Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: sarmadThe solution to the ethical dilemma should come from politicians, but they are unfortunately too corrupt to do the right thing.

Why should ethics be the responsibility of government? That just brings more "nanny state" interference in everyone's lives. Ethics should be personal and exercised on the individual level.

I'm sorry, that's nonsense. A good deal of what government is all about has always been regulating unethical behaviour, in the interests of the community, because unethical behaviour damages the common good, and promoting the common good is what government is for. We're just so used to certain kinds of laws around ethical behaviour that we forget that's what they are. So for instance, laws against fraud are laws about ethical behaviour. Contract laws are laws about ethical behaviour. Arguably practically every law . . . murder, rape, theft, on and on . . . is a law about ethical behaviour. One could argue that laws about traffic aren't about ethics . . . but in a way even they are if you think the laws are rules to try to keep drivers and pedestrians safe, violating them makes people less safe, and making people less safe is an unethical thing to do.

In any case, where exactly has decades of whinging about the "nanny state" and getting rid of it wherever possible brought the United States? The US was a better place to live when it had more "nanny state" and that's no co-incidence. So was Canada, so was Britain.

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Quoting: sarmadWhile I agree there is a lot of immorality in AI, avoiding it just puts you at a disadvantage since everyone is using it.

That does not follow. For one thing, lots of potential buyers don't like AI, so if you don't avoid it, you may lose sales. For another, many applications of AI don't actually give advantage in the end, even if it seems like they ought to. Just because something is unethical does not necessarily mean that it is the best self-interested play. Lots of things are both unethical and stupid things to do.

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Quoting: rustynail

Quoting: sarmadThe snap file format and client side tools are completely open source. What's proprietary is the backend, i.e snapcraft.io, which is fine.

Doesn't that kinda mean that snap being open source is pointless to a large extent? It's like an open source client for a proprietary messaging service

Not entirely. If the file format is open source, then other backends could be written and they would interoperate with the client side tools (you might have to change a little bit of stuff in those tools that currently just point to Canonical's back end, but presumably that part would be trivial). It's certainly not ideal though.

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Quoting: Numerfolt

Quoting: AsciiWolfAnd Mastodon is sadly even more toxic than X/Twitter.

Oh, that's interesting, I haven't encounterd much toxicity on Mastodon so far 🤔

Isn't Mastodon designed to be sort of . . . patchy? Different sub-communities could be very different.

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Quoting: AsciiWolf

Quoting: RedjeAnd I don’t really get the hype for flatpak.

and actually makes desktop Linux usable even for regular, non-technical users.

Flatpak has uses, some of the stuff you said is true, but this is ridiculous. I am a regular, non-technical user. I use Mint, it's the most user-friendly distro around. It is possible to install Flatpaks in Mint, and I have installed a couple, but not enough to make a noticeable difference to how usable my desktop is. Flatpaks are some icing on one or two slices of the cake for "regular, non-technical users".

Being non-technical does not mean I can't recognize a statement that completely contradicts the reality of my experience when I see one.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: Tethys84Except nobody will be able to afford the Steam Machine. I would be surprised if Valve didn't indefinitely delay or even eventually cancel it because of the skyrocketing prices on RAM alone.

It depends. If they made a fixed price contract early enough, they might be able to offer their boxes cheap.

Yeah. After all, this is not a cost of production problem, it is a "what the traffic will bear" supply and demand problem. So if some manufacturer has a contract to deliver hardware for $X, they will still make money doing that, just not as much money as they think they can bilk us for.

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Quoting: LinuxerSteam snap works greatt including all the goodies inside fo gamer by default too but the flatpak of Steam is still a mess cos of access restrictions etc and cant be recommended just sayin

My distro packages Steam, so it's kind of a non-issue. IMO Flatpak is for things the distro isn't already packaging and for commercial things the distro can't package. And Snap is, um, for if you're using Ubuntu I guess.

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Quoting: fabertawe

Quoting: dannielloAnd in the near future - Steam Pocket. The first true Linux phone with decent performance! (of course advertised as only for gaming, so Google should be OK with it... In the same sense like Steam Machine is just Linux PC so Sony and Microsoft also should be OK with it;)

That's already available, it's called the FuriPhone <https://furilabs.com/>.

The . . . Furry Phone?

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Surely no one would ever do that, especially not one of the most ubiquitous high-fidelity game engines out there in their widely-adopted ray-traced global illumination solution...

That's some great snark there.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: Marlockthe percentage of linux machines with Deck-exclusive GPUs is now smaller (iirc it reached ~50% for a while) so linux growth is now driven by actual linux distros installed on PCs, laptops, etc, not a niche console that happens to have linux in it but you might never realize it, if seen as just a console

In case you'd like a graph:

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I'm going to hazard a guess that in Feb 2025, the Steam Survey showed a great big surge in Simplified Chinese. 😁

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