BananaTrifleViolin
@BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
- Comment on No, Phil Spencer, Having AI Mock Up An Old Game Is Not The Same As Preserving It 16 hours ago:
One thing Phil Spencer does not seem to care about is emulation. There are already Xbox and PlayStation emulators that allow access to more of both platforms back catalogues than any of the current generation consoles are capable of…
Xbox could build cloud based emulators off the open source tools already available and make their entire Xbox back catalogue accessible to current users to stream. They could help improve the tools to ensure greater and greater compatibility for titles and then it would be there forever.
The reason it doesn’t happen is money. They dont see money in game preservation so they dont bother beyond a few big name nostalgia hits. Muse AI isn’t about game preservation, its about game development - they’re just pissing around with game preservation to feed it content as a punt on the future for it somehow making game development cheaper.
- Comment on No, Phil Spencer, Having AI Mock Up An Old Game Is Not The Same As Preserving It 16 hours ago:
AI can make Shakespeare BETTER! Like it can put it in modern text speak, and shorten it down to fit in a 30 second tiktok, plus give space for ad breaks and team product placement. AI will help enhance user engagement with Shakespeare and also leverage new monetisation options and cross platform synergies.
All we have to do is let people copyright AI made content because ultimately it wasn’t Shakespeare that did tge hard work, it was the AI tech Bros who transformed it into a modern content meme and raised 3rd quarter profits.
- Comment on No, Phil Spencer, Having AI Mock Up An Old Game Is Not The Same As Preserving It 16 hours ago:
Yeah, instead game preservation is being solved by abandonware and copyright infringement.
Legal open source software is doing the heavy lifting, and then torrenting is sharing by he files. But there is a huge risk as there is no safety net to preserve the niche and unpopular games.
The game publishers and broken copyright laws are blocks to preservation but fortunately people are just doing it anyway. And the more the big companies push against it (including targeting emulation systems for current systems) the more they push it underground and out of any control they might have had. Typical greed and stupidity.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer 1 day ago:
The article totally misses the big intervening step between Skyrim/old Bioware and the failure of Starfield/Dragon Age: CDProjectRED.
While those studios largely just made “more of the same”, CDPR made Witcher 3 and then Cyberpunk 2077. Both games are way better narrative experiences and pushed RPG forward. Starfield looks very dated in comparison to both, and Dragon Age failed to capture to magic. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 are successes because they also bring strong narratives and emotional connections to the stories.
Starfield would have been huge if it had been released soon after Skyrim. But now it just looks old fashioned, and I think the “wide as an ocean, as deep as a puddle” analogy is good for Starfield. Meanwhile Witcher 3 - which is 10 years old! - has quests and storylines with choices and emotional impact. BG3 and KC:D2 are heirs to Witcher 3.
- Comment on Rumor: GTA Roleplay Server FiveM Victim Of Hostile Takeover - And One Of Rockstar's Own Is Involved 2 weeks ago:
Out of interest, when GTAVI comes out will it matter?
Will the next game need a new from-scratch RP mod? Or will some of the open source components of FiveM be reusable?
FiveM have an advantage being owned by Rockstar but if it all has to be done again from scratch, FiveM may be irrelevant? Interested members of the community will make their own thing like they did before. Or is that wishful thinking?
- Comment on Kindle Is Making It Harder to Switch to Rival eReader Brands. 2 weeks ago:
Most services are forced to carry DRM only versions of Ebooks. But there are ways of legally removing the DRM - it’s a faff but doable. I buy epubs and don’t use Kindle (haven’t for a long time) as it’s much harder to remove the DRM and actually own your books.
But way I look at it - if I bought the Kindle version of a book, I can just download a DRM free version by sailing the seas. Fuck Amazon.
- Comment on The English word "four" has 4 letters. Are there any other numbers where the English name for them has that many letters? 4 weeks ago:
Yes: Five has four letters. Nine has four letters.
There are no more.
If you meant to ask if there are any more whole numbers with the same number of letters in the name as the number, then the answer is no. It is fairly simple to check - you only have to look at the numbers 0-30 before it becomes clear no other number will fit this pattern.
If you went into fractions like 20.12325 then there will be many numbers where all the letters added would get close but the fraction itself would mean you couldn’t quite reach the exact number as you can’t have fractions of letters.
If you included negative numbers then “minus eleven” has 11 letters. Minus thirteen has 13 letters. It seems to again break down once you go beyond 13, and its dodgy to include negative numbers as you can’t have negative letters.
So, no.
- Comment on Are mods usually confusing as hell or am I just an idiot? 4 weeks ago:
Genuinely not had a problem with mods, and I’ve been PC gaming for decades. Of course sometimes mods don’t work but thats life. Just be patient, you’ll get it done.
Decent mods have a readme file - follow the steps strictly - no skipping thinking you know better - and they should work.
Also look on YouTube or search online for guides - people often provide step by step guides to mod games purely out of a love for gaming.
Keep going - mods can be great, and its one of the many benefits of PC gaming.
- Comment on Psst, the Americans are asleep, post some eggs 4 weeks ago:
Stop showing off your immense wealth.
- Comment on Flohmarkt - a Fediverse replacement for Facebook Marketplace 4 weeks ago:
Yeah but if you had to search for it you’d have a trouble spelling it. Flowmarked would be how English speakers would hear that I think.
It probably needs an English brand name for outside the germano-sphere - fedimarket?
- Comment on US egg prices expected to climb further as farmers strained by bird flu outbreak 4 weeks ago:
Add to that trumps tarrifs on goods from mexico and Canada, and the price is about to go up even further.
And will be have Trump Flu this year? Hes going to be busy.
- Comment on Tech stocks tumble as a Chinese competitor threatens to upend the AI industry; Nvidia down 17% 5 weeks ago:
OR: “AI speculative bubble deflates as people realise there may not be massive profit in AI”. It’s not upending the AI industry, it’s upending the expectations that AI will be a license to print money (which has been based on nothing).
- Comment on Review into Axel Rudakubana will criticise Prevent for rejecting his case three times 5 weeks ago:
Yeah of the focus is on Prevent then its scapegoating. Prevent is there to tackle people being radicalised - its not there to detect and police all violent people in society.
The real failings are in police, mental health services and social services - all of which have had resources slashed due to austerity.
Blaming Prevent is a distraction - counter terrorism is not the route this very violent and sick individual should have been caught before committing an atrocity.
I work in the NHS and the real question for me is how a very sick and dangerous child could have been allowed to walk away by child mental health services whose excuse has been that he “failed to engage”. A child does not have autonomy to decide to engage or not - it is the mental health services and social services that failed to follow him up.
A child that was too dangerous to even be allowed on site at a specialist school - he was managed from home for staff and pupil safety - should have had heavy mental health and social service input. Prevent would be able to offer nothing.
The whole story is an indictment of the failure of the state over the last 15 years since the ideological nonsense of austerity has ravaged the UK public sector and services.
- Comment on Syria minister says open to talks with Kurds, but ready to use 'force' 1 month ago:
In other words: power struggles and potential for more civil war.
- Comment on 'Terrorism has changed', says Starmer on Southport attacks 1 month ago:
This was a tragedy and missed opportunity, but this was not “terrorism” in the sense being used. This was a seriously dangerous, violent and mentally ill person.
The focus on how Prevent failed is a real problem because the Prevent strategy is there to stop people being radicalised, not to police society for violent individuals.
The focus here should really be on the mental health system & social services, and how an extremely dangerous person who was excluded from school for violence, went to a special school and could only be dealt with as a home schooled student for staff and student safety, and for whom their family raised concerns. This guy was not radicalised, he was not a “terrorist”, he was someone who was clearly flagged as very dangerous as a child and failed to act.
There have been dangerous people before, and there are laws and structures to detain extremely dangerous people for public safety. That’s where everything failed - yet again Social Services, Police, Health and Education. It’s a pattern seen over and over again with public agencies not working together, often because they’re under resourced and stretched as it is.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 publishing director thinks GTA 6 might have the "clout" to normalise a $100 price tag 1 month ago:
“publishing director”. So Marketing.
As for game prices, in fairness to the industry prices have actually come down since 2000.
AAA Games on consoles in 2000 were around $50; that is $92 now due to inflation. Games went up to around $60 on consoles in 2006, that is around $93 now due to inflation. By 2019 they were still $60 but inflation eroded the value, and that is equivalent to $73 today. When they went up to $70 in 2020, that would be equivalent to $84 now.
So a nominal price of $100 is not as unreasonable as it sounds. It’s higher than games were in 2000 but in the future if static would erode back to equivalent to $90 in probably 3-4 years.
But the problem is people do not think in terms of inflationary value, and instead in terms of nominal value. And the bigger problem is most peoples earnings are squeezed by inflation and we have not been having pay rises to account for the inflation, so games are more expensive as proportion of income.
- Comment on Marvel Snap is banned, just like TikTok 1 month ago:
The law bans the distribution of the app and applies fines to the app store companies of $5,000 per user who is able to access the app to download it.
So yes, TikToks position is theatrics - current users could continue to access the app but that would mean a slow inevitable decline as no one new could join and the user base would inevitably decline over time. Its not in TikToks interests to allow that and it would take pressure off politicians to do anything. So they’re within their rights to muddy the water and block access with a message blaming it on the politicians.
- Comment on Beneath a Steel Sky 2 months ago:
It’s freeware on all systems and can be played using ScummVM which has builds for most major platforms - the game files are free to download from ScummVM.org (as well as some other adventure games that have been made freeware like Flight of The Amazon Queen)
- Comment on Beneath a Steel Sky 2 months ago:
What is skydrv?
I wasn’t aware you could play with Roland music and the speech files, would love to give it a try.
I love Bass - excellent choice in a game to play!
- Comment on End of Russian gas via Ukraine sparks unease in eastern Europe 2 months ago:
Yeah, there’s a war on. Slovakia should have taken responsibility for its enegery security like everyone else. The pipelines could easily have been damaged from the war either accidentally or deliberately.
Slovakia’s government is pissed because it knows it won’t be very popular after an energy crisis hits. Fuck them.
- Comment on Study finds young people more likely to spend Christmas alone 2 months ago:
This probably reflects increasing immigration - there will be plenty of people who don’t celebrate christmas so it’s just a bank holiday, or who are alone in the UK without family with them.
For example in 1981, 96% of the population was white british. In 2011 that was down to 87% and in 2021 it’s down to 83%.
It’s not surprising that 10% of young people might spend Christmas alone if nearly 20% of the population is not white (which is largely Christian or secular with some Christian traditions). While some of the non white population may be Christian, it’s not surprising that christmas may not be an important day to Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs.
Also European white migrants who might be christian may celebrate christmas on a different day.
So there is a danger of over interpreting statistics like these. Saying more young people are spending Christmas alone over 50 years is kind of meaningless as it’s a totally different group of young people today than 50 years ago.
- Comment on Do you want the murderer of the UnitHealthcare CEO prosecuted? 2 months ago:
Yes of course he needs to be prosecuted.
I get that people hate insurance companies but at the end of the day this was a brutal and cold blooded murder.
As unhappy as we may be at the state of the world, the last thing anyone should want is for things to be determined by who has the gun and is willing to shoot.
Having said that though, maybe things are getting beyond the point of no return. Democracy in the US seems to be a joke, and the billionaire class have unfettered power. I worry we’re on trajectory towards violent revolution.
The ambivelence and even open celebration of a shocking violent murder is a warning sign of how bad things are right now. Across the democratic world countries are devided and in flux because the political class is not listening to voters and in hoc to the billionaires.
Trump in the US will be a mess. But France and Germany are also in political flux. What we are lacking globally at the moment is an outlet for this mess or a solution. People seem to be divided and unable to coalesce around a solution to the problems. I worry that means more chaos and ultimately violemce to come.
- Comment on US Senator Warner Presses Valve to Crack Down on Hateful Accounts and Rhetoric Proliferating on Steam 3 months ago:
Politicians would be better focusing on things that matter like how the Democrats lost the election to Trump and how they’re going to win the midterms.
A crappy paper finding rude words and phrases on steam is not really worthy of anyone’s attention but Valve’s
“Millions” of examples sounds dramatoc until you look at how many billions of exchanges have been made in valves forums and comment pages. It needs addressing but it’s not of international or even national importance.
Instead of virtue signalling, Warren should be asking how the Dems managed to allow Biden a free ride through the primaries, held on til the bitter end blocking alternatives and then endorsing Harris blocking any debate.
I’d rather Warren focus on fixing the Democratic Party. A bit of democracy in the Democrat party would be a start.
- Comment on Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe 3 months ago:
For electricity generation: Solar across the UK was about 5% in last year, while Wind was about 29% and Nuclear 13.9%, and hydro 1.3% - so 49.2% of energy over the last 12 months was carbon neutral.
That’s a huge success story - still a long way to go, particularly as that does not include Gas burned in homes, but the UK is moving in the right direction. And Scotland is a huge source of Wind & Hydro power for the whole country.
So even if the barriers to solar in your home are still high, the grid is getting cleaner and cleaner every year. There are also community projects installing wind generators which you can join/invest in if you do want to try and get a slice of cleaner energy and solar is not realistic.
- Comment on RazerGenie for configuring Razer devices on Linux v1.2 brings new features 3 months ago:
Great that people are developing tools but personally I use OpenRGB as its broader focused than just one manufacturer. It also uses the same underlying OpenRazer drivers for Razer devices as well as supporting other other RGB devices.
RazerGenie seems a little too focused to me but maybe there are benefits of such a tool I’m missing?
- Comment on Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy 3 months ago:
It’s a thought experiment, not an observation. The idea is that if you have infinity and it’s truly random than eventually all possibilities emerge.
The idea of infinite monkeys typing randomly on infinite typewriters is that eventually one of them would accidentally type out all the works of Shakespeare. Many more would type out parts of the works of Shakespeare. And many many many more would type random garbage.
If we imagine for a moment the multiverse is infinite and random, then every possible universe would exist somewhere in that multiverse.
It can be taken in other directions too. It’s a way of cocneptualising the implications of infinity and true randomness.
- Comment on Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves 4 months ago:
The metaverse a resounding failure, Facebook has latched on to the AI hype train in hopes of making the company relevant. They’re basically put of ideas on how to feed the beast of “forever growth” the markets demand.
- Comment on Why are laptop adapters so much larger than phone adapters of same power rating? 4 months ago:
One significant difference that has been missed here is that Laptops can and often do run on the power supply, while phones usually use the power purely to charge the battery.
It’s a significant difference as the laptop needs a stable electricity supply to supply all it’s components or the laptop would crash. That means not only does the brick need to dissipate heat, but it also needs to be able to deliver a stable continuous DC current. So as well as a taanformer and rectifier (that together convert AC to the correct DC needed) there are smoother and potentially capacitors to ensure a smooth continuous output even if the wall supply is janky.
If you turn off the power at the wall / unplug you often see any light on the power brick stay on - that is because of the capacitors and there is still a small amount of energy available to the laptop as it discharges.
While phones are mini computers they are usually designed to always run on the battery. Even when charging, the phone draws it’s power from the battery and it’s in built circuits to smooth the current; there isn’t usually the redundancy in a phone to switch between different supplies in the same way as a laptop. There isn’t also the expectation that they need to run off the wall continuously by users (even if users might plug their phone in and expect to continue to use it, they will find their phone shuts down if its at 0% and they push it beyond what the recharging battery can supply; a laptop would be expected to run solely on the wall not shut off).
Things are blurring now with USB C power supplies for laptops - but you will find the plug itself has more of the electronics built in or some of the functions of the power brick have moved into the laptop to reduce charger bulkiness. Look at how bulky a USB c charger plug is for a Mac - they’re not simple USB chargers you’d use for a phone or tablet, they’re bulky because they are also doing the smoothing and stabilisation people expect for their laptops.
- Comment on What Ever Happened to Netscape? 4 months ago:
That’s rather simplifying history and not the main reason Netscape failed.
Netscape lost because Microsoft used it’s dominant monopoly position to bundle Internet Explorer with windows. By 1999 the writing was already on the wall - IE had already overtaken Netscape market share and was growing rapidly.
The Mozilla project and code base change was a gamble to try and fix the problems. When Microsoft released IE6 2001 they didn’t bother releasing another major version for 6 years as they were so dominant.
So while the code base change was arguably mishandled, at worst it accelerated the decline. Instead the whole story is a poster child for how monopoloes can be used to destroy competition. The anti trust actions in the US and EU came too late for Netscape.
Ironically Microsoft was the receiving end of the same treatment when Google started pushing Chrome via it’s own monopoly in search. They made a better product than the incumbent but they pushed it hard via their website that everyone uses.
- Comment on What does this emoji mean? Is this a British thumbs up? 4 months ago:
It’s the “call me hand” emoji.