I have an R36s that I installed Rocknix on to give it a tiny bit of an optimization and performance boost and that thing still kinda choked on some PS1 and most PSP games. The thought of it running Dead Cells 💀

Massive props!

Games are a modern media and I think suffer from a lot of modern engagement mechanics.

We need to stop viewing them as a constant stream of “new content” and more as an established library.

My brain just shuts off when I read stuff like this.

Man, I dunno. Fuck AAA gaming, I’ll go play something else.

It’s kind of a weird phenomenon that’s been developing on the internet for awhile called, “just asking questions”. It’s a way to noncommittally insert an opinion or try to muddy the waters with doubt, “Did you ever notice how every {bad thing} is {some minority}? I’m not saying I believe it, I’m just asking questions!” In this instance it seems that by even asking for a clear statement of value you are implying there may not be one, which is upsetting.

To be clear, I’m not accusing you of doing this, but you can see how stumbling into a community that takes their own positions as entirely self evident would see any sort of questioning it as an attempt to undermine it. Anything short of full, unconditional acceptance of their position is treacherous.

It’s worth thinking about because it’s a difficult and nuanced problem. Some things are unquestionable like when I say I love a bad movie or that human rights are inalienable. Still, I should be able to answer sincere questions probing into the whys of that and it really comes down to an assumption of bad faith or not.

Enshittification, as always, is the word here. It’s important to point out because to disenshittify(?) the product would need to turn back the wheel, including profits. Line go down.

With all the other lines going down, they literally cannot course correct here in any way that would matter to the consumer to rebuild trust. So much of their model is built off of force feeding users and directing their behaviors, the thing they absolutely hate.

This misses the point. Dankpods intentionally tested this way, and used Bazzite, to try and show what this would be like for the average gamer schmuck without a ton of technical skill interested in switching to Linux. Out of box experience matters in this situation, even though it’s not quite fair to compare that between free opens source distros and an OS created by a megacorp. To the average end user, it won’t matter. They just want it to work.

From the post itself and when I specifically referenced the OOBE in my own post. You need to read and make certain connections yourself, I can’t connect every point for every one.

While there is a point to be made about the performance directly out of box, this assumes that the user would not eventually seek to resolve the issues to improve performance. While there is a valid point to be made on the overall experience and the difficulty of correcting these issues, comparing the performance between sets of correct and incorrect drivers does not provide valuable data. It just underlines the OOBE point over and over again, I don’t need to watch an hour long video for that point to be made.

Clear enough?

The testing methodology is BAD, though. This is Youtuber science at its worst.

I understand the point of drawing attention to the OOBE and agree it’s valid, but that’s the kind of discussion best reserved for an article (or sure, video) specifically on the topic. This is an hour long video of collated bad data. It’s worthless, who wants to watch that unless you’re simply looking for validation or ragebait =/

I have this working theory that the cloud to butt extension was the beginning of the downfall.

It was the point where the techies began to see the absurdity of the “just jam X into it” trend of technology development and got so frustrated at it they developed a childish (affectionate) extension to vent their disgust. Came out around 2013ish or so?

And over the past ~decade and a half, have we not seen that born out to the extreme? It’s around the time I felt myself start to get cynical and stop following tech news.

I agree. The problem is complex and layered, I don’t claim to fully understand it myself, but the problem is that innovation came to mean “innovation on creating capital” and not “innovation on serving the customer”. If you haven’t read Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shosana Zuboff, I highly recommend it. It lays a lot of the groundwork for what Cory Doctorow would go on to call enshittification.

On top of that, or maybe underneath it, is the idea of disruption. It has long been joked as “ignoring regulations” which has very much become true. When you can’t exploit the current systems you create parallel systems where you are in control of the playing field. Disruption to innovation, innovation to disruption. To the consumer it’s just disruption.

What we’ve ended up with as a result over the past decade and a half or so is a market that is not beholden to the consumer at all. We’ve long known that boycotts are fairly ineffective aside from some occasional groundswell on “culture war” issues, but it doesn’t feel like we’re the market anymore. Look at Nvidia’s recent presentation at the CES which wasn’t even about consumers at all, it was about AI and datacenters mostly. They fully dictate the market at us now and we’re just along for the ride.

BUT to my hopefulness above, there are still a few ways to break free of this, I don’t believe things are so bad as that yet. There does seem to be a real choking point for the consumer, Microsoft is another good example. They continue to leverage their market position but people are rapidly exploring options away from them wherever possible. I don’t think we’ll ever truly see a “year of the Linux desktop” the way some people expect, but the slow erosion is real. Another article I think about a lot is the breaching the trust thermocline which theorizes that customer trust is not a linear system. Executives like to believe that once things begin to sour they can simply make a change to correct course when the course was already lost some time ago.

Call me optimistic, but I truly believe there’s going to be such a tech boom once the market outside the US is insightful enough to look backwards and point their finger at the things that worked well and that people actually wanted and iterate off that instead of this failed path, dead end.

I used to have a little notebook when I was younger where I tried out every option for every game and wrote down my top 3 favorite choices for what looked best on each one.

Nevertheless, the information is accurate (that was the place and the state of the country when she was born). And if you click on Estonian SSR (currently live on Wikipedia), you will immediately see on the top of the page:

(From the article) “Estonia was occupied twice by the Soviet Union between 1940-1941 and 1944-1991. When the country regained independence in 1991, it restored the republic founded in 1918. Estonia’s official position is that the Republic of Estonia was illegally and de facto occupied by the Soviet Union but never ceased to exist during that time.”

I understand your points, but the surface level of reading here is important because it is how most people will consume this information. Arguing over stuff like this is the exact justification that could be used in an attempt to subsume them back into Russia, a thing the Baltics are quite touchy about, and understandably so, especially in light of all that’s happened in Ukraine.

I expected nothing and I’m still disappointed,

We now have a clearer sense of where the tech is headed

Do we?

capability is outpacing our current ability

JFC you are so high on your own supply.

A new concept that evolves “bicycles for the mind” such that we always think of AI as a scaffolding for human potential vs a substitute

So you want your shitty tech to be the scaffolding that underlies all human thought?

Fucking tech industry has come to assume that all disruption is innovation and it’s not. It’s just disruption. Go stuff yourselves.

FIFA’s reputation really in shambles here =/

My favorite new dark pattern is the one where the website forces you to either accept the cookies or pay/subscribe.

There seems to be some argument around whether this is technically legal or not, it seems to worm its way around the written guidelines just enough but certainly goes against the spirit of it.

The fact that “Reject All” is an option, has always been an option, gives the game away entirely.

I used to love this game but I always got stuck in the graveyard. I realize the secret now it to just never take the obvious path and look for something secret, but that shit is mean when you’re 12 years old. I never got into the village of women or upgraded to the Shooting Star T_T

Just as well, I watched a friend beat it years later and the end game looks absolutely brutal!

Not sure I really understand what you’re asking. Looks like a hippo to me?

https://archive.org/details/zooo-eur-manual/mode/2up

It’s funny, the German section calls it a rhino, but the Spanish section calls it a hippo. Definitely a hippo if you ask me.

EDIT: Oh, sorry, I had to stare at this a bit more. It is the man, he’s in the manual on page 6, https://archive.org/details/zooo-eur-manual/page/6/mode/2up

My Christmas present to myself was a 2TB NVMe to pop into the system JUST for retro gaming.

RetroArch backend with ES-DE frontend (until Launchbox relents and focuses on a Linux release …)

All that space to hoard the bulkier PS2/GC ISOs and already at 100GB+ of metadata scraped in put into ES.

I’m old enough to be nostalgic for it, but even if you’re not, there’s something truly magical about the earlier gens, especially the later handhelds like PSP and 3DS. Game design had come a long way and was sufficiently modern without some of the harsher edges of older retro stuff, but still hadn’t given in to excessively evil design patterns. The graphics are clean, if still a little bit crunchy, which I find charming. They’re compact experiences that understood (in the time) the need to be put down at any moment because you could be doing something else or running out of battery. Place that in stark contrast to the modern mobile gacha nightmares that hammer your attention constantly trying to get at your purse strings. Did you remember to do your dailies? Has your party returned from the deployment?! ARE YOU WASTING TIME BY NOT REDEPLOYING THEM! Better check in with the game!

EDIT: Curren recs,

• Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux (3DS): I’ve always been a lowkey SMT fan but missed this back in the day. The graphics are bright and colorful while the story is tense and claustrophobic. Fuse, fuse, fuse those demons like evil pokemon. There’s something viscerally engaging to me about the old school first person dungeon crawling
• Black Rock Shooter The Game (PSP): I missed this one back in the day but it’s peak late-00’s. Extremely dumb, but with a straightforward narrative to work through and an interesting action RPG combat system. I thought it would be more straight shooter but there’s some interesting mechanics here. Great to just turn your brain off and enjoy the ride.

EDIT EDIT: I found an absolutely FANTASTIC repository for ROMs, too. Won’t post it here for fear of drawing too much attention, but DM me and I’ll give you the link when I get around to it.

It’s even worse than all that. The video is worth a watch if you have the time, he gets his hands on the leaked source code via accidental exposure on the Apple store, but then also covers other extensions that exhibit this same behavior as well as Microsoft Edge that just has it built into the browser. That’s right, even Microsoft is getting in on this by having their baseline browser without any extensions hijack the affiliate codes. It’s all so brazen …

Finally! I was getting concerned with how long this was taking but see it was well worth the wait.

Somehow even worse than I ever imagined, and there’s still more to come.

I know we’re all jaded nerds on this corner of the internet that are well aware of “if you’re not paying, etc. etc.” but there’s real value in investigations like this. Just look at how massively damaging and long-running this scam has been. The future of cyber security and cyberwarfare can’t just be fought on tech knowledge alone, there’s a huge social component to it and a “You should’ve known; I told you so” attitude won’t help.

Spread the information and reach out to those closest to you to offer sincere and genuine help. Help your friends, family, and coworkers uninstall these extensions and all extensions like them. I feel like we’re really coming to a point where all these tech industries have overextended themselves to a point where they are immensely vulnerable. Capitalism demands line always go up and if we can even slightly slow or possibly reverse that trend it could pop the bubble for a lot of these corporations.