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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • Just so we’re clear, the first pass of localization of every game you’ve played in the past decade has been machine-generated.

    Which is not to say the final product was, people would then go over the whole text database and change it as needed, but it’s been frequent practice for a while for things like subtitles and translations to start from a machine generated first draft, not just in videogames but in media in general. People are turning around 24h localization for TV in some places, it’s pretty nuts.

    Machine generated voices are also very standard as placeholders. I’m… kinda surprised nobody has slipped up on that post-AI panic, although I guess historically nobody noticed when you didn’t clean up a machine-translated subtitle, but people got good at ensuring all your VO lines got VOd because you definitely notice those.

    As with a lot of the rest of the AI panic, I’m confused about the boundaries here. I mean, Google Translate has used machine learning for a long time, as have most machine translation engines. The robot voices that were used as placeholders up until a few years ago would probably be fine if one slipped up, but newer games often use very natural-sounding placeholders, so if one of those slips I imagine it’d be a bit of drama.

    I guess I don’t know what “AI generated” means anymore.

    I haven’t bumped into the offending text in the game (yet), but I’m playing it in English, so I guess I wouldn’t have anyway? Neither the article nor the disclosure are very clear.

    That said, the game is pretty good, if anybody cares.





  • Yeeeeah, I have less of a problem for that, because… well yeah, people host stuff for you all the time, right? Any time you’re a client the host is someone else. Self-hosting makes some sense for services where you’re both the host and the client.

    Technically you’re not self hosting anything for your family in that case, you’re just… hosting it, but I can live with it.

    I do think this would all go down easier if we had a nice marketable name for it. I don’t know, power-internetting, or “the information superdriveway”. This was all easier in the 90s, I guess is what I’m accidentally saying.


  • This is a me thing and not related to this video specifically, but I absolutely hate that we’ve settled on “homelab” as a term for “I have software in some computer I expose to my home network”.

    It makes sense if you are also a system administrator of an online service and you’re testing stuff before you deploy it, but a home server isn’t a “lab” for anything, it’s the final server you’re using and don’t plan to do anything else with. Your kitchen isn’t a “test kitchen” just because you’re serving food to your family.

    Sorry, pet peeve over. The video is actually ok.


  • Dude I have never been or wanted to be a “seasoned senior software engineer”. I mean, respect to them, can’t get things going without them, but I don’t think of that as an aspirational badge of honor thing.

    Also, I’m shocked to find I’ve been mirroring your “rethorical approach”. You really do overestimate how much of your posts I’ve been reading, because I could not tell you what that is. Is the “approach” to wonder if your callousness comes from not having first hand experience? Because let me tell you, I got there all on my own.

    Anyway, it’s good that we both find each other’s opinion entirely irrelevant, because I sure have better things to do and not enough self-control to do them instead of this. Toodles indeed.


  • And nothing has replaced it.

    That’s what I was saying, it’s all shaky right now. Wilds runs about as well on both, but it’s noticeably less stuttery for me under Linux. Other stuff, particularly when leaning hard into Nvidia features, is either performing poorly or has features disabled on Linux. Plus the compatibility issues.

    There is just no one-size-fits-all solution on PCs thede days, even before you start considering the weirdness of running the same games in ridiculous 1000W powerhouses and 15W handhelds at the same time.

    PC gaming has become a LOT less plug-and-play this last decade, and I don’t know that it’ll go back to where it was any time soon.



  • That depends. In this case, where the Lenovo drivers are clearly outdated and kinda broken, definitely they’re the bottleneck for at least some games. That much they’ve shown, by installing newer drivers and showing a massive performance upgrade.

    Although I’d caveat that by saying that their flashier results with big updates across OSs and driver variants are running at outright unplayable settings. They are benchmarking on settings resulting on framerates in the teens. When they say they saw 12% performance increases on the newer drivers they mean going from 14 to 16 fps in some cases.

    Benchmarking properly is hard, I guess is my point.


  • Yeeeah, you haven’t worked in gaming at all, have you?

    I mean, I believe that you’ve been paid to code at some point and I’m hoping you’re not just being a dick on the Internet for sport, but man, all these I’m-such-a-competent-software-engineer rants are not giving you the authority brownie points you think they are.

    Whatever, if you know you know. I’m not interested. Just… in the off-chance anybody here reads this far down this thread, couple of things: one, stop it, what are you doing. Two, this is not what a person that knows what they’re talking about sounds like. He’ll try to tell you it is, but it is really not.



  • As of right now, both models of the Go S listed on Lenovo’s website have 32 GB of RAM (screenshotted below, if the weird screenshot functionality here works). So no, you’re wrong here. The version with 16 GB is the Go 1. If there is a 16 gig SKU of the Go S, which there may be, they currently don’t have it listed.

    Memory size requirements depend on what you’re trying to run. Easier to run stuff will run on everything, but from hands-on experience I assure you a bunch of newer games struggle with the default allocation of 4 gigs of VRAM and can use the extra RAM. You can still give 8 gigs to the GPU with 16 but then you’re a lot more likely to start struggling with system RAM. If these AMD APUs worked like an Apple chip and could dynamically allocate RAM that wouldn’t be such a pain, but at the moment you need a reboot to change this even on current-gen hardware, so it’s easier to have a larger pool and give the GPU a little too much.

    The amount of CUs and the VRAM aren’t necessarily related. Even with larger RAM allocations and weaker GPUs you can find yourself in the wrong setup, which is annoying. And it’s not just amount of RAM, these shared architectures can struggle with bandwidth as well, so speed can matter (although it’s more giving you more or smoother FPS and the less the fall-off-a-cliff unplayable mess you get if the game is entirely out of RAM budget). That’s also why I suspect being lighter on memory and perhaps having a better default setup may be a part of why SteamOS performance is disproportionally better on heavier scenarios compared to what you see on desktop PCs. I can’t be sure, though.

    This comes from me messing around with a literal handful of PC handhelds on Windows, SteamOS and Bazzite. I’m not guessing, I’m telling you what happened during hands-on testing.


  • Well, you know, Europe can’t just take every refugee from an underdeveloped country that just wants to migrate for economic reasons. There needs to be some border control for these people, otherwise it won’t be sustainable.

    Nah, I’m kidding, it’s all racism, if you’re an American it’s probably fine.

    Well, I’m kinda kidding there, too, it’s still a ton of work and paperwork to get a proper visa that allows work and permanent residency, but it IS much, much easier if you’re a relatively affluent American.


  • You are factually wrong about that. A whole bunch of running an online game is dependent on the platform, depending on how you’re running it.

    If you built a game without cross-play and are relying on the first party for some of the online functionality, then making it work outside of it is extra effort. And even if that third party service isn’t Xbox or Steam it is very likely to be a third party service like Pragma or whatever, so it’s still something you’d have to replace.

    So no, most of your Xbox games won’t work if you remove all traces of Xbox Live. That’s not how this works. And if your answer for future games is for it to be illegal to buy third party networking tools then your plan isn’t going to work, either.

    But also, it’s not what’s being proposed in the first place. This Ross guy even assumes it won’t work like that explicitly. His argument is that third party providers would change to comply. Which… maybe? But then you’re just moving the problem around. How would they change to comply? Who handles their costs when a client drops support? That’s not how any of this works, their services aren’t free for a reason, you can’t just have them continue to provide them for free to every client by law.





  • Antivirus programs? When was the last time you tried Windows, the mid-00s?

    Anyway, it’s not random print services causing CPU overhead, that’s old timey stuff. In this case it’s being RAM heavy in a RAM-limited scenario and, from their testing, Lenovo being really terrible at keeping their AMD Windows drivers updated. As part of the test they manually switched to an ASUS version of newer AMD drivers and saw significant boosts in some games.

    Modern graphics drivers are a mess of per-game features and optimizations. Different manufacturers keeping things at different levels of currency is a nontrivial issue and why some of this benchmarking is hard and throwing five random games at the problem doesn’t fully answer the question.