MudMan

It’s not just the games that support it, it will also tag other metadata it knows automatically on all games, like achievement unlocks. And you can manually add tags, too. It’s all telemetry that Valve and the devs are already extracting from you, of course, plus whatever you volunteer in manual markers, but it’s still a bit creepy to see it laid out on a timeline like that.

Well, it’s two different things, one is the background record, which is less “freaking out” and more “not for me on PC”.

The other is blending the background recording with metadata on a timeline, which starts getting Recall-y in terms of logging a video recording of what you were doing where there is also a data record of what you were doing. I do think that part starts stepping over to kinda creepy.

It’s more useful here than as a OS feature, though, because yeah, I can see it saving one the trouble of recording different matches separately or having to scrub back and forth to find certain things.

Yeah, I get that, but that’s also true of Steam Link and Steam’s general streaming solution (which I presume is what this is using) and it’s trivial to get a different window to show up or even to get to the desktop from the in-game streaming, particularly if you have a non-Steam app in your library.

So yeah, it’s gonna be on demand recordings from me… assuming the quality holds up (Nvidia’s kinda sucks). Otherwise that’s what OBS is for.

Well, that was MS’s argument and I don’t think it flies there either.

On a console it’s fine, it’s only ever gonna catch a game. On the Steam Deck as well, same deal.

For a desktop PC that you also use for work and media and other stuff… yeah, I want to be extra sure that if I alt-tab from a game to quickly answer some work email that’s not going to accidentally be recorded anywhere, even locally. Like Recall, I can see people who would not mind that as long as the data stays in their computer, I myself like knowing that I don’t accidentally leave exposed files with potentially sensitive information laying around without my knowledge.

I mean, it’s fine, it just means turning the feature off. I don’t use the equivalent feature from Nvidia for the same reasons. I still think it’s funny that MS got (rightfully) put on blast for basically doing this and then Apple and Valve both announced similar features immediately afterwards. It’s made for some awkward mental gymnastics on the Internet recently.

Hah. So if you turn the background recording on it keeps a browsable timeline with metadata about which modes you were playing, presumably based on your rich presence data?

How freaked out do you think everyone at Valve was this past month watching Microsoft’s Recall feature get ripped to shreds?

All joking aside, I do not trust background recording on PC. I’ve seen how easy it is to bypass Steam Link’s restritions on streaming your desktop, I guarantee that some of these clips would end up with something I don’t want in them. I do think metadata annotation on long manual recordings is potentially interesting, but it IS creepy.

It’s the PC version with controller support patched into the old Sidewinder support. It works super smoothly, although these days you can get the PS1 version to look a lot better with emulation tweaks.

Still, go get it. It’s so cool to have this DRM free. The installer is safely in my library now.

Neat. Not the version I played, and arguably a lot of those issues were fixed in the PC port. But then, there are a lot more options for accurate hardware-level emulation and preservation of period-appropriate Amiga than the much muddier explosion of PC specs, so it’s weirdly a cleaner way to preserve an optimal version.

I’m never sure how much to push early releases like these, though. Is the clumsy one-unit-at-a-time approach to Dune 2 worth messing with? Or do you just go play the (extremely good) remaster of Command & Conquer at that point?

Even better. There’s a solid chance Bumble wasn’t even born when loss.jpg happened.

What a life.

“Under the age of 30”, huh?

Alright, nerds, just so we’re clear, that was more than 15 years ago. Assuming this is current, which it probably isn’t, that “53yo” dad was in his late 30s at the time, could very much have been posting about it when it happened. Given the current average age for having kids, “bumblebeebats” was probably wearing diapers by the time the Internet got to the point of entirely abstracting it to shapes. There is a longer period of time between loss.jpg and now than between the first rickroll and loss.jpg.

If it makes you feel any better, all of this is hurting me just as bad as it’s hurting you.

I wonder, too. Pro-EU centre-right parties and social democrat parties still hold a majority, so on these things I’m not sure we’ll see a major shift, but I genuinely haven’t checked the voting record to see if the far right parties generally take a different stance on the more pedestrian consumer protection regulations or not. I probably should do that.

But that’s my problem. You guys are here trying to convince somebody who isn’t listening that you’re better than AI at doing a thing AI doesn’t do in the first place.

You’re implicitly accepting that eventually AI will be better than you once it gets “good enough”. May as well jump in ahead of the curve, right?

Only no, that’s not how it’s likely to go. It’s not what it does or how it works. Everybody is arguing about the sci-fi version of this stuff and making wrong decisions as a result, both critics and advocates. It’s super frustrating. We need a lot more unbiased education and a lot less argumentative nonsense on all sides.

Well, yeah, but that’s all bullshit.

So why would you buy into it when presenting a rebuttal?

I am interested in pointing out that the likely response machine getting the answers to test questions right is not a particularly interesting outcome. That’s interesting.

I’m interested in which of the likely responses the machine struggles with and when it stops struggling and what the amount of data and processing associated to each are. That’s interesting.

It’s interesting that language emerges from the math at, all, let alone how plausible the output is in most situations. That’s more than interesting.

But if your response to the obvious misrepresentation that a chatbot is a person of ANY level of intelligence is to point out that it’s dumb you’ve already accepted the premise. You’re now part of the bullshit. That’s counterproductive. And worse, uninteresting and outright boring.

I am excited about the ways different ML applications can help with automation or as part of a workflow. I think explaining to gullible executives how that would actually work (spoilers, it’s not by replacing workers with chatbots) is very relevant. But this and a lot of the online criticism is not doing that, it’s buying into the correct premise that the only reason that’s not how it works is because the AI is too dumb and it’ll be fine when it’s smarter, when that’s unlikely to be the case. Making a better screwdriver won’t turn it into a machete. This is entirely the wrong conversation to be having.

I… no.

It’s a computer, doing math. It’s genuinely fascinating and mind blowing that coherent language emerges from it, and there are probably profound things about exactly when and how. It doesn’t need a fundamental moral stance, let alone eldritch horror, to be seen with some objectivity.

I see next to zero discussion about Gaza here.

People seem to be arguing about whether vandalizing libraries is good or bad. It’s bad, for the record.

Of course that’s only failure if your goal is for people to talk about the thing you’re supposed to care about. If your goal happens to be to get people to talk about you, screw Gaza or anybody else… well, then yeah, mission accomplished. We can all go home now.

I am endlessly frustrated by people “testing” chatbots and posting the results like they’re some revelation.

We know what’s happening here. It’s not a mystery. This weird antropomorphization is prevalent on both advocates and critics of the tech. Both seem to be convinced that they’re dealing with a person.

This is the equivalent of asking a Google search to write a critical essay on A Confederacy of Dunces and being surprised when it spits search results.

Chatbots aren’t useless, they are actually pretty good at proposing likely responses on fuzzy prompts. They’re decent at telling you what an old movie may be based on some details of the plot, sometimes they can identify why a joke you lack cultural context to understand is supposed to be funny… that type of thing. They can take a piece of text and provide another piece of text that is likely to have a relationship with it.

It is not a thinking machine. It is not a person. It’s not a search engine, for that matter, or a calculator. It’s infuriating to see everybody arguing about how good it is at being what it’s not. Both parties are buying into a premise we already know to be incorrect.

Hah. I can tell.

My politics are real world politics. As in, from lived experience. So no, they don’t line up with your cosplay categories. Because it’s not a football match, or good guys vs bad guys. It’s people’s lives, where what you do has real consequences.

So while I’m way to the left of Biden, I am also not an idiot and precisely because I saw what 4 years of Trump did I am telling you that a second Trump term should be avoided by all means necessary. It’s not even a lesser evil, Biden has done pretty alright, by most counts. But even if it was a lesser evil, Trump is a Netanyahu ally, a Putin ally, a fundamentally incompetent anarchocapitalist fascist, an overt racist, an authoritarian with plans to persecute his political opponents and… you know, an actual rapist. You’d think at least one of those would be disqualifying for anybody not pretending to a be a progressive.

And no, I didn’t “live in anecdote” I live in a whole ass country that was a fascist dictatorship for decades. It’s pretty statistically significant, that.

I’m less worried about what will change if people vote for Biden (which hey, I’m actually pretty sure whatever change happens will be for the better, as it has been this term).

I’m way more worried about waht will change if people don’t vote for Biden.

Also, how do you figure the Palestine situation would have gone under Trump, who is the actual guy who reversed 70 years of foreign policy to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and made West Bank settlements legal? How do you think that situation develops the day after Trump wins again?

See, the difference is that when you protest police violence to a future Biden administration he’ll have at most a political problem to manage for the next election and may feel the need to enforce some change in regulation to address it.

When my parents protested the work camps and death sentences for political prisoners during actual fascism (they were both involved to different degrees with banned socialist and communist organizations) the government found that to be a nuisance at worst, a chance to enact more political cleansing at best, so they sent people like that other guy.

So yes, there is a difference. And yes, that guy sounded suspiciously like Trump and not at all like Biden. By the way, like Trump, he was actually funny and charsimatic. I didn’t hate him or dislike him. This is a weird thing to talk about because cosplayers talk about this as a hypothetical or a disingenous argument for online clout, but I’m telling you about a real person I knew and had a relationship with.

Oh, I can help. My best friend’s grandpa was a cop under fascism. He still had the gun he used to hunt down communists in the mountains. It really painted a picture to hear him talk about it and defend it.

I mean it, go vote for Biden.

As a person from a country that was actually fascist within living memory, the US cosplay left is infuriating.

Go vote for Biden in November. Seriously.