Latest 30 Comments

Quoting: M@GOidValve have big pockets and can afford to drag this in courts for years. But there are patent trolls going after the small companies and try to defeat them only trough legal costs.

I think that the legal system should be basically all public defenders/prosecutors. If you want to sue someone, you file the lawsuit, you get assigned a lawyer, the person you sue gets assigned a lawyer, they go at it, you both get assessed a fee based on ability to pay. If it's a complex case, maybe more lawyers, but you both get assigned the same amount of legal team. Maybe there's a step in there for a quick determination if the case is obviously frivolous it just gets dumped before the government has to spend money on you.

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Quoting: eggrole

Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: Mountain Man$150,000 seems too small of a penalty. They should have added another zero.

Even that isn't enough. Businesses like that have no right to exist. They should have seized the entire thing and shut them down.

I'm really torn over this. On one hand I'm pretty pro-capitalism

Quoting: eggroleWhy, oh why, did so many of us allow money worship to be such a central focus... :(

Um, capitalism. That's kind of the point.

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Quoting: eggroleFurther, I think it is folly to underestimate your opponents. Sure those emails show a bunch of room temperature IQs, but I'm more concerned with who was behind organizing Epstein. The people in the emails are, IMHO, the worker bees of the actual oligarchs. Someone financed it all. Someone was/is using whatever happened as blackmail. Those are the real "masterminds" - the names we don't see.

I think what most people underestimate is the money itself. You don't need masterminds if you can buy the playing field. Somewhere back in the early 70s, the master plan for the wealthy class was set up. They asked this guy Powell to come up with ideas, his memo was distributed round particularly to the US Chamber of Commerce, they decided to get behind it, it wasn't even a secret, and they did it and it worked. The Powell memo is fairly easy to find.

And about all it comes down to is "We should, as rich business people, get together to fund propaganda. We should fund people to come up with PR ideas for our side, and fund outfits to popularize them, and make sure we own the media so the media will peddle those ideas for us." This is not a bad plan, but it's not mastermind stuff. And it can work . . . if you have all the money. Nobody who doesn't have all the money can make that plan work. And, there isn't really an equivalent not-having-money plan that matches it.

There isn't really a reason for oligarchs to come up with clever plans. They don't need to, the money itself is usually the winning hand that lets the most basic plays win.

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Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: princecThe latest drivers from Nvidia completely ruined my XFCE experience unfortunately, entirely breaking the compositor, which had to be turned off. Attempting to drop back down to the (known working) 570 drivers left me in "broken computer hell", booting to a black screen, which took a couple of days to fix. Grr. I am loathe to try the new 580 drivers as it's probably still the case that XFCE is broken.

I will probably have to accept that Mint really wants me to use Cinnamon instead, which I suppose is no great hardship.

I am running Linux Mint 22 XFCE with the 580 series driver. I haven't experienced the problems you've described. I'm on an older GPU, however. I also run at a resolution of no more than 1920x1080 (usually 1440x810 in game). Perhaps that accounts for the difference.

Maybe try @clatterfordslim's suggestion? Might work with the 580 series driver as well.

Quoting: jkaart

Quoting: clatterfordslim

Quoting: princecThe latest drivers from Nvidia completely ruined my XFCE experience unfortunately, entirely breaking the compositor, which had to be turned off.

You have to turn the inbuilt v_blank off inside of xfwm to fix the screen flickering, after installing the newish 590.48.01 driver.
Here is the fix, unless you already know then ignore.
xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/vblank_mode -s off
Then reboot your system. Switch on Pipeline Composition in NVIDIA-Settings and you won't have any more problems.

Have you give any source for this fix?

Originally Leo the AI companion in Brave-Browser came up with it, but here is where he got it from.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=311088

Scroll down the page you'll see someone had posted the solution. It worked for me too and have no more screen flickering.

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Great. Opus Magnum felt like the perfect balance of hard and good from Zachtronics, being both very accessible and leaving ample room for fine optimizations. More content is great.

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Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: Mountain Man$150,000 seems too small of a penalty. They should have added another zero.

Even that isn't enough. Businesses like that have no right to exist. They should have seized the entire thing and shut them down.

I'm really torn over this. On one hand I'm pretty pro-capitalism (with the understanding that all -isms need some guardrails) but I'm also very much against owning "ideas". Maybe there could be some kind of middle ground where you can sue for patent infringment if you are actively using the patent in a product. But, if you aren't using it then you lose you ability to sue for infringment. Heck maybe even move the patent to the now producer of said patented product.

Still, it all is so tiresome trying to figure out a million laws/ways to stop everyone from screwing each other over. Why, oh why, did so many of us allow money worship to be such a central focus... :(

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Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: g000hWell, Chrome Books (Google) and Mobile Phones (Google and Apple) are not far off being headless terminals. The public uses them for consuming content, most of their functionality relies on cloud services (e.g. WhatsApp, Instagram, iCloud, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc).

Not sure I agree here. My Android smartphone, for me, is effectively a minicomputer. I do not use it for any of the "functionality" you've listed here. No streaming. No games. No social media. I use it for visiting forums, online research, offline calendar & task management, recording notes, offline office functionality, etc. This is not all that different than my daily driver laptop. On top of that, I also take photographs and send and receive phone calls. These devices are what you make of them.

Yes, but you are the exception. You are using your phone like a computer and restricting yourself mostly to local apps - That is how I use mine. However, the vast majority of the public are using online services for everything - Spotify, Netflix, etc.

In my comment I was referring to a typical person, not a computer geek with privacy concerns.

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Well okay, I guess, but that feels a bit pedantic? Did you read how they used genAI here? They designed their own ML model using medical data. Technically, okay, sure, that's genAI, fine. But it's hardly the kind of genAI that everyone is talking about and hating on. It's not plagiarising books, pirating material, talking kids into suicide or whatever.

It's probably also not quite the planet burning water hog either, because the data sets are so targeted.

Maybe you're right, and I'm the one being pedantic here, but I honestly don't feel like we should conflate these two things and thereby justify the car crash of genAI over-investment by pointing at fringe, targeted medical uses.

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Quoting: scaine

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: ScottCarammellstill waiting for that legitimate use case the technology is sure to get. I mean this is supposed to be the next motor vehicle or whatever, right? there's gotta be something huge right around the corner. not like this was all a giant, unbelievable waste of time, money, life and resources for absolutely nothing of value. that's impossible. the people on wall street said otherwise. they're supposed to be smart, right?

https://asm.org/articles/2025/august/ai-next-frontier-antibiotic-discovery

Oh man, please don't confuse AI, which is vital to this kind of research you've linked, to genAI, which what we're generally complaining about here in articles like this one (even though it's often just termed as AI).

That conflation of AI and genAI is often how the techbros will try to justify the ridiculous investment in this tech, even though medical research AI won't likely see a single penny from those investments, which are all focused on genAI pish.

They literally say: "Researchers are also using generative AI to design "new-to-nature" antibiotic molecules from scratch."

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Native linux or bust

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: ScottCarammellstill waiting for that legitimate use case the technology is sure to get. I mean this is supposed to be the next motor vehicle or whatever, right? there's gotta be something huge right around the corner. not like this was all a giant, unbelievable waste of time, money, life and resources for absolutely nothing of value. that's impossible. the people on wall street said otherwise. they're supposed to be smart, right?

https://asm.org/articles/2025/august/ai-next-frontier-antibiotic-discovery

Oh man, please don't confuse AI, which is vital to this kind of research you've linked, to genAI, which what we're generally complaining about here in articles like this one (even though it's often just termed as AI).

That conflation of AI and genAI is often how the techbros will try to justify the ridiculous investment in this tech, even though medical research AI won't likely see a single penny from those investments, which are all focused on genAI pish.

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I am probably one of the few rare exotic people who actually like to be able to have some manual settings.
(Though I admit it is sometimes consuming more time trying out different Proton, DXVK, VKD3D than actually playing 😅)

That's also why I still am on Lutris v0.5.14

So I am asking a noob question:
Is there a way to have two versions of Lutris installed at the same time?

So I can try out just using automatic v0.5.20 but also have v0.5.14 installed if I am not happy and rather have some manual settings?

*EDIT:
I'm on POP_OS
Is there a possibility to just duplicate and rename Lutris v0.5.14 to for example LutrOs?
and then update the not renamed to v0.5.20?

So I then have Lutris (v0.5.20) and Lutros (v0.5.14) in my program overview?
(got the idea from here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1036337/is-there-way-to-install-two-instances-of-the-same-application but am not knowing enough in Linux..)

Any tips and help would be greatly appreciated <3 !

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Nice, didn't know Planescape: Torment had an Enhanced Edition. Got it. 🥰

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThey're opportunistic as all get out. But they're not smart enough for this to have been a plan all along.

These guys are fucking morons. Their ideas are incoherent, their plans are simpleminded. If they didn't have the masses of money and this sort of elite-scumbucket-solidarity backing them up, their stupid playbooks wouldn't get anywhere.

In the old days it was plausible to imagine the billionaire class as masterminds

It turns out they're just dipstick scuzzbuckets with avalanches of cash, whose stupid brute-force plots kind of succeed because avalanches of cash.

I don't disagree with any of this per-se, but the fact that the descendants of the old school oligarchs DO have all those buckets of cash and can deploy it on people who aren't as dumb to carry the water is the reality.

I also suspect it isn't a clockwork precision crafted plan they have. More like, "lets centralize control". And then offer financial incentives to do what they want within their industries. Heck, I bet most of the people higher up in companies like nvidia/apple/etc are all completely out of the loop in terms of a grand conspiracy and are simply acting in the most profitable way they can.

Further, I think it is folly to underestimate your opponents. Sure those emails show a bunch of room temperature IQs, but I'm more concerned with who was behind organizing Epstein. The people in the emails are, IMHO, the worker bees of the actual oligarchs. Someone financed it all. Someone was/is using whatever happened as blackmail. Those are the real "masterminds" - the names we don't see.

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Gave this another try and was able to immediately get past the scanner bug I had last time: and I love the game! So much so I bought it. Can't wait to give it a proper go! Seems like a great blend of different genres.

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Valve have big pockets and can afford to drag this in courts for years. But there are patent trolls going after the small companies and try to defeat them only trough legal costs.

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Quoting: Liam DaweI'm not going to quote everything they say, but I do suggest instead of instantly thinking like that, you read the blog post for the part you're interested in. They give clear reasoning to explain what was done.

Their explanation does make sense, yes.
For others who were also a bit confused by this:

In the civilizations displayed in the game, women did not usually hold citizenship, which was a prized social status. The "female citizen" was a misnomer. It was also incorrect to display all men as soldiers, and most women as servants. Instead, we want to describe the armies of 0 A.D. as followed by a group of minions of lower social status, able to support the soldiers in the army camp, but not on the battlefield. Those are the new Civilians. Citizens, on the other hand, were soldiers, able to wage war as well as working, which we have always been accurately describing in the game with the citizen-soldier concept. The ambiguity of the term "citizen" is removed: this word now only describes citizen soldiers.

So basically now it is:
Citizen -> soldier+eco unit, male (or mostly? Guess it depends on the civ, haven't played enough to remember)
Civilian -> economy unit, male & female (probably random at production time)

When it used to be:
Citizen Soldier -> soldier+eco unit
(Female) Citizen -> eco unit

More clarity is definitely welcome.

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Quoting: g000hWell, Chrome Books (Google) and Mobile Phones (Google and Apple) are not far off being headless terminals. The public uses them for consuming content, most of their functionality relies on cloud services (e.g. WhatsApp, Instagram, iCloud, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc).

Not sure I agree here. My Android smartphone, for me, is effectively a minicomputer. I do not use it for any of the "functionality" you've listed here. No streaming. No games. No social media. I use it for visiting forums, online research, offline calendar & task management, recording notes, offline office functionality, etc. This is not all that different than my daily driver laptop. On top of that, I also take photographs and send and receive phone calls. These devices are what you make of them.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPMeanwhile, I'm still waiting for some proper kind of campaign or Soulstorm-styled conquest campaigns.

This. I'm waiting for a proper single-player campaign too.

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I'm not going to quote everything they say, but I do suggest instead of instantly thinking like that, you read the blog post for the part you're interested in. They give clear reasoning to explain what was done.

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Gendered Civilians.

Are they just fishing for some faux outrage with this one?

Civilians in 0AD have been available in male and female for ages, usually even fulfilling different roles in the economy as well.
Weird.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for some proper kind of campaign or Soulstorm-styled conquest campaigns.

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Quoting: Mountain Man$150,000 seems too small of a penalty. They should have added another zero.

Even that isn't enough. Businesses like that have no right to exist. They should have seized the entire thing and shut them down.

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Quoting: ScottCarammellstill waiting for that legitimate use case the technology is sure to get. I mean this is supposed to be the next motor vehicle or whatever, right? there's gotta be something huge right around the corner. not like this was all a giant, unbelievable waste of time, money, life and resources for absolutely nothing of value. that's impossible. the people on wall street said otherwise. they're supposed to be smart, right?

https://asm.org/articles/2025/august/ai-next-frontier-antibiotic-discovery

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still waiting for that legitimate use case the technology is sure to get. I mean this is supposed to be the next motor vehicle or whatever, right? there's gotta be something huge right around the corner. not like this was all a giant, unbelievable waste of time, money, life and resources for absolutely nothing of value. that's impossible. the people on wall street said otherwise. they're supposed to be smart, right?

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Of note with this case is that Valve had already bought a licence for the patents. Then they got sued. So there was a case where they said, "actually, we already paid for this." Then they got sued again, so they took the gloves off.

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Quoting: Mountain Man$150,000 seems too small of a penalty. They should have added another zero.

As far as I understood (which is very limited), this is just this step and this actually sets Valve up further action. So I'd expect much more in the future.

Not the smartest move to try and screw over a company that actually has the resources to fight back.

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that really is a great bundle. There's about 1000 hrs of awesome content there.

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$150,000 seems too small of a penalty. They should have added another zero.

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Nothing in life is guaranteed, that's pretty trite, but with Mewgenics there were clear signs the second the media picked it up for the preview cycle. It's not even that it was praised, it's about the type of praise it received, and how it was framed. It wasn't brought up as a quaint indie game by oddball creator first, it wasn't as subjected (if at all) to your typical template-driven news/preview slop. It came across as though people who played it prior to release viscerally liked it and needed to tell you about how much fun they had. At least from what I was seeing it was as much a done deal as humanly possible.

Perhaps I have a career in industry predictions, I dunno ;)

Compare to something like the late Cyberpunk 2077 previews which were all extremely politely lukewarm, but also somehow framed to maintain the ridiculous level of praise from much earlier in that marketing cycle. You could've mapped pretty much the entirety of the design, system and content issues of that game right then, from the universally positive previews, without even looking at the game. Not with certainty, obviously, but the signs were all there.

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