I do have occasional buzzing/whine from easyeffects and have to restart it.

It depends. The old ALSA system was flaky from what I remember. Pipewire seems more stable, but can have issues with multiple devices but that might be more a bluetooth problem.

I’ve also had constant audio problems in windows, including every update shuffling all my audio devices and making a random one default and switching to the wrong device when connecting a new one.

None of this is exclusive to Valve. Yeah, people can technically buy hardware and sell it, but they can also gift games or whatever and people were already using third party websites to sell their items for cash.

And MMOs with random drops have historically always had an RMT market that is against the TOS where people sell in game currency or items for real currency.

I’m not saying that valve should be let off the hook when it comes to loot boxes, but this lawsuit kind of stinks because it is all over the place and again, valve isn’t the worst example of what they describe.

The fact that it’s framed as “protecting children” and claims that valve is intentionally targeting children despite the games in question being rated M and old enough that I seriously doubt there are that many minors playing is putting a ton of red flags up for me. They also add the 90s era “violent video game” rhetoric that was always nonsense.

The conspiracy part of me thinks this is going to eventually lead to more age verification BS and they are targeting valve because it is the only company that is complying in a way that still protects user privacy.

Which actually makes in simple to me. They are throwing things at the wall to see what sticks while also muddying the water as if they are trying to hide something.

They are throwing very convoluted logic around for this, and I immediately distrust anyone in government who makes wild leaps to “protecting kids”.

First off, I don’t like loot boxes. Specifically paid loot boxes, because if you don’t signify that something like this could effect any game with random drops.

Second, all the games in question are rated M. They are very much not targeted at kids. Obviously kids still play them, but that is on the parents.

That they also added “violent video games” nonsense that could have come out of the 90s is absurd. Is it about gambling or violent media? If it’s about violent media, why not go after any of the other shooters that are likely going to have way more kids on them. Counterstrike is old enough that I would be surprised if it isn’t a majority of millennials and gen X. At the very least I seriously doubt there are a ton of minors playing.

If it is actually about gambling targeted at kids, The Pokemon trading card game is probably the best example of “gambling aimed at kids”. Sure, digital loot boxes can be more insidious, but that isn’t how they’ve framed this and if you’ve seen how TCG players buy packs it’s very much looks like gambling.

The framing of this is very suspicious because it doesn’t make sense to go after valve exclusively for any of the things they are claiming. And the 3x fine is ridiculous. I’m all for fines actually being based on profits, but you can’t tell me they would do the same for any other company.

And part of me feels this is a strong-arm tactic because valve is not publicly traded which lets them be very pro user/consumer and is the one company that is complying with age verification in a way that still protects user privacy.

Assuming that they are seems like a leap, but since we don’t really know exactly what consciousness is,

Which is no different that trading card games and also not valve’s fault.

I have no love for loot boxes, at least when real money is used to get them, but from what I’ve seen across the board Valve is far from the worst with them. Valve also doesn’t allow you to sell the skins you get for real money, only steam credit. That is still real-world value, but they are also not the only company that does that.

Outside of real-world money for loot boxes, most of the issues with the skin market are not anything Valve did. It was third party sites popping up that allowed people to sell their skins for cash.

Valve have even made changes to their side that crashed the market and caused a ton of “value” to disappear.

The fact is that this lawsuit is pretty obviously not actually about gambling. If it was there are far worse companies they could go after.

And I do want something to be done about them across the board, but this is not going to do that.

Look, I don’t have any love for loot boxes in general, at least when it’s real money. But there are far more egregious examples that would work just as well if not better for going after the practice of loot boxes than what steam does.

There’s a reason they are singling out steam, and they signal why in the statement, saying this “teaches kids to gamble and makes them violent”, repeating 90s BS about “violent video games”, when the games in question are rated M, meaning if a child is playing it then that is 100% on the parents… and still not illegal anyway.

They are most likely singling out valve because they refuse to play ball with the privacy violating age checks. Valve did the bare minimum they had to: basically clearing anyone with a credit card registered as being over 18.

Valve is also not a publicly traded company and is very customer focused, even with the loot box thing. Which has been the driver for other lawsuits that only single them out.

I have ADHD (diagnosed) and also likely autism (undiagnosed), so I understand.

I ended up figuring out a specific way to write online because people seemed to intentionally assume the worst interpretation of what I said, usually adding meaning I didn’t.

Unfortunately, because the way I write is semi-formal I now regularly get accused of using or being “AI” I guess it’s because I “use words” and “know things”.

One of the goals of Cachy is to take the pain out of Arch. I’d tried to use various Arch flavors before and I just never had a good experience. Vanilla I had no patience for, Manjaro is known to break more than vanilla with updates (something that happened to me), and Endevor just didn’t feel right for some reason.

Arch purists aren’t happy about that because it goes against the “ethos” of arch, but they don’t seem to like when a distro comes with a desktop environment.

Cachy has been pretty painless and I’ve been running it on multiple machines. There are regressions that sometimes happen since it’s still arch and gets the latest updates, but that stuff is usually quickly fixed or rolled back if there is a bigger issue that needs more time to fix.

The only real issue I had was it revealed a hardware problem with the newer Ryzen CPUs getting unstable in the new lower power CState 6 when idle. Disabling the CState fixed the issue.

Bazzite was too limiting for me and the layered updates made updating take forever. I was only using it on a media PC at the time too, so it wasn’t as if I had that many changes.

I’m perfectly happy with CachyOS. Can basically do whatever I want and snapshots are a nice safety net. Updates take like 2-5 minutes depending on how long it’s been since the last time I ran updates and the power of the system (Steamdeck always takes longer than my desktop or media PC).

Which is one of the few things these things can actually do because they’re entire thing is language processing.

Basically put in a vague or comprehensive description of what you are trying to do or trying to find. It can generate a few queries based on your input and do a handful of searches then give you the results and highlight which ones might be the most relevant to your input.

But, that still require traditional, and specifically deterministic, search.

The way people blindly trust it’s output without any actual search or additional context is the worst way to use it. Might as well ask a magic 8-ball.

That’s fair. I do apologize for my tone, but I’m queer and a core of all these attacks on free speech are directed at the LGBTQ community so I tend to get heated about it, especially if someone seems to dismiss the importance of protections like that.

I like playing around with them occasionally, but I only use local models. I cannot stand all the cloud stuff in general and with the way neural nets work you can get as good or better results out of a smaller/more narrow model and the same applies to LLMs.

The massive models the big companies are putting out there are generally just bad. Even if it can occasionally give you accurate output, for whatever it is you are asking it to do, it uses way more power and resources than reasonable and you could have found what you were looking for with a simple web search.

Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFe-PO) are actually really stable. Way less likely to catch fire in thermal runaway and don’t lose capacity as easily.

They just aren’t very energy dense, so you need more weight per wh. They also operate at a lower voltage per cell which means they charge slower.

They are used in short to med range EVs already, but the lower capacity makes it impractical to put enough for longer range EVs.

As an aside, I would argue that for the majority of people a large capacity EV battery is a bit of a waste. Mine is ~70Kwh, give or take. In optimal conditions my car estimates 240-250mi at 100%. Over the winter it’s showing anywhere from 140-180mi at 80%.

I moved cross country right after getting it and drove it 1000 miles. It took a bit longer, than it would in a gas car, but it was doable. Just have to plan segments to get to the next charger and try to charge to 100% with level 2 charging (240v AC) if you can when you stop for the night.

Who could have seen this coming?

“You first.”

Anyone who actually thinks this must not actually do a whole lot and probably could be automated really easily, AI or not.

The only way these things could be implemented is if they phone home to some “AI” model. Printers themselves do not have anywhere near enough power to do any kind of analysis like that. Mine crashes if my microsteps are too high.

So its pretty obvious that the goal of this is to invade people’s privacy and will likely try to use it to block copyrighted material if it built. It’s the age verification BS all over.

I mean, not to defend that idiot because he was voting against net neutrality and obviously had no idea how technology works…

… But we do call some connections “tunnels”.

Even if it was in good faith: 3D printed guns are not a problem. Even if you made one it is going to jam up very quickly due to softening and melting, if not just explode all together.

It would be easier, faster, and more effective to build a gun from things sourced at the local hardware store.

Even then, If someone is going to commit a crime with a gun they are unlikely to build it themselves. Most guns used in crimes are actually legally purchased, purchased at a gunshow, or purchased on the black market.

Anyone 3D printing a gun is doing it as a novelty. Because of that I don’t see this as a second amendment violation. This is blantantly a first and fourth violation.

Even if this could actually be enforced you have the issue that if they go too far you suddenly have it blocking a cylinder because it thinks you are trying to print a gun barrel.

Not that I don’t think they would care about that, but it would certainly cause even more of a backlash.

What kind. Because I’m well aware of how bad democrats can be even if they aren’t as bad as the literal fascists.

At best this is a grossly uninformed position. At worst she is pushing this to add it to the pile of privacy violations or because a system like this, if it could actually work, would have an end goal to block people printing copyrighted objects.