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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • My issue is more with the math of it. Since it requires holding your frames until you’ve got one in reserve (can’t generate an in-between until you know what’s next), it fundamentally makes the game less responsive.

    That said, if you understand that, and like the visual smoothness of motion with more frames, then it’s super cool tech. Not every game has to be treated like it’s competitive Counter Strike, and I think it’s really cool if you like it, but it frustrates me how poorly marketed and understood the actual technology and its compromises are.


  • Eh, FSR3 upscaling and FSR3 frame generation are different things. I’m personally a fan of upscaling, it’s great for a sharper picture on my large 4k TV without spending a fortune on a massive GPU (I use a living room gaming PC), but not at all a fan of frame generation, as it introduces more input lag for the illusion of more frames. Not a tradeoff I’m ever willing to make, especially when VRR already does an incredible job of creating the illusion (and a degree of reality) of good performance when my framerate drops.



  • Eh, not much nefarious you can do by pushing data around. Taking a lot of CPU/GPU usage? Certainly, you can do a lot of evil with distributed computing. But bandwidth?

    Costs a lot to host all that data to push to people, and to handle streaming it to so many as well, all for them to just… throw it out? Users certainly don’t keep enough storage to even store a constant 100Mb/s of sneaky evil data, let alone do any compute with it, because the game’s CPU/GPU usage isn’t particularly out of the ordinary.

    So not much you could do here. Ockham’s razor here just says… planes are fast, MSFS is a high fidelity game, they’ve gotta load a lot of high accuracy data very quickly and probably can’t spare the CPU for terribly complicated decompression.


  • Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.

    What I don’t get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It’s a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.

    Like… it’s neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that’s taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?

    Again, it’s cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?

    So like… from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it’s very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.


  • I think it is a problem. Maybe not for people like us, that understand the concept and its limitations, but “formal reasoning” is exactly how this technology is being pitched to the masses. “Take a picture of your homework and OpenAI will solve it”, “have it reply to your emails”, “have it write code for you”. All reasoning-heavy tasks.

    On top of that, Google/Bing have it answering user questions directly, it’s commonly pitched as a “tutor”, or an “assistant”, the OpenAI API is being shoved everywhere under the sun for anything you can imagine for all kinds of tasks, and nobody is attempting to clarify it’s weaknesses in their marketing.

    As it becomes more and more common, more and more users who don’t understand it’s fundamentally incapable of reliably doing these things will crop up.



  • Eh, you’re applying generalizations universally. These last couple weeks, I literally bought Zelda Echoes of Wisdom day one, even bought NSO vouchers so I can buy the next big game that comes out. Day one, I dumped the game from my own modded switch, and started playing it on Ryujinx rather than on my Switch.

    I modded the game to change the resolution to always 1080p native, remove the double buffered vsync issue to smooth out the framerate and let VRR work, boosted LODs for better distant assets, and swapped the UI for Xbox controls. Ryujinx also let me play at 2x internal resolution, so I could run the game at native 4k.

    My game looks sharper, runs smoother, and is a lot of fun to tinker with. I’ve had a blast checking gamebanana every day for new mods, or for Ryujinx patches. I love it, and I’m preferring that experience to Switch. I’m also getting fun stuff like discord rich presence, and being able to record with my GPU driver, stream my gameplay to discord, play with a controller I prefer to a Pro Controller, everything.

    I’m also looking forward to tinkering with mods for unlimited echoes once I beat the game. I’m more than happy to pay for the game, but this is much more fun for me, and trades blows with the real hardware experience well enough that I’d much rather play here than on Switch.


  • Yeah… even worse, it appears the admin didn’t even announce it, this is just one of the developers clarifying what the admin probably did.

    As someone who uses Ryujinx, I literally spent the afternoon curious about an error I was getting while updating about the build server being down “probably because it’s building a new version, check back in a few minutes”, only to find a Twitter screenshot of this linked in slack that evening.


  • Hazzard@lemm.eetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    Ah, he recommends saving 1000$, then tackling your debt, then building to 3-6 months expenses. Which is… fine, I agree with the principle of it, but that number is definitely one of those things I’d consider being more flexible with. The amount I think you should save before tackling your debts depends on a lot of factors.

    I also don’t necessarily agree with saving that amount in two blocks, we personally saved 1000$, paid the most pressing card off, and then saved another 1000$. I think it makes sense to adjust that minimum emergency fund number as your situation evolves.

    Just another case where I find he works fine as a starting point, but where most people shouldn’t follow his advice to the letter.


  • Mmm, excellent addendum to my proposed changes. 1000$ is better than nothing, but it hasn’t really kept up with inflation, and circumstances really change things. For example, if you have a house, the potential opportunity and cost of an “emergency” goes up immensely.

    But yeah, for us personally we pretty quickly went up to a 2000$ emergency fund, despite the relative stability of renting and driving a fairly new car. We’ll be working on our 3-6 month expense emergency fund soon. I definitely think it’s better to view the baby steps as flexible guidance on a starting point, rather than the concrete law they frame it as.


  • Hazzard@lemm.eetoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    I think I have an interesting perspective here, as someone who did kinda get their finances under control thanks to a Dave Ramsey course, and later had the unpleasant experience of discovering how much of a right-wing idiot he is during COVID.

    Something I’ve noticed is that a lot of his advice seems targeted towards people who are crushingly bad at navigating debt. One of the most viral things they do is called “the debt free scream”, where people share their stories on his radio show after getting debt free, and just… do a victory scream, essentially. Kinda fun, not really a bad thing, but it shows how most of the people he deals with directly and the ones that make the best marketing are people with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of debt despite making very average money. Just absolutely no self-preservation instinct around available credit.

    And for these people I think his advice makes sense. Absolutely no debt, debt is the enemy, it will crush you. And stuff like how he pushes you to chase paying debt with high intensity, get multiple jobs, etc. Because otherwise it’s impossible to even manage to put money on the principle of a debt that large.

    For the average person though? His best advice is basic budgeting, focusing on paying your debts one by one so you can celebrate each victory quickly, and building an emergency fund so you don’t need to go backwards as soon as you have a car problem. Also, yeah, ditch the brand new truck, it’s burying you in debt you didn’t need.

    But absolutely, I’d highly recommend modifying his recommendations for most people, and I don’t doubt someone out there is doing a better job of teaching this stuff than Ramsey is. My advised tweaks:

    • Find a budget you can live with, paying your debts a couple months faster isn’t worth being miserable, and makes it more likely you’ll be able to stick to a budget for as long as it takes.
    • Zero-based budgeting (budgeting every dollar at the start of the month) isn’t really necessary, leaving a little loose change that you can allocate later once the month is actually happening is pretty helpful. It’s ok to shift things around so long as you aren’t spending money you don’t have.
    • Actually do keep “fun money” or “restaurant money”, so long as you’re capable of including it in the budget without hamstringing your ability to pay debt. If you’re giving more to debt than these things, then you’re probably fine.
    • Ultimately just… think for yourself, and make your own decisions, based on your own income and expenses. Ramsey is a decent, if aggressive, starting point (and again, not the best person, he seems to have lost the plot somewhere).




  • They did overhaul the controller mapping in this update, along with just about everything else, so it would be worth checking out. I really can’t emphasize enough how massive this update is, it’s like the emulator leaping from 2010 to 2024, they’ve been exceptionally active over the past 4 years.

    Aren’t there emulators for newer platforms out there now?

    And of course. I assume you’re referring to RPCS3 for PS3. PS4 is also in the early stages of being emulated, with simple games being playable.



  • Storytime! Earlier this year, I had an Amazon package stolen. We had reason to be suspicious, so we immediately contacted the landlord and within six hours we had video footage of a woman biking up to the building, taking our packages, and hurriedly leaving.

    So of course, I go to Amazon and try to report my package as stolen… which traps me for a whole hour in a loop with Amazon’s “chat support” AI, repeatedly insisting that I wait 48 hours “in case my package shows up”. I cannot explain to this thing clearly enough that, no, it’s not showing up, I literally have video evidence of it being stolen that I’m willing to send you. It literally cuts off the conversation once it gives its final “solution” and I have to restart the convo over and over.

    Takes me hours to wrench a damn phone number out of the thing, and a human being actually understands me and sends me a refund within 5 minutes.


  • For sure, valid to fear the enshittification of steam. But they aren’t killing proton. Maybe ignoring proton at worst. But Steam has profit motivations for not being reliant on Windows, which has actively been trying to supplant them with the Windows Store for years.

    As another separate, profit-motivated company, with a gaming division and a lot to gain from eating Steam’s lunch, Microsoft is not Steam’s friend. Proton is a critical bargaining tool for them, and not having to include windows licenses for devices like the Steam Deck helps their costs too.