Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, credit to Steam then.

  I didn’t know one way or the other if Proton development ended up in Wine or not, much less if Steam was or not directly participating in Wine development, all I knew is that Proton was forked from Wine in the beginning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve tried switching to Linux on my home desktop several times over the last 3 decades, but because I always use that machine also for gaming it always had some Windows in a dual boot configuration and I always found myself not really booting Linux more than once in a while.

  Since my last switch, maybe a year ago, even though Windows is still there in duat boot, I’ve only ever booted it once and that only to move some data files which were in the main windows partition over to a data partition I have in a seperated drive (were most of my data files already resided but a few were still elsewhere) so that I can cleanly share it between both OSes.

  Whilst I know more than enough to muck around with Linux and Wine configuration (and for example had to do the latter to get a pirated version working of a game I have in Steam whose official version won’t run in Linux no matter what I do), it’s very seldom that I actually have to do it (and I don’t just use Steam with Proton but also Lutris with Wine for GOG games), whilst in my previous try maybe 5 years ago getting anything but DOS games to run under Linux was a major PITA.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience, it’s not actually Proton specifically but more generally Wine along with DXVK and Vulkan itself.

  I have as good a success rate with Windows games from GOG under Wine through Lutris (which also defaults to using DXVK and Vulkan plus has Wine configuration scripts for most GOG games, making their install fully automated and zero-configuration) as I have with Windows games from Steam under Proton.

  If I understand it correctly, Proton is mainly a fork of Wine with Steam integration thrown in and changes to make sure it works with specific Steam games, so I don’t think the improvements are Proton specific, but rather more global than that (the use of Vulkan instead of OpenGL, DXVK making DirectX games run with Vulkan, Wine improvements).

  Mind you, if improvements in Proton are flowing to those other projects and having a big impact, then credit were credit is due for Proton pulling up the whole ecosystem, otherwise Proton isn’t actually as crucial in improving Gaming on Linux as seems to be portrayed in so many posts here.

  I can understand that if all people have used for gaming in Linux is Steam and never games from other digital sources - like GOG or even pirated games - via launchers like Heroic or Lutris, it might seem like Proton is the secret juice, but in my experience in the last year of gaming in Linux using both, Wine + DXVK + Vulkan works just as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Computer Science, a popular college major, has one of the highest unemployment rates⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My own experience (being probably around your age) is that “Software development being fashionable” and hence there being a subsequent oversupply of devs, comes in cycles, with the peaks being roughly coincident with Tech bubbles.

  I remember that period in the mid and late 90s when being a software developer was actually seen as “a good career choice” as the industry was growing fast (with personal computers, then computing spreading into all sizes of companies and vusiness activities, then the Net bubble).

  Then the bubble crashed and suddenly it wasn’t fashionable anymore. The outsourcing wave made it fashionable again but in places like India, because they were serving not just their own IT needs but also a big slice of the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world’s, so the demand-supply over there was so inballanced that being a software developer was enough for a good house with servants in places like Mumbai. (I actually managed a small team based in India back then and I remember how most were clearly people who had no natural skill at all for programming). At the same time in those countries which were outsourcing to places like India, programming wasn’t a good career choice (mainly because it was the entry level stuff that got outsourced) but if you were senior back then demand had never been as high.

  Then came a period of retrenchment of outsourcing because it wasn’t that good at delivering robust software that does what the business needs it to do (the mix of mediocre business requirements and development teams which are in fact not even it the same company means that deliverables invariably don’t do what the business needs them to do and the back-and-forth cycles needed to get it there take more time than it would if everything was in-house) and a new Tech bubble, so software development became fashionable again and once again people who would otherwise not consider it, were choosing it as a career.

  I think that what we’re seeing now is the initial effects of the crash of the latest Tech bubble: the Stock Market might still be ridding its own momentum, but the actual people “at the coalface” are already reducing costs, plus the AI fad is hitting entry level positions like the outsourcing fad did, and probably it too will fade because AI “coding” has its own set of problems which will emerge as companies get more of that code and try and take it through a full production life-cycle.

  As for how you chose devs, I would say it’s really just anchored on the eternal rule that “toolmakers make much better devs than tool users” - in my experience gifted devs tend be the ones who “solve their own problems” and for a dev that often means coding coming up with their own tool for it, either as a whole or as part of an existing open source project.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  One thing is the Political self-proclaimed Liberals mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world, a very different thing is the Political Ideology of Liberalism.

  “Liberals are Fascists” definitely applies to the mainstream politicians in at least the UK, US and Canada who say they are “Liberals” and have “Liberal policies”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  When the Snowden Revelations came out, it turned out the UK did as much or maybe even more civil society surveillance as the US, and unlike the US it doesn’t even have constitutional limitations on surveillance of people on their own soil (in fact the UK doesn’t even have a written Constitution).

  In the US they actually walked back on some of the surveillance (because of said constitutional protections), in the UK they just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, got the editor of the newspaper who brought out the Snowden Revelations kicked, fired a bunch of D-Notices around (the UK’s Press Censorship mechanism) out and nobody ever talked about it again.

  As soon as the technology was good enough for that the UK created a Digital Stasi and it’s only gotten worse since.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Hooliganism is members of the Working Class fighting other members of the Working Class or foreigners due to nothing more than tribalism and enjoying violence.

  It has zero to do with pushing back on those with power over them or standing up for one’s principles.

  Hooliganism is actually a perfect example of the one of the ways the elites in the UK control the “lower” classes by having them discharge their anger at each other instead of going against the powerful.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Video] Cops not sure whether to arrest man with "Plasticine Action" shirt for supporting terrorism⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Their job is not to solve crimes, their job is to get people convicted, the subtle difference being that they’ll turn non-crimes into crimes (for example, they’ll chose to legally interpret things which can go both ways as crimes which require prosecution, which is why one often sees kids criminalized for childish bullshit) and it doesn’t matter if the person convicted is innocent, all that matters is that somebody got convicted (so, for example, they won’t try and find exonerating evidence).

  This partly explains their tendency to take an adversarial posture towards people who aren’t from their group, also partly because that posture indirectly feeds back on them (people don’t treat them as they treat other people) and partly because they do tend to get exposed far more than most people to the seedy side of humanity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Video] Cops not sure whether to arrest man with "Plasticine Action" shirt for supporting terrorism⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The poor copper lost all that time arresting a guy with Plasticine Action on his t-shirt when he could’ve been arresting an old lady with the words “Palestine Action” written down on a piece of paper.

  It’s making it hard for him to make his quota of arrests for that week.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Well that didn't work out as planned⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Interestingly as an European I didn’t even thought about school buses when I read the shitpost and instead a regular public transport bus was what popped into my mind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Well that didn't work out as planned⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Public Transportation is no joke!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chat Control is back & we've got two months to stop the EU CSAM scanning plans.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorta.

  The cultural clashes between people with different cultural backgrounds are to be expected, and the bigger the percentage of people with different backgrounds the more it happens (hence why in the days of countries having 5% immigrants, the idea that “immigrants are a problem” had very little traction). This is just how things are - you can think it’s closed minded of most people (and, by the way, in my experience as an immigrant myself, that includes many if not most of the immigrants), but people are as they are, so we have to deal with it.

  Further, judging by the studies I saw in the UK back during the Leave Referendum, immigration does push down salaries in one category only - unspecialized workers. Economically one might think “well, it’s alright then”, but socially the ones suffering are already the worse off amongst the locals plus this is happenning under Neoliberal governments who are actually pulling down Social Safety nets and privatising essential services. This is probably why the Middle Class is often pro-Immigration whilst the anti-Immigration Far-Right Populists end up finding most of their traction amongst the Working Class - immigration benefits the Middle Class because immigrants barelly compete with them for the jobs whilst the mere presence of immigrants pumps up the Economy and lowers the cost of many services, benefitting the Middle Class, but the picture is very different for the Working Class.

  (This is why you see a lot of the non-mainstream “Thinking Left” in Europe who bought into Identity Politics is failing to gain any traction and even dissapearing whilst the far-right booms - unlike the old Left these people are from the upper levels of the Middle Class and don’t really see as a problem things which the Working Class sees as a problem and is increasingly hitting the lower Middle Class too, so ultimatelly they fizzle out because they support things like “Open door immigration” which they don’t see as a problem but which de facto end up making life worse for a lot of those who would otherwise gravitate to them as they lose trust in the mainstream politicians).

  Last but not least, judging by my own country Immigration is the “solution” used to plug the low birthrate problem which is itself caused by decades of policies which lowered quality of life and pumped up realestate bubbles - the very politicians who are causing the problems that make the locals have fewer children, then claim that “we need Immigration because of an aging population” - Immigration is literally the tool used to keep countries going a little longer whilst the pillaging of the wealth of the many carries on. The poor immigrants have no blame for this - they’re just people looking for a better life, same as the locals - but Immigration Policies do have the blame on this and fake-Leftwing (neo)Liberals have purposefully confounded Immigrants (the people) with Immigration (the policy) to portray being against the latter (and, even more, against the artificial need for the latter and who gains most from it - which aren’t the immigrants) as being against “poor defenseless people”.

  Unsurprisingly this shit has eventually resulted in increasingly more people losing trust in the mainstream politicians and believing in populists preaching the simple message that “immigrants are bad”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chat Control is back & we've got two months to stop the EU CSAM scanning plans.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah.

  The European Parliament is impeccably democratic, its members selected by direct vote of EU citizens under a Proportional Vote system

  The EU Council is way less democractic, being just made up of representatives of each local government in Europe with zero representation for any political forces not in government. It’s like a giant First Pass The Post system with electoral circles the size of countries, only worse so since citizens don’t directly vote for them, they vote for the people who nominate them. Also in practice there is very little oversight over their actions since the Press barelly talks about them.

  The EU Commission is even less democratic than the EU Council, since it’s members are nominated by the latter, so it’s even more indirect. It’s supposed by tradition to be one comissioner per country so nowadays there are a lot of commissioners for “irrelevant thing” and the whole thing is the result of a massive game of horse trading and cronyism, especially the head, with the result that plenty of comissioners are complete total crap - the only time my country had somebody as the EU commission head, it was one if not the most crooked Portuguese politician ever to hold an international position (almost the opposite of the current head of the UN who is also a Portuguese) and it looks like Germany is currently suffering from the same problem.

  Unsurprisingly, most of the “unbelievably authocratic” shit comes from the Council or the Commission.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, as I said, Steam already supports all the national payment systems in Europe and yeah, since I’ve switched away from PayPal in GOG, my game payments have also been done by scanning a QR code from the banking app (which goes via an intermediary but ultimately gets turned into a SEPA transfer).

  Sure, Steam could add bank transfer payments. They don’t need to as in Europe they already have the VISA/MasterCard/PayPal mafia problem solved, but it would be nice if they did (actually the whole split between payment-system and bank-transfer disappearing and it becoming a single mechanism is probably a good idea).

  The lack of a pan-European payment system that’s accepted anywhere in the World isn’t a problem for Steam, it’s a general problem for Europeans wanting to avoid using VISA/MasterCard/PayPal in all their payments no matter where the seller is located (plus even in Europe a bunch of things such as car rental often require a Credit Card). It’s solved for the likes of Steam, but not for other sellers (for example I buy eBooks books from a US based seller who doesn’t support anything but PayPal, VISA and MasterCard and the same when I buy stuff from AliExpress),

  When it comes to Steam, the problem of them being dependent for payments on VISA/MasterCard/PayPal is outside Europe, not in Europe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As I wrote elsewhere, Steam already supports all the European national payment systems, which are all more convenient than bank transfers.

  Mind you, a lot of sellers in Europe do actually support bank transfer payments (which go via SEPA) but a lot don’t, plus it’s a bit less convenient than a dedicate payment system (though if you do the bank transfer from a banking app in your smartphone it’s reasonably simple plus some of those payment systems are really just a convenience layer - say an app scanning a QR-code for automated payment - over the whole “open the transfer screen and manually enter 20-something digits and an euro amount”).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe Valve already supports all the local payment systems in Europe, though they’ll only show it to you if you’re in one of those countries (the payment processing flow asks you which country are you paying from upfront and then uses that to display the various payment systems available for that country).

  Same for GOG, by the way.

  The problem is mainly that to sell to anywhere in Europe a seller has to integrate with the many local payment systems out there, which is a lot of work for a small seller.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam payment headaches grow as PayPal is no longer usable for much of the world: Valve hopes to bring it back in the future, 'but the timeline is uncertain'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s for bank transfers, not for payments.

  Mind you, you often can pay stuff online in Europe via bank transfer if it’s within the Eurozone (and the fact that it works from anywhere to anywhere in the Eurozone rather than just locally in each country is exactly because SEPA has been standardized), but it’s not reliably available in sellers and is a bit more convoluted than pure payment systems (basically you have to use your bank’s online site or app to transfer money to the account the seller provides you).

  Actually payment systems are not standardized across Europe yet, though various country-specific ones have been getting together and setting up cross-compatibility, but none of those covers more than a handful of countries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NANDalf!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a NAND gate (back is flat like the AND, front has the little ball on the output to indicate it’s negated). The back of the OR/NOR is curvy.

  AND is “Only both shall pass” hence NAND is “No more than one one shall pass” (which are the other logical options).

  As other pointed out what you’re describing is the negation of a XOR (which is “no more and no less than one shall pass”), i.e. NXOR.

  OR would be “One or both shall pass” hence NOR would be “None shall pass”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why LLMs can't really build software⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure mate, your logic is flawless and you’re not at all pretty much just using falacies and axiomatic statements to make the case that “this is going to be the greatest thing ever (invest now!)” like all the other types selling their book on some tech hype as has become common since the 90s and anybody pointing this out is really just insulting you by not accepting your clear genius.

  Life must be hard for the benevolent AI Investor just trying to share with others how the tech domain they’re invested in is CERTAIN to become the greatest thing ever because it’s made on top of elements which are CERTAIN to be the elements that will one day deliver the greatest thing ever, only to get insulted by people daring to point out that all that certainty isn’t backed by anything but “trust me”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why LLMs can't really build software⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That doesn’t even make sense - it’s not merely the there being multiple elements which add up to a specific tech that makes it capable of reaching a specific goal, just like throwing multiple ingredients into a pot doesn’t guarantee you a tasty dish as output and you have absolutely no proof that “we finally have the hardware and the software to make breakthroughs” hence you can’t anchor the forecast that the stuff done on top of said hardware and software will achieve what you want us to believe will achieve on “trust me it’s made up of stuff which can do greatness”.

  As for the tech being a composition of multiple tech elements, that doesn’t mean much: most dishes too are a composition of multiple elements and that doesn’t mean that any random combination of stuff thrown into a pot will make a good dish.

  That idea that more inputs make a specific output more likely is like claiming that “the chances of finding a needle increase with the size of the haystack” - the very opposite of reality.

  Might want to stop using LLMs to write your responses and engage your brain instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why LLMs can't really build software⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Your whole point is discounting the experience of 50 years in technological evolution (that all technological branches invariably slow down and stop improving) and the last 20 years of hype in Tech (literally everything is pushed like crazy as “the next big thing” by people trying to make a lot of money from it, and almost all of it isn’t), so that specific satirical take on your post is well deserved.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why LLMs can't really build software⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Like the guy whose baby doubled in weight in 3 months and thus he extrapolated that by the age of 10 the child would weight many tons, you’re assuming that this technology has a linear rate of improvement of “intelligence”.

  This is not at all what’s happening - the evolution of things like LLMs in the last year or so (say between GPT4 and GPT5) is far less than it was earlier in that Tech and we keep seeing more and more news on problems about training it further and getting it improved, including the big one which is that training LLMs on the output of LLMs makes them worse, and the more the output of LLMs is out there, the harder it gets to train them with clean data.

  With this specific path taken in implementing AI, the question is not “when will it get there” but rather “can it get there or is it a technological dead-end”, and at least for things like LLMs the answer increasingly seems to be that it is a technological dead-end for the purpose of creating reasoning intelligence and doing work that requires it.

  (For all your preemptive defense by implying that critics are “ai haters”, no hate is required to do this analysis, just analytical ability and skepticism, untainted by fanboyism)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World's first 'thermodynamic computing chip' reaches tape out⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It makes some sense to handle self-discovered real numbers of infinite precision using analog methods, though I’m curious about how they handle noise, since in the real world and unlike the mathematical world all storage, transmission and calculations have some error.

  That said, my experience way back with a project I did at Uni with Neural Networks in their early days, is that they’ll even make up for implementation bugs (we managed about 85% rate of number recognition with a buggy implementation) so maybe that kind of thing is quite robust in the face of analog error.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK government suggests deleting files to save water⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Competent Politicians are well aware that they’re not experts on everything and hence hire domain experts to help them understand those domains and actually make informed decisions about them.

  Mind you, I suspect this specifically is more a side effect of the profound problems with Dishonesty and Cronyism that the UK has: basically they tackled drought as a negative perception of the Government problem, so set up a talk group to project the impression that the Government was doing something about it and chose as head of it (and to be well paid for it) somebody whose greatest qualification for it was being their mate, all of which is very typically in British power circles.

  The natural consequence of such things is them producing press releases which look absolutelly moronic for domain experts, but since most of the people who read such releases are not domain experts, that’s usually fine and in fact advances the true purpose of that “group” (managing perceptions).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK government suggests deleting files to save water⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The British Government are Authoritarian and Incompetent.

  As is invariably the case with Fascists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK government suggests deleting files to save water⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Authoritarian and incompetent.

  Just like all the other Fascists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anyone else from Europe feels the same while browsing the "All" feed?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not even “news” - a lot of that shit is just Clown-President does yet another thing that a Clown would do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gen Z Is Cutting Back On Video Game Purchases⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t control your peons, you mainly define zones were certain things should happen and the peons go and do it.

  Zones can be for very low level explicit things (such as “cut all trees in this area” or “mine these iron nodes”) or broader activities (for example defining an area for cultivation of a specific plant, were the peons will automatically seed and sow, and you don’t even have to assigned specific peons to it).

  There are a few single-action commands (say, toggle this machine ON/OFF) but again they’re not peon-specific (you just signal that the machine needs to be toggled ON or OFF and somebody will get around to do it),

  You can force a specific peon to do a specific action just once, but it’s seldom used or useful.

  You do normally control your peons directly for warfare, though.

  In practice, you vaguely control who does which kind of things and with which priority via a control board where you define priorities per type of activity and per-peon, so basically a high-level management tool.

  My impression is that there is a little bit of micromanagement but very little.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gen Z Is Cutting Back On Video Game Purchases⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s basically a survival management game where the skills of the peons you control are random and the terrain and broader world are procedurally generated.

  Whilst the graphics are simple, the actual gameplay is solid and interesting with enough depth to keep you interested for many hours, The randomly generated per-game terrain and peons means that even though one can get bored after playing for tens of hours (maybe a bit over 100h), after a couple of months playing something else Rimworld is interesting again because whilst the game mechanics don’t change between games (hence to a point you do “crack the game”), the game space is different for every game hence the situation your colony finds itself in is different too,

  If you like that survival and/or management games it’s well worth it if you can get it for 20 bucks or so.

  As for the DLCs, I don’t think they actually add enough to be worth it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Blamed for Steam games ban, Mastercard encourages censorship during Riot Games VCT livestreams⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure mate, banking in Britain is the Greatest In The World, you being a Briton rushing to claim Britain’s banking sectors is the most competitive “compared to pretty much any other country” is not at all driven by “love of the Fatherland”.

  Oh, and by the way, check the law on overdraft fees a decade and a half ago before you call others liars.

  En zeker, het is absoluut gelovelijk dat je in Nederlands en Zuid-Afrika gewoont en bankiered heben.