The Octonaut

Are you under the impression that what you quoted is a long or unclear text?

If third parties means AWS, then every website you’ve accessed this year shares your data with third parties. This is why the GDPR exists.

I’m always confused when people are surprised by something like an account sync meaning that the operators have to store your data

Makes me wonder if they understand how Lemmy works…

Step 1. Reconsider your chosen birthplace. Choose another location with consumer protection.

Step 2. Restart your life.

Step 3. If the restart life option is not available on your plan, contact support. Location transfer options are available but terms and conditions of port outs have changed recently.

How about if the idle animation is Gal Gadot in full IDF regalia singing “Imagine”?

I’ve put hundreds or thousands of hours into every Civ game since Civ 2. I’m so fucking sad that I don’t care about this new release. I’m Irish and I can’t even enjoy Britain being relegated to DLC because somehow Ada Lovelace is a leader? Who is this game for?

Again, it’s just a computer. You can open it and replace parts. You can plug in a USB hub and a monitor and do spreadsheets with keyboard and mouse.

My favourite bit of weirdness from it being just a computer is that the screen is actually a vertical screen by default, so when you boot to the desktop, for half a second the cursor is rotated the wrong way.

Steam OS is just a Linux desktop with the Steam client in fullscreen. With two clicks you are on an ordinary KDE desktop. It’s not at all like Android or ChromeOS. If it were, Android would be a much bigger market for Steam to want to put their games. Everyone outside the US having their Steam library in their pocket would far outweigh however many thousand Decks they’ve sold.

Your ignorance on this tracks with the less obvious clues that you don’t know what you’re talking about, like your talk of “Linux games on Steam”. Linux games on Steam vs playing Steam games on Linux are two different things.

You can disable the built-in apps.

They can’t be removed as pre-installed apps are part of the OS image. It’s a bit like the immutable distros now popular in Linux. Any update to the OS would just re-add them anyway.

These apps aren’t exactly huge in disk size so disabling them is safe and effective. It will reduce battery and memory usage if you would ordinarily have them running in the background for some reason.

I love my Steam Deck. It’s literally beside my hotel bed right now, while the Switch is at home with two kids under 10. But:

• the docking and detaching experience is frustrating as hell
• it is significantly heavier and yet feels more fragile.
• it has profiles but not comparably to the Switch in terms of use and UX
• and the controller experience is very hit and miss.
• • It spent 2 months just literally randomly shutting off bluetooth - you had to go into desktop mode and re-enable with a Linux command until they patched it - but that’s not even it - whenever it did that, it also disabled the sticks!.
• • I have multiple entries in the controllers screen - none of which can be renamed or show indicators as to which controller they are - where every now and again the Deck decides sorry, I don’t recognise that controller anymore. Please come walk across the living room and awkwardly stand in front of the telly pressing buttons on the Steam Deck’s face to re-pair things.
• • Oh and controller layout schemes are a cool and powerful feature but way too complicated for me to explain to an 8 year old.

If “I just want to pick up a controller after work and forget what Philip in Marketing said he thought the project was going to look like”, or “I want to buy games once and share them with my kids” or even “I’ll throw this in my bag to kill 20 minutes at the waiting room” are factors, the Steam Deck is very much not superior in every way.

Again. Love my Deck. Almost exclusively buy “Verified” games now. Halfway through a Nintendo game that somehow is easier for me, a software dev to find ajd emulate on Deck than on a Nintendo console. But the Switch has been a remarkable console to have in my living room. The first console I bought (actually now that I think of it, that my wife bought for me) since Wii and before that since PlayStation 2. I’m not really a console player. I have 1000+ games on Steam. Still Switch excels at many things and the sales figures should make that obvious.

Do one maleshep run. I promise he has some great deliveries too.

The number of people that do this is not going to even remotely shift the usage share percentage.

The same reputation extends to Windows too so I don’t think it’s a Linux specific issue.

I like the UX as it’s pretty powerful but I’m mindful of being ancient and having spent nearly a decade working with arcane telco applications. I have the opposite of your complaint - I like that it does periodic checks and will notify you of detected problems and usually give you a button to press to solve it.

My biggest pain usually comes in load order management. Usually this is because this is mentioned nowhere but in a note at the bottom of the mod description that might say something like “near the top” or “after mod x”. I don’t know how Steam just handles this mostly but I have a feeling it might be strong categorisation of mods.

No-one has ever told me what’s actually wrong with Vortex.

Oh I’m sure it’s not wasted work. But any content delivered now, for free, is in direct competition with buying a whole new game, probably for >=$70. I guess they’re very confident in the new game modes or something.

I’m surprised to see this update- I thought MS were making a “new” Flight Simulator for this year. I’m aware that content creation and game creation are usually quite separate but odd that they’d be release stuff to “keep” you on the “old”/current FS iteration.

I build software that’s used in call centers and have therefore been in several of them, including 2 in India. My team builds things that help with voice and chat.

I can’t stress enough two things: the aim is and probably always will be to deflect away things that people could have Googled themselves. LLMs, if trained on the right stuff and not hallucinating, would genuinely be good on this.

Secondly, CCs and telecoms in general have not escaped the business cultural shift in the last 10 years to the frantic obsession with g r o w t h. So yes, they definitely are trying to sell you something on every call. However this really depends on the human personality involved, and any near-future LLMs would definitely struggle to sell you anything. Some of these people are magical at talking you into buying stuff. Do j mean scamming? No. The easiest thing to sell is the thing you’d probably benefit from, the hurdle being that you didn’t know about it or aren’t in the mood to buy because you called to complain about coverage. For European telecoms at least, there are severe penalties for misselling, too (that’s part of what our software tracks).

So in summary, LLMs might replace the link you’re sent to the FAQs page or the bit where you confirm who you are. But they are at least many years away from replacing the agents who can do what telecoms currently want them to do - turn the call into a sale.

I had YouTube Premium after Vanced was killed. I gave it a fair go. No ads- great, it is now back to how it was a decade ago. But also no SponsorBlock - and my God, how many channels I realised I couldn’t listen to anymore when 50% of every video was an ad for one of three online services or games I’m definitely not going to ever pay for. So now I just… don’t watch YouTube on my phone. Hurray?

Seriously, if the ads are supposedly worth €15 a month, pay the fucking YouTubers enough that I don’t have to listen to a linguist try to sell me WarThunder

Nobody is disabling 4G bands except the bands they lied about being 4G in the first place?

Temperature is basically how creative you want the AI to be. The lower the temperature, the more predictable (and repeatable) the response.