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Latest 30 Comments

News - Godot Engine suffering from lots of "AI slop" code submissions
By mr-victory, 20 Feb 2026 at 3:53 pm UTC

Quoting: scaineBut... again, this isn't what I'm talking about when I disparage genAI. From the article:

I tried to find a short source as I recalled that something akin to GenAI was used in this specific discovery, instead of checking the content of the source. My bad.

PS: If I use at least 2 quotes or links, do I end up in the mod queue?

News - The Wolf Among Us, The Last Express and more join the GOG Preservation Program
By Arehandoro, 20 Feb 2026 at 3:31 pm UTC

What's the main difference between The Last Express and The Last Express Gold Edition? Is it a good remaster? Although, at that price, not that it matters... 😅

News - Prepare for HDD availability trouble as they're getting sold out too
By Lofty, 20 Feb 2026 at 3:10 pm UTC

Quoting: g000hPeople are already being manipulated into not having fully functional computers any more.
i wouldn't say manipulated. Most everyday 'consumers' are completely tech illiterate & just use what they see as a great way to communicate easily.. i.e lazily. Much like how MP3 replaced CD, but then MP3 was (not entirely) replaced by streaming.

Now with Ai we don't see it in the same way as it replacing what came before. Because we already sacrificed quality for easy of use, but we didn't sacrificed quality for ease to justify a completely Fake product in the end.

Probably a poor analogy here, but to me it's like we swapped writing letters for email, then swapped that for texting, and then swapped texting for social media. But in the end your still wanting that person in your life to communicate with on Facebook not a bot post about what virtual Ai rendered dinner it had last night after watching that Ai virtual composed concert. Removing the human interaction element out of digital services is a stupid misstep that leaves all the 'Ai' investors kind of floating in a virtual 'useless space' beyond the practical.

In essence it feels like a giant scam. Like they built a long peer, the last section looks like it exists but you just fall into the ocean and the scammers run away whilst you drown.

News - Steam Deck now out of stock in the EU in addition to USA, Canada and Japan
By Cybolic, 20 Feb 2026 at 3:04 pm UTC

Quoting: Ehvis
Quoting: hardpenguinIf you are not hating on AI yet, you have a good reason to start now.
I don't hate "AI" as a tech. Machine learning/neural networks have had very good applications for decades since it is very effective in certain tasks. What I hate is the LLM/GenAI fueled hype machine that is created as a smokescreen over unrealistic promises of future potential. An attempt to try to bind as many people as they can before the house of cards collapses. Luckily this hard push is causing serious quality issues, which at least turns a significant portion of the public against it even beyond those wanting a new GPU or extra RAM.
Oh, you can definitely wholesale hate "AI" as a tech, as it doesn't exist. "AI" is a buzzword that means nothing concrete. If something is selling itself on "AI", there's a good chance it's smoke and mirrors. As you touched on, the actual technologies are called Machine Learning and Large Language Models (one could argue that "GenAI" could be a term for a category, but I'd still rather call them generative models, to not confuse things with the nonsense that is "AI").

In other words:
"The program uses ML to categorize your photo gallery locally" = fine, that makes sense.
"Our advanced AI handles all your photo needs" = marketing bullshit which may or may not include sending your private data off to a hastily built data centre that's likely not following environmental safety laws or guidelines.

News - Steam Deck now out of stock in the EU in addition to USA, Canada and Japan
By whizse, 20 Feb 2026 at 2:06 pm UTC

I feel I'm one bad sector, one failed memtest away from being radicalized...

Oh look at that, it's cheaper to buy an [AR-15 than 64 GB of RAM](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1r9eykc/its_cheaper_to_buy_an_ar15_rifle_than_64gb_of/?share_id=YIrgv7yXMQ6rDYsGGj-Bw&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1), how convenient!

(Joking of course!)

News - Slay the Spire 2 arrives March 5 with 4-player co-op
By Erzfeind, 20 Feb 2026 at 1:25 pm UTC

Must buy on day 1 for me! So excited to see a coop mode. The board game already had this and it is so much fun! Hope it is also couch coop, so that I can play with my gf.

News - Steam Deck now out of stock in the EU in addition to USA, Canada and Japan
By Jarmer, 20 Feb 2026 at 1:19 pm UTC

all models out of stock in the usa still.

I'm gonna just keep saying it:

BURST BURST BURST!!! LETS HAVE A BURST PARTY!

News - Widelands, the open source Settlers-like, devs plan to ban all AI generated contributions
By Jarmer, 20 Feb 2026 at 1:16 pm UTC

We hold that AI-generated content generally stands on dubious ethical and legal grounds, as it violates the copyright of creators whose work was scraped for the AI's training data set without their permission and without due attribution. Also, we find that it is frequently of low overall quality and/or is overly generic and fails to embrace requirements specific to Widelands.

Pull requests that have been generated by AI may in the future be closed without review.
🥰❤️

Absolutely love this. I think this is an excellent summary of the whole shebang. It's:

1- ethically wrong
2- legally wrong
3- created by stealing source material
4- resulting in low quality garbage

LOVE. I don't even know this game, but now I do, and I love it! Installing via the cachy repo right now and will give it a go.

News - Steam Deck now out of stock in the EU in addition to USA, Canada and Japan
By hardpenguin, 20 Feb 2026 at 1:01 pm UTC

Quoting: EhvisI don't hate "AI" as a tech. Machine learning/neural networks have had very good applications for decades since it is very effective in certain tasks. What I hate is the LLM/GenAI fueled hype machine that is created as a smokescreen over unrealistic promises of future potential. An attempt to try to bind as many people as they can before the house of cards collapses.
Nitpicking but yes. Obviously ML can be pretty great.

News - Steam Deck now out of stock in the EU in addition to USA, Canada and Japan
By Chrisznix, 20 Feb 2026 at 12:20 pm UTC

I repeat a phrase of my late best friend peter: "This timeline was never intended to be used in an productive reality."

News - Steam Deck now out of stock in the EU in addition to USA, Canada and Japan
By Ehvis, 20 Feb 2026 at 11:55 am UTC

Quoting: hardpenguinIf you are not hating on AI yet, you have a good reason to start now.
I don't hate "AI" as a tech. Machine learning/neural networks have had very good applications for decades since it is very effective in certain tasks. What I hate is the LLM/GenAI fueled hype machine that is created as a smokescreen over unrealistic promises of future potential. An attempt to try to bind as many people as they can before the house of cards collapses. Luckily this hard push is causing serious quality issues, which at least turns a significant portion of the public against it even beyond those wanting a new GPU or extra RAM.

News - Steam Deck now out of stock in the EU in addition to USA, Canada and Japan
By Liam Dawe, 20 Feb 2026 at 11:47 am UTC

Update: the article original noted both models were out out stock across all of Asia, it was amended as that's just for Japan. Also made it clearer it's the EU.

News - Slay the Spire 2 arrives March 5 with 4-player co-op
By Ehvis, 20 Feb 2026 at 11:31 am UTC

This is one I'm very likely to get. While I'm probably not the biggest player of StS, I've still managed a good number of hours in the game over the years. And I'm not too worried about EA for these devs. Plus, a nice native Linux version made with Godot as a bonus.

News - Steam Deck now out of stock in the EU in addition to USA, Canada and Japan
By hardpenguin, 20 Feb 2026 at 11:30 am UTC

If you are not hating on AI yet, you have a good reason to start now.

News - Widelands, the open source Settlers-like, devs plan to ban all AI generated contributions
By pb, 20 Feb 2026 at 10:53 am UTC

They touch on yet another important question here: dubious legal ground for AI "creations" and whether that can get an open source project in trouble. I imagine that in the field of code generation, the risk that AI output is just a "remix" of what it was trained on is especially big.

News - Steam Deck now out of stock in the EU in addition to USA, Canada and Japan
By soulsource, 20 Feb 2026 at 10:49 am UTC

I guess everyone knows [this tweet](https://x.com/jatinkrmalik/status/2009689523513618887) by now, but I still feel it needs to be quoted yet again:
Quoting: jatinThe reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.

News - Widelands, the open source Settlers-like, devs plan to ban all AI generated contributions
By ShadowXeldron, 20 Feb 2026 at 10:49 am UTC

I'd say this is fair. AI generated contributions have significant quality concerns so I'd probably block them as well if I was a maintainer.

News - Steam Deck now out of stock in the EU in addition to USA, Canada and Japan
By Brokatt, 20 Feb 2026 at 10:47 am UTC

Out of stock Steam Decks is just the beginning of our problems this year. Probably a lot of companies that will go out of business. Especially smaller PC part manufacturers as fewer and fewer customers will invest in new builds with prices as they are. It's very sad.

News - Steam Deck now out of stock in the EU in addition to USA, Canada and Japan
By einherjar, 20 Feb 2026 at 10:31 am UTC

If Valve teases new hardware, one should by stocks from manufacturers..

Sadly the producers of RAM and GPUs did not ramp up their production early enough. It should have been forsteeable for them, that the demand will rise fast.
But I guess, it is more safe to just wait and raise the prices, instead of investing in production machines in advance.

News - Godot Engine suffering from lots of "AI slop" code submissions
By scaine, 20 Feb 2026 at 9:27 am UTC

Quoting: mr-victory
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?
I'll drop another one: generative ai found an algorithm to multiply matrices faster

https://spectrum.ieee.org/matrix-multiplication-deepmind
But... again, this isn't what I'm talking about when I disparage genAI. From the article:

The scientists developed an AI system dubbed AlphaTensor based on AlphaZero, which they earlier developed to master chess, Go, and other games
They didn't use ChatGPT, or Claude, Gemini or Perplexity here. The kind of genAI that makes people's blood boil is very different from the useful, targeted ML instances that have existed for decades before all the genAI hype kicked off around 2022.

The actual technology of LLMs might have merit. But the over-hyping and over-investments in genAI... the lack of governance and ethical standards... the illegality of the training data... the inefficiency in the middle of a climate crisis... does not have merit.

And you know what? Finding one of two loosely related wins for LLMs won't balance the scales here anyway. Too much damage has already been done.

News - Valve confirm Steam Deck stock issues due to "memory and storage shortages"
By Chrisznix, 20 Feb 2026 at 7:51 am UTC

Now the last model (the 1TB OLED) is gone in germany, too. Scalpers already shifting gears to almost 1k. Sigh.
Anyone from germany remember the 1999s frequency auctions, where the mobile providers almost murdered themselves? Feels a bit like this.

News - Free and open source RTS 0 A.D. release 28 "Boiorix" is live
By TheSHEEEP, 20 Feb 2026 at 6:47 am UTC

Quoting: Hamish
Quoting: sarmadThis is unquestionably the most polished open source game. Prove me wrong.
I mean, the game is not finished even according to it development team. Although you could also say that just proves their ambition.

I would say The Battle for Wesnoth is a strong contender for "most polished" though. Less graphically intense sure but polish also implies stable and feature complete.
Definitely.
I'd also throw Mindustry into that ring.

News - Free and open source RTS 0 A.D. release 28 "Boiorix" is live
By Hamish, 20 Feb 2026 at 6:32 am UTC

Quoting: sarmadThis is unquestionably the most polished open source game. Prove me wrong.
I mean, the game is not finished even according to it development team. Although you could also say that just proves their ambition.

I would say The Battle for Wesnoth is a strong contender for "most polished" though. Less graphically intense sure but polish also implies stable and feature complete.

News - Game manager Lutris v0.5.20 released with Proton upgrades, store updates and much more
By fenglengshun, 20 Feb 2026 at 5:59 am UTC

Quoting: memvirusSo 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?
Yes. Just install through different package managements. Maybe your main is apt, and use Flatpak or Nix in addition to it - both supports downgrading and version pinning.

Distrobox is another option and the one that I recommend - just setup an Arch distrobox with a separate home, maybe add cachyos + chaotic-aur for convenience, and then install whatever you need.

Also, I think Conty comes with Lutris as well. Again, just set up a separate home (well, XDG_CONFIG_HOME and XDG_DATA_HOME) so it doesn't collide with your existing Lutris. Login to Lutris if you want to sync them, maybe.

News - Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 50: Dawn of Civilization
By Technopeasant, 20 Feb 2026 at 4:52 am UTC

Quoting: amataiIsn't GNULactic/Konquest a Linux exclusive ?
Also available on Mac apparently, so technically not.

https://apps.kde.org/konquest/

This is cheating, but...

https://cygwin.com/packages/summary/konquest.html

News - Godot Engine suffering from lots of "AI slop" code submissions
By mr-victory, 20 Feb 2026 at 4:46 am UTC

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?
I'll drop another one: generative ai found an algorithm to multiply matrices faster

https://spectrum.ieee.org/matrix-multiplication-deepmind

News - KDE Plasma 6.6 released with improved accessibility, new on-screen keyboard and lots more
By Purple Library Guy, 20 Feb 2026 at 2:47 am UTC

Quoting: PyratePlease, point to me where I suggested that you should use or not use anything. The lack of reading comprehension here is astounding.
I would agree, but I think we differ as to where it sits. Good day, sir.

News - Free and open source RTS 0 A.D. release 28 "Boiorix" is live
By sarmad, 19 Feb 2026 at 11:50 pm UTC

This is unquestionably the most polished open source game. Prove me wrong.

News - Get some great games in the new Beamdog & Owlcat RPG Bundle
By Purple Library Guy, 19 Feb 2026 at 11:45 pm UTC

Quoting: TarosNice, didn't know Planescape: Torment had an Enhanced Edition. Got it. 🥰
Now, with even better torment!

News - Valve wins legal battle against patent troll Rothschild and associated companies
By Purple Library Guy, 19 Feb 2026 at 11:42 pm UTC

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.