provides a way for micro transactions to pay out mod developers.

No.

Absolutely not.

I’m sorry, I like the idea of mod devs earning incomes, but this just opens the door to too much drama, attention farming, infighting, and trouble. Every paid mod I’ve ever seen is a hot mess that cooperates with zero other mods.

Mods should all be Apache licensed, free, with prominant support/donation links and maybe paid cosmetic features. Or a DLC/update sponsored by the dev, if they want to go that big.

The poor state of Stellaris QA is incredible.

It feels like one of those friends you adore, with a constantly relapsing, and worsening, drug habit.

The price fixing part is an issue, but they don’t technically do any illegal price fixing. They just say they don’t want to see your game cheaper elsewhere - you can drop prices elsewhere AND on Steam though.

I mean, if Amazon or Walmart tell a supplier “we’re doubling our cut, but you can’t price any lower in cheaper stores. Don’t like it? We will drop your brand and ruin you,” people scream bloody murder.

…Because that’s exactly what Amazon and Walmart do! It’s awful, and it’s not okay if Valve does it either.

EGS is a victim of Sweeney’s absolutely massive ego, but still, I think they’d have gotten a lot more business if every game on there was 20% cheaper. No one can compete with Steam on software features at this point, so it’s either niche angles (like GoG being DRM free), discount stores (eg key resellers), or ‘1st’ party discount shops like EGS could be.

They should be reigned in as a monopoly. That’s how it’s fixed. Nothing drastic either, just stop Valve from (say) dictating prices outside their platform, and do the same for Amazon and Walmart while they’re at it.

Uh, simple.

Clear your chat history, and see if it remembers anything.

LLMs are, by current defitions, static. They’re like clones you take out of cryostasis every time you hit enter; nothing you say has an impact on them. Meanwhile, the ‘memory’ and thinking of a true AGI are not seperable; it has a state that changes with time, and everything it experiences impacts its output.

…There are a ton of other differences. Transformers models trained with glorified linear regression are about a million miles away from AGI, but this one thing is an easy one to test right now. It’d work as an LLM vs human test too.

The ‘Steam is a pseudo monopoly’ thread was NOT like this. It was a bunch of commenters simping for Valve and Gabe, even here on Lemmy.

…Which is why they can charge 30%, and Gabe has a few mega yachts.

Could it perhaps be, I don’t know, the entire rest of the world calling out China’s own genocides?

And no, the US has no leg to stand on when it comes to stamping out ethnic groups, especially Muslims. So?

Yeah. I would massively emphasize this too.

Don’t mess around.

Especially don’t mess around with AUR. Discrete apps and such are fine, but AUR ‘tweaks’ that mess with the system are asking for trouble, as they have no guarantee of staying in sync with base Arch packages.

Ease of use.

I’ve run the same CachyOS partition for 2 (3?) years, and I don’t do a freaking thing to it anymore. No fixes, no tweaking. It just works.

…Because the tweaks and rapid updates are constantly coming down the pipe for me. I pay attention to them and any errors, but it’s all just done for me! Whenever I run into an issue, a system update fixes it 90% of the time, and if it doesn’t it’s either coming or my own stupid mistake.

On Ubuntu and some other “slow” distros I was constantly:

• Fighting bugs in old packages

• Fighting and maintaining all the manual fixes for them

• Fighting the system which does not like me rolling packages forward.

• And breaking all that for a major system update, instead of incremental ones where breakage is (as it turns out) more manageable.

• I’d often be consulting the Arch wiki, but it wasn’t really applicable to my system.

I could go on and on, but it was miserable and high maintenance.

I avoided Fedora because of the 3rd party Nvidia support, given how much trouble I already had with Nvidia.

…It seems like a misconception that it’s always “a la carte” too. The big distros like Endeavor and Cachy and such pick the subsystems for you. And there are big application groups like KDE that install a bunch of stuff at once.

Hence, Zuckerberg has just recently fired most of the LLAMA staff, the lab’s leader is rumored to be leaving for their own startup, and the new lab where all the funding’s going is a bunch of tech bro egos that are pro-closed models.

…And I suspect PyTorch is too “utilitarian” for Facebook’s leadership to draw enshittification attention.

Llama was an anomaly, and it seems they’re done with that. Which is quite sad. But on the plus side, it could be a death knell for Meta (as all that ego in the new lab will be a catastrophe).

Baloo can be disabled, it’s just the background search indexer. So can kaccess (the accessibility service) and kde wallet (the secrets manager).

A lot of the widgets, effects and stuff take up RAM too.

I mean…

You are looking at this the wrong way. If you post stuff on the open web, it’s out there. It’s been scraped for years, and will get scraped. The Fediverse is as low profile a place as any, but its no different.

If you don’t like that, keep it in private chats, like Signal or text chains or whatever.

This is like mod makers who release Apache/MIT licensed stuff, but get frustrated over what others do with their mods. That’s what releasing content into public means: others may do stuff with it you don’t like, and you have to live with it, unfortunately. And honestly, I think it’d be tragic if they didn’t publish mods over that fear.

Look up RAM usage in btop, sort processes by memory usage. A lot it is random services you can disable in the system setting or uninstall with a package manager.

And yeah… it even matters on a higher RAM setup. Sometimes I have most of mine filled with a background thing, and 1GB vs 2 or 3 can make a big difference.

Yes. 74% is the “average” point of diminishing returns to preserve the battery, according to Accubattery’s data. It tracks charging cycles and battery wear across many thousands of smartphones.

In fact, the reason many phones/gadgets don’t offer this feature (and that Apple sometimes charges to 100% in spite of the toggle) is likely planned obsolescence.

…To add to this, the actual charging threshold of the battery is a bit arbitrary and set by the manufacturer, as a tradeoff of capacity vs life. Fast charging is the same; charging quickly is hard on the battery, and the limits at different charge levels are configured as a “balance” between convenience and life.

…And sometimes they get those thresholds wrong.

Like Samsung rather infamously did for the exploding Galaxy Notes. Google did for the Nexus 6P. They pushed the batteries too hard and borked the phones.

Except maybe for the cinematic part.

I mean… The rendered cutscenes? The emotive facial expressions synced to dialogue and music? Just to start?

because I don’t know what makes a game cinematic.

…Look. I’ve played text-only RPGs and 2000s top down explorers that would fit in the cache of my CPU now, and they’re great! But you can’t tell me the visual gulf between BG1 and BG3 isn’t blindingly obvious. It’s almost a different medium!

or why you’d want a CRPG to be cinematic.

…Because I like seeing the emotions of my party and my character? And the visuals details of exploration?

Again, interpoliating all that in one’s head like a novel is fine, but I like an interactive movie, too!

That’s what sold me. I’m not a fan of the pen-and-paper mechanics so directly translated, TBH, but the sheer depth of presentation and the party characters are what kept me hooked.

Oblivion’s side quests (and into) had charm though. Especially the Shivering Isles, that was great.

The real problem is social media, and how feeds are structured now.

The ‘few trustworthy institutions’ model has been utterly obliterated because a few tech companies figured out a sea of influencers is more profitable/exploitable. Not to minimize some of the great creators out there, but one’s daily news shouldn’t come from Joe Rogan + your Facebook uncle’s reshares.

And KDE’s RAM usage is very reasonable these days, especially if you opt out of some of the bells and whistles.

Honestly I don’t even like fantasy CRPGs (hence I don’t have the reference of 1/2), but BG3 kinda blew me away.

It’s incredibly cinematic. The world design is tight and reasonably interconnected, voice acting great, and I thought the script was fine.

UI and build choice was… alright? I can see room for improvement there. A lot of mods seem to be going for that.

That’s kind of the game’s theme, ironically. Meditative peace.

To be fair, the gameplay loop isn’t the most fun for me either, but I got really hooked by the ambience and characters.