babypuncher

It's going to be really funny if this ends up killing SpaceX in the long run.

At the end of the day LLMs just reproduce the consensus of the internet, so it makes sense that a coding agent would spit out software that looks like most of what's on the internet.

LLM output is called slop for a reason.

SteamOS is actively shipping on consumer hardware today, that's the real major difference here. People who don't even know how to install their own operating system are using it.

There isn't a downside to these other distros like Bazzite.

I think donating that amount of money to a political candidate is unethical no matter who that candidate is.

I reject the premise that whatever this guy wants from Trump is a moral good greater than the harm that is being wrought. It is almost certainly not about pushing the common good, but ensuring that his wealth continues to grow unabated by government interference.

I find this motivation especially despicable, because he has "donates $25m to political campaigns" level wealth already. He could quit Open AI today and live out an early retirement in unparalleled luxury. But that isn't enough for him. He has to keep pouring gasoline on the dumpster fire that is American politics, leaving the rest of us to suffer, because he doesn't think hundreds of millions of dollars is enough for one person.

These "single issue donors" are the most morally corrupt. I can understand someone who genuinely believes in the cause, even if that cause is disgusting. But this guy...this guy knows that the things happening are wrong, and he doesn't care as long as he gets what he wants from this administration.

These people should be made social pariahs.

Our own health department has completely removed objectivity from their process. It doesn't matter if they say something right or wrong now, they've completely lost our trust.

Lots of great engineers will work for way less than a FAANG salary as long as it means not having to work for FAANG. $1m/year still won't get you all that much though.

Lack of immigration enforcement is nonsense. Enforcement ramped up under Obama and hasn't gone down since. We americans are just very dumb and buy into obviously bullshit stories about brown people stealing and eating cats.

It's a colossal misallocation of resources by a handful of fucknuggets so wealthy that they will never experience real consequences for it. Meanwhile, everyone else is made to suffer.

I hope to god the next administration actually holds the criminals in the current administration accountable. Gerry Ford set a disgusting precedent when he loudly said that those who hold the office of the President should never be be held accountable for their actions.

Well it wouldn't be Texas if there wasn't some grotesque corruption involved. Vizio is the absolute worst of the TV manufacturers when it comes to this shit, so now it's clear Texas is really just trying to bully Walmart's competition rather than do something positive for consumers.

The real trick is to never connect your TV to the internet under any circumstances. These things are displays, they don't need the internet to do their job. Leave that to the game consoles and streaming boxes.

It's been clear to me since the very beginning of this TikTok drama, even before the war in Gaza, that it was never about TikTok being naughty; it is about TikTok not being owned by the wealthiest people in America. These people have no problem with Facebook, Instagram, et al. being naughty because they profit from it.

That's why the every proposed TikTok ban is so specific to TikTok, and never does anything to actually regulate the naughty things TikTok does, because that would mean hurting American social media companies.

I can definitely agree with that. AAA game production has become bloated with out of control budgets and protracted development cycles, a lot of that due to needing to fill massive overbuilt game worlds with an endless supply of unique high quality assets.

Ray tracing is a hardware feature that can help cut down on a chunk of that bloat, but only when developers can rely on it as a baseline.

Well in the case of Doom: The Dark ages, it's not just about about fidelity but about scale and production. To make TDA's levels with the baked GI used in the previous game would have taken their artists considerably more time and resulted in a 2-3x growth in install size, all while providing lighting that is less dynamic. The only benefit would have been the ability to support a handful of GPUs slightly older than the listed minimum spec.

Ray tracing has real implications not just for the production pipeline, but the kind of environments designers can make for their games. You really only notice the benefits in games that are built from the ground up for it though. So far, most games with ray tracing have just tacked it on top of a game built for raster lighting, which means they are still built around those limitations.

The push for ray tracing comes from the fact that they've reached the practical limits of scaling more conventional rendering. RT performance is where we are seeing the most gen-on-gen performance improvement, across GPU vendors.

Poor RT performance is more a developer skill issue than a problem with the tech. We've had games like Doom The Dark Ages that flat out require RT, but the RT lighting pass only accounts for ~13% of frame times while pushing much better results than any raster GI solution would do with the same budget.

My problem with this take is that it takes ARM > x86 as some kind of given, like there is an inherent flaw with the x6-64 ISA that means a chip that provides it can never be competitive with ARM on power consumption.

We've already seen Intel and AMD narrow the gap considerably, in part by adopting designs pioneered by ARM manufacturers like hybrid big-little cores.

Another aspect that I think gets forgotton in the Steam Deck conversation is the fact that AMD graphics performance is well ahead of Qualcomm, and that is extremely important for a gaming device. I'm willing to bet that the next Steam Deck goes with another custom AMD chip, but the generation after that is more of a question mark.

RISC-V is another wildcard that could end up threatening ARM's path to total dominance.

Direct3D -> Vulkan -> Metal is quite the translation layer sandwich, I wonder if that would have a meaningful impact on performance

I think the problem is that, until recently, there was little impetus to actually run Windows on devices where ARM actually has a meaningful advantage over x86. The Windows ARM laptops out there today don't impress, not just because of the software, but because the hardware itself isn't "better enough" than Intel or AMD to justify the transition for most people the way Apple Silicon was, especially for games. That is to say nothing of desktops, where battery life isn't even a concern.

Valve is using ARM to run Windows games on "ultra portable" devices, starting with the Steam Frame. At least right now, there isn't a competitive x86 chip that fits this use case. It also feels like more of an experiment, as Valve themselves are setting the expectation that this is a "streaming first" headset for running games on your desktop, and they've even said not to expect a great experience playing Half-Life: Alyx locally (a nearly 7 year old title).

It will be interesting to see if Intel/AMD catch up to ARM on efficiency in time to keep handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally from jumping ship. Right now it seems Valve is hedging their bets.

I wonder if Apple's GPT (Game Porting Toolkit) could added to the macOS Steam client as a compatibility tool, like Proton is in the Linux client.

> These things do not prevent cheating at all.

Yes they do. They don't stop all cheating, but they raise the barrier to entry which means fewer cheaters.

I don't like arguments that sound like "well you can't stop all crime so you may as well not even try"

> If you are in the higher skill levels, you might end up playing too many cheaters who are impossible to beat.

It's almost kind of worse than this. If you are in higher skill levels, you end up getting matched with cheaters who lack the same fundamental understanding of the game that you do and make up for it with raw mechanical skill conferred by cheats.

So you get players who don't understand things like positioning, target priority, or team composition, which makes them un-fun to play with, while the aimbots and wallhacks make them un-fun to play against.

And as a skilled player, you are much better equipped to identify genuine cheaters in your games. Whereas in low skill levels cheaters may appear almost indistinguishable from players with real talent so long as they aren't flat out ragehacking with the aimbot or autotrigger.

You're saying it's not a problem when cheaters to completely ruin the experience for top-10% players

I hated wasting a whole half hour server hopping until I found one that didn't suck

PunkBuster and later VAC were commonplace. Anti-cheat middleware is not new by any stretch.

Community-run servers weren't a magic bullet, and they had a lot of other problems that modern matchmaking systems solve more effectively.

> Why would the government wish to remove private jets from the list of purchases that can be deducted from income taxes?

To bring in tax revenue to pay for things we actually need.

> Why would they be unable to do this without making a deal with people who want open source software development to be designated a charitable purpose? How would making a deal with people who want open source software development fix this?

Because my comment is this thing we call a joke, it was meant to highlight the absurdity of the fact that some obviously charitable work gets taxed, while toys for billionaires are tax exempt because...reasons?

Maybe we can make a deal with the government. In exchange for making the development of open source software a tax exempt charitable work, we remove private jets from the list of purchases that can be deducted from income taxes. Seems like a win-win.

A file system and its files are a very simple abstraction that lets us organize these exact things.

I understand that some people get confused and overwhelmed by a directory structure, but I see that as an education problem, not a UX problem. I was taught all of this in elementary and middle school computer classes in the '90s and early '00s. Having this knowledge early on made me less afraid of my computer, made it feel less like a magical black box, and gave me the confidence to learn more complex topics on my own.

Computers become way more capable when the people using them understand fundamentals like directory structures and command line usage. I don't think either of these things are as difficult to learn as reading, writing, and arithmetic (especially if you already have a base level education in those three things).

If more "everyday people" just had a little bit more knowledge about these things, they would be able to do way more with their computers with less of a reliance on proprietary solutions that funnel them down whatever path makes someone else the most money.

That isn't at all what they are saying. They are saying that you need to provide all the game assets. Exactly like you do if you want to play the original Doom with modern source ports. Since the game is not available to buy, this means either pulling those assets from an original retail copy, or pirating them.