The Pepe doesn’t quite have the same significance and weight yet. It’s not too late. Make leftist Pepes. Drown their identifiers in false positives until they become useless.

A signal is less useful the more “false” signals (i.e. noise) pollute the medium it’s transferred over.

If we can make it clear that “their” memes aren’t actually just theirs by “re-appropriating” them and abuse whatever secret identification dogwhistles they want to use, we can drown their signals in noise.

Posting Pepes for non-nazi purposes is an act of resistance.

Hey, don’t apologise or defend yourself for loving something! I’m pretty sure you’ll find plenty of people sharing your enthusiasm, if not about this game then about others. Loving something is wonderful and I hope you have tons more fun with it 😊

So ~80 hours for a completionist run? That’s decent

The willingness to be responsible for consequences does factor in. If you round the corner and crash into someone, you probably didn’t intend to, but whether you’ll be an ass about it and yell at the other person or whether you’ll apologise and check they’re alright makes a difference.

In a perfect-information-setting, intent equals result: If I know what my actions will cause and continue to carry them out, the difference between “primary objective” and “accepted side-effect” becomes academic. But in most cases, we don’t have perfect information.

I feel like the intent-approach better accounts for the blind spots and unknowns. I’ll try to construct two examples to illustrate my reeasoning. Consider them moral dilemmas, as in: arguing around them “out of the box” misses the point.

Ex. 1:
A person is trying to dislodge a stone from their shoe, and in doing so leans on a transformator box to shake it out. You see them leaning on a trafo and shaking and suspect that they might be under electric shock, so you try to save them by grabbing a nearby piece of wood and knocking them away from the box. They lose balance, fall over and get a concussion.
Are you to blame for their concussion, because you knocked them over without need, despite your (misplaced) intention to save them?

Ex. 2:
You try to kill someone by shooting them with a handgun. The bullet misses all critical organs, they’re rushed to a hospital and in the process of scanning for bullet fragments to remove, a cancer in the earliest stages is discovered and subsequently removed. The rest of the treatment goes without complications and they make a speedy and full recovery.
Does that make you their saviour, despite your intent to kill them?

In both cases, missing information and unpredictable variables are at play. In the first, you didn’t know they weren’t actually in danger and couldn’t predict they’d get hurt so badly. In the second, you probably didn’t know about the tumor and couldn’t predict that your shot would fail to kill them. In both cases, I’d argue that it’s your intent that matters for moral judgement, while the outcome is due to (bad) “luck” in the sense of “circumstances beyond human control coinciding”. You aren’t responsible for the concussion, nor are you to credit with saving that life.

So if YouTube provided an RSS feed for its channels, all videos would be podcasts because they can be processed as audio-only and are distributed via RSS?

I was responding to the “Look, they’re all nice people” defense you quoted, not contradicting you. I agree with you in principle.

I don’t consider “misguided” a valid defence.

My view of morality is largely centered on intent, so “I thought it would be a good thing” is a valid defence (though there is also a degree of responsibility to check assumptions; if you never made any effort to check if it actually is a good thing, that’s negligence)

So it’s hard to be good when your salary depends on you being bad.

…and by extension, when your livelihood depends on you being bad, yes. Not everyone’s livelihood depends on their salary, but for many people it does. If it’s hard to find a job that can pay the bills, I don’t fault people for the human reflex of justifying bad things to yourself in the name of survival.

(But if they do have a choice and choose to enrich themselves at the expense of others, they’re obviously pricks - just saying this might not apply to all the devs involved here).

You can be a great person and still write garbage software. Whether you’re just doing it because you need money or whether you’re misguided and think it’s actually good, that doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person (and remember: It’s hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it).

Doesn’t make the software less garbage.

What exactly makes a podcast then?

Probably because there are no sanctions against them that his government is cracking down on? I don’t think he wants to get involved in politics so much as stay out of prison.

I mean, your counterexample is already the epitome of exploitation, so I’m not sure citing it would exonerate Paradox here :D

I mean, your counterexample is already the epitome of exploitation, so I’m not sure citing it would exonerate Paradox here :D

I do think that we should continue to encourage developers to create native builds when they can

Yes

My problem is calling people who want Linux native games misguided or wrong. I really don’t think that’s helpful.

I’d prefer games to be compatible natively too, so I definitely count myself among them. I think it’s an issue of visibility, the usual “loud and visible minority”. A thousand calm “I would prefer games were natively compatible” just don’t stick out as much as one aggressive “Fuck every company that doesn’t make their games natively compatible, and fuck you for supporting them by buying their game”.

I just don’t think Proton is the worst thing to happen to Linux Gaming because it allows developers to target alternative platforms without having to actually support them. This is where my personal impression of “misguided” (again, probably a loud minority) native game advocates comes from: Platform Inertia works because people stick with the platforms holding things they like, and the things on those platforms stay there because their prime audience is there. If the extra effort (=cost) of supporting Linux doesn’t match a sufficient uptake (=revenue), profit-controlled companies won’t do it (as they can’t justify it to their shareholders).

This isn’t just an issue with the evil corpos, but with the whole system itself. Screaming at consumers to change their habits won’t make much of a dent either there. Compelling people to change rarely has lasting results, if any. Better to invite them over and make the switch attractive enough to break that inertia. Only then can we meaningfully challenge the status quo.

It comes down to strategy accounting for ideological passion, an understanding of social and economic dynamics and patience. By and large, I think many understand this. Proton may not be what we want, but it’s an ally in achieving our goal. When we get to the point where it’s no longer “Underdog Linux against the near monopoly of Windows”, we can push harder (and honestly, I don’t think Valve would be terribly upset if Proton became obsolete and saved them resources).

We shouldn’t stop asking for native builds, so long as we do it mindfully and respectfully.

I maintain that Proton could be a gateway to open the Linux market and create a sufficient share of revenue that, if and when it is shutdown, it’s lucrative enough to make natively compatible games.

It’s a bit of a deadlock issue: Most Devs will only develop for Linux if they see there’s money to be made there and they can estimate it will be worth the effort. But we need games on Linux for that to happen.

Proton is a stop-gap solution to provide the latter and lower the barrier on both ends: I can play games on Linux and devs have an easier time shipping their games to a Linux audience. I hope long term, the major frameworks will feature defaults that allow devs to easily do so without relying on Steam, but until then, Proton is better than nothing.

I’ve had to grapple with pipewire. My old pulseaudio config didn’t seem to work and I wanted to migrate to the pw config file format anyway, but I found the pw docs to be highly opaque. You get a thousand solutions for commands online, or tools you can do it visually in, but to apply that config you need to start the tool…

I’m a noob, granted, but there seemed to be a lot of assumed common knowledge that I just don’t have. And if I don’t even know what I’m missing, it’s hard to google for it.

Can we have both? A concise textual description and a video exemplifying the features?

Fallen Order ran well for me on my potato (GTX 970 + some 4th gen i5) back when I played it. I’m not sure how my new rig will handle Survivor, but I’m starting to be cautiously optimistic.

That’s not even correct. I said “not all that useful” and then “next to useless”. Never “absolutely useless”.

It’s a simplification to condense the core point:
People say “I like this! This is useful!”
You say “It’s not all that useful”
I reply “It is to me”
You double down “next to useless”
I say “For you maybe, but for me it’s very useful”

The essence is that it’s not very useful to you, but it is for others. Yet you steamroll over that (subjective) take to double down on how shitty it is.

The whole point of this feature is to provide something built into Steam that works without a whole bunch of fiddling like other recording software.

It does. It’s a built-in utility to record gameplay clips. That’s neat.

It currently fails at that on Linux because the implementation of it is half-assed.

It’s lacking one feature, yes, but I’d not call that a failure if plenty of people seem fine without it.

That is my position.

Rich, coming from “You’re wrong when you say it’s useful”.

End of conversation.

“I’m right, you’re wrong and I refuse to hear otherwise”

Alright then. I figured you were genuinely confused and thought maybe seeing the other perspective could help clear things up. Guess you’d have to actually look for that to work.

Your opinion is posited as an absolute: “This is useless” suggests you consider it useless in general. People arguing otherwise are challenging that general claim by providing examples where it can be useful.

They’re not invalidsting your subjective perception that it’s not particularly useful for your primary use case. In fact, I’ve seen explicit acknowledgements that your use case will require different tools. If anything, your doubling down on the assertion that it is useless invalidates those that do find it useful.

For contrast, consider the more personal phrasing “This isn’t really useful to me, because I generally clip conversations and it doesn’t capture my mic.” This both respects that other people may find it useful and makes it clear why you don’t.

Aside from the semantics, you might be able to work around the issue by customising your audio setup, which is something I don’t know if Windows lets you. I don’t know what exactly it captures and what audio server you use, but if it can be pointed at a specific virtual device, you might be able to loop back your audio input to that device and use a combine-stream to route your other audio both to that virtual and your actual pysical output device.

Are you talking about in-game voice chat, that should be available to the game to record, or a third party tool that probably shouldn’t? If the game doesn’t need your mic, it shouldn’t access it; if it doesn’t access it, it’s not part of the gameplay recording.

That doesn’t mean it’s “not all that useful”, Linux or otherwise, just because it doesn’t cover your specific use case. I can definitely see myself using it to record brief clips - on linux - without having to run OBS in the background.