I’m constantly struck by the imagery of the giant warrior from Nausicaa. There is a timeline or a reality where this worked, but they couldn’t help themselves. They woke the beast up the second it was even halfway possible and now it’s tearing itself apart in self-destructive blasts because the whole thing was under-cooked (and probably the completely wrong direction to begin with).

If there’s any consolation here it’s that hopefully this has soured enough people on the idea that a second effort won’t even get off the ground. I hope …

There’s never going to be a “Year of the Linux Desktop” where there’s some critical inflection point like a lot of people think. But Microsoft has fucked up here in assuming that consumer trust is a linear relationship and it’s not. They broke the trust, the cracks are there, and users will keep bleeding. They’ll keep a certain percentage of users through apathy or complacency, but the momentum is flowing in reverse now.

What it takes for any one person to cross over is going to look different, whether that’s Linux getting up to speed on a feature they were looking for or Microsoft crossing yet another unacceptable threshold, but despite all my anger and personal grievances aside, I truly believe Microsoft as a company is incapable of correcting this problem.

Their goals are entirely misaligned, they believe they can dictate the market at the consumer and their revenue is dependent on that. They’re bleeding more money and talent through this AI debacle and that’s making them even less capable of facing and addressing the issues. Unfortunately I don’t think they’ll ever fully implode, but just like Chrome eventually ate IE’s market share and now won’t go away, so it will be with Linux.

Bonus points: I’m calling it, I truly do believe that in ~5 years or so Windows will cease to be its own operating system and start shifting towards a Linux distro with a bespoke DE (again, see Chrome/Edge). They don’t want to have to keep maintaining an OS like this and one of the biggest arguments for doing so has been the backwards compatibility, but everything is cloud and SaaS now and they want to push more business customers in that direction anyway. Server will be a thorn in their side for awhile, but consumer facing Windows distro will be the perfect testing ground. Mark it, ~5 years … EEE

Benn Jordan is a gem, do yourself a favor and just go watch all his stuff.

His latest on robot dogs is amazingly well-executed and researched with terrifying conclusions.

Yeah, nothing will help attract players like diluting any weak identity it already had with an open deluge of metaverse slop. Everything will be everything. It’s not enough to have a product anymore, it has to be a whole ecosystem. God forbid a single bloody dollar slip through your grasp.

What does end-to-end encryption even accomplish when you’re just feeding the information into an obscured, blackbox AI on the other end?

Like yes, I understand the importance of E2EE, I’m just making a point, it’s all rather ridiculous.

I sympathize, even just from the trailer I did have expectations and there was a bit of friction for the first hour or two as I had to work past them and meet the game where it’s at. As someone very familiar with all of the influences it draws from, this can be kinda difficult.

For the right person, this is going to be a GotY candidate.

The discourse around this one is going to be brutal already I can tell. As you say, it really is just a matter of taste and at the end of the day there’s no arguing that if this isn’t your kind of thing it’s not going to click. But it does frustrate me some already seeing people so confidently assert their taste as “simply bad game design”. So it goes, I can only argue on the internet so much, but I do want Yacht Club to do well and I want the game to find its audience without being turned off by disingenuous reviews. After Shovel Knight and this, I can see they have serious chops and I’m praying they stick around long enough to get another few games out before the industry eats them alive T_T

The game is absolutely fantastic, I plan to do a writeup here once I’ve progressed through a bit more of the game. I’m 14 hours in and partway through the 3rd of 7(?) main dungeons, largely because I’ve been picking every last scrap of meat off the bones. If I had to use one word to describe the game it would be dense. I didn’t play the demo, so I was a bit surprised to find it has less in common with Link’s Awakening and Castlevania than you might think, though it’s certainly wearing their skin. I’d call it Saturday morning cartoon Bloodborne with a heaping helping of adorable, furry characters and I mean that all 💯 positively.

Unlike Link’s Awakening, progression isn’t tied to finding items in dungeons. A lot of traversal is tied to subweapons you find unceremoniously strewn about the world that opens things up for you and you can really go most anywhere you want if you can figure it out. Instead of simply navigating each screen there are secrets and bones tucked in almost every corner encouraging you to observe, explore, and platform every inch. Dense.

There’s already discourse about the difficulty and if I give one concession, it’s that the early game is perhaps a bit “overtuned” like Silksong was, partially because the early game power curve is just rough when you don’t have a lot of stats or options to work with and part of it is maybe spending ~6 years in the oven. Stick with it, it’s worth it. Go slow, be deliberate, and I promise you losing your bones is not that big of a deal. Grinding is actually fairly easy and painless once you figure things out and if you decide to go that route (grinding is not necessary but you can absolutely do it if you want to accrue an early edge with a lot of items). Other than that, use the build in modifiers. They disable achievements, but also some of those achievements are just ass anyways and there’s no way I’m 100%ing this game (beat the game without ever entering the underlab, are you for serious?!)

Starter tips:

1. The game moves fast in the beginning and doesn’t run you through a tutorial but it WILL lead you into most things if you give it a chance, just pay attention and try everything on everything.
2. There’s a manual in the start menu! It’s cute and informative, read it, it actually contains helpful info
3. The game does a great job of pointing you down the optimal, beginner’s path if you read the newspapers, listen to the NPCs, and just pay attention to clues. Knowing where to go is half the battle, but you can always explore and push into other places early and get some nice treats for it. Be creative, you’ll be surprised the places you can go

Ultimately, this is a game for sickos. If you are a sicko, especially a Fromsoft sicko, then this is a no-brainer.

I go back and forth with Metal Slug. 3 is absolutely peak, but sometimes it’s just too much, you know? 2/X is a bit more of a focused, compact adventure and I really like it for that.

Commercial for AI: Now you can order a cake while planning your child’s birthday and sending an email to your boss while printing the tickets for your trip to Italy!

My unemployed ass, sitting around in boxers eating cereal at 10PM watching cartoons from the 90’s: Sweet, this is gonna change my life!

Nah, I’m another nano guy. You can set up syntax highlighting for it you know?

It’s not that any one is better than the other, it’s up to your use cases. I’ve learned vim a few times in my life already (and mostly just know the hjkl bindings from playing tons of terminal roguelikes) but it always decays because I don’t put the knowledge to use. Because it just doesn’t fit my use case.

I write small scripts, some Python and stuff and I’ll usually use PyCharm to debug that these days. So nano is relegated to the small tasks like config editing or quick, in place fixes to scripts.

The thing about this though, is that it’s not a new problem at all. LLMs didn’t start to get good enough in the early 20’s and only then did they come up with this idea. I worked for a company out near Seattle back in ~2014 that was already well into trying to tackle this problem.

They ran callcenters with a variety of contracts for different companies and took calls, chats, and emails. The main business model wasn’t the centers themselves but the information gathered by the ticketing system to help build tools like this.

Personally, with that insight and assuming surely there must’ve been other companies moving along that path, I find it quite telling that they still haven’t sufficiently stepped up to the role. There are some hard limits on cost and hallucinations that I think will ultimately fail to deliver a truly long-term, viable product. When you see they can’t maintain the veneer on even that use case, you’ll know the bubble has to be close to popping.

Of course no one can really say for sure, we’ve all been predicting it for some time and when there’s this much money invested they’ll protect that reality ferociously, so who really fucking knows. But still …

Anyone familiar with this, would you recommend the original here or the DS one? It’s been sitting on my list for awhile now, too …

I appreciate your cynicism, shit sucks.

But I do choose to see this as a good sign; that they were pressured into taking even this much action when they could’ve just continued doing nothing and it would’ve been easier and probably less controversial. I hope it amounts to something, but tides are shifting even on the business end.

I consider myself pretty computer savvy but phones have always pissed me off. I got a Galaxy S22 Ultra because I wanted stylus and high refresh rate, but I consistently regret giving Samsung my business.

I have the SM-S908U1, what are realistically my best options here? I can’t really afford an upgrade right now.

Seager explained in this morning’s update while there won’t be a “global kill switch” for AI features on Ubuntu, their plan is to deliver all the AI features via Snap packages. So removing AI features on Ubuntu will come down to removing Snaps.

IMHO opt-in means the snaps wouldn’t even be on the system unless you had already opted in, but I was never going to use Ubuntu anyways so what does it matter.

But imagine if you could just like, ask your phone to set an alarm! And then it would do it!

… what do you mean we’ve already had that tech for a decade?

I was thinking more Jokerz, but honestly ICP is cool by me. Not really my thing, but they’ve always been anti-fash and after Violent J’s daughter got into the furry fandom and formed an alliance, they’re solid in my book.

Super Mario 3D World is a fascinating game when you think about it.

When Mario moved to 3D, it simply wasn’t practical to make a lot of course-based levels like this, you can understand how intense that work would be. That’s what necessitated the move to the more open, star-based missions.

It’s only recently that the skill and tooling has allowed for this and 3D World/Land are the expression of that: an evolution of the Mario 3/World formula.

Personally it’s one of my favorites, I should go back and play it again.

Your point is well-taken, but this is also exactly why AI reliance is dangerous. Anyone who sees this should realize the precarity of relying on products that can just be locked away from you.

Finally! As someone who has played the only(?) available English translation of “I am an Air Traffic Controller: Airport Hero” on the 3DS, my time has COME!

What’s that? Drug test? … Nevermind.

EDIT: But like seriously, are there any other English translations than the Osaka-KIX version? It’s all I managed to find scraping about the internet, I’d love if there was a fan translation of some of those old GBA versions with the cute, crunchy pixel work.