, I grew up the the game as well (well, TF2, but it was the “golden years” of Valve and source-based multiplayer games). That doesn’t mean Garry Newman can’t send them a copy of the dmca for them to include in their C&D. I honestly want to see Valve do it, regardless of whether the original dmca is legit, because it’d bring a lot of attention to false-dmcas. The reason why I’m not saying that Garry should do it is because, well, the assets are actually Valve’s, not Garry’s, and I’m not sure if Garry actually has an explicit license to use them and as such, would not be in a position to “fight fire with fire” himself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Michael Bay's Skibidi Toilet movie production company has apparently sent DMCA takedowns to Garry's Mod⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d love to see valve return the dmca with a c&d telling them that all the models and character designs use their creative property and that they can go fuck themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve gives developers some big reasons to add a demo on Steam⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nice! This is particularly useful for games when the demo has different content than the final game (it’s not very common, but sometimes devs treat demos more like teasers and/or prequels and have different content in them than the actual game).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ridiculed Stable Diffusion 3 release excels at AI-generated body horror⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m normally (mostly) against generative AI (I’m mostly okay with it if it’s not being used commercially, but you should still pay artists if you have the means), but I’m actually kinda into this. I love how it’s shitty but photorealistic at the same time.

  That said…

  “It wasn’t too long ago that StableDiffusion was competing with Midjourney, now it just looks like a joke in comparison. At least our datasets are safe and ethical!” wrote one Reddit user.

  Sure buddy. Listen, using other people’s work doesn’t become ethical just because you’re not selling the training or dataset. That doesn’t mean it’s unethical either, but imo it falls into a ethical grey area where the way you use it determines whether or not it’s ethical.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve has little to worry about as new Steam Deck rival arrives⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re the one contradicting yourself when you’re saying that linux requires a Translation layer. And the translations are not always 1:1. Please show me the benchmarks.

  How is this a contradiction? It seems like it’d be the opposite. Translation layers reduce performance as they translate programs from one system to another, so the fact that Linux can run games in a translation layer and still get as good, or better, performance than Windows means that Linux is fast enough to make up for the translation layer performance penalty.

  Regardless, here are some benchmarks.

  From 2019, Windows 10 vs Pop_OS:

  forbes.com/…/these-windows-10-vs-pop-os-benchmark…

  While these are all in 1080p, several are also running in translation layers. The ones that are running native were faster in Linux, while the ones running in proton achieved roughly the same performance. This was also 4~5 yrs ago, and proton has improved a lot. Additionally, these were run on an Nvidia card using their proprietary drivers, and Linux is known to be AMD-biased.

  So here’s another one from a couple years ago with Windows 11 vs Manjaro (benchmark totals for 4k, 1440p and 1080p at the end): m.youtube.com/watch?v=xwmNLqJL7Zo

  While they found that games tended to perform better on windows in 4k, they also found that games in 1440p were roughly the same while 1080p averaged faster on Linux despite running in a mix of proton, Proton-GE, and wine. This is also a couple years old though, and while the average might be better on Linux, there were some pretty significant performance gaps at the top and bottom of the chart.

  Here’s a third one from about 6 months ago. This was pretty highly circulated on Lemmy, so I’m surprised you didn’t see it, but here it is:

  discuss.tchncs.de/post/5340976

  They claim to have seen an average 17% improvement on the games they benchmarked, and included a video of the benchmarks. There was a later benchmark where they claimed they got +20% performance using a tweaked version of Garuda Linux, but that required user tweaks and I’m mainly concerned with “un-tweaked” performance.

  Linux isn’t perfect, and if you want to play games with no hassle, then Windows is probably still your best bet. However, in situations where you’re trying to squeeze as much performance as you can out of an underpowered device, Linux just seems obvious. You have standardized hardware that allows you to spend the time and effort to iron out bugs and deficiencies with fewer edge cases than you’d get with non-standardized hardware. I think that’s why Steam(Deck) OS is so good. It runs on standardized hardware and so it’s easy for Valve to configure and optimize for user-friendliness because they don’t have to worry about ten billion different hardware configurations.

  Also, as a side note, I’ve found that older games just run better on Linux. They ironically tend to be way less of a hassle to get working. It’s because Wine (and I think Proton/Proton-GE) have compatibility for 16bit programs, while windows doesn’t. You have to run a virtual machine with Windows XP or earlier to run 16bit programs, and I’ve found that to be a mess.

  Seriously, I cannot get a Windows 98 virtual machine set up on Windows 10 to save my life. It just won’t properly install on software like VMWare, and I’ve had to resort to actual PC emulators to get 16bit games to run on a modern windows PC (which are slow as fuck). I’ve read it has something to do with AMD CPUs? I don’t know what the specific issue is though, just that it supposedly works just fine on Intel but not AMD. However, I haven’t encountered that mess on Linux.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve has little to worry about as new Steam Deck rival arrives⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Many of the games are made to be run on windows, windows is still a effecient os, it’s just a lot of bloat, which can be disabled.

  A) as someone else pointed out, “bloat” and “efficient” are exclusive to one another. Now, you can argue that windows is efficient in some areas and bloated in others, but “bloat” and “efficiency” are mutually exclusive when applied generally.

  B) yes, most, if not all of it, can be disabled through registry edits and 3rd party hacks. However, in my experience, the more you try to debloat windows, the more unstable it gets. Then, it will all come back eventually via updates, which means you get to disable it all again. Finally, again in my experience, the more you try to debloat windows, the less stable it gets, and this carries over even when the OS reinstalls/reenables bloat you tried to get rid of. Seriously, my experience is that even after windows updates rebloat everything, the OS remains unstable, and becomes even more unstable after you debloat again. Granted this was with windows 10, but I imagine the same is more or less true for windows 11.

  Also a lot of optimizations in nt has been done for gaming, features which are missing in the linux kernel, but there are RFCs to add nt like synchronization primitives, in the linux kernel.

  C) and yet, iirc, recent Linux vs Windows 11 benchmarks show Windows games running on Linux via Proton/Proton-GE anywhere from slightly slower to slightly faster than Windows, despite requiring translation layers to run; while the Linux-native games typically run faster than their Windows counterparts.

  Windows is just that bloated.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve has little to worry about as new Steam Deck rival arrives⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Same. I just can’t imagine using anything other than Linux for this kinda handheld. Like, I’m mainly a Windows user and I can’t imagine trying to use windows on my steam deck. When you want to make a gaming-focueed handheld like this, you want as much performance as you can squeeze out of the hardware. You’re not doing that with windows.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hi-Fi Rush Gets Final Patch To Fix Minor Issues, Reconfirms Limited Physical Edition⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m surprised and disappointed companies are still teaming up with lrg after their cd/dvd-r fiasco. Tl;Dr they were caught using CD and dvd-r instead of CD/dvd-rom. Not all releases are effected, it seems to just be releases with low batch numbers. However, the fact they did it at all is scummy as fuck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Helldivers 2 has received 100,000 negative reviews since announcing players must link Steam to a PSN account⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally, I don’t have the game. I was interested in getting it, but I’ve lost a lot of interest due to this move. However, I wanted to help let people know that it’s worth asking for a refund, but that they may need to submit a second request before it’s approved.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Helldivers 2 has received 100,000 negative reviews since announcing players must link Steam to a PSN account⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve heard that

  A) you have to trigger a manual review (your first attempt will be denied by a bot, second refund request is usually manually reviewed). So you have to request a refund at least twice.

  B) get lucky, because not everyone seems to be getting refunds.

  It may be a regional thing (giving refunds to people who live in areas where PSN isn’t available), or it could just be pure luck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Golden Week Game Fest has some awesome deals on Steam⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been considering picking up No More Heroes however I’ve heard the PC port is ass. Are there any community patches for it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This "gamified focus tool" lets you construct your own lofi girl/boy to chill/study with⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It sounds neat, but as they noted, it’s a shame it doesn’t have options to use your own music; either via local files or integration with streaming services.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FCC to vote to restore net neutrality rules, reversing Trump⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I looked into it and I was wrong about it being a law, but it was regulated under title 1 regulations, which the FCC claimed let them enforce net neutrality. That got struck down in court, which lead to the FCC regulating it under title 2, which was removed by Pai and is now being reinstated by Burden’s FCC.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FCC to vote to restore net neutrality rules, reversing Trump⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So, iirc, net neutrality was originally a law, then it was struck down by the Supreme Court because “there’s enough competition in the marketplace that makes it unnecessary”, then the FCC under Obama tried to regulate it as a title 2 service, which got repealed by Ajit Pai (aka “A shit pie”), and now the FCC is trying to impose net neutrality again. Assuming my memory is correct, how certain are we that the Supreme Court won’t eventually turn around and rule against it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RetroDECK - Yuzu Removal from 0.8.0b⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ew. It looks like the patch notes are gone, but if they actually pull citra and yuzu from retrodeck then I’ll probably switch to emudeck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Help] Issue with on-screen keyboard⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m on the stable branch and have this issue, so not a beta bug.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Discussion] Emudeck - Great Emulator on the Steam Deck⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pssst… Hi, got a couple questions, one’s potentially bug related, the other is feature related.

  First question: when I plug a controller in and try to play something with Dolphin, many times I have to go and swap the controller in Dolphin’s gamepad setup, otherwise it doesn’t see the controller. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that way when I originally installed retrodeck (I could seamlessly go from holding the deck to using a controller on the couch), so I’m wondering if there are any settings that I might have accidently enabled/disabled that are requiring me to manually swap controllers in dolphin settings. If it helps, the steam deck shows up as Xbox 360 pad 0, my steam controller shows up as Xbox 360 pad 1.

  Second question: someone else mentioned that it’s possible to use emudeck to launch games directly from steam. Is this possible with retrodeck, and if not, are you planning to implement the ability to do something like that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Discussion] Emudeck - Great Emulator on the Steam Deck⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I may have to check out emudeck then. I’m not sure if retrodeck can do that too, but I like the idea of it treating roms as standalone games in my library. I might end up running some games as part of retrodeck, and some from emudeck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Discussion] Emudeck - Great Emulator on the Steam Deck⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s in the Discover app, just do a search for it! I like the fact that it has a scraper for getting box art, game metadata, etc.

  As for what I’ve been playing, recently finished Jet Set Radio Future and I’ve been playing Luigi’s Mansion and Super Mario Sunshine, along with some og Animal Crossing (I love that the villagers have no problems with insulting you).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Discussion] Emudeck - Great Emulator on the Steam Deck⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s the difference between emudeck and retrodeck? I’ve been using retrodeck and enjoying it quite a lot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨RetroDECK 0.7.5 - Released! (we also got a new wiki)⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fuck yeah! Scummvm was fixed!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SEGA Reveal Teasers (Jet Set Radio, Shinobi, Golden Axe, Crazy Taxi & More)⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Legit me when I saw Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gotta get that flarp⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can get a first gen Xbox for about $50~$100, including games. Just be aware of the clock capacitor. A lot of xboxes have bad clock capacitors now (they used them instead of coin cell batteries for some reason), which can leak and damage the board. If you get an OG Xbox, make sure you A) check the serial number to figure out where the capacitor is and if the Xbox needs it because B) the last Xbox version had better capacitors that don’t fail nearly as much, but they’re required for the Xbox to start up. On older models you can just snap off the capacitor and call it a day so long as it didn’t leak and corrode the board traces.

  Oh, and electron shepherd has an hdmi adapter for the Xbox. Works pretty well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Incident in the parking lot⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What the fuck? Is there context for this?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the reason why valve is doing this is because people might buy a game at a higher price, either on Steam or another storefront, and then complain that it was cheaper on Steam or another storefront and start demanding refunds or demand that Valve reduce the game’s price on steam.

  What do you do then?

  If you don’t address it, you’re automatically seen as the asshole even if it was the developer’s choice.

  You can give out refunds, which makes you look like the good guy, but that also looks bad to companies like Visa or PayPal (my understanding is that large numbers of refunds tend to look bad to payment processors, even if the refund was initiated from the company and not the consumer). Granted, Valve is a big enough company that they shouldn’t have issues with that kinda thing, especially since they already offer refunds, but my understanding is that it still doesn’t look good to payment processors and can make them upset.

  You can ask the developer to reduce the price on steam, but what if the dev says no?

  You can force the dev to reduce the price, but now you’re even more of an asshole.

  You can lower the cost on your storefront and cover the difference yourself, but now you’re potentially losing money. That, if I’m not mistaken, is actually anti-competative from a legal standpoint.

  You’re kinda screwed if you’re trying to be the good guy.

  That’s not even getting into how bad it looks if it’s cheaper on steam than somewhere else when you have a marketshare as large as Valve’s.