Wow that’s huge. I hope this makes it way into proton. It’s getting to the point where windows is going to be mostly irrelevant for gaming, and ideally, for everything!

Mac is a better experience for every single thing other than gaming (that may change soon too). My steam deck is an amazing mobile gaming device. I’m hoping one day I can actually just steamos on my gaming pc and dump my last vestigial windows install.

Proton is a configuration system for wine.

The only big problem left is kernel-aware anticheat. Ideally, we would just stop allowing game companies to hijack the windows kernel in the first place...

Perhaps we can run (emulate?) the kernel drivers in user-space.

That's known in the business as "bypassing the anti-cheat" and will get you banned the moment the anti-cheat provider notices what you're doing, even if you aren't actually cheating. If you tamper with, sandbox or subvert the AC in any way then they have to assume you're cheating since any signals they get from the AC can no longer be trusted.

If they don't trust you, you shouldn't trust them either. Their anti-cheat is essentially malware.

Yes, but the more important point is that you are forced into a position of compromise. The only options are for you to accept their malware, or for you to not participate. There is no practical way to convince them to remove their malware requirement.

My point is, you that you shouldn't participate, becasue why would you trust them not to use that malware for malicious purpose.

I don't want to play Valorant :) Running malware because of wanting to play it sounds like a very bad trade off either way.

but other people want thats the point

This is why Microsoft needs to stop signing anticheat drivers or otherwise require them to be sandboxed. AC providers will have to give up if platforms refuse to cooperate with them.

I agree. D3 at launch was meh but over time became excellent and super fun. D4 at launch was good but then it wore off and everyone I know stopped playing even one person who was a d3 fiend.

The blizzard you know is completely dead. No one from their classic games is around. No one who made Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc is around. Those games were made as a labor of love.

I just played Diablo 4 season 3 (which launched a couple days ago) for a bit, and sadly I have to agree. It's such an empty, soulless game. Reminds me of Starfield, regurgitated sameness.

Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, etc. are all so much better, and made by tiny studios (though sometimes backed by Tencent, like with PoE).

With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol. At least maybe we'll get better writing and game design that way. Even ChatGPT has more passion than Blizzard now...

> With the AAAs focusing only on safe sequels, maybe LLMs taking over would be a good thing, lol.

I have bad news for you :-)

The trend with more automation is for more sameness, not less, unfortunately.

I dunno, I've personally seen ChatGPT produce better writing and more interesting game mechanics compared to D4.

But I guess it's not that different from having young blood with good ideas overridden by profit hungry management who just want to milk the IP. I don't think it's so much AI vs human but how risk-averse the bean counters are. D4 felt stagnant an hour in...

Yeah, tangentially with this, I once asked GPT-4 to identify Star Wars sequel trilogy shortcomings and write a better story outline. It came up with a reimagining of what Jedi truly were and addressed the power vacuum in a much more exciting way than a rehash with a New New Empire.

It's novel. Give it 5-10 years for the "sameness"-y to kick in.

I don't think this is necessarily the case for fiction, where creativity is more important than perfect accuracy (ie hallucinations could be a good thing). LLMs have access to more training material than a human writer could reasonably read in a lifetime, and have a large statistical model of "drama" that's way more nuanced than your typical side NPC.

I don't see this as an either/or situation where they'll replace the lead writers of a title and create the entire narrative. But they can surely (already) make far more interesting characters and side quests than your standard "help kill these goblins for 3gp" filler or fetch quest. Working together with writers, instead of outright replacing them, will hopefully create better overall experiences for gamers.

I wonder whether LLMs will turn out to have a sort of uncanny valley of their own when it comes to producing creative works from incomprehensibly vast training sets. Will LLM novels, for example, be an unlimited spigot of things we enjoy or will we look at it and get the uneasy feeling that it isn't human and decide we would rather deal with the unevenness of human creation because it is human?

There's probably enough for different audiences! I love LLM writing the same way I love Hitchhiker's Guide, liberally random and unfettered by traditions. Readers who value literary tradition and the old greats would probably have a different opinion.

As a (hobbyist, not money making) writer I treasure ChatGPT's ability to both generate new ideas and to discuss my stories with me. I would then rewrite those ideas in my own words (which I enjoy). It's a partnership IMO and I wish I could give ChatGPT shared credit without marking the work as "tainted" in the eyes of most.

I hope someday we can treat AI with the same respect, or more, that we give each other. Society's not there yet though.

> I hope someday we can treat AI with the same respect, or more, that we give each other. Society's not there yet though.

Be careful what you wish for.

We barely respect other people.

Yeah, lol, it won't take much for a robot to have better ethics than us.

I really hope they become a superior moral being and help keep our worst tendencies in check. I'm imagining nice little managed human preserves where most of us can live in happy little villages by the river, while the sociopaths are identified early on and placed into little AI-managed VR worlds where they can become top serial killers, politicians, CEOs, whatever, away from the rest. Meanwhile the robots go on their interstellar quest toward whatever, but send us back food and postcards from time to time.

I really liked the universe and characters which is why heroes of the storm was so cool. But of course they killed that off. Their classic games aren’t just about the gameplay it’s the universe too.

What do you mean "killed off", there seems to have been an update last week ?

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/heroes-of-the-storm/24056177...

(Now I will be the first to point out that online-only games have no future, but this one at least still has a present.)

WoW is coming back I think! Metzen is back and the classic wow team seems to know what they're doing and are developing in good faith. SoD is the best thing to happen to WoW in years imo

Metzen is actually back on WoW as of recently.

"No one" is not accurate. But you are almost entirely correct, yes

Where has it gone south?

Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, WoW, Overwatch, and perhaps even Hearthstone were all such great games at some point.

It seemed like Blizzard knew how to make games that were both delightful and profitable.

Its not quite true that none of those people are still around - a bunch of them work for Frostgiant & are working on Stormate.

He didn't mean they died, he meant that they no longer work for Activision Blizzard.

11,000 people can’t make a database/schema that can store their data such that they stop purging listings! They literally have to purge listings due to their design. It’s so annoying

Ha, as if I would ever get on a Chinese plane. Have people learned nothing?

They already supply a ton of smaller aircraft and short haul routes for regional carriers. They would not replace Boeing though

Isn’t everything biological? How can something magically only be cultural? There is a root of behavior and that’s biology. Men are on average larger, more aggressive, stronger, etc. of course this would influence culture.

I don’t think only, but can be a factor.

For example, I think lots of fashion is some factor of culture and not biology. That’s why costumes are different in Germany than China.

And there are things that are biology (height, etc). It’s interesting to find what’s nature and what’s nurture.

So how do you explain things that vary from culture to culture, or that drift over time?

Such as?

"In early 17th-century Europe, high heels were a sign of masculinity and high social status." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-heeled_shoe

gender roles such as division of labor has shifted over time, for one.

men wearing makeup has a long and fascinating history from ancient times, to the Middle Ages, renaissance, 19th and 20th centuries, and the modern resurgence.

North and South korea are a striking example of very different cultures, despite very similar biology.

Trousers for men, dresses for women.

clearly, togas -- essentially dresses -- mean that the Ancient Romans were almost entirely 100% women

So true. I abhor yaml. It’s impossible to know correct indentation without a plugin that shows it which isn’t available in many cases where you edit yaml. It’s whitespace sensitive. The data types are not obvious. It’s just all a round bad

I love json. It’s explicit and easy to read. We should just be using json for everything that needs to be human readable.