Quoting: dziadulewicz

Quoting: whizsedon't buy it and leave it."

What does this mean? :huh:

It means if you buy from a browser or something rather than from inside Steam, and you want your purchase to count as a Linux purchase, then play it some on Linux within two weeks of buying it; do not leave it unplayed for two weeks plus.

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Quoting: TcheySeems like so many other "game changing" keyboards.

A touchpad for your palm is like a game changing keyboard?

They're not saying the keyboard is game changing, they're saying the separate thing, sold separately, under the keyboard is game changing. I'm skeptical, but it's a different claim.

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Quoting: eldarion

Quoting: HoriBy that logic, games played on the monitor/TV are not worth it either when compared to VR.

Games that were made with VR in mind are indeed best played with a VR set. Not exactly a good analogy there. ;)

I understand you. For each his own. If you are ok to pay 60 bucks on a game to play it while you are pooping, it's fine. That's not a thing I would do, because like a good movie is an experience to be savored, or a good wine, the same applies to a good game. But that is my take on it.

Yes, well. If the North American market were made of 400 million of me, there would be no such thing as, for instance, the NFL. But I understand it's fairly popular.

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Quoting: anewson

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: anewsonAcemoglu is the world's greatest political economist (among other things).

Heh. Well, if he has an ideology different from mine, he can't be the world's greatest! :grin:

The Guns, Germs and Steel geographic interpretation is not a hill I'm gonna die on, although I'd want to see the actual arguments for what's wrong with it. Certainly I've seen some more specific things Diamond was seriously wrong about. And I'm definitely seeing many modern Western institutions becoming dysfunctional in ways they weren't so much 50 years ago, and making the society work poorly, so I'm not going to claim there's no such thing as a cultural or institutional factor.

But it's all very vague at best. Western Europe suddenly became the big enchilada a few hundred years ago; does that mean Western European institutions were the best? Well . . . except Western Europe was a cultural and technological backwater for hundreds of years before that; does that mean Western European institutions were the worst? Somebody flipped a switch somewhere in the 1400s or so and Europe went from having an ineffective culture and lousy institutions to suddenly having really good ones? Colonizing the heck out of various places was all about institutional superiority and had nothing to do with having developed one or two particular technologies, such as gunpowder?

And it's going to be a massive pain teasing out the reality, in part because of human psychology. I'm thinking of the experiment these guys ran with Monopoly, where they would have two people play and they'd give one guy three times as much money to start, give them extra money when they passed Go, and let them roll three dice while the other guy rolled one. Obviously, the one with the advantage would win. But two things showed up: First, the one with the advantage would become more aggressive, ruder, change their body language to take up more space and such. Second, they would generally tell themselves that they won because of skill, superior play, not because they were given an advantage. Even though objectively, that was obviously rubbish. So I don't have a ton of expectations of objectivity from scholars figuring out the cultural factors that lead to victory. It'll be "The Mismeasure of Man" all over again, except at a cultural rather than individual level.

I didn't know that experiment but it sounds great, I'm going to take a look for it. Another example along the same lines is the "Dictator game" - there are two players, one player is given X dollars and asked to propose a share (aX, (1-a)X) to give to the second player; if the second player rejects the offer then both players get nothing, if the second player accepts then the money is split and the game ends. "Rationally," the second player should accept any amount of money because any strictly positive amount is better than getting nothing, but of course that's not what happens; there are strong cultural norms of fairness. Anyway it's wrong to dismiss all the good work that goes into figuring out how culture matters, but I'm just very cautious about leaning on it.

As for evidence on institutions vs geography, it's really quite a long literature in development. I'll reveal my bias here and link an article that my academic supervisor coauthored: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=m9VHPscAAAAJ&citation_for_view=m9VHPscAAAAJ:hFOr9nPyWt4C [External Link]

Wait, that article by your supervisor is about institutions being determinants of prosperity in modern world economics?! The other contender being . . . geography?! This is a totally different kettle of fish from questions of how societies developed over the long term, especially in ancient times when different parts of the world could be treated as more or less separate.

I notice in the blurb the article mentions and discounts trade . . . in a weird surfacey way I suppose that's plausible, like if you look at how much $ of goods go one way, how much $ of goods go another, and the difference is small. But does your supervisor look at capital flows, and investment and ownership and debt and interest? Does he look at the clever internal pricing techniques of transnational corporations?

Prosperity in large portions of the globe is determined by power and imperialism, whether it's on the "being looted" side or the "receiving the loot" side. To the extent that institutions are involved, it's more that we don't tolerate certain institutions developing in countries we insist stay undeveloped. So for instance, if you look at IMF and World Bank loans, they regularly insist as preconditions of the loans that the borrowing countries destroy social safety nets, healthcare systems and so forth, privatize and allow foreign ownership of various state possessions and so on . . . in short, get rid of prosperity-producing institutions. So there may be some systematic variation in institutions, but that's not an explanation, it's just a dependent variable.

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Quoting: F.UltraNot only does the closed source of Windows help it in any way possible, we can also see that Epic is lying out their teeth, there is no need for cheaters to force Fortnite to work on the Steam Deck in order to cheat, they can cheat right now using Windows

Amusingly, since these are Windows programs, and since the Wine people probably have never really spent any time making sure they work on Wine (I mean, correct me if I'm wrong here, just an assumption), there is a good chance these cheat programs won't work well, or perhaps at all, over Proton. Which would mean that cheating would, for the present at least, actually be harder on the Steam Deck, whether EAC worked worth a damn on it or not.

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Quoting: F.UltraSo did a quick google (since Fortnite is not a game that I have ever played, and since I don't use cheats) and the first response was to https://www.iwantcheats.net/fortnite-hacks-cheats-glitches-aimbot/ [External Link] which have a long list of cheats for Fortnite, that works on Windows 10 and Windows 11.

The cheats are sold for money so there are monetary incentives to break EAC which points back to my earlier post that Windows is open source if you are a hacker. Not only does the closed source of Windows help it in any way possible, we can also see that Epic is lying out their teeth, there is no need for cheaters to force Fortnite to work on the Steam Deck in order to cheat, they can cheat right now using Windows (and they also carry cheats for consoles).

EAC only keeps out the amateurs, and the amateurs wouldn't know where to begin to create Linux kernel drivers in the first place either so this is all moot.

About what I figured.
And OK, Sweeney can't really admit that EAC basically just doesn't work on Fortnite against anyone capable of googling and willing to pay for some cheat software. So he kind of had to tell some kind of lie.

But if he was going to lie about it, he could just as easily have lyingly claimed that it works great on Windows and would work great on Proton as well and enabled it for Fortnite. Or he could have told technically the truth, and claimed it would work "just as well" on Proton (which is to say, mostly not at all) and enabled it. But instead he chose to tell a different lie, that it works very well on Windows but would not on Proton, so he could justify not enabling it.

Enabling EAC on Proton for Fortnite would surely have resulted in some non-zero number of sales. And, showing lack of confidence in his EAC product may not have a huge impact, but it's certainly not going to help sales. So this lie is not one told for the simple immediate benefit of making a few dollars; it actually loses a little. The only plausible motivation, then, is he's trying to nobble the Steam Deck to hurt Valve, but trying to do it in such a way that he isn't just coming out and saying "We're going to block the Steam Deck from using our products because we hate Valve". I find it interesting that even some people here are falling for it.

I might be more shy of calling him a liar if it weren't for the "20-30%" comment made at the same time, which is a simple, black-and-white, direct, amazingly easily provable lie. If someone's willing to say something like that, I find it hard to give them the benefit of the doubt.

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I have a question slightly to the side of the discussion so far:
OK, so Fortnite is a ridiculously popular game. But is it the kind of game people would be likely to play on a thing like a Steam Deck?

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: damarrinHe doesn’t have to support all the various kernel configs, just the official SD one. Isn’t that what the chain of trust is for? Detect signed software and work, don’t and don’t.

in that case, fortinite would be an steamdeck exclusive in the context of linux...

Very true. You know, as someone whose only interest in Fortnite is strategic (lots of people would want it who would be buying a Steam Deck, so it would be good if the Steam Deck allowed it to be played, if I want the Steam Deck to be a success) it hadn't even occurred to me that actual existing Linux users might want to, like, play the game, and so there would be a downside if a solution didn't allow that.

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Quoting: rustybroomhandle

With regard to anti-cheat on the Linux platform supporting custom kernels and the threat model to a game of Fortnite's size, YES THAT'S EXACTLY RIGHT!

but the market for non-Steam-hosted games on limited availability Steam Deck hardware is how big exactly?

Oh dear, that paradox again. He's worried about a big influx of cheaters from a negligibly small market?

Lots of cheating or tiny market. You can't use both excuses at the same time.

Technically, I think you can. Consider:
He said that on very big games, it's not just that there are more cheaters because the same proportion of cheaters means a larger absolute number. What he said was, that there is more motivation to cheat--the stakes and payoffs are higher. What he seemed to be claiming is, on very large games, the existence of a semiprofessional category of cheaters.
Thus, if cheating were easier on the Steam Deck, in theory such semiprofessional cheaters might buy Steam Decks just to use them to cheat. Or just put a Linux partition on their hard drive and use it mainly for cheating on Fortnite.

So it's not actually a logical inconsistency. I still don't think it's true, though. In real life, I'm pretty sure such semiprofessional cheaters have no real problem cheating anyway, so they wouldn't need to buy a Steam Deck to do it. But, um, maybe hemi-semi-demi-professional cheaters would exist, just not quite good enough to cheat without a Steam Deck, but good enough to do it with? I don't find that amazingly plausible. And I'd be willing to bet most of these semiprofessional cheaters don't do it with their own skill, they do it with software that they get on whatever the modern equivalent of warez sites are. And that software is all written on and for Windows, partly because it's the main platform, and partly because if Linux people want to get fame for writing software, they contribute to an open source project. There have never really been a lot of Warez D00dz on Linux for just that reason--there's better/cooler stuff to do.

And from some of the comments here from people who know far more about such things than I am ever likely to, it kinda sounds like the whole "anti-cheat without kernel access will work bad" isn't really particularly true in the first place. Although, you know, maybe he believes it, or maybe it's true if your programmers are mediocre, and maybe that's the kind of programmers who write things like Easy Anti-Cheat.

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Quoting: TermyOn the one hand, Fortnite isn't big loss. On the other hand - spreading such fear is just bullshit. The same bullshit as the claim they would have to give valve 20-30% - it's not apple, if you have your own payment option ingame, 0% of that goes to valve (if i'm not completely mistaken).

It's always the same with Tim's tweets: best to ignore them as 99% is either useless bullshit or fearmongering bullshit...

Oh, right, I hadn't even spotted that. Fortnite is free to play, so Sweeney is saying he'd be happy to have Fortnite on Steam if he didn't have to pay 20% of zero! What a lying sack of . . .

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