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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • It absolutely does.

    I do take issue with the idea that shilling for Valve versus GOG is on the same level, though. CDPR’s entire market valuation is like 20% of Steam’s revenue for one year. Based on best data available CounterStrike loot boxes make more money than all of GOG’s store.

    I’m not shilling for GOG. I’m shilling for DRM free stores in general. GOG just happens to be the one that has these EA games, but if you can find what you’re looking for in a different place with a DRM free mandate go for that!



  • It is exactly the same beast. The beasts are the same. It’s the same picture.

    I mean, respect to your extremely wrong preferences, friend. Not everybody has the same use case. I’m not too sure who feels the need to come all the way out to do PR for a multibillion dollar corporation specifically on the basis of not being super into playing the stuff they buy from them, but you guys are clearly out there and I hope you are living your best lives. I’m not gonna say the cultish vibes one sometimes gets from the Valve apologia aren’t concerning, but if it works for you it works for you.

    For the record, I don’t even dislike Valve. They’re just a gaming first party like any other gaming first party. I buy stuff on Steam just like I buy stuff on PSN. It’s all good. And I do like most of their first party stuff. If they ever decide to get back in the business of actually making games I’ll probably check them out.

    Also for the record, I do download and back up everything I buy on GOG. It all goes to the same backup space where I dump my BluRays and my CDs. And I absolutely have purchased most of the 2000+ games I own on GOG through sales, so I don’t know about the value part either. Just today I played a 30 year old game and bought a brand new game from 2024 on GOG, so…


  • Well, most of these run on Dosbox and you can download DRM free installer packages directly from their website, so there’s that.

    But the Linux gaming crowd here keeps telling me how well Lutris and Heroic are supposed to work when I explain to them that I use a Windows handheld while my Steam Deck is gathering dust, so I’ll point them to this next time instead of just telling them those don’t quite do it for me.

    All joking aside, yeah, I’d love GOG having a better client overall, including a Linux port, but the quality of the packages and the lack of DRM easily trump that, so still buy these on GOG.



  • I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn’t storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don’t grow on trees, you know?

    It’s still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We’ll see where or if they resurface next, but I’m pretty sure we’re not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.


  • Yeah, I keep hearing the “you don’t get how big it is” thing, too.

    I get how big it is.

    European agriculture workers just reversed EU-wide policy as recently as last week by blocking major roads throughout the continent with tractors. They didn’t even agree with each other (half those guys are pissed at the other guys for being too competitive), and the regulations they opposed were climate protection regulations, among other more reasonable things, so this isn’t necessarily a feel-good story.

    But they won.

    They didn’t even have to try that hard, honestly. Besides mild traffic jams and some tense standoffs with police it was all pretty mild. And yet politicians across the entire continent, over multiple countries, were terrified of the optics of working class people protesting in loose coordination, especially with right wing parties trying to co-opt their anger.

    I get how big it is. The size is not the reason.


  • Yeah, ok.

    I don’t want to speak for the OP, but… I’m guessing that’s what they’re saying.

    I mean, this issue is not on the ballot elsewhere. Even conservatives who are actively trying to dismantle public health care won’t dare suggest that they want less public health care. At most they’ll tell you they found ways to invest more and then turn around and give that money to private managers. You certainly broke through the propaganda. I don’t think I’ve spoken to an American anywhere who has made a case for the current health care system. Polls suggest this issue, among other “aren’t Americans weird” stuff are wildly impopular with the actual population.

    But I also constantly hear from Americans that it’s impossible to turn it around, that candidates who support these common sense moves are unelectable and that there is nothing they could ever do about it.

    That part is what I don’t get. I mean, I’m familiar with elections not going my way, it happens to everybody, but holy crap. There’s a reason why this is not on the ballot elsewhere. You wouldn’t need an election to figure this out. Even in countries with the bare minimum of democratic guarantees and no money you would have the mother of all endless riots under these circumstances.

    Me, personally, I’m not so much judgemental of the American public as I am baffled at their defeatism and conformism.




  • Man, I’ve had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

    I have enough coomputers laying around that I’d move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn’t tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I’m not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.





  • I default to 4KBR on any movie I have a genuine interest in. I am also equipped to rip them (no thanks to the industry’s increasingly absurd attempts at DRM), so streaming safe digital backups is an option, although it’s still a bit heavy to do so without losing quality if you’re not really well set up for it.

    I could understand the format being dismissed when people were using 1080p SDR displays but man, since OLEDs got popular the quality improvement over streaming is so obvious, especially in older movies with a lot of grain and shoddy digital masters.

    I can live with it becoming a cinephile option if I have to, but in the current environment of quality degradation for online services it’s still how I’d recommend watching movies.


  • That is most likely going to generate less revenue than promoting donations, or a comparable amount at best. WinRAR is the meme example.

    From a PR and marketing perspective, if I wanted to maximize my revenue as a single developer I would set up a Patreon or encourage recurring donations through the software by providing bragging rights stuff (merch, insider access, early access to unfinished builds and so on). Single mandatory payments simply reproduce the piracy/license access of commercial software and shaming people into paying without coercion just makes you seem less appealing to people who would donate anyway.


  • Right, but that’s my point, compute is compute is compute. There are tensor acceleration cores in commercially available hardware dating back five years. They capped things above a specific performance threshold, is my understanding, but that just means you need more of the less powerful hardware, so all you’ve done is make things more expensive/less energy-efficient, but not block any specific application. Not in cheap, portable chips, not in huge industrial data center processors.

    So not particularly useful to stop cyberwarfare, not particularly useful to stop military applications. The only use I see is making commercial applications less competitive. Specifically on the training side of things.



  • I am very confused about this ongoing thing regarding “stifling China’s access to AI models”. Does the US government think GPUs are magic? All you need to make a ML model is some tensor math and a web crawler, maybe some human processing on the later bits. You’re not gonna stop China from making them. You’re not gonna stop college kids with gaming rigs making them.

    I’m guessing the endgame here is to make it slightly more expensive to do this in China to get American companies to have slightly better versions in the market and prevent a TikTok situation, rather than any legitimate strategic goal. Right? I mean, besides commercial protectionism I don’t see how this type of language makes sense.


  • It’s not lip service if I can send messages and other people can receive them.

    Again, the status quo is you can’t do that. Hell, in the spectrum of being dragged into reasonableness by the EU kicking and screaming, Meta is orders of magnitude below Apple here.

    I mean, we can debate the finer points of the implementation once it’s live, but for now this is nothing but positive movement. If people got over rejecting cookies they can get over dismissing warnings regarding interoperability, and if they don’t, the same regulators have a history of re-spanking unruly malicious compliers.