• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Isn’t Reddit currently messing up things with search? And yeah I’d agree with the stable users comment. We shall see what the next few months look like to tell.

    I think that the adoption will mostly work in steps. Lemmy is currently functional, not pretty, not stable, not well moderated, not well integrated with federation, and poor discovery but it is functional.

    Hopefully the next time a wave hits, Lemmy will be more mature and ready to take in more users who will already have communities set up even if they’re small.

    I’m concerned though given the slower pace of updates that’s often complained about though.


  • Tbh it’s the reason I asked. I expected results to look about like this but I’m really interested in the graphs of posts vs active users.

    Posting has exploded. I assume a good portion of that is bots. Bots posting news or reposting memes probably. However, a good portion of that must be users posting as well right?

    I don’t think that retaining about half of the users that joined in the massive wave is bad actually, it’s the trends that come next where we see what happens. If that line keeps going down for the rest of the year, the platform is probably in trouble.



  • I won’t tell people what to do with their money, but it’s clear people have bought in to both of these games existing. And if it were my money, I’d want to believe in these devs. But for the rest of us, these games need to materialize as functional and fully featured releases for us to care.

    And I don’t think the timeline is crazy so far with their development. What’s wild to me is thinking that a newly founded studio, even a well funded one, can knock out a competent single player and MMO with these scopes. It’s slim chances from an outsiders perspective.

    Take a look at what mature and well funded studios are putting out in 2023. The likes of Starfield are actually some of the better cases. I know the incentives are different, but still. So I’m expecting a lot of tooling to need to be done for both these games to exist and exist at an enjoyable playability by the end of the 20s.

    Anyways, im not trying to kill enthusiasm for people who enjoy interest in the project but to everyone outside of that, this isn’t reassuring. All large scope games should be considered to be nonexistent until they hit reviewers hands at this point.


  • I still kind of doubt it’s going anywhere fast. Because a game with this scope has already signed up for some pretty massive post-launch support. Let’s be generous and say it takes them another 2-3 years to develop this single player and another 5-6 to finish star citizen. That’s very generous.

    They started pre-production in 2010. So it’s already been 13 years of development with near unlimited money on SC. So again, add 5 years till a mainstream launch and another 3-5 years of active support and you’ll be well over two decades deep in a single games development. That’s half of someone’s career to develop one game. Now we add another game on top of this.

    The other game is admittedly much easier to develop but still it will take massive amounts of support. If Bethesda can’t do it well, why does anyone think this dev can and in such good time? I have my doubts.



  • I think people don’t often factor in that time in a game is just as much or more a cost than money is.

    If I make it super nerdy, my equation for games would be more like fun / (money cost + time cost). But really I don’t actively quantify these things, I just have a sense of it.

    The other thing id say is that games recently are being judged more on how they respect the players time. The max game money cost is locked in at $70, likely for a long time. So the thing being optimized right now is the fun/time part. Not respecting the players time is one of the worst crimes a game can commit in my opinion.

    That’s what I’m hearing about games like Starfield and it’s always been a criticism for games like assassins creed. Like they’re fun games, but the time investment is far too large for what they offer.

    The reason it doesn’t apply to sim games or city builders is because you are largely in control of how best your time is spent. That’s why open world games used to rule Steam for a long time and still somewhat do.

    Anyways that’s my rant.


  • Okay so I fully agree on the use of better AI in games as competitors. The AI in games, though sometimes complex, is lacking in a lot of major games and the difficulty setting just basically amps up their damage and health instead of causing them to outplay you.

    I think there are two solutions to better competitive games that reduces cheating and they’re already somewhat at work.

    The first solution is implementing AI to detect cheating which has been done but very limited in scope. This will require more data collection for the user, but I fully support that if you’re being competitive and not playing casually. Why? Because in person sports also collect plenty of data on you, often even more invasive, to make sure you aren’t cheating. This can be done in collaboration with Microsoft actually because they have the ability to lock down their OS in certain ways while playing competitive games. They just haven’t bothered because no one asks. Same with Linux potentially if someone wanted to make that.

    The second important improvement is to raise the stakes for someone who plays any sort of Esport game. I’m reminded of Valve requiring a phone number for CSGO because it’s easy to validate but raises the difficulty and price of cheating and bans. Having a higher price for competitive games is also entirely possible and also raises the stakes to cheat. The less accounts cheaters can buy, the better. Should it ask for a social security card? No. But I think that system bans based on hardware and IP are also important. You can also improve the value/time put into each account to make it more trustworthy. If a person plays CS for thousands of hours, make their account worth something.

    And a minor third improvement would be: match people with more matches/xp/hours with other people of similar dedication at similar skill levels. That means cheaters will decrease the more you play and a cheater would have to play for far longer with cheats undetected to get to that point.

    There’s plenty that can be done, companies are just doing almost nothing about the problem because cheaters make them money.


  • And for good reason. If they trusted user input and took it at face value even for just the current conversation, the user could run wild and get it saying basically anything.

    Also chatGPT not having current info is a problem when trying to feed it current info. It will either try to daydream with you or it will follow its data that has hundreds of sources saying they haven’t invaded yet.

    As far as covering the companies ass, I think AI models currently have plenty of problems and I’m amazed that corporations can just let this run wild. Even being able to do what OP just did here is a big liability because more laws around AI aren’t even written yet. Companies are fine being sued and expect to be through this. They just think that will cost less than losing out on AI. And I think they’re right.








  • I mean… the default keys work just fine which is why it’s so odd. I know what the issue is, I just don’t know why they can’t fix it. The issue is that currently games have priority over inputs. That’s especially true with keyboard and mouse and I know this because other things also break when loading games.

    I had a problem with pillars of eternity for instance. Keyboard and mouse work fine in overlay. Boot up the game and they break. But switch from the dongle mode to Bluetooth mode on the mouse and it works. So something is very wrong with the input for that stuff when inside of games. It’s almost like they’re switching drivers?


  • Yep! Please watch the DBrand tutorial for applying the wrap. It may not be from them, but all wraps work similarly. If you don’t want to watch it, basically you need to: -heat up the edge with a hair dryer (not too hot, just warm) -start with the entire edge lifted off the steam deck and not at all rounded over the corner -you want to slow roll your thumb over the corner and down the side. Apply pressure and pull the vinyl a bit with your thumb as it rolls. If you mess it up, more heat and retry it



  • Playing some old nostalgia classics currently. I previously made my way through the entire Sly Cooper series earlier this year so I decided I’d try to emulate Crash Bandicoot on the deck.

    I’ve had about as many bugs as I would with normal emulation and resuming from wake can sometimes make things go a bit strange. Other than that I’ve had a great time 100% completing 1,2, and 3. Working on Wrath of Cortex but I’ll likely finish it tomorrow. That game turned out to be quite the challenge.

    Can’t tell you how nice it was to play those games on a plane though. Would’ve made my younger self so happy to be enjoying a game like that though.


  • Yeah I find most of this to be similar to what I’ve heard so that’s good confirmation, thank you.

    The reason I’m considering it now is that: 1. I believe it will be applicable to industry and will raise my initial pay and work out in the long run. 2. I don’t want to work through a masters. 3. It will only take me 1 year to do it. And 4. I have a way to pay for it so I expect it to accrue very minimal debt. I have about $25k debt from my bachelors but I expect not much more to come from my masters from scholarships/assistant for a professor.

    So I’m viewing this as more of a deal, I wouldn’t consider a masters if any one of these things weren’t the case probably.


  • Wow this is good feedback. I’ll just give some short thoughts on what you said, but thank you for all of that. I’ll also use your comment to give more info about what I’m doing.

    1. My program is on the civil side of engineering and is most applicable in space exploration and crossover with other engineering fields. I expect industry would find most of the skills I’d use valuable.
    2. I’ve heard this and I’m prepared, but luckily I’m not doing a thesis if I go for this. I’d be writing papers instead.
    3. One of my goals is to establish good contacts, so this is good to hear
    4. I’m trying to avoid this actually, I’d rather not work and do school at the same time
    5. Very much heard and I’m not considering a PhD unless I find myself either enjoying research or I have a career application for it.
    6. I do actually have a research assistantship lined up so paying for a masters shouldn’t be a problem.