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MudMan

@ MudMan @fedia.io

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2 yr. ago

  • Boys to learn difference between porn and real life to tackle misogyny in England’s schools

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  • Hey, if you just happen to be a run of the mill traditional prudish conservative that would actually be mildly heartening. I genuinely don't care about those continuing to run that line.

    Still not wrong about the underlying issue, though. And for the record, I don't think anti-porn so-called "abolitionists" are "my enemy". I think all left of center forces are my allies, personally. The problem is single issue wedges used as hostile propaganda do work, as seen very clearly in the case of trans issues.

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    Firefox vs LibreWolf: Two Very Different Takes on AI

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  • I mean, ChatGPT broke the top 5 most visited sites earlier this year.

    People do use chatbots, but there is a biiiig gap between popping in to a chatbot to... I don't know, help you remember the name of a movie, or sub in for Google Translate or check your spelling or whatever people are doing in there, and a very different one to push it as an agentic always-there ur-feature.

    Chatbots are alright at chatbotting, but most of these other applications are way out of spec and just don't work or fit the user experience of the software they're being bolted on to.

    I sometimes think the overzealous, always-online blanket rejection of GenAI stuff is doing a disservice by obscuring the things that have an use from all this forced garbage designed to tick a checkbox.

    FWIW, I'll happily keep ignoring these features as long as I'm able to actually ignore them. It's a bit of a waste, but not a dealbreaker. The whole conversation, the irrational stances, the insane, transparent false hype and the quivering economy-ending bubble are all exhausting and incredibly depressing.

  • Boys to learn difference between porn and real life to tackle misogyny in England’s schools

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  • I, once again, did not say or imply that I am persecuted in any way.

    I do think porn is free expression, of sexuality and otherwise, and should be protected about as much as any other form of free expression. Which is not universally and without limit, before you try that one.

    And all of that is not the same as saying I "can't stand criticism" about it. Which I didn't say or think. I will actively, aggressively criticise actual porn, both as a media product and as an industry.

    Once again, the strawmanning and talking points aren't doing much to disprove the notion that anti-porn activism will become the new TERF-like trojan horse wedge among ostensible leftist movements going forward. People don't like to talk about those, but they are bad and this is incoming.

  • Latest Steam Deck update will warn you if an Xbox controller needs upgrading

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  • There are definitely ways to send backwards compatible data when required and separately support additional features in a new iteration of an API. This wouldn't be in the top 10 backwards compatibility challenges MS has figured out.

    But in any case, I don't care if they call it XInput2 or Game Input. I just need it to support all controller features in all games. It's a bit hard to tell whether Game Input will ever do that, but so far it seems more concerned with acting as a layer to explicitly support a bunch of different hardware, each with its own standards, than a XInput replacement for controllers. There doesn't seem to be a concept for a "Game Input controller" there at all, actually, just supported controllers you can listen for regardless of what they're sending through.

    I guess over time if they stick with it and it does end up working as a Steam Input-style intermediary layer that just recognizes anything you'd just ship controllers that match whatever format with gyro support and Game Input-enabled games would just pick them up fine more or less universally, but that doesn't seem to be what it does right now, or at least not something that either games or manufacturers are relying upon.

    Anyway, this was interesting and informative, but I think I'm good now. I definitely don't want to have a conversation formatted as an argument in which nobody is disagreeing with anybody else. Those are exhausting.

  • Boys to learn difference between porn and real life to tackle misogyny in England’s schools

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  • That's a cool argument you're having with a thing nobody said.

    Educating children about sex in general is educating children about sex (and nobody here has argued against it or equated it with being anti-porn).

    There is a rising trend in European lefitsm, and particularly in European feminism, that argues that all porn is inherently pernicious and ultimately should not exist.

    Note those are two separate statements.

    You definitely dabbled in the second of those statements when you claimed that "that [can't] be considered safe for anyone". Whether you meant to say what you said is in your head, but as presented that slope is both mighty slippery AND very consistent with some of the very anti sex-work trend I'm talking about. The false equivalence and misquote at the top of your response doesn't lead me to believe you're treating this "objectively", either.

  • Boys to learn difference between porn and real life to tackle misogyny in England’s schools

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  • Waaay better than the porn bans and online age verification schemes, honestly.

    I question why this is just for "children who show mysoginistic behavior", though. Sex ed should be universal, and this should be a major part of sex ed.

    I assume the fear here is parents complaining about their kids being talked about porn, which may end up being a larger underlying issue than the porn itself. I guess you just have to trust that education professionals handle the opportunity well and this doesn't become a stern talking to for problem kids, which is likely to do as much as stern talking tos have done historically.

  • Boys to learn difference between porn and real life to tackle misogyny in England’s schools

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  • "Young humans" sure. Not young humans, you absolutely do you.

    There's a bit of an emerging trend in leftist European circles in particular that sees porn as inherently patriarchal and wrong and we're not ready for how much anti-porn is going to be the new terfism yet. This is going to suck a lot, and not in a good way.

  • Boys to learn difference between porn and real life to tackle misogyny in England’s schools

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  • There are boys in trousers in the picture, though. And no real "short" skirts.

    I mean... you do you, but some of this may be an eye of the beholder situation.

  • me_irl

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  • Good to know. In fairness, I don't think you can get that much Coke in anything but plastic. They don't do 1L cans and there are thick plastic bottles starting at 500ml, so thin plastic may actually be better.

    I do think there's a 1L glass bottle, but it's more of a special edition thing. I don't think it's easy to find in supermarkets and I havent' seen it anywhere else. And for any soft drink other than specifically Coca Cola it's mostly just plastic for anything above 500 mil.

  • What is the technical hill you are willing to die on in your industry?

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  • Is there anybody on Lemmy that isn't a software engineer of some description? No? Anyone?

  • me_irl

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  • I can do 1L over a period of time... in a plastic bottle. If US cups are like they are elsewhere they eventually get eaten away by the liquid and start dripping, which seems to go against the implied notion that you can just order a big one and take it with you to keep drinking elsewhere.

  • me_irl

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  • Isn't that the idea?

    I used to live in a place where they just don't do ice in soda at all, and it's like licking a can of dried out syrup. In the local Imax they didn't even have ice at all as an option. They looked at me like I was insane when I asked, then calmly pointed out that the soda comes out of the machine chilled. I just had to learn to watch two hour movies while sucking on a tub of lukewarm, full-strength soda like a deviant.

  • Latest Steam Deck update will warn you if an Xbox controller needs upgrading

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  • That's interesting, but considering this note:

    We recommend the GameInput API for all new code, regardless of the target platform, because it provides support across all Microsoft platforms (including earlier versions of Windows) and provides superior performance versus legacy APIs.

    For games developed on the GDK for Xbox One, GameInput is the only input API

    I'm really not sure this would do what we both want it to do. If everybody has had a GameInput version of their controller support since last-gen and we're still getting limited to the XInput feature set I don't think it sorts out gyro-on-Xinput at all. I am not familiar with the behind the scenes of how modern engine controller code is handled, but this sounds like maybe it's how games with native PS controller support are doing that, but not necessarily a new standard that will allow the default XInput PC setting of new controllers to pass gyro input to games detecting them as an XInput device. I think it's more like MS's answer to Steam Input as an additional layer between the games and the hardware, regardless of what the hardware is using.

    It does show that all the tools are in place. MS has control over all the involved APIs. They could expand the Xbox controller API feature set tomorrow, whether or not they add the hardware feature to their base controller model. They just... don't. And Steam could deploy a Steam-independent Steam Input driver or software to just take over all controller support on a dedicated full-feature OS layer, but they also don't (on either Windows or Linux, as far as I can tell).

    Honestly, there are enough workarounds (add games as non-Steam games, use Switch modes and so on), I just bump against the edge cases of it often because I'm both a controller and handheld nerd, so I'm stuck with a GPD Win handheld that insists on injecting their internal gyro as mouse inputs, which confuses the hell out of half the games, along with a bunch of GameSir and Gullikit controllers that do weird things with gyro, like injecting it at the firmware level instead of passing it to the OS. And I mess around with enough emulators to also end up with "oh, this was on DI mode when I booted RetroArch, so now all my buttons are in the wrong places until I quit". It's only dumb for like ten of us... but man, is it dumb.

  • Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases

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  • I think they probably felt that having SteamOS perpetually be the holder for the "most popular" slot in the Linux category is not what the survey is for.

    But then, they could have also finally provided a historical chart of OS usage, or a different category for SteamOS altogether.

  • Latest Steam Deck update will warn you if an Xbox controller needs upgrading

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  • Yes, I'm aware, that's why I'm calling out it's weird that XInput doesn't support gyro, because we're a long way away of it being just based on Xbox controller support and a whole bunch of other controllers with a whole bunch of other features now go through it. If MS doesn't want to add gyro that's up to them, but Windows supporting it natively is way overdue. Of course at that point older controllers would probably need a firmware update, but hey, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

    In practice the situation we're having is games are defaulting to Xinput and relying on Steam Input as an intermediate layer for additional features, so the end result is that gyro is... not NOT supported, but often not acknowledged at all, so you end up with a bunch of situations where you have to config gyro manually per game as a bit of a Steam-level hack, and then your controller is all wonky anywhere other than Steam because the way Switch/DI/PS input modes get picked up in non-Steam stuff can be weird.

    And it gets worse in handhelds where you're absolutely at the mercy of how the manufacturer decided to set up their controller and gyro support, and sometimes need to do a lot of weird stuff to pass it on outside of Steam.

    It's the jankiest part of controller set up left on PC gaming, and it's all down to this weird "mom and dad aren't talking" dance where MS keeps pretending PC controllers are fundamentally Xbox controllers at the XInput layer and Steam is the de facto curator of the controller support but has no interest (and to be frank no expectation or need) to have their controller layer work outside their launcher.

  • Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases

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  • Oh, hey, it is. Why the hell would it work that way? It seems to be manually excluded from the unfiltered list despite being by far the biggest usage.

    So the data exists but it's weirdly buried for no reason.

    Still, thanks for the pointer. I genuinely didn't know they had it set up that way.

  • Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases

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  • I mean, you do you, but I don't see any of the things that you want requiring active surveillance. That all seems very attainable by having decent search, filtering and categorization tools.

    If anything, I find myself now seeking "hidden gems on Steam" despite Steam knowing everything about my gaming habits. And that's on Steam, which does have a semi-decent crowdsourced tagging and categorization system. Their main page recommendations for e have consistently been either generically popular shovelware or insistent recommendations for games I do like but already own in other platforms that I can't tell Steam to stop shoving down my throat.

  • Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases

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  • Is it listed? Do you have a link to that? Checking the latest survey the Linux section shows

    "Arch Linux" 64 bit 0.32% +0.01%

    Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 0.24% +0.04%

    Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 0.14% 0.00%

    Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS 64 bit 0.12% +0.01%

    I don't see a SteamOS segment listed as a non-Linux OS anywhere, either. If they do provide the info I'd love to see it, but it doesn't seem to be shown at a glance in the OS Version category.

    Tracking game use by device isn't any more or less "crazy" than anything else they store. It's just telemetry. It's noteworthy that they share it in the format that they share it.

  • Latest Steam Deck update will warn you if an Xbox controller needs upgrading

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  • It's hard to fault Steam's controller layer, but I really wish they finally found a way to parse gyro data from third party controllers without having to run them on Switch mode. That goes for Microsoft and their own drivers. At this point it's weird to keep pretending the Windows controller APIs are supposed to work on their first party Xbox controllers only.

  • Latest Steam Deck update will warn you if an Xbox controller needs upgrading

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  • I'm almost entirely sure that PS4 and XOne controllers did get upgrades at some points. Definitely Switch 1 ones, which matters or not depending on how you split the gens. There were definitely revisions in older controllers, though. Some were labeled and had obvious new features, some were quieter. And PC-side drivers got updates all the time, obviously.

    Also, your current gen controller will also keep working indefinitely without an update. In this case Valve is annoyed about a particular dependency where THEY need the upgrade to happen for a feature compatibility thing, but the controller proper will work if you plug it in.