The price tag doesn't concern me all that much, but I won't understand for the life of me why someone would put Win 11 on a handheld.

Waiting for Steam Deck 2. In the meantime, the 1 will serve me nicely.

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It's so funny how the gaming industry goes "Nah, it can't be done." and then the community gets it done, under much harder circumstances (the devs would not have had to re-implement the server from scratch).

Shows how full of bs they are.

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The law has been passed by the Torries.

Yes. And the current not-Tory government had every chance on earth to let this law die in legislature. They didn't. The problem with the UK is that their last head of government who wasn't a complete idiot was named Winston Churchill.

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Better than having show ID to some shady online service that might or might not lose your data, sell it, or keep it forever.

But geesh, remember when we used to look down on certain non-Western countries with intrusive mass-surveillance programs, and called them "unfree"?

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I know that HK is popular, but people behave like Star Citizen would launch next week. oO

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Wow, German words can get REALLY long...

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@R Daneel Olivaw:

There are many people believing (or hoping?) AI is the next dotcom bubble waiting to burst. Well, maybe there is indeed no sane reason why NVidia should be worth four trillion dollars. But there is a huge difference between then and now. Most relevant AI companies are established for decades and are profitable, with or without AI. AI is just another new product for them. The dotcom implosion was nothing like that. It was caused by people shoveling billions at more or less shady startup companies that had absolute nothing to show other than a vague business plans that required at least nine planets to randomly align to work out. Most of them never created a marketable product. Most of them never showed a dime of profit. Of course that had to eventually blow, once people realized they might as well burn their money.

I really don't believe AI will fade. But even if it does, Meta will still be there. So will Google and Microsoft. And NVidia still has a monopoly on gaming GPUs. Maybe "Open"AI wouldn't survive that, but they're not even publicly traded, so no bubble waiting to burst here.

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Hot take coming up, putting on the flame-proof armor.

First thing - at least they were honest. You can't really say they weren't. If people dislike AI use, they can make a conscious decision not to buy that game. As is proper. I have boycotted games for personal reasons, too.

In the end, this debate is way more heated than it should be. Like using the word "stolen" in the context of AI training, when nothing ever gets stolen anywhere in the process. No trace of source material is ever remaining in the trained model, and people know that. As of today. the legality of using copyrighted material is disputed and there are no laws in effect in any jurisdiction I'd know of that would explicitly ban AI training with copyrighted material. It is explicitly allowed in same places and for some purposes, even. So far, every single lawsuit filed against use of copyrighted material in AI training has been struck down. That leaves ethical considerations, but ethics are the most subjective thing known to mankind, and people will have differing views on what's ethical and what's not. Throwing around insults, death threats and charged phrases like "it's theft!" will not help in finding a constructive solution.

Compensation of creators is something that needs and probably will be resolved in the near future. Personally I'd love providers of commercial (not open source!) AI models to have to pay a share of their revenue to fund compensation payments towards creators. The idea of having to seek permission for every single piece used in training is pretty impractical, at least. But that's just my opinion.

But some of the argument reminds me how people went ballistic over how pocket calculators would make people dumber at math, or how Photoshop would kill all art. People just hate change, particularly when they feel threatened by it. AI is a tool, nothing more, nothing less. It can make games better if used right, just like Photoshop can be used to enhance images with tools creators didn't have at their disposal prior to its existence. Sure, AI also has the potential to produce a lot of unimaginative slop, but it's not that Steam wasn't getting flooded in low-effort garbage prior to AI.

Particularly looking at small-budget or solo game projects, AI use can make projects possible that otherwise never would get realized. How many artists are there who can't code, but can't afford hiring a coder? Or how many coders can't do art and can't afford hiring an artist? Maybe this writer has an awesome story in mind, but can't paint the pictures for that visual novel, and doesn't want to take the financial risk that comes with sourcing it out? These projects normally would never have gotten done. Now they can. People can make their dream game, and AI can help them with the skills they don't have. I fail to see anything wrong with that, even if I can see some of you guys reaching for the pitchforks now.

I am a coder, and these days I use AI to help me coding in some situations. Shocking, I know. But tell you what? Most coders these days do it. The reason for that is that I can use my time for more interesting things than writing the 10,000th variant of some standard problem.

AI will never replace human creativity. These models are stochastic parrots after all, that can really invent anything new and exciting. There will always be demand for human art, human writing and human coding. Maybe people will realize that one day, and then we can have a sane discussion about how to compensate creators.

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I switched to Mint because of Snap, like two years ago (was tired of manually nuking an increasing number of applications forcing it down my throat). There are currently four machines in our house running it, including a home-server. It's a very smooth and polished experience, really. The only time I ran into an issue I had to spend any meaningful time to troubleshoot was not Mint's fault, is was the f****** NVidia driver that refused to cleanly update from 550 to 575.

All things considered, I can only recommend it. I think it's the overall best distro for people like me, who don't want a rolling release distro.

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Now, if MMOs start doing this then that will be a different story. I don't know what I'd do if Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft started blocking Linux.

The only MMO I ever played I can think of using anti-cheat software is BDO. The vast majority of MMOs I have seen doesn't use any anti-cheat software at all, other than the measures they code directly into the game, where it belongs. I think we're safe.

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