Skip Navigation
InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)BA
Posts 4
Comments 540
Ubisoft Insider Alleges That Company Wants Steam To Remove Concurrent Player Counts To Hide Its Failures
  • Ubisofts being anti consumer? Surprise surprise!

    They're not happy because they think people seeing other people not playing a game is the cause of the problem. They're wrong - it is the result of the problem - they make bad games, so people don't want to pay rip off prices for them.

    Ubusift needs steam more than steam needs Ubusift. They tried to leave the platform and dictate to their users via their own store and launchers, and then realised people didn't follow them.

    Steam is no paradise - it's basically a glorified piece of convenient DRM - but it's popular and they have no reason to bend to the demands of Ubisoft. Plenty of other devs that make good games that are popular have had the concurrent gamers tally work in their favour - helping people see that a game is growing in popularity or unexpectedly popular.

    I suspect best case for Ubisoft is their games are somehow excluded but that'll end up being worst case because then it'll look like no one is playing their games. And I doubt Steam will want to open the can of worms of publishers dictating which features are or are not allowed on steam.

  • Only about 720,000 Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops sold since launch — under 0.8% of the total number of PCs shipped in Q3, or less than 1 out of every 125 devices
  • This is such a bizarre story. First as others pointed out 1 in 125 is 0.8% not 0.008%. They presumably forgot the 100 but in percent conversions. It's presumably 0.8% as if it's 0.008% then they're saying 9billion devices were sold on the last quarter. At 0.8% it's 90million laptop devices. They later say 20% of all laptop sales were AI laptops at 13.3 million which would be 66.5 million laptops overall, not 90milljon. 720,000 would actually 1.1% of all laptops and 5.4% of the AI subcategory.

    So whoever wrote the article doesn't seem to know how to do basic maths? They also don't make clear how they arrived at their figures with these contradictory figures elsewhere in their own article.

    But the main thing is this whole story is some bizarre idea that a new device getting nearly 1% of global sales in its first quarter is doing badly?

    To me that's actually good? But maybe the manufacturer had some crazy expectations? Or maybe the writers think that all products should behave like incumbents?

    This reads like shitty journalism - trying to make big claims to get clicks. I have no idea if the product is doing well or not versus expectations, but I don't trust this articles take on it.

    I'm personally skeptical about the "AI" bullshit in these products, but I do think the power efficiency of ARM chips may give these Snapdragon X a chance to take market share from traditional chips.

  • DOJ Orders Google to Sell Chrome to End Search Monopoly: A Possible Game-Changer for Competition
  • We will have to see if this happens. Google will certainly be appealing so this will still drag on for years.

    And let's not forget the last big anti trust case in the US - Microsoft. That was supposed to break up Microsoft but in the end the government and Microsoft came to a settlement. And it was a very weak settlement in Microsoft favour.

    Microsoft opened up some of its APIs to developers but that only applied to Windows, not allowing those APIs on other systems. And the Web browser part of the case was dropped.

    And look what happened - Microsoft maintained it's monopolies with Windows and Office, and they have only strengthened. On Web browsers it's monopoly wa overturned but that was in part due to the EU case (forcing a choice window in Europe) and largely because another monopolist Googlr came along leveraging search instead of an OS.

    Microsoft has oblitered competition again with office. The latest example is bundling Teams in, which has destroyed Slack. And it's now aggressively pushing Edge, integrating it in unnecessary ways into the OS and making it unremovable.

    The US anti trust actions against tech are weak. I don't see Google being broken up or receiving harsh sanctions. It's lost the case, but like Microsoft it will negotiate a settlement that costs it little but gives the politicians something to point at to say they did something.

    I suspect the big loser will be Firefox. Part of the case against Google was that it makes exclusivity deals to funnel search customers to it. Mozilla has such a deal and is very reliant on that revenue to keep going.

    And if it were forced to sell Chrome, who would buy it? It's entire business model is around funneling people to search, and snooping on customers to strengthen Googles ad data. Likely one of the other big tech companies, and they'd just try to redirect everyone and built a new monopoly.

  • Chris Hayes: The final 2024 election tally is almost in. It should end the MAGA mandate myth.
  • All told Trump is up about 2m votes and Harris down 7m compared to Biden in 2020.

    This is not a massive increase in support for Trump but it is a significant drop in support for the Dems that lost them the election.

    The mandate "myth" is irrelevant. They won all 3 parts of government , they got their mandate.

    In the UK we had Brexit and it was extremely close at 48% to 52%. Yet ever since all we ever heard about is how it was decisive and people treat everyone in the UK as if we're pro Brexit. In our elections the tories got 42% of the vote yet massive majorities so dictated what we did.

    In short the problem is not the number of voters, it is the electoral system. In the US system if you win enough votes in the right places you win decisively. That seemed like a good system when there was a consensus. Not so good when there is division.

    The solution in the US is the same as the UK - electoral reform is needed. The problem in the US is the same as the UK - no one will deliver that as the parties that win power are the ones who benefit from the rigged system.

  • .world powermod Flyingsquid harasses News mod Blackbeard off lemmy
  • Jeeze both people come across as petty idiots. Lots of passive aggressive nonsense, and both sides want to have the last word.

    Also it drives me up the wall when 2 people argue and one person tells the other to "calm down". And in this case it's "CALM DONW" and "CALM YOURSELF" between line by line quotes. So fucking childish.

    I wish Blackbeard all the best on Bluesky; I think they will be disappointed. Human nature is human nature; I've been around long enough to see the cylical nature of social media. A new thing comes along, everyone joins, there is a love-in, and a "consensus" is built around how this time it's be great and what is and isn't allowed. Then things grow and a consensus that holds with 10 people breaks down with 100 or 1000, and people blame the new people for the change.

    And mods at each others throats is just the nature of the beast. This has played out over and over on the internet - Usenet through to X, Reddit, etc, and the fediverse will experience the same. It's just human nature.

  • Apple TV+ spent $20B on original content. If only people actually watched.
  • Apple's focus is vendor lock-in. Everything in their ecosystem integrates perfectly. They're selling devices that lock you in to their ecosystem and they get a 1/3 cut from all digital sales from competitors also using their platform.

    They're not interested in getting as many people as possible watching their shows. They're interested in getting as many people as possible buying Apple TV devices, and then getting drawn into the Apple ecosystem.

    Regard the $20bn spent on TV shows as marketing spend.

  • Apple TV+ spent $20B on original content. If only people actually watched.
  • The reason is Apple is not in the streaming business, it's in the hardware business and sales business.

    Apple is not trying to get you to just join it's streaming service. It's trying to get you to buy it's hardware so you're in it's ecosystem so it gets 1/3 of everything you spend on content and services. It's the ultimate route in upselling.

    You buy an Apple TV device, you watch some of their shows but also you buy some apps, and you sign up for other services (who have to pay apple for access), maybe you buy content through iTunes.

    Apple wants you using Apple TV, and get an IPhone and a Mac and tablet etc. If you're not on an Apple device they don't want you because you're able to spend money elsewhere.

    Apples whole business is vendor lock-in. They just lock you in a gilded cage so you don't realise you're a prisoner. And they make you pay for the gilding.

    $20bn is nothing in the scale of Apples ecosystem.

  • Zoe Ball to leave BBC Radio 2 breakfast show
  • Have to admit I never really enjoyed her on the breakfast show. She comes across as a but too much like a children's TV presenter; a bit patronising? Not my thing in the mornings.

    Must admit I was hoping Sarah Cox would be taking over, but Scott Mills is a really good choice. I'll be turning in when he starts.

  • Illinois Democratic Governor Vows to do Everything He Can 'To Protect Our Undocumented Immigrants'
  • Democrats need to play this carefully.

    "protect our undocumented immigrants" plays into the MAGA playbook that the dems are weak on immigration issues.

    I don't know what the right play is though. All left leaning parties find it hard to communicate clearly on immigration issues.

    But this kind of headline at a glance makes it look like the governor of illinois is in favour of illegal immigration?

    Its difficult topic to communicate clearly on when you have the right behaving hysterically about the topic and conflating terms like "undocumented" with "illegal" in people's minds.

  • How use AV1 video with Firefox ??
  • Your html looks wrong to me in your second example.

    The type should be closed with " not continued with ; Codecs should also use" "

    I don't think the Codecs bit is needed though. Having the Type correct should be enough.

    <video controls preload="none"> <source src="FooBar.mp4" type="video/webm"> </video>

    Edit: Also presumably your files are definitely AV1? Double check that. I think you can also drag and drop video into Firefox to see if they will play.

    Edit2: Also on searching I've seen someone say you may need to use the video tag itself for mkv:

    <video controls preload="none" src="FooBar.mkv"> </video>

    It's one of the solutions lower down on this stack post, but you'd need to test that. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21192713/how-to-playback-mkv-video-in-web-browser

    As a side, it's very frustrating to see how many people wrote code on that page that just works on Chrome. So much for Web standards!

  • US Senator Warner Presses Valve to Crack Down on Hateful Accounts and Rhetoric Proliferating on Steam
  • Politicians would be better focusing on things that matter like how the Democrats lost the election to Trump and how they're going to win the midterms.

    A crappy paper finding rude words and phrases on steam is not really worthy of anyone's attention but Valve's

    "Millions" of examples sounds dramatic until you look at how many billions of exchanges have been made in valves forums and comment pages. It needs addressing but it's not of international or even national importance.

    Instead of virtue signalling, Warren should be asking how the Dems managed to allow Biden a free ride through the primaries, held on til the bitter end blocking alternatives and then endorsing Harris blocking any debate.

    I'd rather Warren focus on fixing the Democratic Party. A bit of democracy in the Democrat party would be a start.

  • Is Chrome the new IE? – Magic Lasso Adblock
  • I take issue with the idea that Edge could be a disruptor - it's just another chromium/blink browser. The flaws with the browser are fundamental - not something a different interface and Microsoft telemetry can fix.

    The only alternatives are non-chromium based browsers - so that's Apple with safari/Webkit and Mozilla with Firefox/gecko.

    Apple is hardly the champion of open standards - it forces all browsers to use Webkit on IOS because it's app store too much of a money spinner to allow users free access to the internet. They might buy digital things and apple not be able to snoop and block it so they get their 30%.

    So realistically the only options are Firefox derivatives or a 3rd party coming along and using Webkit. But Webkit is problematic due to the level of control Apple has, in the same way Google has control of Blink/Chromium. And the open source KDE project Khtml that both Apple and Google forked from has died, leaving Gecko as the only independent Web engine available.

    I don't see anything coming along to disrupt Google at the moment.

    I use Firefox myself. I also use Librefox which is a decent spin. It would be good to see an ecosystem of gecko browsers - a gecko browser similar to Brave or Vivalidi might be able to disrupt things. It's also kinda wasteful that any contributions all these chromium based projects currently make upstream also ultimately benefit Google.

  • After Starfield: Shattered Space's mixed reviews, Todd Howard wondered if Bethesda should "have waited to put buggies out"
  • Nah Todd. The base game was boring, and the expansion sounds mediocre. The buggies aren't the problem.

    They should play The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldurs Gate 3 - they all show what can be done with RPGs now.

    Bethesda haven't evolved enough since Skyrim. Starfield would probably have been seen as a great game 10 years ago. But the best description I've seen is that's its as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.

    An expansion on one world doesn't address the fundamental problem with the game. I don't see this game having a No Man's Sky ark. Please move on to Elder Scrolls 6 - it's been 13 years already and it seems Betheasa have a lot to learn from the competition.

  • Wales’s 20mph speed limit saves lives and money. So why has it become a culture-war battlefield?
  • As someone who drives in Wales a fair bit, it was badly implemented so it became unpopular.

    The blanket rule was applied to roads it shouldn't have been, with a slow and costly process to fix the speed limits on roads that's shouldn't have been covered.

    It makes sense on all side streets, but it doesn't make sense on all main roads. Some yes, but not all inside towns and cities. I think this is being unpicked it seems with more flexibility for councils? I don't really follow Welsh politics, like many people I suspect.

    The other issue is enforcement or lack there of. There seems to be zero enforcement so you get into the situation of driving down roads and everyone is still going at 30 ignoring the law. It puts you under pressure to go at 30 and it's easy to drift up to that speed.

    I'm am generally a supporter of the new law but the politicians have to take ownership that the reason it's controversial is because it was poorly implemented. Its easy to paint the critics as extreme or as part of a "culture-war" but that's just people taking advantage of actual anger and frustration.

    The policy can be popular I think - there just needs to be some minor changes. As an example I can think of 4 roads in the town I drive or walk on that could do with going back to 30mph; thats nothing in the 100s of roads in the area.

    It'd even potentially be safer as people are just breaking the law and speeding on these road anyway making it less predictable for pedestrians.

    An example is a long main road that climbs up a steep hill in my town. It's actually a struggle. climbing it at 20mph, and I even get foot pain trying to keep the accelerator at just the right depression to stay at 20mph. The road is wide too so you're struggling all the time with the accelerator, monitoring your speed as it's natural to go faster on wide roads and other drivers putting you under pressure to go faster. People are even overtaking each other which can be dangerous as you don't always see what's coming down the other way easily.

    So I'd be worrying less about the fringe lunatics stirring up anger and more about tweaking the implementation to get the majority on board. That'll take the support and interest away from the fringe noise makers.

  • What non-Steam games do you play?
  • If you're worried about DRM then look at GOG.com - they sell DRM free games, and you can download the installers direct from their website if you don't want to use their client and want permanent backups. The installers are not online either. I have a large library of classics and new games from them.

  • Data is Beautiful @lemmy.world BananaTrifleViolin @lemmy.world

    UK Electricity Generation: 2009-2024

    Source: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/historical

    12
    Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe
  • For electricity generation: Solar across the UK was about 5% in last year, while Wind was about 29% and Nuclear 13.9%, and hydro 1.3% - so 49.2% of electricity generation over the last 12 months was carbon neutral.

    That's a huge success story - still a long way to go, particularly as that does not include Gas burned in homes, but the UK is moving in the right direction. And Scotland is a huge source of Wind & Hydro power for the whole country.

    So even if the barriers to solar in your home are still high, the grid is getting cleaner and cleaner every year. There are also community projects installing wind generators which you can join/invest in if you do want to try and get a slice of cleaner energy and solar is not realistic.

    Edit: Source on UK electricity generation: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/historical Good data on UK electricity generation

  • Just donated to KDE and adopted Okular, their really nice PDF reader, which I use on a daily basis <3
  • Inspired me to donate too.

    Donated €50 but misread the adopt an app thing so didn't write a comment. Shame, but still happy to support KDE!

    I use it on my OpenSuSE and Nobara devices, as my daily driver. I love Plasma, and Kate, Dolphin, Okular, Ark, Gwenview, KDE Connect, Spectacle, and Konsole in particular. Also love KDE's Marble as a Google Earth replacement.

  • "The Phantom Fellows" released on GOG and Steam

    New adventure game "The Phantom Fellows" has released on GOG and Steam, with a 10% discount until 4th Oct.

    It's a comedy mystery game featuring a guy and his ghost friend, who perform jobs and investigate mysteries over 7 days in a small Colorado town. The game has a pixel art aesthetic, reminiscent of recent games like The Darkside Detective, and synthwave music.

    I have no connection to the company, stumbled across the game and been playing for a few hours. So far, it's a fun game, good production values for £11. Certainly scratches that adventure game itch.

    EDIT: it's made for Windows, but I've been playing it on Linux via Lutris/Wine without issue.

    0
    www.eurogamer.net New York Times takedown domino effect hits nearly 2000 Wordle clones

    The New York Times has issued a takedown notice to Reactle, a Wordle clone, which has meant around 1900 other versions …

    New York Times takedown domino effect hits nearly 2000 Wordle clones

    The New York Times has used a DMCA take down notice to remove an open source Wordle clone called Reactle

    9

    VLC Scaling issues on 4K KDE (Fix)

    I'd been having problems with the scale of the VLC interface at 4K on my Linux machine (KDE Plasma, Wayland).

    I found a solution from a mix of previous solutions for Windows and other Linux solutions which did not work for me. The problem is with QT (which is used by VLC) and the linux solution was to put extra lines in the /etc/environment file but I found while this fixed VLC it mucked up all other QT apps including my Plasma desktop.

    The solution is to use VLC flatpak and set the environment variables for the VLC flatpak app only using Flatseal or the Flatpak Permission Settings in KDE.

    Add two Environment variable: > Variable name: QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR > Variable value: 0 > > Variable name: QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS > Variable value: 2

    For the second variable, scale_factors, set it to match the scaling you use on your desktop. 1.0 means 100%, 1.5 is 150%, 2 is 200% and so on. My desktop is set to 225% scaling, so I set mine to 2.25 and it worked. In the end I went up to 3 for VLC because I liked the interface even more at that scale (it's a living room TV Linux machine)

    Hopefully this will help other people using VLC in Linux.

    If you don't want to use Flatpak, you can add the same variables to your /etc/environment file (in the format QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0) but be warned you may get jank elsewhere. This may be less problematic outside of KDE Plasma as that is QT based desktop environment. For Windows users it is a similar problem with QT and there are posts out there about where to put the exact same variables to fix the problem.

    2