Oh yeah, you’re right. It’s both degradation in some way, but through entirely different causes.

Technically you can do everything through email, because everything online can be represented as text. Doesn’t mean you should.

PRs also aren’t just a simple back and forth anymore: Tagging, Assignees, inline reviews, CI with checks, progress tracking, and yes, reactions. Sure, you can kinda hack all of that into a mailing list but at that point it’s becoming really clunky and abuses email even more for something it was never meant to handle. Having a purpose-built interface for that is just so much nicer.

I wouldn’t agree either, but I think there’s some kind of logic: At a certain point familiarity can be a detriment to learning if it leads to you adding invalid assumptions to your mental model because everything else is so familiar. If everything is unfamiliar however you’re less likely to start making assumptions.

As for how true of effective this is, I don’t know. Anecdotally however I had less problems learning entirely different keyboard layouts for example as opposed to layouts that are just slightly different.

I’m sorry to be blunt, but mailing lists just suck for group conversations and are a crutch that only gained popularity due to the lack of better alternatives at the time. While the current solutions also come with their own unique set of drawbacks, it’s undeniable that the majority clearly prefers them and wouldn’t want to go back. There’s a reason why almost everyone switched over.

I’d guess because the same argument could be made for the website you’re on right now. Why use that when we could just use mailing lists instead?

More specifically: Sure, Git is decentral at its core, but all the tooling that has been built around it, like issue tracking, is not. Suggesting to go back to email, even if some projects still use it, isn’t the way to go forward.

Same thing with Stable Diffusion if you’ve ever used a generated image as an input and repeated the same prompt. You basically get a deep-fried copy.

I’ve been trying to find some better/original sources [1] [2] [3] and from what I can gather it’s even worse. It’s not even an upscaler of any kind, it apparently uses an NPU just to control clocks and fan speeds to reduce power draw, dropping FPS by ~10% in the process.

So yeah, I’m not really sure why they needed an NPU to figure out that running a GPU at its limit has always been wildly inefficient. Outside of getting that investor money of course.

AI acceleration for 3d upscaling

Isn’t that not only similar to, but exactly what DLSS already is? A neural network that upscales games?

That, and there’s a high likelyhood the only thing the unsubscribe button would do is giving the spammers the valuable information that this email address is actually in use.

I see. That I can mostly agree with. I really don’t like the temporal artifacts that come with TAA either, though it’s not a deal-breaker for me if the game hides it well.

A few tidbits I’d like to note though:

they announce them way too early, so people are waiting like 2-3 years for it.

Agree. It’s kind of insane how early some games are being announced in advance. That said, 2-3 years back then was the time it took for a game to get a sequel. Nowadays you often have to wait an entire console-cycle for a sequel to come out instead of getting a trilogy of games on during one.

Games shouldn’t be relying on them and their trade-offs are not worth it

Which trade-offs are you alluding to? Assuming a halfway decent implementation, DLSS 2+ in particular often yields a better image quality than even native resolution with no visible artifacts, so I turn it on even if my GPU can handle a game just fine, even if just to save a few watts.

The quality of games has dropped a lot, they make them fast

Isn’t the public opinion that games take way too long to make nowadays? They certainly don’t make them fast anymore.

As for the rest, I also can’t really agree. IMO, graphics have taken a huge jump in recent years, even outside of RT. Lighting, texture quality shaders, as well as object density and variety have been getting a noticeable bump. Other than the occasional dud and awful shader compilation stutter that has plagued many PC games over the last few years (but is getting more awareness now) I’d argue that game performance is pretty good for most games right now.

That’s why I see techniques like DLSS/FSR/XeSS/TSR not as crutch, but as just as one of the dozen other rendering shortcuts game engines have accumulated over the years. That said, it’s not often we see a new technique deliver such a big performance boost while having almost no visual impact.

Also, who decided that ‘we’ would rather have games looking like Skyrim? While I do like high FPS very much, I also do like shiny graphics with all the bells and whistles. A Game like ‘The Talos Principle 2’ for example does hammer the GPU quite a bit on its highest settings, but it certainly delivers in the graphics department. So much so that I’ve probably spent as much time admiring the highly detailed environments as I did actually solving the puzzles.

(like do I seriously need No Man’s Sky installed all the time for the once every three months that I play it?)

That sound’s like the data is in semi-regular use at least. For me it’s more like “Do I seriously need the sequel installed for that other game I haven’t even started yet, but am definitely going to start any day now, after years of having it installed?”.

It was the early days of homebrew when there wasn’t much information out there and the tools were much less advanced. I didn’t really care about the risk either, so it could’ve been anything. I wasn’t immediately banned either. Took about half a year or so.

But yeah, emulation can pretty run all the relevant titles, meaning the exclusives, much better than the Switch itself.

Yeah, I pretty much hopped on it as soon as it was hacked so there wasn’t much knowledge of what could lead to bans. Granted, at that point I was already a bit dissatisfied with the Switch, so I went in fully aware of the risks and not really being afraid of the risk. I even had a preorder running that I got locked out of, though luckily enough, that got a PC port not soon after.

It was similar for me, except that Nintendo made the decision for me by prevening me from purchasing (or downloading) any game from the eShop. Of course, it wasn’t entirely unexpected to get banned since I also hacked mine in order to dump my games and transfer saves for games I owned on PC and Switch.

Still, since Nintendo apparently didn’t want to have a customer and the SteamDeck was announced shortly after I jumped ship day one and only turned the Switch on once again to transfer my saves back.

And Linux will slowly turn into Windows.

Some distros maybe, but I’d say that instead we’d quickly have another golden era of malware.

All it takes is an App that you”trust” to break that trust

I get what you’re trying to say, but that’s something I’d classify as “compromised” as well.

Some sites like this one won’t link their RSS feeds directly anymore but still surfaces it through metadata in the HTML code, so just adding the regular URL of the blog to a proper RSS-Reader shoul just worked. Otherwise a browser extension that displays the embedded Feeds on the current page should work as well.

One thing that might really help would be Valve releasing an official version of SteamOS to the public. It would hopefully get us more handhelds running SteamOS natively and people switching their PCs, particularly if they can release it before the Win10 EOL date.

Sure, projects like Bazzite exist, but I don’t think those have enough reach beyond the people already running some form of Linux.

From my experience there’s this weird subset of people who don’t like newer Windows versions, which is fair enough, but instead of learning to modify those or learning Linux, they believe they can turn back time, which isn’t something you can just do when connecting it to the ever forward-marching internet.