orclev

@orclev@lemmy.world

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

  No but I think the point being made is that people that have been clinging to Win 10 as a refuge from the crapfest that Win 11 is are going to start running into significant problems soon. Increasingly you’re not going to be able to get software for Windows 10. A lot of people are opting to migrate to Linux rather than going from Win 10 to Win 11, and as the holdouts on 10 are increasingly corned some amount of them will make the same decision.

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

  Ah cool, thanks for looking all that up. I knew Proton pre-dated Steam Deck, I just wasn’t sure exactly where in the timeline it fit between the original Steam Machine launch and the release of the Steam Deck.

  It’s kind of a shame that Steam Machine failed, but in many ways it was a little too ahead of its time and its failure brought us to the Steam Deck which is a much more sensible approach.

  Ultimately none of this would have existed without Wine and ironically the Microsoft app store (or whatever they’re calling it these days). The threat of MS getting a stranglehold on program distribution on Windows the way Apple does on OS X and iOS was enough to spur Valve into putting significant effort into making Linux a viable gaming platform, something we’re all benefitting from greatly.

  People seem to be downplaying somewhat how significant an achievement this is for Linux. The thing is, for most programs you can find alternatives because the point is the program it’s what you do with it. People don’t use Photoshop because they enjoy Photoshop, they do it because they want to create something, which means if you can create that same thing using a different program then you don’t need Photoshop. On the other hand games are an experience. The point is the game. Sure you can play a different game, but that’s not an Apples to Apples thing as the experience however similar isn’t the same. That means games are uniquely placed as a roadblock for migrating away from a platform, something consoles with their exclusive releases have known for a long time. Giving people the option to play the exact same game under Linux as they can under Windows is massive because there really isn’t any other way to solve that problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Couple technical nitpicks.

  First it’s debatable if Proton existed long before Steam Deck. I’m not sure the exact timeline but I think it was created as part of the Steam Box effort which wasn’t all that long ago. On the other hand though Wine which Proton is built on top of most certainly has existed for a very long time before either the Steam Deck or even Proton (I have fond memories of LAN gaming with it back when Diablo 2 was new).

  Second Proton doesn’t enable ARM (at least by itself) so that claim is a little misleading. There is a project to realtime translate x86 instructions into ARM but that project (Box86) although it fulfills a similar role and could be used in conjunction with Proton isn’t actually Proton. Using Proton by itself will not enable you to play x86/Windows games on ARM.

  Lastly Proton is kind of irrelevant to the whole Linux vs BSD thing. Technically what enables that is that both implement POSIX standards plus use mostly the same libraries, frameworks (like Vulkan), and applications. Yes running Proton on BSD will let you game on BSD but that isn’t really a result of Proton doing the work so much as it’s a side effect of the fact you can run Proton on BSD in the first place. Additionally while there are technical and philosophical reasons why the distinction between Linux and BSD is important, practically speaking they’re the same thing these days. OpenBSD isn’t that much more different from a Linux distro as one Linux distro is from another.

• ⁨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:

  Yes, but actually no. In the strictest sense that is true in that it isn’t “officially” settled typically for a day or two. However, the reason why businesses are willing to accept credit card transactions is that there’s a soft approval that happens pretty much instantly and weeds out nearly every non-fraud instance of non-payment. Once that soft approval comes back (which remember happens within a second or two) the retailer can be confident that the card is tied to a valid account, that has a large enough balance to cover the transaction, and barring fraud dispute it will go through and they’ll get paid. If something were to go wrong in that process there’s also banks and the CC processor that the business could go after in court to get their money.

  In contrast crypto takes several minutes to go through if not significantly longer, and if something goes wrong in that process there’s no legal recourse of any kind. If a business were to allow product to leave their store prior to that minute+ approval process and it fails, they’re screwed, they just have to eat that cost.

• ⁨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:

  Look into the Privacy app (kind of a terrible name honestly). It’s effectively a Paypal type system but one that issues CC numbers for each vendor or transaction and allows you to easily audit and manage them. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than Paypal.

• ⁨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:

  The fundamental flaw with all current crypto is that it’s far too volatile to use as a currency. The only reasonable use for it at the moment is as a high risk commodity which is the vast overwhelming majority of what we see. Any so called “currency” that regularly sees price swings of multiple percentage points in a day isn’t actually a currency and is unsuitable to be used as one.

  Adding to this is the problem of transaction times. Actual payment systems typically have transaction times of less than a second, occasionally a second or two. Bitcoin in contrast can take multiple minutes, sometimes hours or even days to confirm a transaction. There’s no way for Valve to accept and then immediately convert Crypto to USD. The process would inherently involve at least to transactions, one to transfer the crypto to Valves wallet, then a second to transfer from Valves wallet to the exchanges wallet, and only then could Valve attempt to sell that crypto. The financial uncertainty involved in all of that is entirely unacceptable for a business.

  At this moment there is only one potentially viable way of approaching this and it’s government regulation of some kind. Either government needs to regulate that payment processors get no say in the contents of customers business, or else they need to regulate the adoption of a neutral digital payment system. One possible example of what that could look like would be the GNU Taler system which might eventually become a payment system in Switzerland but isn’t yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EnteAuth (and a bunch of other FOSS) take Microsoft's "free" money⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In terms of the open source community Microsoft has been significantly less sketchy than usual for about a decade now. For those of us that are old enough to remember the halloween files it’s hard to let go of that paranoia, particularly with the sketchy shit MS has been doing with their proprietary stuff lately, but near as I can tell they’ve been above board on their open source stuff.

  I wouldn’t go so far as to say blindly trust them at this point, but I wouldn’t just assume with no evidence at all that there has to be something nefarious going on either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Chicken is not beef. Pork is not beef. Fish is certainly not beef. I hate chicken. Pork isn’t bad but can be hit or miss. The only meat I hate more than chicken is fish. So no, I can’t just eat other meats. Even if that wasn’t the case there are also people who are allergic to chicken. We had one of our friends over recently and we have to make sure nothing we serve has chicken in it because of their allergy.

  You’re also missing the point entirely. I neither need nor want AI. Nobody needs AI. 90% of what AI is used for now could be done without AI using half the power and just as quickly. It’s a solution in search of a problem and that’s fundamentally the wrong way to do things. All this AI crap is purely being driven by marketing departments that are just frothing at the mouth to find some way to justify slapping “AI” into their ads.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is all those other things are useful, unlike AI. AI is a gimmick and a distraction. It wasn’t so bad when it was a novelty being experimented with, but now that corporations have decided it’s the hot new thing and are racing each other to find the most pointless places to cram it in it’s out of hand. It’s approached fundamentally wrong, instead of looking at a problem and asking “could AI help with this?” companies are starting with AI and then asking “now what problems can we invent to justify using this?”. The result is a bunch of power gets wasted solving problems that aren’t actually problems or could have been solved much more efficiently in traditional ways, and yes that’s bad for the environment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Developing from scratch yes, but several decent open source renderers exist. I’d love to see someone grab Servo and polish it to a fully usable state (I think it’s something like 75% of the way there).

  The issue also isn’t Mozilla trying to make money, it’s Mozilla trying to make money in the stupidest way possible, or even worse actively wasting money like with this AI slop. There’s also the issue of what Mozilla is spending on. It came out a little while back how much their executives are making and it’s completely ridiculous. They could afford multiple full time devs with just the money the CEO makes for making the worst decisions imaginable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Try IronFox on android.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sadly this is nothing new for Mozilla. It’s easier to count the decisions they’ve made that aren’t terrible than the ones that are. Their history is a long series of fuckups occasionally punctuated by a decent decision.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, in a perfect world the EU would require banks to support Taler for transactions in euros and presumably also provide the necessary infrastructure for that support. Doing so would allow you to seamlessly (and transparently) convert back and forth between Taler and Euro as needs require just like is done with cheques and credit cards.

  It would honestly be the smartest play by the EU since they would avoid reinventing the wheel. That said I doubt it would happen because even at the best of times government of any type rarely makes the best decision. If you’re lucky they still make a good decision, just not the best one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, that was me. Unfortunately much like GNU Hurd, Taler is less of a project than it is a thought experiment. It lacks a sufficient number of people pushing it to become a viable project. It exists, but as far as I’m aware it’s never been used seriously in the real world outside of some proof of concept type deployments at a university. Without a champion, ideally a major business or significant public figure, it’s likely to continue being far more conceptual than practical.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bitcoin is sadly a failed experiment and you’re not a luddite for pointing out its various shortcomings. I was an early adopter back when you could get an entire coin for a buck or two, but never invested much in it and lost most of what I had when one of the early exchanges imploded.

  The concept of bitcoin was great, a decentralized currency not under the control of any government or institution, but that was still reliable and pseudo-anonymous. The execution however was beyond disappointing. It was quickly commandeered by “investors” looking to gamble on something even more volatile than forex markets and ceased being able to function as an actual currency due to the wild swings in value. In order to be a useful currency something must have a relatively stable value. Additionally scammers and criminals also gravitated to bitcoin further driving legitimate businesses away from it not wanting the guilt by association. Finally it turned out that the anonymity was even easier to break than initially thought and the tax headaches involved in buying, selling, or trading in bitcoin or any cryptocurrency make it too annoying to actually use (massively compounded by its wildly fluctuating exchange rates).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft CFO calls for 'intensity' in an internal memo, after blowout earnings⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s because they’re concentrating all the wealth. The wealth in the US used to be far more distributed, with the majority existing in the large middle class. Reagan started the policy by Republicans to pass laws and regulations designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and then Clinton got the Democrats on board with the same strategy. We’re approaching the end game now where the middle and lower classes are nearly bled dry and the rich will start cannibalizing each other to be the last fattest rat in the garbage pile while the entire US economy collapses around them. Be on the lookout for the smarter rats to start fleeing the ship by transferring as much wealth as they can into foreign assets that will survive the collapse of America.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So that’s kind of missing the point. First as I pointed out you don’t actually have to buy anything to see the explicit preview images, so Steam is arguably in violation of those laws. Secondly the issue is that the Visa and Mastercard contracts require companies to be in compliance with local laws. It doesn’t matter whether someone is using a Visa or Mastercard to make the actual payment if the purchase would technically be considered illegal (which it arguably could be in some states/countries under the new super strict porn laws).

  At the end of the day this boils down to a) terms of the Visa/Mastercard contracts, and possibly b) new anti-porn laws that are putting an onerous burden on services to collect customers IDs in order to prove age. This isn’t a question of common sense, in contract law (and law in general) it’s about the letter of it and not so much the spirit. Yes, it stands to reason that if you legally own a credit card, and you must be at least 18 to own a card, then you are obviously 18 or older. However that doesn’t matter at all when the laws are written such that services must validate age using a photo ID. It also does not account for stolen credit cards (never mind that that’s a far more serious situation than the possibility of under age kids seeing some naughty pixels).

  This whole situation is stupid and Visa and Mastercard clearly need to make some changes to their terms and conditions, but until they do from a legal standpoint businesses like Valve and Itch.io have their hands tied.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You would think, but I believe the law(s) require verification of a photo ID. I haven’t looked too closely into the UK one, but the way the laws are written for a couple of the US states a credit card doesn’t meet the requirements. There’s also the fact that many of the preview images and videos for porn games on Steam show nudity and/or sex and you can access those without needing to purchase the game (just the birthday question to “verify” your age).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know that anyone has put together a complete list of games taken down specifically because of this, but you can look at steam-tracker.com and sort by date to see what has been removed recently. It doesn’t show why a game was removed, but you can usually infer a lot from the title and cover art.

  Also I should clarify it wasn’t specifically multiple large waves, there was a large initial group, but the remainder have been slowly trickling in. I’d guess there’s someone going through Steams catalog slowly flagging games to remove. The first group was likely an easy keyword search, while the rest are being evaluated on a case by case basis most likely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s what it started with but it seems to have quickly expanded to include a lot of more mundane things. Initial reporting was only on the first wave of censored games and didn’t include the stuff that was removed later on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a catch 22. You need a phenomenal amount of capital to stand up a payment network with all those criteria, but anyone with that amount of capital can’t actually be trusted not to abuse their position in exactly the same way the existing banking networks have.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re trying with GNU Taler, but it’s pretty much a pipe dream at this point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The main reason is that the credit industry isn’t in the business of running an intelligence service or part of law enforcement. That said, what they are connected to is almost the same as an intelligence service, that being the advertising industry, and there’s literally nothing stopping them from selling or even being forced to give their data to law enforcement. The only reason it doesn’t happen more I’d say is just the optics of it.

  Ultimately what’s needed is a digital payment system that’s at least somewhat anonymous, but that’s an incredibly hard nut to crack. Bitcoin tried it, but largely failed to do so (and immediately got corrupted by speculators that wanted to use it as a forex instead of currency). A couple of the other crypto currencies that have come out since then have claimed to be better but I’m still incredibly skeptical that there’s any real anonymity there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nobody on any side has cited any sections of any agreement specifically. The closest we’ve got is the statement from Stripe who is the payment processor who recently had to turn down business with a womens sexual education charity (despite spending months trying to get to an agreement) and the reason they cited was contractual obligations with banking networks including Visa and Mastercard. They stated they want to be able to process payments for porn companies, and that they’re exploring other options, but they couldn’t at this time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Valves statement also matches with the claims of Itch.io, Stripe, and what Collective Shout themselves have claimed. So we’ve got two different claims, on one side are Visa and Mastercard, and on the other we’ve got literally everyone else. I feel pretty confident about which one is a load of bullshit.

  It’s also worth noting that Visa and Mastercard are playing semantic games with their statements. Nobody ever claimed they were “refusing legal transactions”, rather what they’re doing is threatening to stop working with any business that doesn’t implement censorship that they’re happy with. It’s a subtle but important difference and they’ve never denied that’s what they’re doing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Tea cup" app - user database leaked today (incl. drivers license & IDs). Daily reminder not to give your ID to online services [THEY DO NOT PROTECT YOUR INFORMATION]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Uh… What’s the tea app?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New youtube web video player interface...?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It looks a lot like their smart TV interface which has always been less functional than their web or mobile app interface. They’re probably trying to cut the UI down to just the bare minimum that the majority of casual users regularly use. In part I’d assume to reduce the maintenance overhead, but I’m sure it likely will also make things harder for ad blockers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unless users take action, Android will let Gemini access third-party apps⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks awesome, but unfortunately seems to only be for the UK and EU. I wish the US market would get something similar.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unless users take action, Android will let Gemini access third-party apps⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That is literally the only thing keeping me from installing Graphene on my phone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 finally overtakes Windows 10⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Same difference. If someone has a Windows 10 device and got rid of it, but didn’t purchase a Windows 11 device to replace it, they’re no longer a Windows user. Sure they could have had multiple Windows devices for some reason, but it’s rare for someone to own more computers than they have potential users to operate them (barring things like schools or companies that maintain a fixed pool of devices, although even they try to avoid having significant excess inventory). So yes, fewer Windows devices is to within a certain margin of error fewer Windows users.