Mossy Feathers (They/Them)

A

  • 0 Posts
  • 177 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 20th, 2023

help-circle





  • This. If I’m not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren’t originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn’t worth renewing copyright on).

    Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that’s effectively indefinite.


  • My biggest complaint about Sims-likes is that the visual style always looks too serious. It gives me the feeling that whatever I’m going to do with my not-Sims, it’s gonna be something that makes me regret my real life.

    You wanna know what I did the last time I played the Sims 2 though? I repeatedly held parties at my Sim’s house and then lured the guests into a room they couldn’t get out of. I also used the moveobjects cheat to collect police cars whenever a cop showed up to shut the party down. By the time I was done I had amassed around 70 urns, many hysterical immortal Sims (Sims with households can’t die while visiting someone’s house in the Sims 2), 4 Police cars and a fire truck.

    The Sims has a mischievous air to it that tickles the devil on your shoulder and begs you to listen to them. None of the Sims-likes I’m aware of seem to have the same air.

    Edit: now I want to play the Sims again.




  • The alternative explanation is that the employers have investments in corporate real estate and don’t want their investments to lose value. Personally, I think that the the people at the top probably have investments in corporate real estate, while middle managers are the way you describe.

    I don’t think the people at the top usually care what the employees are doing so long as they’re making money, and being in the office means they’re keeping corporate real estate prices afloat. As such, being in office makes money for the executives, even if that money isn’t made directly through the company.

    Middle managers on the other hand, likely don’t have any significant corporate real estate investments, nor are they as likely get significant bonuses for company productivity. As such, it makes more sense for their motive to be more about control than it is money.

    That said, I do know some executives do indeed see employees the way you’ve described them; an infamous example comes to mind about the Australian real estate executive talking about how they needed to bring workers to heel and crash the economy to remind workers that they work for the company and not the other way around. I’m just not sure that many executives actually think about their workers in that much depth. I think if they did then we’d see a stark contrast of very ethical companies and highly abusive companies instead of the mix of workplace cultures we have now; because some ceos would come to the conclusion that a happy worker is a good worker, while others would become complete control freaks.





  • I want them to make the Sims 4 feel more chaotic. I’ve been playing the Sims 2 lately and weird shit just kinda happens all the time, either because of relatively harmless bugs that never got fixed or the amount of autonomy that Sims have (edit: or the fact that I recently discovered you can use the moveobjects cheat to place Sims on top of Sims, and if you do it right then they seem to get permanently attached to another Sim). The Sims 4 just feels weirdly flat or something in comparison. It just isn’t as interesting for some reason, and I think it’s just not as chaotic and seemingly determined to derail whatever plans you had for your sim.

    Edit: also, something tells me that Project Rene isn’t replacing the Sims 4, and it’s going to be The Sims Online 2 or something. Ironic considering the issues with the Sims 4 mainly stem from it originally being “The Sims Online 2” but then getting hastily turned into a main line Sims game.

    Anyway, I bet they’re doing all the bug fixes and performance improvements because EA has made it clear that they’re going to be stuck developing for The Sims 4 for another +5yrs. So now they’re trying to clean everything up so they can keep developing it.


  • You’re the one contradicting yourself when you’re saying that linux requires a Translation layer. And the translations are not always 1:1. Please show me the benchmarks.

    How is this a contradiction? It seems like it’d be the opposite. Translation layers reduce performance as they translate programs from one system to another, so the fact that Linux can run games in a translation layer and still get as good, or better, performance than Windows means that Linux is fast enough to make up for the translation layer performance penalty.

    Regardless, here are some benchmarks.

    From 2019, Windows 10 vs Pop_OS:

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/07/17/these-windows-10-vs-pop-os-benchmarks-reveal-a-surprising-truth-about-linux-gaming-performance/?sh=6035a5e65e74

    While these are all in 1080p, several are also running in translation layers. The ones that are running native were faster in Linux, while the ones running in proton achieved roughly the same performance. This was also 4~5 yrs ago, and proton has improved a lot. Additionally, these were run on an Nvidia card using their proprietary drivers, and Linux is known to be AMD-biased.

    So here’s another one from a couple years ago with Windows 11 vs Manjaro (benchmark totals for 4k, 1440p and 1080p at the end): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xwmNLqJL7Zo

    While they found that games tended to perform better on windows in 4k, they also found that games in 1440p were roughly the same while 1080p averaged faster on Linux despite running in a mix of proton, Proton-GE, and wine. This is also a couple years old though, and while the average might be better on Linux, there were some pretty significant performance gaps at the top and bottom of the chart.

    Here’s a third one from about 6 months ago. This was pretty highly circulated on Lemmy, so I’m surprised you didn’t see it, but here it is:

    https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/5340976

    They claim to have seen an average 17% improvement on the games they benchmarked, and included a video of the benchmarks. There was a later benchmark where they claimed they got +20% performance using a tweaked version of Garuda Linux, but that required user tweaks and I’m mainly concerned with “un-tweaked” performance.


    Linux isn’t perfect, and if you want to play games with no hassle, then Windows is probably still your best bet. However, in situations where you’re trying to squeeze as much performance as you can out of an underpowered device, Linux just seems obvious. You have standardized hardware that allows you to spend the time and effort to iron out bugs and deficiencies with fewer edge cases than you’d get with non-standardized hardware. I think that’s why Steam(Deck) OS is so good. It runs on standardized hardware and so it’s easy for Valve to configure and optimize for user-friendliness because they don’t have to worry about ten billion different hardware configurations.

    Also, as a side note, I’ve found that older games just run better on Linux. They ironically tend to be way less of a hassle to get working. It’s because Wine (and I think Proton/Proton-GE) have compatibility for 16bit programs, while windows doesn’t. You have to run a virtual machine with Windows XP or earlier to run 16bit programs, and I’ve found that to be a mess.

    Seriously, I cannot get a Windows 98 virtual machine set up on Windows 10 to save my life. It just won’t properly install on software like VMWare, and I’ve had to resort to actual PC emulators to get 16bit games to run on a modern windows PC (which are slow as fuck). I’ve read it has something to do with AMD CPUs? I don’t know what the specific issue is though, just that it supposedly works just fine on Intel but not AMD. However, I haven’t encountered that mess on Linux.

    Edit: as an amusing side-side note, I’m old enough that a number of my favorite games from when I was growing up are no longer able to run on Windows because they require a 16bit OS (or a 32bit OS with 16bit compatibility). Despite that, my grandfather’s Hoyle card game that’s older than I am, still somehow runs flawlessly on Windows 10. What the fuck?


  • Many of the games are made to be run on windows, windows is still a effecient os, it’s just a lot of bloat, which can be disabled.

    A) as someone else pointed out, “bloat” and “efficient” are exclusive to one another. Now, you can argue that windows is efficient in some areas and bloated in others, but “bloat” and “efficiency” are mutually exclusive when applied generally.

    B) yes, most, if not all of it, can be disabled through registry edits and 3rd party hacks. However, in my experience, the more you try to debloat windows, the more unstable it gets. Then, it will all come back eventually via updates, which means you get to disable it all again. Finally, again in my experience, the more you try to debloat windows, the less stable it gets, and this carries over even when the OS reinstalls/reenables bloat you tried to get rid of. Seriously, my experience is that even after windows updates rebloat everything, the OS remains unstable, and becomes even more unstable after you debloat again. Granted this was with windows 10, but I imagine the same is more or less true for windows 11.

    Also a lot of optimizations in nt has been done for gaming, features which are missing in the linux kernel, but there are RFCs to add nt like synchronization primitives, in the linux kernel.

    C) and yet, iirc, recent Linux vs Windows 11 benchmarks show Windows games running on Linux via Proton/Proton-GE anywhere from slightly slower to slightly faster than Windows, despite requiring translation layers to run; while the Linux-native games typically run faster than their Windows counterparts.

    Windows is just that bloated.





  • I wonder… does anyone know how many shares in a company you have to own before you can call-in during shareholder meetings to ask questions? I’m wondering if we could push back against this by “”“asking questions”“” that make majority shareholders aware of the damage companies are doing to their own brands. I know modern capitalism is all about “money today, fuck tomorrow”, but I wonder how many shareholders would be happy knowing that companies would probably make more money if they’d stop cannibalizing studios and franchises.

    You know, play into their greed and make convincing arguments about how their decisions are ultimately robbing them of money.