Pfff. Dude, I'm RIGHT HERE. <sob>

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AI will become a tool like Photoshop or a calculator.

I suspect a lot of what you're saying has the potential to be true. But the reason people quite reasonably despise AI in particular, and definitely don't hate Photoshop or calculators, is that those products aren't destroying the planet.

Also, they're rarely forced on you. There are alternatives to these things (that doesn't quite work with calculators as an example, but hey ho - spreadsheets, or abacuses. Okay!) and so these things have to provide real, measurable value before you buy them.

Finally, they didn't absolutely piss on existing creators by stealing their work (and hence livelihood) in order to exist.

I sincerely hope the article below is spot on, and that AI is absolutely unsustainable in the medium or long term. The only reason it exists today is because big tech is front running the costs in the hope to establish dependency, so that when they price this tech according to its actual cost, there are enough subscribers unwilling to do without the tech, and they'll pay up.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/ [External Link]

Fingers crossed.

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Lovely looking game, and feels a bit more accessible than similar types of this genre.

That link you posted made me think that it would be wonderful if Steam could create a symlink, during PFX creation, for all that dross that makes finding the actual game content so tedious.

So create a "game" symbolic link for:
drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/LocalLow/TheFarmerWasReplaced/TheFarmerWasReplaced

And that way, instead of
steamapps/compatdata/2060160/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/LocalLow/TheFarmerWasReplaced/TheFarmerWasReplaced/Saves/Save0/

You'd just have:
steamapps/compatdata/2060160/pfx/game/Saves/Save0/

A boy can dream.

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I believe the problem is that buying a piece of media and feeding it into an algorithm to create a model isn't considered copyright infringement because the result is a piece of software rather than a copy of the original piece of media.

You're probably right, but that just means that copyright law needs to be updated.

If they want to create a new AI that's a great interior designer, but the creators of that AI need to knock doors and be shown the insides of people's houses - let's face it, they'd be told to do one.

The issue here is that they didn't have to knock doors and be let in. They just scraped everything they could find on the internet and considering all that data "free".

Even when it was provably not free, such as when Meta, absolutely scumbags that they are, scraped terrabytes of LibGen for pirated books, to train their shitty model. And then the ball-less judge ruled against the authors. Nothing about them breaking the law by torrenting LibGen, nah, just a weak excuse about "not dilating the market through their actions". Holy fuck, Zuckerberg makes me feel physically sick.

If you're still using Facebook or Insta after this, you have no soul. I can't judge you for Whatsapp because I know from personal experience how difficult it is to get people moved to alternatives, when they just don't care.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/26/meta-wins-ai-copyright-lawsuit-as-us-judge-rules-against-authors [External Link]

Remember Kazaa in the early 2000's? Remember that single mother being sued into oblivion because her son shared songs using it??

In Duluth, Minnesota, the recording industry sued Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a 30-year-old single mother. On 5 October 2007, Thomas was ordered to pay the six record companies (Sony BMG, Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, UMG Recordings Inc., Capitol Records Inc. and Warner Bros. Records Inc.) $9,250 for each of the 24 songs they had focused on in this case.

(Where are those guys? She ended up owing over £2M - which was reduced to around £45K after YEARS of retrials because who the fuck thinks that anyone should be fined £2M for downloading/sharing files in 2003. Insane.)

Anyway. Clearly anything on the internet is free now. So that's nice.

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My biggest surprise is that so many game devs choose to self-report rather than keep it hush-hush to avoid turning principled potential buyers away. Does Steam penalize developers that don’t disclaim it?

Even if they ignore the link that lilovent posted, they risk absolutely insane backlash if they use it and are caught doing so by gamers, let alone Valve. Not sure what Valve's response would be, but the gamer response is brutal.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1601570/discussions/0/604160267118483770/ [External Link]

And that was a game that only used it on placeholders in EA! They subsequently removed the AI-gen placeholders and recovered some semblence of respectability, but only after been absolutely dragged twice - once for using AI, and then again for their shitty "it was only in placeholders" response.

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I've just installed Garuda for testing, and it surprised me to learn that Debian is still on 6.3, while Garuda (being an Arch derivative) is on 6.4, which already has some really lovely quality-of-life features. Really excited to see what 6.5 looks like there!

Garuda does some funky stuff with desktop-enhancements that don't exist in 6.3, so it's actually a bit jarring and needs some toning down (bright purple outlines on windows, for example), but I love the welcome app on Garuda which gives me one-button installs of popular software like Steam, Spotify, Zoom and over a hundred more! Quite slick, takes a lot of pain out.

Not sure if I'll shift full time yet, but it's a step up from when I last tried an Arch-derivative.

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Incoming deluge to Steam (or the consoles' app stores, I guess, since that seems to be where this aimed) of AI slop. In fact, "AI slop" is the new "Asset flip".

Weird to advertise AI as a feature when its use will often be viewed negatively.

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I've spent 45 hours with this one, mainly two player with a mate of mine. We've really enjoyed it, despite the odd difficulty spike when you hit the next boss.

It doesn't hold your hand much, but it can also be reasonably chill - events are well telegraphed and give you plenty of time to respond. Village management is simple and not at all micro-managing. Bosses are fun. Exploring is fun. Mining is fun. It's a cracking game.

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Pretty infuriating to see another title fall to shitty anti-cheat updates... which don't actually affect cheating.

At least Farlight 84 is largely irrelevant. It took less than 12 months to reduce a 40K high in player count to just 2K. Another year in, it was around 1K. The past few months it only attracts around 600-800 players, although this new season caused a brief spike back to 2k.

But it's a trend in online gaming to block Linux players and I really wish Valve would say, or better still do, something to address it.

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Looking at the Unity support page, it seems like the native Linux version might never properly support the Dualsense controller?

Double frustrating, because setting lightbar and rumble via bluetooth is simply on Linux if you have dualsensectl installed. But the Dualsense is generally a bit frustrating on Steam regardless of O/S, because you'll almost always get Xbox glyphs in-game unless you turn off Steam input (ironically).

I thought Ryan C. Gordon (icculus) was working on better gamepad support in SDL3, but perhaps Unity doesn't use SDL? Or it hasn't filtered down yet?

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