I can’t tell you how to do it under Wayland off the cuff, but you can map a controller’s analog stick to act like a mouse. It’s a little clumsy, but that’ll let you use any mouse-oriented DE.

Some gamepads, like the PS5’s controller and I assume the Steam Controller, have touchpads built into the controller that work as pointing devices.

If you don’t specifically want only a gamepad, I’d probably use a trackball or touchpad and maybe keyboard, as a trackball can be used from a couch, lile a gamepad.

I think, from past reading, that some of the shift to white — well, or at least light colors — may have been with the intention of making interiors brighter. Like, more reflected light, so for a given amount of light from windows or from lamps, the room is better lit.

Like, I remember a lot of 1970s-era stuff looking dark and shadowed. Dark wood paneling and often darker furniture. If you look at photos of house interiors that people took, a lot were also kinda dark. The 1960 and 1970 shots from the above article aren’t dark, but those are gonna be professionally-taken pieces, might have light diffusers or whatever set up for the shot. If you have light colored stuff all over, the light bounces around more, get more diffuse lighting.

You can do even better if you do things like have mirrored walls, but that’s fragile and can be obnoxious.

So it might have been a shift based on functionality to try to get more and more-diffuse lighting, and white just happened to be the most-reflective color.

Today we can do energy-efficient diffuse lighting with things like LED strips. If wanting more diffuse light is the dominant factor causing a shift towards white, I wonder if extensive use of that might reduce the desire for light colors. Though…that doesn’t help where one is relying on sunlight during the day.

There are passive devices that can gather sunlight. I remember that sailing ships used to use these glass things that were flush with the deck but had a sort of crystal shape to pipe more light down to the top deck. That wasn’t a lot of light — ship interiors were dark — but maybe we could use some combination of that and other stuff.

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Apparently I’m thinking of a deck prism.

According to Wikipedia, something analogous was used in buildings, but electric lighting kind of killed it off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prism_lighting

Prism lighting is the use of prisms to improve the distribution of light in a space. It is usually used to distribute daylight, and is a form of anidolic lighting.

Prism lighting was popular from its introduction in the 1890s through to the 1930s, when cheap electric lights became commonplace and prism lighting became unfashionable. While mass production of prism lighting systems ended around 1940,[1] the 2010s have seen a revival using new materials.[2]

That’s a job, but it’d be nice to not have a single point of failure. Multiple safeguards reduces the chance of overall failure.

There are a number of games — particularly those since SSD storage became pretty much the norm — that do not load a whole level, but load while playing. Why not just load the game (or the level)? Because it lets devices with less RAM store more stuff than they otherwise would. You have more relaxed caps on things lile texture size.

I’d assume that the engine is still going to try to predict what content is going to be needed prior to it being needed, that it’s got a strategy more sophisticated than just “load resource first time it’s requested”. But SSD storage is going to be more forgiving of a miss than rotational storage.

Bethesda uses the term “cell”. I know that their engine uses a square grid as the loading unit, loads a sort of circle of cells around the cell where the player is.

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It sounds like the Unreal 5 terminology is “sublevel”, for the units loaded.

https://old.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/1tchk8k/is_level_streaming_even_worth_it_if_your_game/

We might have a habit of being curious and seeing things and patterns that aren’t really there. And it’s frustrating to watch it misfire.

But…maybe it’s worth it to come up with silly ideas on a fair number of occasions if that same tendency sometimes leads us to make valid discoveries that we wouldn’t otherwise have made. Sometimes even people who have wrong ideas run over important things.

There was this guy once who disregarded well-established (and correct) geophysical science with some cockamamie theory that he thought would make him rich. He tried to sell a bunch of people on funding his ideas, who mostly turned him down. Eventually, he managed to get funds and set out to prove his ideas. That experiment would have been suicidal for him — because his ideas were totally wrong, making the experiment lethal — if not for the great good fortune of, during the course of this experiment, making a (very important) real discovery that saved his life. He then tried — not very successfully — to claim that his new discovery actually showed that his ideas were correct.

He was a dreamer, and a bit of a nut, and he was wrong. His name was Christopher Columbus, and he had convinced himself that the circumference of the world was much smaller than was actually the case, and that if there was nothing but ocean to the west of Europe, one could safely reach Asia in a single trip of the sort that ships of the time could make. Instead, he discovered the New World.

There were a lot of other people who went looking down other weird rabbit holes with other weird ideas. They usually didn’t come up with anything worthwhile.

But…that discovery was worth a whole lot of poking around blind alleys.

So, hey, maybe a human tendency towards a bit of being a crank and running down crazy ideas is worthwhile, if it’s the price we pay to occasionally come up with something really amazing down a weird rabbit hole.

That comment is quoting text from an article.

Slate?

Some car manufacturers have used WWI-style dazzle camouflage to make it harder to photograph prototype cars.

If it’s hard for a viewer to even make out the car’s lines, probably hard to make out anything on the car too.

So, I get the argument — there’s hardware, why not use it — but it’s got some things that I’m not super-enthralled with, even though the author has clearly put a lot of work into making it work.

• I don’t know how far I’d trust the Linux side of things to automatically come up and stay up. Like, they use a program to trigger Termux at boot and disable battery management to try to avoid having Termux be killed, but the host OS isn’t really designed for this.

• Stuff like the network is outside the control of the GNU environment; Android apps can only do so much. They did mention some of the issues here and looked to work around those limitations.

• I don’t know if Android apps are allowed to reboot the phone; I would guess not. My Termux environment doesn’t have a shutdown or reboot command, which also kinda makes me bet not.

• Android is a lot more amenable to doing things like expecting there to be a user at the screen. Say the phone reboots to do a system upgrade and prompts me for something, which is reasonable to do for a phone but not great for a server. I can’t do much about that remotely.

• I don’t get to update the kernel, and at some point, phone vendors stop shipping updates.

• I don’t have access to all of the hardware.

• Phone hardware does have a battery, which is neat, but it’s also missing hardware that I’d like on a server, like an Ethernet socket and much (or on many phones, any) by way of expandable storage. No external display port (which, given the Android expectations about a user being present, might be something that one might want to have a way to access remotely). Might be possible to add on some of this via USB.

• No convenient way to remotely do a hard reboot, which is something that I’d like on a server. That integrated battery backup also means that you can’t just yank power. I mean, maybe you could rip the power button off and rig up some sort of relay hooked to the contacts or something to hold the power button down using some other system, but…

I think that there might be reasons to do this. Like, 14-year-old-me might have done it because 14-year-old-me has little disposable income, but plenty of time to work on things. If an old phone fell into my lap then, hey, sure. And it’s got interest from an “I’m gonna do this, dammit” standpoint. But in terms of saving money…even with memory prices where they are, low-end, small PCs are not that expensive. Here’s a system with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD for $180. Here’s a refurb — and it is a refurb, but the phone is also used and EOL — for $129 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD. Those have the ports above, can just run straight GNU/Linux, run x86, are more expandable, are designed with less constraints on power and cooling, and meet or exceed the phone specs. Most of the people who are in a position to hack together a custom server on a phone and are comfortable fixing or working around any issues are also the kind of people who probably are in a position to pull a pretty solid income, and where the time tradeoff becomes increasingly unfavorable.

Thinks of how to look up some data on this.

There are a bunch of “by decade” style things. I bet someone has done one for interior design.

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If one takes this as authoritative, I’d say that it well predates Gen Y. Going by the text in this article, it sounds like the peak was maybe the 1960s or 1970s.

https://mcarthurhomes.com/design-by-decade/

1960s

Bright colors were introduced in the 60s, along with new shapes and designs. Neon colors, bold prints, and texture fabrics were common design elements of home interiors. Couches and chairs were often covered with wild fabrics (influences of the hippie movement). 60s homes also had shag carpeting and wood-paneled walls to create a cozy space. Lamps were also a huge part of defining any space; lamps in the 60s had interesting shapes, and paper lampshades were colorful.

Influenced by the space race, furniture and decorations in 60s homes looked like they came straight from the future. Homebuilders also integrated technology and used new materials in home construction.

1970s

Color continued to be a large part of interior design in the 1970s as self-expression flourished. Mustard yellow was a favorite, but it was often combined with other bright colors to create a unique palette. Crafts and DIY projects were commonly seen throughout the 70s house to reflect the individuality of the time period.

Nature replaced the technology influences from the 60s, as society became more socially conscious. As a result, design relied on organic lines, colors, and forms. Many homes had large windows or skylights to bring in natural light. And interior designers also began to think more about self-sufficient designs and creating an environmentally-friendly space.

This says that pastels started to become a thing in 1980s — that’s still color, but more muted.

1980s

Triangles were a popular shape in the 1980s, and pastel colors were extremely popular. Pastels offered a softer color palette than the 70s. Floral patterns were popular, especially for drapes and bedding. Chintz often decorated homes in the 80s, along with floor-sweeping window drapes.

Overall, interior design trends of this time period were often a conglomeration of previous decades. Interior design in the 80s reflected opulence, ornamentation, and over-indulgence. But unique to the 80s was the concept of an open kitchen. This layout was designed for family living and helped create a more open dining area and living room.

In the 1990s, they say it started to be common to just have beige or white rooms:

1990s

During the 90s, interior design focused on creating a comfortable space. Homes had neutral colors and featured natural wood. Natural wood cabinets were extremely popular in kitchens. If a kitchen didn’t have natural wood cabinets, it probably had white cabinets. Walls in some rooms were covered in a patterned wallpaper to add some color and texture, but it wasn’t uncommon to see a room that was just beige and white.

Furniture and decor were somewhat minimal, especially compared to the 80s. Wall-to-wall carpet helped some homes feel cozier. And long drapes continued to be quite popular.

They don’t say much about the 2000s except that green became more common as an accent:

2000s

Interior design in the 2000s was extremely environmentally-friendly. Greens became more stylish as a wall color or accent color. Homeowners sought after materials that were better for the environment, like recycled materials, and environmentally-friendly appliances. Some homeowners went as far as to bring the outdoors inside by building sunrooms to let in a lot of natural sunlight.

Overall, the layout of homes in the 2000s was more relaxed than in previous decades. Open floor plans allowed interior designers and homeowners to choose what they wanted a space to become. For example, it was common to have an “office” area with a computer in the heart of the home instead of in a separate room.

They say that neutral colors dominated in the 2010s:

2010s

Because of the global marketplace that exists today, anyone can be an interior designer. Cookie-cutter designs just don’t cut it. Homeowners looking for something unique to make their house stand out. Designs today feature handmade craftsmanship and showcase the DIY attitude. And you will find eclectic decor that makes a home feel authentic and genuine.

While there is still room for accents of color and sections of prints, homes are typically painted with more neutral colors like grays and tans to create a clean look and a cozy atmosphere. Homes continue to be built with open layouts to accommodate families.

And that you still had neutral tones in the 2020s (and minimalism is mentioned)

2020s

The 2020s interior design trends focus on sustainability and smart home technology, reflecting a global awareness of environmental impact and technological integration.

Eco-friendly materials and upcycled furnishings dominate, supporting a greener lifestyle. The rise of smart devices and home automation allows for energy-efficient and convenient living. Style-wise, there’s a shift towards minimalism with a twist, incorporating bold statement pieces and vibrant accents against a backdrop of neutral tones.

Multifunctional spaces are essential, accommodating remote work and wellness activities. Natural light and biophilic design principles enhance the connection to the outdoors, promoting health and well-being in home environments.

So, this doesn’t have numbers, and I like numbers, but I’ll buy that it’s at least a rough approximation of what things looked like. If this is correct, the shift away from vibrant colors had to have at least started by the 1980s. If you figure that new households had maybe people that were, say, 20, that’d be people maybe born in 1960, so late Boomers or maybe early Gen X are about the latest that the shift could have started.

That being said, it also seems fair to say that it was a progression, and it was probably taken further by later generations.

So, from past reading, I believe that a lot of jobs in brick-and-mortar banks — which have historically had a major brick-and-mortar presence — have been on a long decline. That’s a phenomenon that well predates popular LLM use, brought about by Internet, ATMs, and similar, which tended to displace brick-and-mortar stuff.

I physically went by my local bank the other month (for the first time in a long time) and while the building was still there, it was like a tomb. All of the service desks that had once held tellers were empty. There was one person in an office handling the few people coming by in person.

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https://www.alliantcreditunion.org/money-mentor/the-rise-of-online-banking-in-the-us

Every year, more and more Americans are going online to do their banking.

According to Pew Research Center, 46 percent of adults in the United States banked online in 2010. That number grew to 51 percent in 2013, and in 2015, a full 81 percent of adults who manage their household’s finances banked online.

https://www.branchspot.com/bank-branches-closed/

U.S. banks have been closing branches for years — thinning out “banking deserts” where the nearest branch is now miles away. Branchspot tracks 939 closed or relocated branches nationwide, sourced from the FDIC.

I agree that “open source” is often incorrectly used to refer to open-weight models, things that are more analogous to closed-source software where you get the binaries.

That being said, the article does correctly use “open weights”. The submitted title here lacks it, but the current title of the article does appear to have it, so either the article author updated the title or the submitter truncated it.

Most people wouldn’t use their phones for console games if they could, because it’s a different form, with a device that has a different purpose. The way most people play mobile games & console games are very different: sporadic short sessions during the day is different from a 2-3 hour gaming session.

I mean, he’s talking about at the game dev level, so if he’s thinking of mobile, which he did not explicitly say, I assume that he’s not talking about “run existing non-mobile-platform game on server, play on mobile”, but rather “develop new game that runs on server and displays on mobile”. It could reasonably be structured toward bursty mobile play. Just provides more compute power than exists on a phone. The phone basically is doing the equivalent of streaming YouTube and passing inputs up, in such a scenario.

The article author, on the other hand, is clearly thinking about PCs, given that they’re talking about GPU prices.

The “advent of streaming,” Zelnick said, is something that Take-Two believes is “right around the corner, in terms of having something that’s low latency and really works well for consumers. Machines that weren’t game machines before will become game machines.”

I mean, if you’re comparing it to, say, a local PC, it’s higher latency, less configurability, less reliability, and games will probably stop being available at some point. I am also skeptical that we have the bandwidth to move everyone to unicast high-res video streaming at once. You maybe gain on a troubleshooting front and it might be somewhat cheaper on a hardware front due to shared costs and people not using the systems 24/7 (though I suspect that people would want datacenters as near as possible due to latency, so you can’t be sharing hardware with a country who isn’t awake at the same time, say).

If there’s a real case for streaming gaming, I think that it has to be for mobile-only users. Mobile hardware is just too power- and cooling-constrained to be competitive with larger, fixed-in-place systems with wall power, so using a phone as a display for a remote server might make more sense, if it lets users without a PC play games that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to play.

I’m also really skeptical that the current memory crisis is going to be that much of a factor. Yeah, okay, so it costs more to buy a PC in 2026 and 2027…but it also costs more to buy a server to do streaming gaming on. That server might get higher capacity utilization, so it might benefit the streaming providers somewhat relative to everyone having a PC, but I’m pretty skeptical that that’s going to be a sea change.

I think that outside of mobile, if streaming games are going to be the future, that you’d see a major shift to console games doing it first. They have limited expandability, so don’t give up some of the things that you would if moving away from a local PC. Basically, instead of a PS6, say, yould just provide PS6-class games to PS5 users, with the PS5 being a thin client for a game running in a datacenter. But we haven’t seen a major transition of that sort.

There are genres for which the latency isn’t such a big deal. I think that it’ll always be a poor match with twitch games. If you’re playing a point-and-click adventure, though, latency may not matter much.

But my bet is going to be that in 2029, at the end of his three year period, most PC games continue to be local.

I think that if people really feel priced out of newer hardware during the memory shortage, they’re more likely to just keep playing less-hardware-demanding games locally than to transition to streaming games.

more economical to fly roundtrip from the UK to buy an MSRP GPU at Nvidia’s QuakeCon booth than it is to buy one anywhere online

That was for a limited number, for a high-end GPU, and for an Nvidia GPU. Most people are not using 5090s.

EDIT: There are some changes that could be made to game engines, if you’re doing it at the game dev level and developing a new game, to try to mitigate streaming latency, stuff that you can’t do if you’re trying to retrofit streaming to existing games. So, like, existing multiplayer latency-sensitive network games typically make use of client-side prediction. Like, my client will make some guesses about what other players are doing, since it won’t actually know until a packet reaches the server from them and then the server sends a packet to me. It might (reasonably) assume that the player will, say, keep the same buttons that they presently have down. So it makes that assumption and renders the world as if that assumption were true…but it remembers the last time it got a state update from that player, and it retains all the game world state up until that point. If it turns out that one of its predictions was wrong in a way that invalidates its assumptions, then it recomputes game state from that point in time. I see what looks like a short “glitch” maybe, but most of the time, latency appears to be reduced. There are variants on this, but this is roughly how things work.

It should be technically possible — though not normally done today that I’m aware of — for a streaming game server to make server-side predictions about my input and to render the game world and start streaming input to me as if that had been my input. If it gets an update from me and turns out that it was wrong, then it rolls back that world state and recomputes from that point. Similar approach to client-side prediction.

Prediction isn’t magic. It can’t make latency simply go away. You’d tend to see a lot more brief “glitches” this way after you push a button (or, if it’s a mobile phone, probably tap on the screen). But…you could potentially reduce the apparent impact of latency to some degree.

If you add thin client software to the mix that can do things like render simple visual effects and play some preset sounds, where the game instructs the thin client how to respond in advance, then when you push a button, you could potentially have the game software immediately play a “button pressed” sound and then start a visual effect like the screen flashing or something like that, even if it takes more time to get a rendered frame reflecting the input back from the other side. That could potentially improve perceived responsiveness.

Nobody will ever know unless some brave soul tries painting the Lincoln Memorial teal.

Actually…you know, I could see Trump deciding to gild the thing. He put gold all over in the White House…

thinks a bit

Is it really true that houses need to have contrasting colors, that that objectively is preferable? Maybe it’s just what we’re used to, so it feels more “normal”.

Like, I can certainly think of architectural styles that don’t have much color variety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Estévan_del_Rey_Mission_Church

The San Estévan del Rey Mission Church stands at the northern end of the large plaza that takes up the southern end of the mesa top that houses Sky City, the traditional Acoma pueblo settlement that has been continuously occupied since prehistoric times. It is a large adobe structure, built in a wall and beam construction style.

Brutalism often just exposes the raw color of concrete for the whole exterior:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_Carreño_Cultural_Complex

Architectural style: Brutalist

A lot of modern architecture styles go in for a stark white:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Paul_Poiret

Villa Paul Poiret in Mézy-sur-Seine, Yvelines, France, is an early 1920s Cubism-inspired Art Deco private house originally designed by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens.

The house stands in 48,500 square metres (12.0 acres) of parkland in Mézy-sur-Seine, to the west of Paris, overlooking the Seine Valley. It is constructed in reinforced concrete in a geometric style, has 25 rooms on three levels, 800 square metres (8,600 sq ft) of internal space, an upper terrace with panoramic views, and a 7-metre-tall (23 ft) corner salon with floor-to-ceiling windows.[1]

Greek Revival architecture exteriors tend to have the same sort of uncolored surface. Amusingly, this was based on a misunderstanding of Greek architecture — we often think of classical Greek statues and buildings as white marble, though that’s because the paint that was once on there wore away prior to archeologists discovering them. In the early US, we used it a lot in government buildings because it was associated with democracy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Revival_architecture

EDIT: And the styles based on Spanish Colonial stuff are often monocolored other than having a terracotta roof:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Colonial_Revival_architecture

Since the late 2000s, Buckter has watched with dismay as essentially colorless colors—think white, beige, gray—have taken over. “It’s not even three shades, or four shades, of gray. It’s just one dark gray,” he said.

The share of new cars in grayscale colors rose from 60 percent in 2004 to 80 percent in 2023. Production of purple cars dropped 93 percent over that period, gold by 97 percent.

So, that’s certainly true for cars in the US — I’ve read articles about that and was amazed when I realized rhe shift myself. I can believe that it’s true for houses in San Francisco, though I’m not certain that that’s true nationwide and the article doesn’t cite data supporting that other than in Washington, DC.

But I’m not sure that it’s true in, say, clothing, and the article doesn’t cite figures there. I’m wearing muted earth tones, but the next person over in the restaurant I’m in is wearing a bright green shirt, and the guy bicycling by outside is wearing yellow.

And I’m not sure that it’s true globally.

I’m pretty confident that at least in menswear, the US is more colorful than it was, say, a century back. Maybe not if you compare to the 1970s.

So, being specific, what are you claiming? That the rate of change in price over some time period (what time period?) was comparable and accelerating and you believed that it would continue to increase?

Hard drive prices returned to their pre-flood level a decade prior to the AI boom.