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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • Cool.

    But the pitch wasn’t “everything will be interoperable unless the company doesn’t mean it or wants to make money or we aren’t “morally aligned”, whatever that means”.

    I don’t understand how you can be a “walled garden” and still feature interoperability with a set of open source platforms under a pre-established set protocol. This is not an ethical problem or a problem of ideology, those two things are mutually exclusive.

    This also sounds a whole lot like it disproves skrlet13’s point on the heterogeneous Fedi where everything fits under different but overlapping bubbles. Seems to me you think Fedi has the one moral and ethical position on this.



  • Yeah, we’re almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you’re most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.

    I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.

    The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus… and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.

    The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There’s just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren’t are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.


  • It’s about time they ported their Deck performance viewer back to other platforms. It’s still a bit touch and go whether it picks up some things. No GPU readout under Linux, for example, as far as I can tell, at least with an Nvidia GPU.

    The DLSS stuff is interesting, but it wasn’t much of a secret before. They took the way they present it from the generally amazing Lossless Scaling and, if anything, I like that you can now compare their solution to DLSS apples-to-apples. I’m a bit confused about their graph display, though. I’m guessing the red line is supposed to be native frames and green is all frames? That’s a bit weird, since the color coding on the text is backwards from that.

    As a side note, it’s weird and has always been weird that Steam’s performance monitor has a way better time picking up apps than Nvidia’s on Windows. You’d think owning the drivers would give you the edge, but nope.


  • Yeah, that’s exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It’s just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you’re not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.

    And that’s alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we’re on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it’s just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their “homelab” and pretend they’re doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.








  • I mean, those work fine and are fast. You mean we’ll get those for cheap.

    In any case, the image is about physical dimensions, and SD cards are tiny! Considering we’re comparing to a 40 MB mechanical drive, I’m gonna say the comparison is valid and they aren’t even near the bottom of the specs table.

    Of course people like it when ALL the specs get better in these things, but that’s because people like simple things more than true things.



  • 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.


  • OK, let me fix that for you permanently.

    This is Retroachievements.org.

    Not only does it do what it says on the tin, but it’s, for my money, the best discoverability tool out there for old games. The most obvious way to use it for that is to check the new games they’ve added achievements to, but they also have book club-style events (they’re revisiting F1 games this month to go with the movie currently in theatres), challenges, seasonal achievements, leaderboards and all sorts of the types of metagaming stats tools you’ve seen in modern platforms to point you in the rigth direction.

    You can start by selecting “all games” and sorting them all by players to see what’s popular. Or, hell, reverse sort by players and see what weird crap is in there. Once you start down that rabbit hole you’re more likely to have too much in your retro backlog than you are to ask this question again.