Latest 30 Comments

I must be missing something because I truly don't see the problem with local models run on local hardware. There are SO many problems with AI today but this case strikes me as a "storm in a drinking glass". Canonical is even distributing it in a easily removable, containerized Snap. What am I missing? Isn't this a best case scenario? Like if everyone was handling AI like this most people would be singing Hallelujah.

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How is everyday life with bazzite? I installed it on one of my kids' laptop (Thinkpad X260) and it my first impressions were quite nice. I wonder if this could be a good daily driver. I really don´t have any experience with immutable systems, though.

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once again punishes legitimate players

Right on the nose. This is why I detest Denuvo. It's not about performance hits, it's just that it treats the customer like a criminal.

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It's pretty much an asymmetric sport. Two teams battling it out with different tasks to see who wins the match. Fun to watch, but I still won't buy anything with Denuvo in it.

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The Blender Foundation is getting absolutely roasted for accepting this "donation", and rightfully so!

As an open source project, their ultimate goal should be to have a good feedback loop between their users and the developers. It even says, in enormous letters, on the front page of the Blender website:

It's about people.

Accepting this donation, from a company that represents everything wrong with the tech industry over the past 8 years, betrays that goal of having goodwill between the users and developers.

It would be wise for them to return the money, and deny any future donations from them, or any other company whose primary product is an AI or LLM.

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because of many reported performance issues that could be as a result of its inclusion in various games.

Often these results may be either:
* Result of a different DRM or different aggressive checks that was included besides Denuvo Anti-Tamper.
* The developer themselves setting up Denuvo's flag on critical parts that don't require a check.

Otherwise the performance impact is quite minimal. PCGamingWiki made an entire [article](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Denuvo#Denuvo_Anti-Tamper) about Denuvo Anti-Tamper with controversies that offers some explanation and debunks, including a graph how it actually works.

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Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: Talon1024

Quoting: CaldathrasNo demo? No thanks.

And yet, there are already reports about the game [on ProtonDB](https://www.protondb.com/app/2679100). 😲

I stand corrected. There apparently was once a "demo" or "playtest" available:
[SteamDB: Witchspire Demo](https://steamdb.info/app/4328010/info/)

I played the demo on some recent NextFest... Felt a bit like Palworld, to be honest...

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Quoting: williamjcm

Quoting: STiATPocket money for an AI company.

"Pocket money" that they pretty much can't afford to spend because they're not profitable in the slightest.

You can read Ed Zitron's great articles on the economic situation of generative AI companies for a nice overview of why those companies (and genAI in general) are nothing less than a money sink. The latest one is particularly interesting: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ais-economics-dont-make-sense/

The thing is when you are losing billions every year, losing a fraction of a billion more won't make a difference. And this can be obtained from the marketing budget.

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Plasmalogin is really nice. Finally I can see the characters I'm typing to log in 😄

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They have to make fixes for the EA App quite regularly. It's almost like EA is going out of their way to break it.

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Quoting: Doktor-MandrakeSo is there any confirmation if steam-input/steam is required for it to work?

I believe it was an IGN interview where they said it is first and foremost designed to work with Steam, but also functions as a basic HID device (emulating mouse and keyboard), so you can navigate BIOS screens with it, for example. It was noted that it does NOT work with consoles. But it wasn't entirely clear if it would work out of the box as a gamepad outside of Steam. I suspect it will work with games that utilize SDL3, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux kernel support for it eventually, but perhaps not initially.

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Updated the article on the NVIDIA note, as it's a lot easier now.

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I'll accept "no more news yet, we hope to have some soon" as an update on the Steam Frame! It feels a lot better than actually hearing nothing.
I guess "your call is very important to us" exists for a reason.

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I feel like platforms like Roblox have outlived their usefulness in a lot of ways with how game development and publishing keeps getting more accessible. The people who would've made a Roblox or flash game 10+ years ago can make something better in Godot (or Unity, etc.) and publish on Steam or Itch, and that's why there are so many neat small indie games.

Maybe s&box will find a useful niche, assuming it can overcome its current roles of making me hallucinate broken text formatting and reminding me where the ampersand key is. That's gotta be bad for word-of-mouth.

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"Easy to remove" is not opt-in, it is opt-out. Thankfully, the opt-in part is still true, as installing Ubuntu is still an opt-in choice.

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Honestly, this may just be as simple as buying goodwill and continuing to normalize AI companies by doing things that legitimate companies do.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Jarmer

So we've been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements

So basically a guarantee SD2 will be arm based? Especially with their recent advances in fex?

I know very little about hardware, so this question isn't a diss but is genuinely for information:
So, would that be good if it were arm based?

Unlikely to very unlikely. SOCs don’t become performant just because they use ARM. The ISA of a SOC has much less to do with efficiency (performance/watt) in this application (10-20 watts) than general good design and robust software support. Most modern x64 SOCs are largely RISC with legacy CISC fallback support bolted on in microcode. For ARM, your “CISC fallback” is just Fex running in userspace. I think ARM still scales down better than x64, which is why you see it in Steam Frame where the SOC is running at half or lower the peak power of the Steam Deck SOC with idle power requirements in the milliwatts (Steam Deck is idling at 1-2 watts IIRC).

So it’s not a given that ARM will be in the next Steam Deck or anything else. Valve has been really good so far at understanding nuances of what’s available on the market and choosing the best off-the-shelf or nearly off-the-shelf product on offer. They likely won’t go for a TRUE custom SOC until they’re selling units in the hundreds of millions. Until then, this semi-custom approach of choosing a good performing cheap chip that would otherwise be written down as scrap for these hardware companies and optimizing the crap out of their software stack to make a fun performant device has been very smart and scrappy. The only way I see ARM spreading to other Valve hardware is if Qualcomm or another ARM player has a very good chip that sells well enough to justify its existence, but too poorly to achieve their sales goals that just happens to fit the requirements of a product Valve want to work on so that Valve can buy the scraps for cheap to enable their new product. That’s exactly what happened with Steam Deck, exactly what happened with the Steam Machine GPU (RX 7600M), and is likely a contributing factor to why they’re using a non-VR-specific Qualcomm chip in Steam Frame.

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This all should've been more clearly stated from the start; Considering how similar this approach is to how Firefox is handling the AI stuff, why not bring up the fact that these features are opt-in-only in the original post?

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Quoting: STiATPocket money for an AI company.

"Pocket money" that they pretty much can't afford to spend because they're not profitable in the slightest.

You can read Ed Zitron's great articles on the economic situation of generative AI companies for a nice overview of why those companies (and genAI in general) are nothing less than a money sink. The latest one is particularly interesting: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ais-economics-dont-make-sense/

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Blender don't take their RAM blood money 😭

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My God.

I remember well online tournaments in fighting games thanks to ZSNES. Glad it is coming back.

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Pocket money for an AI company.

But welcome.

Blender should become Blendet IA. Nobody will realize its IA instead of AI and they will be rich.

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Quoting: Jarmer

So we've been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements

So basically a guarantee SD2 will be arm based? Especially with their recent advances in fex?

I know very little about hardware, so this question isn't a diss but is genuinely for information:
So, would that be good if it were arm based?

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Quoting: scaineIt doesn't mention opt-in or opt-out at all, only saying that in future we'll see AI features land in Ubuntu as snaps. It doesn't talk about "easy to shut off" or even that this is optional, only that they're snaps, which might infer as much.

Even going only by the parts Liam quoted, they did say that AI-centric features would be there "for those who want them", so it was obvious that there has to be either opt-in or opt-out. I will grant you that this specific quote isn’t entirely clear regarding whether that also applies to AI-based improvements of existing features.

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They were going to release a week earlier, but decided that wouldn't be on brand. ;)

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LLM tools are available since around 2022 for Blender in form of plugins and Anthropic may just has an interest to deliver their own plugin. I

from their pov blender is great for that since they wont need to care about paying royalites on an asset store.

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great, fund the software that help the artists...
now artists maybe wont complain that your ai took their jobs?

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Quoting: CaldathrasDid you have to do anything to disable GOG's wrapper?

in my case gog wrapper still stay, however with ddraw use native, builtin in winecfg

😀

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: EWGGreat. Help me rename, tag, and sort all of my photos and other images.

Same with text files and other documents. Fix my Markdown mistakes. Convert MD to basic HTML to post on forums. Provide a TOC from headers on longer articles I've written.

Help me manage my workspaces and windows. Prompt me with sensible window rules automatically and nudge me to be organized. Take a look into which Librewolf profile I'm using and ensure it stays in the proper Activity.

There are simple, useful usecases for more advanced, personalized computer help tools.

Some of that is stuff I wouldn't do, and the rest sounds absolutely horrible. I do not want some idiot AI deciding how stuff gets named and sorted.

MusicBrainz has been doing it with music, without the "ai", for a long time now. Good practice is to use it on a copy of the files or to require a review before final writing/saving.

Specialized LLMs can be incredible. I was at one nerd con or another and spoke with a guy who worked in the medical industry. The company he worked for spent a long time feeding it books and other such papers. People could search using human terms and it would present exactly the right information quickly and concisely.

I'm really curious to see how Canonical, Red Hat, KDE, MZLA, etc all begin using these newer sorts of tools. I do have faith that they will implement everything in user conscious ways. Newer CPUs contain instruction sets for it. Let me get the most of out my machine, get my money's worth, and save time on menial tasks so I can spend more time slacking off. 😆

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I was excited for this game pre-release, but after looking into it, I have very little faith this will succeed in much outside of becoming filled with monetisation-motivated (AI) slop.

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