Steam really ought to learn their lessons, Tim is only trying to help. They’re still crippled from their decision not to allow blockchain games while Epic used the opportunity to eat their lunch /s

I’m constantly struck by the imagery of the giant warrior from Nausicaa. There is a timeline or a reality where this worked, but they couldn’t help themselves. They woke the beast up the second it was even halfway possible and now it’s tearing itself apart in self-destructive blasts because the whole thing was under-cooked (and probably the completely wrong direction to begin with).

If there’s any consolation here it’s that hopefully this has soured enough people on the idea that a second effort won’t even get off the ground. I hope …

There’s never going to be a “Year of the Linux Desktop” where there’s some critical inflection point like a lot of people think. But Microsoft has fucked up here in assuming that consumer trust is a linear relationship and it’s not. They broke the trust, the cracks are there, and users will keep bleeding. They’ll keep a certain percentage of users through apathy or complacency, but the momentum is flowing in reverse now.

What it takes for any one person to cross over is going to look different, whether that’s Linux getting up to speed on a feature they were looking for or Microsoft crossing yet another unacceptable threshold, but despite all my anger and personal grievances aside, I truly believe Microsoft as a company is incapable of correcting this problem.

Their goals are entirely misaligned, they believe they can dictate the market at the consumer and their revenue is dependent on that. They’re bleeding more money and talent through this AI debacle and that’s making them even less capable of facing and addressing the issues. Unfortunately I don’t think they’ll ever fully implode, but just like Chrome eventually ate IE’s market share and now won’t go away, so it will be with Linux.

Bonus points: I’m calling it, I truly do believe that in ~5 years or so Windows will cease to be its own operating system and start shifting towards a Linux distro with a bespoke DE (again, see Chrome/Edge). They don’t want to have to keep maintaining an OS like this and one of the biggest arguments for doing so has been the backwards compatibility, but everything is cloud and SaaS now and they want to push more business customers in that direction anyway. Server will be a thorn in their side for awhile, but consumer facing Windows distro will be the perfect testing ground. Mark it, ~5 years … EEE

Benn Jordan is a gem, do yourself a favor and just go watch all his stuff.

His latest on robot dogs is amazingly well-executed and researched with terrifying conclusions.

Yeah, nothing will help attract players like diluting any weak identity it already had with an open deluge of metaverse slop. Everything will be everything. It’s not enough to have a product anymore, it has to be a whole ecosystem. God forbid a single bloody dollar slip through your grasp.

I honestly thinks that’s just a part of it; realizing that you don’t have an allegiance to other men just because you’re a man yourself.

I think if woman are willing to talk about men in that way in front of you, it’s generally a sign that they trust you enough to be open about their concerns in front of you without you having to push back. I try to hear the concerns they’re voicing, do a quick internal check (is this me?) and if it’s not, yeah fuck those guys! They’re the worst!

So many of these ancient ghouls will die before they ever see any justice. All we can do is record their awful deeds and make sure their names are remembered in history as abhorrent.

It was both, and that’s the problem. If that’s what our optimism looked like, what chance did we even stand?

Been awhile since I watched that video, but I believe he does arrive at that point or something similar. Good video, would recommend, don’t have another 1:30 to dedicate to a rewatch right now.

What does end-to-end encryption even accomplish when you’re just feeding the information into an obscured, blackbox AI on the other end?

Like yes, I understand the importance of E2EE, I’m just making a point, it’s all rather ridiculous.

I’m not saying they were right to have done any of that, but I do have a lot of sympathy for them. Kickstarters are not simple affairs, never have been. The processes are a lot more documented and streamlined now, but especially back when this happened, having to physically produce, order, and ship all those books on a successful campaign is in fact a lot of work. Especially when you have a lot of other things going on.

Mental breakdown, very public, people lost money so I understand why they feel burned. Again, not saying it’s right but as someone who did lose money over it … it was a book. I can understand the humanity of the situation and find sympathy for that.

Some people on the other hand love internet drama and can’t let things go.

I miss the comics …

I sympathize, even just from the trailer I did have expectations and there was a bit of friction for the first hour or two as I had to work past them and meet the game where it’s at. As someone very familiar with all of the influences it draws from, this can be kinda difficult.

For the right person, this is going to be a GotY candidate.

The discourse around this one is going to be brutal already I can tell. As you say, it really is just a matter of taste and at the end of the day there’s no arguing that if this isn’t your kind of thing it’s not going to click. But it does frustrate me some already seeing people so confidently assert their taste as “simply bad game design”. So it goes, I can only argue on the internet so much, but I do want Yacht Club to do well and I want the game to find its audience without being turned off by disingenuous reviews. After Shovel Knight and this, I can see they have serious chops and I’m praying they stick around long enough to get another few games out before the industry eats them alive T_T

The game is absolutely fantastic, I plan to do a writeup here once I’ve progressed through a bit more of the game. I’m 14 hours in and partway through the 3rd of 7(?) main dungeons, largely because I’ve been picking every last scrap of meat off the bones. If I had to use one word to describe the game it would be dense. I didn’t play the demo, so I was a bit surprised to find it has less in common with Link’s Awakening and Castlevania than you might think, though it’s certainly wearing their skin. I’d call it Saturday morning cartoon Bloodborne with a heaping helping of adorable, furry characters and I mean that all 💯 positively.

Unlike Link’s Awakening, progression isn’t tied to finding items in dungeons. A lot of traversal is tied to subweapons you find unceremoniously strewn about the world that opens things up for you and you can really go most anywhere you want if you can figure it out. Instead of simply navigating each screen there are secrets and bones tucked in almost every corner encouraging you to observe, explore, and platform every inch. Dense.

There’s already discourse about the difficulty and if I give one concession, it’s that the early game is perhaps a bit “overtuned” like Silksong was, partially because the early game power curve is just rough when you don’t have a lot of stats or options to work with and part of it is maybe spending ~6 years in the oven. Stick with it, it’s worth it. Go slow, be deliberate, and I promise you losing your bones is not that big of a deal. Grinding is actually fairly easy and painless once you figure things out and if you decide to go that route (grinding is not necessary but you can absolutely do it if you want to accrue an early edge with a lot of items). Other than that, use the build in modifiers. They disable achievements, but also some of those achievements are just ass anyways and there’s no way I’m 100%ing this game (beat the game without ever entering the underlab, are you for serious?!)

Starter tips:

1. The game moves fast in the beginning and doesn’t run you through a tutorial but it WILL lead you into most things if you give it a chance, just pay attention and try everything on everything.
2. There’s a manual in the start menu! It’s cute and informative, read it, it actually contains helpful info
3. The game does a great job of pointing you down the optimal, beginner’s path if you read the newspapers, listen to the NPCs, and just pay attention to clues. Knowing where to go is half the battle, but you can always explore and push into other places early and get some nice treats for it. Be creative, you’ll be surprised the places you can go

Ultimately, this is a game for sickos. If you are a sicko, especially a Fromsoft sicko, then this is a no-brainer.

US taxes are the worst homework you can imagine. Do them poorly and you end up fined even deeper in a hole or possibly jail. Do them correctly and you get to fund a genocide! Woo!

I don’t normally like indulging in speculation and I certainly can’t speak for anyone else, but suicide is very deep, dark pit of despair. It’s a last resort for end of the rope, no other options, extreme loss.

If I’m in a position like this where my testimony is being used to move forward a case against a giant corporation doing harm to others, I’m hanging on. At least until that’s accomplished. That’s the motivation, that’s the light. To get your voice heard and have an impact. Suicide nullifies that. As does murder … and yeah it sure seems like one party is more invested in not having his voice heard.

I go back and forth with Metal Slug. 3 is absolutely peak, but sometimes it’s just too much, you know? 2/X is a bit more of a focused, compact adventure and I really like it for that.

Respect.

There’s a lot of layers here. Personally, I fucking hate AI and I’m in favor, sure. But I can easily see there being legal ramifications for this too, it’s something you have to tread lightly. And as much as I hate AI, what are the odds that some idiot somewhere using AI on my team gets bit by this and I still suffer the consequences?

Ultimately I don’t think this is particularly a good idea, but it’s worth being aware of just how easy this is to do and how likely it is to be overlooked. Relying on everyone to behave politely around a tech that they are increasingly growing disgruntled over is not a gamble I’m really willing to take. The fact that this kind of well-poisoning could end up being quite effective is only going to further incentivize it. This for sure isn’t the last time we’re gonna hear about something like this and honestly I’m surprised it took this long in the first place.

Commercial for AI: Now you can order a cake while planning your child’s birthday and sending an email to your boss while printing the tickets for your trip to Italy!

My unemployed ass, sitting around in boxers eating cereal at 10PM watching cartoons from the 90’s: Sweet, this is gonna change my life!

Nah, I’m another nano guy. You can set up syntax highlighting for it you know?

It’s not that any one is better than the other, it’s up to your use cases. I’ve learned vim a few times in my life already (and mostly just know the hjkl bindings from playing tons of terminal roguelikes) but it always decays because I don’t put the knowledge to use. Because it just doesn’t fit my use case.

I write small scripts, some Python and stuff and I’ll usually use PyCharm to debug that these days. So nano is relegated to the small tasks like config editing or quick, in place fixes to scripts.

The thing about this though, is that it’s not a new problem at all. LLMs didn’t start to get good enough in the early 20’s and only then did they come up with this idea. I worked for a company out near Seattle back in ~2014 that was already well into trying to tackle this problem.

They ran callcenters with a variety of contracts for different companies and took calls, chats, and emails. The main business model wasn’t the centers themselves but the information gathered by the ticketing system to help build tools like this.

Personally, with that insight and assuming surely there must’ve been other companies moving along that path, I find it quite telling that they still haven’t sufficiently stepped up to the role. There are some hard limits on cost and hallucinations that I think will ultimately fail to deliver a truly long-term, viable product. When you see they can’t maintain the veneer on even that use case, you’ll know the bubble has to be close to popping.

Of course no one can really say for sure, we’ve all been predicting it for some time and when there’s this much money invested they’ll protect that reality ferociously, so who really fucking knows. But still …

Anyone familiar with this, would you recommend the original here or the DS one? It’s been sitting on my list for awhile now, too …