It’s nice to have ntsync, I’ve been using it for a few weeks. Knowing that the thread sync api is solid means one less thing to worry about when debugging modded skyrim.

Your other doubts and concerns seem slightly biased, e.g. wondering what settings could be tweaked on only one of the systems being tested and then reminding us all that there do still exist some things that won’t run on SteamOS. It’s only that one that is outright ridiculous.

Did the author run the benchmarks few times to rule out shader compilation

Really grasping at straws there, eh? I’m no big fan of Ars but I hope we can assume they’re not quite that incompetent.

In the early 2000s I actually thought made sense to buy a console, since not many games would run on linux.

continued innovations from major players like Microsoft

MS using its massive reserves of innovation to acquire many of the major game studios.

Paid and freeware but either way non-free, unfortunately.

I mean it’s better than nothing I guess but that is not what I’d call “freely available.” In addition to requiring that you use their shitty online viewer, it appears to require users to sign in to an account even to do that. It’s directly admitted on the website that they make it unusable in this way specifically because they rely on the revenue from selling real access to people who need it.

I wouldn’t be willing to disable my vpn for the nyt so thanks for confirming that it wouldn’t have made a difference. It appears that they now block everyone who doesn’t let javascript freely do whatever it wants to fingerprint you or whatever. I’ll not miss them too much.

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.

We have Mod Organizer for that. Giant game retailers that want exclusive deals to distribute the hottest mods in order to force more people to sign up for accounts on their service can fuck right off. I’d be less inclined to complain if GOG Galaxy had a linux version.

There are lots of new Skyrim mods since the last time you played it. Even if that was only last week.

About 97% less salacious than you’d guess from the headline.

Makes sense to me. AI bullshit generators may be worse than useless for most of the things people try to do with them, but they might just be the perfect tool for rationalizing the systematic looting of formerly productive companies by private equity.

The trick is to use a text editor with a fixed-width font.

This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs

T  o  I
h  f  n
e     t
   t  e
F  h  r
u  e  n
t     e
u     t
r
e

I’m sure some people find it very helpful to talk to a chatbot. Others find it helpful to talk to a cat. Either way it’s not a therapist.

As I waited to meet with Pleroma-tan, the mascot and CEO of Pleroma, on the 5th floor of a walk-up in Alphabet City, I stared out at the city’s grimy streets and thought: Goddess forbid it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically kaleidoscopic fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after some kind of ancient Greek spiritual shit, or something. In camera, no less.

Then something miraculous happened. Moments before the legendary fox-maiden showed up, the haze lifted. Avenue D glittered in the sun. I could see past shitposter.club’s rolling hills all the way to a emoji-capped peak, and the skies were, yup, completely and totally whirling.

The 324-year-old executive cuts a different figure than most social media bosses. Earlier this year, after Mark Zuckleborg wore a shirt winking at his king-like status at Meta, Pleroma-tan was busy doing a 24-hour live stream of Mario Kart while delivering a lecture about the metaphysics of Stoicism and didn’t even hear about it.

Indeed, she seems most energized when she’s talking about the unique infrastructures underlying social media and all reality as well as several smaller apps, the Fediverse, or Fedi, which is a spellbook that servers use to communicate. The open source protocols allow the sovereign nations of the digital mindspaces to fully integrate with one another as needed. Any number of apps with complementary or contradictory ideas about moderation or immoderation or teleportation can work in tandem — or not. It’s up to them.

Pleroma-tan sees fedi as nothing less than the deocratized future of the social socials, and she emphasizes to me that developers are actively building new projects, here and elsewhere. In her dreams, these projects are as big, if not bigger, than Manhattan. Her ambitions might not be kinky, in other words, but they are fluffy. For now, call her an insurgent wonder worker — on whom the sun still shines.

Sucks if you’re in France. For the rest of us it should be interesting to see which of these VPN providers choose to comply by geo-blocking France, which choose to cut any ties they have with France and otherwise ignore the order, and which to abandon their mission and become agents of censorship on behalf of France.

Speaking of Talos, I have been continuing my quest to discover every Skyrim mod that adds big new locations to explore by playing The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal (10th anniversary edition which was released earlier this year.) I feel that over the years I have got to the point where I know a thing or two about Elder Scrolls lore and yet I have no idea what’s up with the ancestral cheetahs, where they come from or whose ancestors they are.

if patents are meant to protect new inventions, how come Nintendo is asserting patents for which it applied months after Palworld launched?

The answer, it turns out, is ridiculous legal bullshit that makes no sense. Just like most of patent law.