We literally cannot have even one nice thing in this country. You best start believin’ in cyberpunk dystopias… because you’re in one.

The Edge of who gives a fuck?

Doesn’t that have more to do with Gamepass eating game studios’ lunch though? And a lot less with AI? Just regular ol’ dumbass management decisions.

No, the graphics from Intel back in 07-10 were crap.

What are you using graphics on a server for instead of just CLI?

You just can’t buy too old or the inverse happens and the performance per watt drops. I think you’re right that 2012 is about the cutoff. Maybe 2007 for certain items, like my 2007 iMac. But if you’re getting back to the Pentium 4 era you’ve gone too far and need to turn back around.

See, I only use flatpaks sparingly for this reason, but in some cases they’re indispensable when you don’t want an application to access certain parts of your system. The sandboxing is what makes them useful, in my opinion. For everything else, there’s the deb packages.

Hell yuh.

Counterpoint: When Louis CK (prior to being outed as a sex pest) released one of his comedy specials on his website DRM-free for $5 he became a millionaire almost overnight.

https://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/drm-free-experiment-makes-loui.html

Price point matters, too.

It also jives with early Steam Sales when Valve would cut titles like Left 4 Dead Counter Strike down to 90% off, and they would sell so many digital copies that they were actually making more money off the lower price.

https://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell/

Now we did something where we decided to look at price elasticity. Without making announcements, we varied the price of one of our products. We have Steam so we can watch user behavior in real time. That gives us a useful tool for making experiments which you can’t really do through a lot of other distribution mechanisms. What we saw was that pricing was perfectly elastic. In other words, our gross revenue would remain constant. We thought, hooray, we understand this really well. There’s no way to use price to increase or decrease the size of your business.

But then we did this different experiment where we did a sale. The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation. …

Then we decided that all we were really doing was time-shifting revenue. We were moving sales forward from the future. Then when we analyzed that we saw two things that were very surprising. Promotions on the digital channel increased sales at retail at the same time, and increased sales after the sale was finished, which falsified the temporal shifting and channel cannibalization arguments. Essentially, your audience, the people who bought the game, were more effective than traditional promotional tools. So we tried a third-party product to see if we had some artificial home-field advantage. We saw the same pricing phenomenon. Twenty-five percent, 50 percent and 75 percent very reliably generate different increases in gross revenue.

I’m having trouble finding a link to substantiate it, but I remember in the early 2000’s a group of artists having to sue their record labels because of the lawsuits on file-sharing users. The record labels said they were doing it for the artists, but the artists had to sue the record labels to even ever see a penny from the fruits of those lawsuits. The record labels were just pocketing the money for themselves while saying it was “for the artists.”

Anyway, long story short is that kind of behavior from the recording industry made me want to give money directly to the artists and cut out these selfish middlemen who did nothing but claimed all the profits.

Devil’s Advocate: Many pirates would have not paid for access to that media so to say it takes away from the creators profit isn’t exactly true since one act of piracy does not equal one lost sale.

Devil’s Advocate Part II: There is s significant amount of research that supports the notion that pirates actually spend more money on media than the average person.

I personally am an example of part II. I pirate a lot of music but I refuse to use Spotify because of how little it pays artists and I have also spent significant amounts of money buying music from artists I enjoy via Bandcamp or buying from the artist directly because I know they get a bigger cut of the profits that way.

Exactly, I doubt the person or persons who developed ICEBlock are getting tons of income from the project compared how much it costs to host and run the project, but the project is immediately creating a positive impact in society.

despite risk to Trump relations

This is where we are at, not risk to US relations, a risk to relations with Emperor Trump.

We are fully cooked, well-done so to speak.

I remember the days of high quality fansubs by people who were just doing it for free because they loved it.

Those still exist and still give you a better consumer experience than these fucking dogshit streaming services.

Right, socialism doesn’t necessarily say that markets themselves are evil, but rather that the workers should have direct control over their own workplaces and reap the value of their labor instead of being siphoned off to a parasite class. A socialist business owned by the workers would still be selling their goods in the marketplace. It’s just a fairer distribution of control of the company through democracy and a fairer distribution of the value generated by the labor.

As I often say, it’s not like Jeff Bezos can deliver every Amazon package or manage every AWS server on his own. No, the value he has is leeched from all the workers who make his business function. Without the workers, he is effectively useless on his own.

But it feels like we’re regressing and we can’t even get to that socialist ideal because we’re busy fighting for the basic rules of capitalism that produce an actually healthy economy where everyone is involved be followed.

We have come so far that we have gone from “maybe the world should be a better place” to “if we are really going to do this capitalism shit, could we at least follow the fundamental foundational concepts instead of a corporate free-for-all where the rules of the game have been tossed out?”

Are there even any really good games coming out this year?

Further, didn’t the Switch 2 already break sales records? 5.4 million consoles? 1.8 million of them in the US?

Looking at the roster of games that have come out so far this year, it looks pretty barren for genuinely quality games. Maybe people just haven’t bought a lot of the kind of forgettable titles? The only games that seem popular that aren’t remakes or re-releases of previous games are Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince, Split Fiction, Death Stranding 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance II, Doom: The Dark Ages, and Elden Ring Nightreign. Of those, only the first four listed score above 90 on Metacritic. Even stuff like Monster Hunter Wilds has been deeply panned.

I think it’s probably a mixture of high prices, lack of money, Switch 2 sales and waiting on better Switch 2 titles other than just Mario Kart World, as well as a lackluster roster of other quality games.

Its always Cruz.

Ha, that’s pretty optimistic to think after all this that democracy and voting will still be part of the picture.

It looked like from comments that’s why he made the Ollama integration optional, because some people were concerned since Ollama was built by Meta. It can run without Ollama, it seems.

EDIT: Doing more research on Ollama itself, I’m unconvinced that it’s sharing any data, despite being built by Meta.

https://github.com/Jeffser/Alpaca

This will probably help anyone unfamiliar with it, since the first search result for Alpaca AI is another online paid AI service which does something entirely different than this. It’s used for AI image generation.

The main question I have is since Ollama is optional… If you optionally use it, is it still sharing data with Facebook Meta?