Let’s start with the word “blame”: Veilguard isn’t bad on the whole. It’s possibly good, even. I think a lot of the problem with how it’s been received is that it’s not “Bioware good”, which can be a disappontment even for a good game, especially after coming down from Baldur’s fucking Gate 3, a once in a generation game.

So maybe if we said “credit” instead, and I think we can say yeah she sort of can take credit for the game. They offered her game director and she took it, and she put her name to it. I know it’s a shit position to be in, but if you look at Whedon and the Justice League, he passed the “credit” onto Snyder. Busche could have done the same if she chose, but she chose to put her name to it.

Getting a game which is going off the rails back onto the rails is really tough. Kudos to her.

The forces at play are far greater than you realize in scope and scale

I know it’s a turn of phrase but you don’t know me. I realise the scope and scale of how the world works, thanks.

Your pitching

The future you want

You’re assuming a lot given what I’ve said. It’s not an “in effect” thing either. You talk about actual systems in a way which invokes Gandalf magic when they work like Penn and Teller magic. You assume the article and any defense of it is naive, but you’re missing the simple reality that sometimes you can simply remove huge amounts of complexity and get a better result.

The internet, for example, is not magic. There were several competing communication protocols, from circuit switched systems to fax to pagers. The internet is able to do all of those jobs, and it is a simpler system than the ones which existed in the past. It moved some complexity around, and therefore removed a bunch of complexity which was unnecessary.

This increase in simplicity is also called the second industrial revolution.

Simplification is always regressive and backwards.

Perhaps you prefer the term decomplecting? Complexity is an overloaded term, but you literally follow up “simplification as a regressive thing” with a bunch of simplification which is effective. Since we are sharing reading lists, perhaps a bit of Dr Fatima and Think that Through on Youtube might help you. It’s clear you do not understand the article nor my points.

The world without complexity was only able to feed around 2 billion humans

Bold claim. Why do you think complexity itself can improve efficiency? I can easily tank efficiency by adding complexity. Complexity also necessarily destroys resilience. Every time we’ve tried adding complexity, all of those societies disappear, from ancient Egypt to Rome to the Incans.

Often it’s a bit difficult to make an abstract point out of examples. You seem to be countering those examples with today’s zeitgeist, the exact thing the article is looking to counter.

The person decided this was the normal they wanted and where they chose to live.

This would be true if all else were equal, but it isn’t. Society built roads. It had to tear down housing to build the roads. The house prices went up because corporations bought up the housing stock and are using it to manipulate rents. None of that was the “choice” of the farmer. One cannot just opt out. “oh no thanks. I’ll just take efficient public transport and we can just rip up the road network. Just give me one of the houses we build through more dense development.”

Things are going to increase in complexity unless civilization collapses

Why? Many folks today are talking about making society resilient over efficient, with respect to COVID and supply chains. This is a direct ask for reducing complexity. The 15 minute city is an ask to reduce complexity. Complex societies fail.

Ultimately, the issue is cultural.

The issue is hegemony. Every company claiming to benefit you are building a fiefdom and you are the bricks. You can work around it but you have to beat the products and services you buy into submission. This is true of phones, computers, cars, TVs, subscriptions, AI, and increasingly how it asks more and more of us. People say “the things we own end up owning us” but no one says that about a fridge, or a washing machine.

I keep mine in an ever growing wishlist, which I never get back to, but it stops me from feeling like I forgot anything.

I’ve given up. I’m going to just keep adding to wishlist and nibble on a new one every now and then.

No, it’s another company, but I know nothing about them.

They’re green growth. Relevant Think that through video.

This is fine. I don’t mind a diversity of opinion here. I agree that Proton is a stop-gap solution, and that most older games are going to need it, and newer AAA games are not going to support Linux all of a sudden.

However, I do think that we should continue to encourage developers to create native builds when they can. Indie devs tend to do this and it’s a pretty great experience. Not only that, it often enables playing on unusual devices such as SBCs. For example, UFO 50 was made in Gamemaker, which offers native Linux builds, and it’s already on Portmaster. You basically can’t do that with Proton.

My problem is calling people who want Linux native games misguided or wrong. I really don’t think that’s helpful.

I wish he wouldn’t repeat the idea that Proton is acceptable to game devs and Linux users shouldn’t demand native games. I’m much closer to Nick’s (from Linux Experiment) idea: That these games work as long as a company like Valve pays for Proton. The day Valve stops is the day these Proton games start to rot. For archival, for our own history, and for actual games on Linux, we should want Linux native games.

The thing is, the “no tux no bucks” crowd doesn’t advocate for other people to say the same. The proton crowd is actively telling the “no tux no bucks” people to shut up, and it’s not very nice. We need a multitude of views to succeed in the long term as a community.

Oh wow this is Bevy and Rust?! RIP to everyone saying no “real” games are made in Rust.

Bespoke

Voting isn’t going to do shit.

Convince the people around you to protest and vote.

Which is it?

The issue is, the “wisdom” isn’t “don’t worry about personal emissions”, it’s “take voting extremely seriously. Become a single issue voter, that issue should be climate”

But there’s a psychological thing where people take the discount today and the payment later.

Yet another reason PC is superior.

Bit of both. Actually I think ARM the ISA overall is in good (even great!) shape, but it’s the GPU and other SoC functions which cause the most headaches.

Qualcomm had an exclusivity deal with Microsoft which has expired. I think that’s what is causing them to put relevant code in mainline.

Snapdragon hasn’t had mainline kernel support and has always been a pain to set up, enough so that nobody does it. This is using a snapdragon processor. Those are also fairly powerful.

Man these guys should try putting more effort into making the game rather than harrassing their employees.

My main issue with it is that everyone is using it to push their own narrative about why the game failed. People doing the “It’s a woke game, so it went broke”, or “it’s a saturated market”, or whatever. These are just reactions, not data driven analyses.