Your article doesn't say "Larian are no longer involved with development of BG3". It in fact says they're still developing it, but won't be making BG4.
The official Larian BG3 Discord server is promoting a mod competition, and they're still adding content, bug fixes, and new features to the game as well.
I've update the link. It seems they've released a bunch of free content instead in recent patches, which contradicts what they previously said somewhat.
> Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable.
I find it really frustrating how they phrase things because there is so much BS in almost one sentence. The entire point of having a private server is so that they are no longer in control of these things.
Moreover if I am running a private server:
- It isn't their responsibility to secure players data.
- it isn't their responsibility to remove illegal content.
- it isn't their responsibility to remove "unsafe" (whatever that means) community content.
So how could they be liable?
> In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
This is pretty much disingenuous argument that "PirateSoftware" was pushing. They are pretending that a single player mode would need to be created. This isn't what is being requested.
This is often repeated but I don't believe this for a second. I have an 90s vehicle which is based on 60/70s technology. A switch for a fog light is like £10 on ebay for a replacement and I know I am not paying anywhere near cost i.e. I am being ripped off.
I'm pretty sure that simple switch is something directly in the circuit for the fog light, and there is a dedicated wire between the fog light, the switch, and the fuse box. And if its an old Jag, those wires flake out and have to be redone at great expense.
Compare this to the databus that is used in today's cars, it really isn't even a fair comparison on cost (you don't have to have 100 wires running through different places in your car, just one bus to 100 things and signal is separated from power).
> I'm pretty sure that simple switch is something directly in the circuit for the fog light, and there is a dedicated wire between the fog light, the switch, and the fuse box. And if its an old Jag, those wires flake out and have to be redone at great expense.
I don't really want to get into a big debate about this as I haven't worked on Jags, but I don't believe that replacing parts of the loom is would be that expensive. Remaking an entire loom, I will admit that would expensive as that would be a custom job with a lot of labour.
> Compare this to the databus that is used in today's cars, it really isn't even a fair comparison on cost (you don't have to have 100 wires running through different places in your car, just one bus to 100 things and signal is separated from power).
Ok fine. But the discussion was button vs touch screens and there is nothing preventing buttons being used with the newer databus design. I am pretty sure older BMWs, Mercs etc worked this way.
They can be used, they just need more complexity than a simple switch that completes a circuit, they now have tiny cpus so they can signal the bus correctly. The switch must broadcast turn thing on when the switch is set to on, and then turn thing off when the switch is set to off, all with whatever serial protocol being used (including back off and retry, etc.
..). So your input devices need to be little computers so that you can use one bus for everything, now you can see where one touch screen begins to save money.
I don't believe what you are describing is necessary. I am pretty sure you could have a module where the switches are wired normally into something and that communicates with the main bus. I am pretty sure this is how a lot of cars already work from watching people work on more modern vehicles.
In any event. I've never heard a good explanation of why I need all of this to turn the lights on or off in a car, when much simpler systems worked perfectly fine.
Many of the low-speed switches are connected to a single controller that then interfaces over LIN or CAN to the car.
Reducing the copper content of cars and reducing the size of the wiring bundles that have to pass through grommets to doors, in body channels, etc. was the main driver. Offering greater interconnectedness and (eventually) reliability was a nice side effect.
It used to be a pain in the ass to get the parking lights to flash some kind of feedback for remote locking, remote start, etc. Now, it’s two signals on the CAN bus.
> Offering greater interconnected news and (eventually) reliability was a nice side effect.
I am not sure about that. You still suffer from electronic problems due to corrosion around the plugs, duff sockets and dodgy earths as the vehicle ages.
As someone who works in building-automation controls that are based on CANbus, which is a communication network commonly used to connect various parts of cars, I can say that this is not true.
Depending on age, it’s more likely that the physical switch drives an electric relay and the relay switches the actual fog lamp current which could be 3-5amps per lamp, letting the manufacturer use a small gauge trigger wire to run to/from the dash and thicker wire only for the shorter high-current path.
You think you’re being ripped off for a £10 fog light switch on a ~30 year old car?
That sounds like an incredible bargain to me.
Why do you think you should pay near cost? What’s the incentive for all the people who had to make, test, box, pack, move, finance, unpack, inventory, pick, box, label, and send it to you? I can’t imagine the price between £10 and free that you’d think wasn’t a rip-off for a part that probably sells well under a 100 units per year worldwide.
It depends on the games you play and what you are doing. It is a mixed bag IME. If you are installing a game that is several years old it will work wonderfully. Most guides assume you have Arch Linux or are using one of the "gaming" distros like Bazzite. I use Debian (I am running Testing/Trixie RC on my main PC).
I play a lot of HellDivers 2. Despite what a lot of Linux YouTubers say. It doesn't work very well on Linux.
The recommendations I got from people was to change distro. I do other stuff on Linux. Game slows down when you need it to be running smoothly doesn't matter what resolution/settings you set.
Anything with anti-cheat probably won't work very well if at all.
I also wanted to play the old Command and Conquer games. Getting the fan made patchers (not the games itself) to run properly that fix a bunch of bugs that EA/Westwood never fixed and mod support is more difficult than I cared to bother with.
This will use gamemode to run it, give it priority, put the system in performance power mode, and will fix any pulse audio static you may be having. You can do this for any game you launch with steam, any shortcut, etc.
It's missing probably 15fps on this card between windows and Linux, and since it's above 100fps I really don't even notice.
It does seem to run a bit better under gnome with Variable Refresh Rate than KDE.
I will be honest, I just gave up. I couldn't get consistent performance on HellDivers 2. Many of the things you have mentioned I've tried and found they don't make much of a difference or made things worse.
I did get it running nice for about a day and then an update was pushed and it ran like rubbish again. The game runs smoothly when initially running the map and then massive dip in frames for several seconds. This is usually when one of the bugs is jumping at you.
This game may work better on Fedora/Bazzite or <some other distro> but I find Debian to be super reliable and don't want to switch distro. I also don't like Fedora generally as I've found it unreliable in the past. I had a look at Bazzite and I honestly just wasn't interested. This is due to it having a bunch of technologies that I have no interest in using.
There are other issues that are tangential but related issues.
e.g.
I normally play on Super HellDive with other players in a Discord VC. Discord / Pipewire seems to reset my sound for no particular reason and my Plantronics Headset Mic (good headset, not some gamer nonsense) will be not found. This requires a restart of pipewire/wireplumber and Discord (in that order). This happens often enough I have a shell script alias called "fix_discord".
I have weird audio problems on HDMI (AMD card) thanks to a regression in the kernel (Kernel 6.1 with Debian worked fine).
I could mess about with this for ages and maybe get it working or just reboot into Windows which takes me all of a minute.
It is just easier to use Windows for Gaming. Then use Linux for work stuff.
I don't want to use Fedora. Other than I've found it unreliable I switched to Debian because I was fed up of all the Window-isms/Corporate stuff in the distro that was enabled by default that I was trying to get away from.
It the same reason I don't want to use Bazzite. It misses the point of using a Linux/Unix system altogether.
I also learned a long time ago Distro Hopping doesn't actually fix your issues. You just end up either with the same issues or different ones. If I switched from Debian to Fedora, I suspect I would have many of the same issues.
e.g. If a issue is in the Linux kernel itself such as HDMI Audio on AMD cards having random noise, I fail to see how changing from one distro to another would help. Fedora might have a custom patch to fix this, however I could also take this patch and make my own kernel image (which I've done in the past btw).
The reality is that most people doing development for various project / packages that make the Linux desktop don't have the setup I have and some of the peculiarities I am running into. If I had a more standard setup, I wouldn't have an issue.
Moreover, I would be using FreeBSD/OpenBSD or some other more traditional Unix system and ditch Linux if I didn't require some Linux specific applications. I am considering moving to something like Artix / Devuan in the future if I did decide to switch.
Nvidia is the high end, AMD is the mid segment and Intel is the low end. In reality I am playing 4K on HellDivers with 50-60FPS on a 6800XT.
Traditionally the NVIDIA drivers have been more stable on Windows than the AMD drivers. I choose an AMD card because I wanted a hassle free experience on Linux (well as much as you can).
> The RTX 4090 was massive, a real heccin chonker. It was so huge in fact, that it kicked off the trend of needing support brackets to keep the GPU from sagging and straining the PCIe slot.
This isn't true. People were buying brackets with 10 series cards.
Compared to the “Magnificent Seven”, Bitcoin’s volatility has put it in the middle, while it’s performance puts it at or near the top depending on the time window.
I find it odd that someone would make a comparison between bitcoin and other financial assets, as if bitcoin was just another financial asset and its theoretical price wasn't zero... which is a pretty big market anomaly. Normally, when you find a market anomaly, you try to explain it. But these analysts, they pretend that there's no anomaly. They just don't talk about it, in the hopes that nobody will notice.
It could be compared to other assets in the asset class of assets that have no intrinsic value (e.g. other crypto-currencies). I think that would make sense.
Working in smaller tech companies with worse pay is worse than working these tech jobs.
Most of your co-workers you cannot trust to do anything e.g. Today I was investigating an issue (screen for X not updating). I open the dashboard and there was a sea of read over my console. They hadn't even checked the terminal for errors.
> Tech itself is not the issue here - tech being filled with high paying jobs where you effectively work on issues that directly damage humanity is the issue.
That is a matter of point of view. I've worked in industries that most consider amoral. I've had the most job satisfaction from working in those industries. I actually got to do interesting work. Every other job has me over-engineering basic web apps because they are a <Azure/Sitecore/AWS/Google Cloud> partner.
The worst job was working for a large charity, do you know why? They literally pissed money away on bullshit, while collecting large sums of via unpaid volunteers. That sickened me and so I left.
Yes. You can get dirt cheap mini-pcs / NUC like devices on ebay for next to nothing and they aren't too crazy on the power front.
The biggest problem for the Raspberry PI platform if you are using it as a home server or like a lite desktop is the lack of proper storage.
However I do like the pi for things where you set them up and forget about it. I run a pi-hole on an old Pi 2. However that could be run as a docker container on a small home server / NAS.
You cannot just compare raspberry pi specifically with all the slew of the random no name / ephemeral mini-pc builds, they're not the same.
I was trying to find something deemed reliable for myself (I need two: one to replace kodi, one as the home storage) and I just don't know. Some have good prices and terrifyingly bad reviews, some look decent but in-depth reviews show significant design shortcomings (eg very bad air circulation inside, 2.5G ports but one chip for this and dosk, for example.
You can compare them because they overlap in use cases especially as lite-desktop/emulation/media/home-server.
The PC ecosystem is more open so of course you are going to find lots of no name brands on amazon/ebay/ali-express or wherever you are looking. These N100/N150 piece of kit have 1000s of reviews on youtube. There are a few brands that seem dominate and seem to be reasonably well built.
A lot of the mini-pcs / nuc you find on ebay are Dell/Lenovo/HP decommissioned stuff that you can put 16/32gb of ram in and a proper NVME. To do something similar with a PI you need to buy a PI5 and some additional hardware, it about two/three times more expensive. Yes they do consume more power but typically it isn't crazy.
The ARM ecosystem isn't just RPi either. There are other manufacturers offering small credit sized arms boards but their drivers/software/firmware isn't nearly as good as the RPi.
If you want a name brand mini PC, I'll note that System76 also sells one under the name of Meerkat. And traditionally Intel sells them itself but these days the official successor is ASUS.
> The only browser with built-in tipping is the one spearheaded by a man whose other claims to fame are inventing JavaScript and wanting to outlaw my marriage, and the token it uses apparently had 80 whole sellers in the past 24 hours. Sounds like all of that is going great.
Brenden Eich's beliefs about marriage aren't relevant. It been what well over a decade since he was ousted from Mozilla? Wasn't that enough? People constantly bring this up as a reason why you shouldn't use Brave. There are valid reasons not to use Brave Browser. Brendan Eich's beliefs about marriage isn't one of them. It some tired old jab at Eich who like most older people have beliefs that are considered backwards by today's standards.
> This is starting to get away from the main thesis of Whatever but every time I hear about students coasting through school just using LLMs, I wonder what we are doing to humanity’s ability to think critically about anything. It already wasn’t great, but now we’re raising a whole generation on a machine that gives them Whatever, and they just take it. You’ve seen anecdotes of people posting comments and submitting papers and whatnot with obvious tells like “As a large language model…” in them. That means they aren’t even reading the words they claim as their own! They just produce Whatever.
People were cut and pasting Wikipedia articles into University work and doing zero effort back in the mid-2000s while I was in University. There is a deeper problem with education generally and it isn't people copying stuff with AI.
> The most obnoxious people like to talk about how Stable Diffusion is “democratizing art” and that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There is no fucking King of Art decreeing who is allowed to draw and who isn’t. You could do it. You could do it right now. But it’s hard, so you’d rather spend that time crying on Twitter about how unfair it is that learning a skill takes work and thank god the computer can give you all of the admiration with none of the effort now.
This isn't what is meant when people say this.
What people typically mean is that people can cheaply create things in the AI that match what they have in their head.
e.g.
- There are parody songs / music videos made for internet streams I watch by other fans of the show. In the past people used to cheaply copy and paste stuff into a video editor and crudely animate it and they weren't great. I literally laughed a parody song that was done like a sea shanty that mocked a well known e-celeb.
- I make cheesy YouTube Thumbnails for my videos because I have zero budget for an artist and my skills with image editing software isn't stellar. I can use the AI to generate me some of the thumbnail and the rest I can do in GIMP. I get something that looks better than if I didn't have the AI IMO. This does democratise it, because I don't have to spend literally hundreds on a graphic designer.
- AI can help with animations. A friend of mind could take a 20 FPS animation and have the AI interpolate the animations accordingly. He has told me this saves him a huge amount of time.
https://www.ign.com/articles/wizards-of-the-coast-not-to-bla...
EDIT: Updated Link. It seems they've added free patches and won't be working on BG4.