Generally, games cannot tell what the performance bottleneck in your configuration is, especially taking into account things like upscaling or playing at scaled res. This is pretty significant for mid-range configurations. That people want plug and play doesn’t mean they’re happy for games not to take full advantage of their hardware.

Microsoft and Sony have no leverage at all over Valve when it comes to PC sales. Reneging on their deals to bring their published games to Steam would only mean fewer sales.

VR, controller, and console/PC that all interact seamlessly

I don’t see it as a killer feature. In fact, the main advantage of these individual devices (as in the new ones, not Steam Deck) is that you don’t need the others, rather than that they interact seamlessly.

e.g with Steam Frame, you don’t need a gaming PC to actually run Half Life Alyx to be able to play it. If you already have a gaming PC, at most it offers minor advantages over any other VR headset.

e.g with Steam Machine, you don’t need a gaming PC to engage with the Valve ecosystem and play on your TV. If you already have a gaming PC, you can already stream it to your TV for free.

Also, ecosystem maturity won’t fundamentally change that as a prospective steam machine customer, you will still need to configure game settings. You will still accidentally touch the trackpads in a way that causes issues in some games. Granted, the relative maturity and design improvements will make a big difference. But it’s more of a difference in customer retention and satisfaction than a difference that will get Valve’s foot in the door with someone invested enough in gaming to prefer a more open ecosystem, yet not invested enough to already own an equivalent console or equivalent/better gaming PC.

There are many ways they could leverage a lower cost which Sony/MS can’t/won’t, e.g. make generic controllers compatible, sell the console without one, recoup margin on steam controllers (one of the highest-margin tech product categories around these days)

They already tried that with the original steam machines and it flopped hard. It’ll be significantly better value or it’ll flop again, simple. They’re clearly optimizing for price based on the vram/ram specs. Yeah maybe it’ll go up after launch but out of the gate it’ll be sub-$500/512gb otherwise the whole exercise is pointless

https://archive.md/e0S3y

Price or multibuy promotions

First words of the article

I think you’re both right. The active boycotting part likely will blow over quickly for most. But it’s still an opportunity for a large group of subscribers, many of which are primarily subscribed due to FOMO, to reconsider the value of their subscription. Some segment of boycott participants will end up resubscribing. Some segment will remain unsubscribed and go without. Some other segment will remain unsubscribed and switch to piracy. Over the past 5 years since the service started, this kind of opportunity has only really happened around the annual price increase (e.g in Dec 2022, Oct 2023, Oct 2024).

I think it’s totally plausible that we would have seen another price increase next month, but won’t. It’d be too many reasons to unsubscribe, too close together. Even if they’re comfortable enough to increase in Dec instead of Oct, that’s still a hypothetical loss of 100s of millions in monthly revenue. That’s a significant win for the boycott.

I think “oot” emphasises the difference from US accents for parody reasons, and also it’s just not that simple to describe that difference by substituting a single letter of the alphabet. The best way I can think of to describe it (based on experience with friends from BC) is like a combination of “oht” and “oat”

https://store.steampowered.com/app/385380/Planet_Centauri/

They did kinda abuse early access to crowdfund development for a very long time. 100k+ copies sold is not a bad result overall. The bug is pretty unfortunate, but they didn’t exactly set themselves up for future financial success. Seems more like an unfortunate factor in the “flop” rather than the ultimate cause of it.

The game does look interesting though and if they can regain enough momentum off a daily deal and/or future discounts to fix some of the issues mentioned in the post-1.0 reviews, I’ll definitely consider getting it on sale.

You’re right, the messages would not be decrypted by the server but by the client making the report. Key rotation also shouldn’t be an issue because it uses a ratcheting chain key. But if the non-malicious client is already set up to send decrypted messages to the server, this seems antithetical to the idea that WhatsApp can’t read your conversations. There are clear caveats without even introducing the idea of a malicious client potentially exfiltrating decrypted messages elsewhere. Signal on the other hand receives the reported senders phone number and an encrypted message ID, presumably acting on spam reports by relying on multiple reports of the same message from the same sender, rather than by reading the message

https://faq.whatsapp.com/414631957536067/

Either the report function doesn’t work like they say, or messages are stored decrypted, or they can decrypt messages at will based on a simple request from another user

Edit: fixed

Oh they figured it out alright, that’s how the current players were handed the keys to the industry and why they take the more insidious DRM approach to controlling the content they own. They understand it’s less likely to cause customer to revolt than the fundamental problems with the movie/tv show distribution business model that came before. And tbh they’re right - yeah I pirate, but mostly because that’s what I’ve done for 30+ years at this point. People have been saying the most recent anti-consumer decision by Netflix will finally be their downfall for like a decade - their stock is now at all time highs.

You aren’t wrong that people will prioritise convenience/features highest but make no mistake, these companies are fully aware of the impact of their shitty practices. It’s all calculated.

A custom skin with widgets on the home screen pulling from Trakt, TMDB, IMDB etc lists - here I have the “New” category set to “Trending Recent Shows” from Trakt to highlight actually new stuff, whereas “Trending” category is set to “Trending This Week” from TMDB to cover returning shows. This approach inevitably leads to duplicates but at least covers everything important without the perpetual The Office, Breaking Bad etc results. When a title is highlighted, network badge is shown where available. The categories that point to individual episodes autoplay upon selection, the ones that point to series go to the ‘folder’ type browser

Search page overriding default kodi search, categorised by movie / tv show, also includes trakt lists.

Heaps of navigation and backend customisation, too much to show or mention but some notable things being the play next dialog including display prompt being based on end of subtitles track (with time-based backup), customised context menu including option to play trailer (displayed via long press on remote, requires youtube API key for HD trailer playback), codec prioritisation/blacklist, overriding local watched/unwatched status with trakt, partial playback resume including auto resume option

FWIW these examples are on a minimally configured proof of concept instance, when I set this up for family I need to test and tune it a bunch to ensure codec compatibility with the device/display, auto resume if that’s the behaviour they want etc. Base Kodi also allows to prefer non-hearing impaired subtitle tracks, audio tracks in a specific language or original language etc. The end result being they get what they want spoonfed to their home screen the vast majority of the time, and otherwise can find it easily with the search without hassling me lol. In the worst case scenario I need to show them how to rescrape/source select from the context menu, but that’s only happened once where an older title’s only cached release had russian-only audio. The rest of their time they can just choose an episode/movie without having to understand any specifics about whether the top result is the best stream or not. It’s enough that I’m still finding more UX improvements to add, years later.

I’d love to have this set up for usenet but don’t have any issues using torrent cache on torbox essential so just can’t really justify the cost difference

The Kodi add-on I’m using uses torrentio in the backend, but has way more customisation than the stremio app + trakt integration, autoplay using preset quality filters etc

Stremio app is more seamless experience when there’s no hits for the title already in debrid cache but that’s pretty rare these days even on torbox

deleted by creator

The problem with a wrapper as you put it, specifically one running on Linux, is DRM. The only way I know of to achieve the desired Widevine encryption level is running the service in a tab in Chrome. Not any other browser, not even Chromium.

Of course you could just bypass all that nonsense by pirating your media, and have a nice easy interface consolidating titles from all streamers - even retaining a network badge so they can see where a given popular show is airing - like what I’ve set up in Kodi for myself as well as boomer relatives.

Other than that I’d recommend Flirc for input via remote (or LIRC if you have a supported remote already and don’t mind some extra configuration)

Last Epoch, an indie ARPG similar to Diablo or Path of Exile. I have about 450 hours in it (since the early access phase) but hadn’t played it for over a year. Now that I’m boycotting Microsoft/Xbox I recently jumped back in and have been enjoying the impressive amount of stuff that’s been added post-launch.

I play this kind of game “casually”, by which I mean I don’t look up build guides. To me the most fun part of the game is developing a good enough understanding of the mechanics to be able to find success building whatever type of character it is that I want to play. For someone with this type of approach I think LE is great and very flexible! It’s the only game I’ve reviewed on Steam and years later I still recommend it!

I wouldn’t have minded it other than that it led into the lower decks tie-in, which led into the season finale. Kind of derailed the season’s momentum for me

Thanks for your input. I agree with you that it is a labour and capitalism issue. This seems to be where your perspective differs from the OP.

I guess my fundamental disagreement is that we should deny ourselves technological advancement because we live under capitalism. Yes, that is the system we will live under for the foreseeable future. I don’t like it and don’t like how capital takes advantage of technology. The way capital takes advantage of AI isn’t unique. Generally, significant advancement will bring change and the biggest impact of that change will be felt by the proletariat. That sucks and we shouldn’t have to put up with it.

Circling back to the topic of the post, OP uses this negative impact as justification to disagree with the apparent use of AI in the community banner art. This is non-sequitur. No one is making a living off of designing Lemmy community banners. The people that run the community simply decided not to arbitrarily deny themselves what they felt to be the best tool for the task. What I’m defending isn’t necessarily the current AI landscape as such, just the technology part I’m interested in.

I don’t think my earlier reply came through. I’ll try rewriting it.

AI can add, remove, change or refine input, either text or image-based, either wholly or partially, which may or may not itself be AI-generated. That feature set certainly allows room for genuine, inspired artistic expression. The way you describe AI art is as though it is all created by asking ChatGPT to draw you something. This isn’t the case, and neglects to consider the litany of AI model types that are fundamentally different to LLM’s. Models which are operated by humans directly interacting with them in a range of ways.

Let’s say you’re a concept artist for a movie. After replacing you with AI, how does the company instruct the model in the concept to be represented? If they’re just asking ChatGPT to come up with something itself, then sure - your description applies. And the output will be shitty concept art, and the movie will shittier than it otherwise would be. People might consume it, but it would be a slippery slope towards failure either because a) people don’t like it, or don’t like it enough for it to reach the critical mass required to spread, or b) someone else does the same uninspired and easy job more cheaply or effectively. If you’re an AI-slop consumer, why watch AI slop movies when you can just watch AI slop Tiktoks?

Good art resonates with people not because humans are easily entertained by pretty flashing lights or whatever an AI can churn out, but because of their relationship to a piece of art which is derived from their human experience. Companies have tried to broaden appeal and lower costs by appealing to the lowest common denominator for centuries, but beyond a certain point it is a failing business model. In my opinion, if some companies want to try, let them find out why there are 1000s of AI-generated movie trailers but no movies.

I think that AI can be used for the concept art in a way that maintains artistic integrity and capacity for artistic expression by having someone skilled in representing visual concepts operate the AI tool. That someone would be for all intents and purposes an artist. In essence the artist position would not be redundant; the way their job is done would have changed.