MudMan

I think from the game development side there are pros and cons. There are games that struggle to demand a high enough sticker price that do better under a subscription service.

The problem is that, much like subscriptions elsewhere, these are deliberately underpriced and used as a loss leader to sink competitors and the direct purchase market, so they aren’t priced reasonably and it’s unclear what the money flow towards creators is supposed to be.

And it’d be one thing if the money was flowing at all, but in the current industry, with Microsoft shedding people left and right while holding a ridiculous amount of IP, both active and inactive… well, it’s not a great look for the industry as a whole to be dumping content below cost for the sake of a speculative move. And to make matters worse, I don’t think that many people know just exactly how much of a money pit Game Pass is.

And that’s before the more fundamental issues with ownership and preservation. Which I have strong feelings about, it’s just that they happen to be so strong that I’m typically the one to remind people you don’t own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.

I mean, fair enough, on a technicality at least.

Sure. There can be more than one terrible driver endangering everybody on the road at the same time.

I’m constantly, endlessly disappointed at how hard it is for human brains to accept that two people disagreeing with each other can both be wrong.

I mean, the text say the guy honked for going “70 in a 50”.

If you take it at face value, the person posting is the asshole and a terrible driver endangering everybody on the road.

For me it got particularly bad back when I was running Manjaro and the GUI package manager showed you multiple package types for the same software all the time. Three metronomes is bad, but three differently packaged versions of Steam is worse and potentially unrecoverable.

Gonna raise the notion that a good, usable piece of software would not require much, if any level of awareness on this front, since most users aren’t willing or able to have that awareness in the first place.

The way this should work is you click on things you want in a package manager and then those are present and available transparently whether you use them or not. That goes for all OSs.

Hell, even Android’s semi-automatic hybernating of unused apps is a step too close to my face, as far as I’m concerned.

I hate modern reporting.

So, ok, here we go, fact checking dot lemmy dot com.

Tihs one seems to come from Google’s 2025 environmental report, which the article mentions but does not link despite being publicly available. The message Google would like you to take here is that while their power consumption has increased significantly their emissions have not (key chart below).

I guess that’s what you get for trying to spin these things. You get spun right back.

Anyway, Google would also like you to know that:

“However, it’s important to note that our growing electricity needs aren’t solely driven by AI. The accelerating growth of Google Cloud, continued investments in Search, the expanding reach of YouTube, and more, have also contributed to this overall growth.”

This tracks. While power consumption seems to be speeding up a bit, it’s been climbing for a while pretty consistently. I don’t know of Google’s implication that less CO2-heavy power generation is enough to not have to care about it, but I also don’t really see a way to reverse this trend. Data centers are data centers, and whether they’re crunching AI numbers or running every spreadsheet in the world, a bunch of big companies are committed to continuing to own a disproportionate chunk of the computing power of the entire planet so they can sell it to you by the minute.

That’s a weird change of perspective there. I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.

To be clear, yes, all social media with likes/votes has information about the likes/votes. That’s all likes/votes is.

The question is whether you surface that information to users. For a system like ActivityPub there are some hard limiters to how much you can keep that info hidden or build features around withholding information from users at all because the entire thing is built on the notion that anybody can be hosting an instance.

My point is that I’m not going to treat it differently or have different expectations of it just because it works in a different way. And if anything, I’d have some additional privacy concerns for a system like than I would for a less open system.

So from there I’m not sure what your argument is. Are you saying that you disagree that Fedi has the same expectations for privacy and usability than other social networks? That they have the same expectations but get there some other way? I’m not trying to put words in your mouth here, I’m trying to understand what you’re saying.

I have to say, I normally find the “ha-ha, this word sounds like something else in English” stuff to be a bit… provincial, but I’ll admit some are a bit .

As I said tgo someone else above, I think this is a cop-out.

If Fedi’s features suck expressing support by giving them a pass on implementation or privacy issues isn’t helpful either to improve the issues or in the process of making open alternatives more popular.

For the record, nothing is being gained here in terms of features. Up/downvoting already doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do and it already isn’t reliable or consistent across instances/services pretty much at all. Being public is the cherry on top of the “wanted to look like we have the feature but we really, really don’t” sundae.

Yeeeeah, I’m gonna say if a different social network tried to pull that move you would not be taking that line.

There’s a frequent undercurrent of “it’s fine because it’s Fedi” that I don’t subscribe to. Fedi moderation sucks ass and some of their hacks to visually replicate features from other social networks that don’t replicate the functionality suck as well. You could argue that up/downvotes shouldn’t exist at all, and I may agree with you, but this is a bug, not a feature.

Cool.

But the pitch wasn’t “everything will be interoperable unless the company doesn’t mean it or wants to make money or we aren’t “morally aligned”, whatever that means”.

I don’t understand how you can be a “walled garden” and still feature interoperability with a set of open source platforms under a pre-established set protocol. This is not an ethical problem or a problem of ideology, those two things are mutually exclusive.

This also sounds a whole lot like it disproves skrlet13’s point on the heterogeneous Fedi where everything fits under different but overlapping bubbles. Seems to me you think Fedi has the one moral and ethical position on this.

Yeah, we’re almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you’re most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.

I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.

The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus… and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.

The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There’s just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren’t are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.

Yeah, that sucks. I’ve had it get stuck trying to update Proton for a game that no longer existed on an external drive. Steam definitely isn’t as “works every time out of the box” as people around here like to claim, and its reliance on reproducing itself to its last state, even if that state is broken, can be super annoying.

But hey, I still think having access to all the games it can run in your system should be the default, even if it warns you when you are doing so under Proton.

As far as I understand it the option remain on the menu, they just changed the default.

I would have been less annoyed at the default being off if the client asked you if you want to switch it on when you click on a non-native game. They instead have the toggle hidden away in their already cluttered and annoying Settings menu, at least on the desktop version.

Likewise, I think the answer to your issue would be to just give you a warning splash screen when booting under Proton the first time. That’s fairly established UX language on Steam, they do the same when you hit the controller compatibility layer for the first time and when you try to play games with small UI elements on handheld.

I never encountered that, but Steam can get weirdly stuck on a Proton update or setting if you start manually messing with its library folders. For as much as people like their contributions to the ecosystem it’s still a private, for-profit storefront and they’re not particularly keen on you fiddling with it or in supporting you when/if you do.

That said, I haven’t had that issue. In theory Proton shouldn’t mess with your native software regardless of your options setting being on or off. Presumably even with it defaulted to on if you switch it off manually things would go back to showing all non-native software as “unavailable” again, right?

Oh. Well, no duh.

Did they ever explain why this wasn’t on by default before? Was there a practical reason for it at all? It’s one of those things you do once and never think about again, but it’s weird that you even had to.

I guess maybe they thought that having some games try to launch and fail by default would look bad? They’ve recently added compatibility ratings to non-SteamOS Linux systems, so maybe that’s the difference now? Still a weirdly annoying choice originally, though.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It’s just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you’re not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.

And that’s alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we’re on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it’s just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their “homelab” and pretend they’re doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.

Well, no, it’s a concise way to say some objections are logical and sound and some are stemming from a moral panic.

Whether I agree with the objections on each camp is, again, irrelevant.

I disagree with some of the non-moral panic objections, too, and I’m happy to have that conversation.

Four possible types of objections in this scenario, if you want to be “logical” about it:

• Objections that aren’t moral panic that I agree with.
• Objections that aren’t moral panic that I disagree with.
• Objections that are moral panic that I disagree with.
• Objections that are moral panic that I agree with.

I think there aren’t any in that last group, but there are certainly at least some objections in all other three.

Neither of those things happened here.

The examples people found include a monitor showing random technical text that someone asked a LLM to write (presumably the writer who goofed is getting paid) and some localized subtitles that were left with a machine localization (the rest of the localization was contracted out).

Even assuming a bunch of other stuff in the game was AI generated and just went undetected, which is likely, if it’s all iterations on what people noticed it definitely doesn’t fit your description.