Was quite excited to try this, but uh.... well, DOOM: TDA (what I've been playing recently) won't start on this version.

At least the fun stuff they've borrowed from CachyOS works if I switch to CachyOS-latest for now.

I smell weed in the elevator of our non-smoking apartment building regularly, because someone has walked outside, smoked, and returned to their apartment at some time before I had to leave. I usually know before the elevator even reaches my floor. And you can't smoke at our entrance either, I've seen them walking back from a nearby park.

I've smelled weed on my own clothes and hair days after visiting people who smoke, when I never have. It's strong enough I've had friends comment I smell like weed in this scenario. These days whenever we visit them we immediately shower and do laundry as soon as we get home.

People were polite or slow to assume the weed smell came from the teacher. I know I would be. I ignore the smell of weed and regular smoking all the time. There's no amount of sneakiness sufficient to stop it clinging to your clothes and hair.

Man, AI agents are remarkably bad at "self-awareness" like this, I've used it to configure some networking on a Raspberry Pi, and found myself reminding it frequently, "hey buddy, maybe don't lock us out of connecting to this thing over the network, I really don't want to have to wipe the thing because it's running a headless OS".

It's a perfect example of the kind of thing that "walk or drive to wash your car?" captures. I need you to realize some non-explicit context and make some basic logical inferences before you can be even remotely trusted to do anything important without very close expert supervision, a degree of supervision that almost makes it totally worthless for that kind of task because the expert could just do it instead.

Alright, I'll bite and be devil's advocate here.

As someone who has studied the Bible fairly closely and cares about it, this is no surprise. I'll give a few scattered points here, and you'll also have to pardon me, as this is from the top of my head, I only have so much time to burn on this today.

#1 The Bible is not first and foremost a "historical documentary" in the modern sense. The very idea of a historical account striving for objective unbiased reality is fairly recent historically, and the Bible is meant to be a religious text that's trying to teach you something.

I'll give an example. At the end of most of the gospels, there's a Roman guard, who reacts in wonder to the death of Jesus. In each account, he marvels aloud, saying something that caps off the themes of each gospel. As a reader, I don't believe that each apostle happened to be by a different guard that happened to say the perfect thing. Maybe one apostle saw a guard in the distance with a look on his face? Maybe there was no guard at all? The historical veracity of this detail doesn't really matter. The story is accurate in the major points, that Jesus died on a cross, etc, but the small details like this are full of embellishments and storytelling. Even in tiny details you wouldn't expect, details like numbers have symbolic significance. Ancient Jewish readers were aware of what was happening here, and this wasn't considered a lie or a devastating contradiction just like we don't think modern writers are liars for using exaggeration, metaphors, and sarcasm.

#2 The Biblical authors are aware there are contradictions. For example, there's a case where a ritual meal is originally supposed to be boiled. Later, the same meal is described as being roasted. Both of these cases are divine law given by God. I'd argue this change was because Israel was no longer fleeing through the desert, and so could prepare the meal in a slower way.

Much later in the Bible, an especially good King is described as being "so faithful that he roasts his meat in water". It's a Biblical author literally cracking a joke about a Biblical contradiction. These moments aren't some shocking gotcha to any reader paying attention.

#3 The Bible contradicts itself intentionally. It's an ancient Jewish way of teaching to have two rabbis take different stances, and argue publicly. Often, the truth of something is in the tension between two perspectives.

My favourite book in the Bible is Ecclesiastes, which takes a Nietzsche-esque stance that nothing we do matters, and life is terribly unfair. Bad things happen to good people and vice versa, so simply eat, drink, and be merry. It comes right after Proverbs, which is the classic book everyone quotes from about how doing good things leads to good things. The truth is somewhere in the middle. The books directly contradict, but are both true, being kind often leads to kindness, but life is also often unfair and out of our control. The best way to explain that is to state both sides, and let the reader sit on those two ideas and ponder them.

In summary, this collection of contradictions is a great visualization, and I love it for those obstinate people who are deep in the Dunning-Kruger effect with the Bible. But for those who actually pay attention and study, this isn't anything revelatory. When someone says the Bible is inerrant and has "no mistakes", they (hopefully) mean that they believe it's inspired by God, and everything in it has some value, even if they may not understand every detail. I would hope that they don't mean that there are literally no contradictory statements, as that's objectively untrue.

The part you're missing is that it's the Feywild, often known for trickery and being literal with language. I.E. The classic "can I have your name?" being a Fey asking to steal your identity.

In the Feywild specifically, the DM's pun could have literal power in that the characters would take a literal fall, and players in the Feywild should be prepared for such shenanigans.

I'm surprised Bazzite isn't higher on the list, here, it really seems like the OS I hear about whenever Linux gaming comes up.

I'd recommend you get some practice identifying and proving AI generated images. I agree this has a bit of that "look", but in this case I'm quite certain it's just repeated image compression/a cheap camera. Here's the major details I looked at after seeing your comment:

• The grass at the bottom left. AI is frequently sloppy with little details and straight lines, usually the ones in the background. In this case, you can look at any blade of grass and follow it, and its path makes sense. The same happens with the lines in the tiles, the water stains, etc.
• The birthmark on the large brown dog. In this case, this is a set of three photos, which gives us an easy way to spot AI. AI generated images start from random noise, so you'd never get the exact same birthmark, consistent across different angles, from a prompt like "large brown dog with white birthmark on chest". Spotting a change in the birthmark, or a detail like it, would be a dead giveaway, but I can't spot any.
• There are other tricks as well, such as looking for strange variations in contrast and exposure from the underlying noise, but those are more difficult to explain in text. Corridor Digital has some good videos demonstrating it with visual examples if you're interested, but suffice to say I don't pick up on that here either.

It's useful to be able to prove or disprove your suspicions, as well as to be able to back them up with something as simple as "this is AI generated, just look at the grass". Hope this helps!

This reads like a loading screen tip

Pretty much the answer I'd expect. In my most outlandish hopes, I'd love for this thing to serve as proper competition to the PS5, it's certainly more exciting than Xbox right now, and pretty much sounds like what MS is planning to try for the next Xbox anyway.

That's probably not likely, that kind of threat would require some really aggressive pricing, and Valve can't guarantee as much vendor lock-in money post-sale as Sony can. That said... man it'd be incredible to see Valve step into that near-monopoly as well and viably compete against both Switch and PS5, as they both pretty desperately need competition to keep them working for the consumer.

Hard to blame them. Proton is dang impressive, and if it works, it works.

I'll add some other good questions to ask yourself to catch AI:

1. Who's holding this camera? How are they getting this angle?
2. How is the camera work in the situation? AI tends to be smooth and even movements, like it's on a track and stabilized, unlike real footage in hectic scenarios.

The best part is, these are somewhat unlikely to be fixed in the near future, as footage looking "professional" is desirable for the AI companies, unlike gibberish text and questionable physics.

Well... duh. The guy runs a competing storefront who's only claims to fame are:

1. Spending a bunch of money for timed exclusivity and free giveaways, rather than building out core features.
2. They give devs a better cut than Steam to claim moral high ground.

... that's it, that's all the reasons to use Epic, unless you want to play Fortnite or participate in an Early Access period where they chose Epic to reduce the overwhelming amount of feedback like Hades.

Unfortunately, as far as succeeding in almost anything goes, this seems to be the meta. Even if these guys hate Trump and (very likely) recognize that he's wreaking havoc on the economy and really hurting their business with tariffs, for some reason, flattery gets you everywhere with Trump. Gifts and bribery get you very far with Trump. Trump makes decisions with his ego rather than for the good of the country. And it's substantially better for business/diplomacy/whatever for such a fickle and vindictive US president to like you.

Absolutely not how the world should be, but IMO it's up to democracy to oust Trump and not to let this madness happen again. Any time I see CEOs or world leaders flattering Trump like this, I can no longer tell the difference between utter morons and people who have just learned to play the game to manipulate Trump and get what they want. This is just how Trump-era politics work, to everyone's detriment.

Honestly, I don't hate the feature, it somewhat helps with the (YT created) problem of clickbait-y titles. But it hilariously has no understanding of satire that isn't spelled out clearly, exactly as you'd expect.

I've particularly enjoyed it summarizing some of Dunkey's videos, thinking games like "Piglet's Big Game" are proper horror titles. The feature would probably be better with community-driven descriptions, like twitter's community notes. Which would admittedly be even more sarcastic about Dunkey's videos, but at least the author would be in on the gag.

Already shared my thoughts on [email protected], but I am playing on Linux, so:

Been playing this, and it's great! Started right up at 9x resolution, wasn't too hard to setup a high quality texture pack, and the game is looking sharp at 4k/120 without any issues!

Things look great, and this launching with features like gyro aim, free cam, and QoL like fast climbing and skipping that damn rupee cutscene is phenomenal.

Also, man, can't wait to come back to this in a year or two with a randomizer and whatever other features they can pack in here.

I assumed you were exaggerating, but literally the first paragraph states they're "punting into the stratosphere" the "concept that you have to pay to play a game". What an insane false equivalency.

Pirating it is still illegal, and pretty much every game is cracked and distributable eventually, making it no different than this case. This reads like either a very uneducated reporter, or some kind of deliberate propaganda on behalf of tools like Denuvo.

The big benefit of raytracing now, imo (which most games aren't doing), is that it frees games up to introduce dynamic destruction again. We used to have all kinds of destructible walls and bits and bobs around, with flat lighting, but baked lighting has really limited what devs can do, because if you break something you need a solution to handle all the ways the lighting changes, and for the majority of games they just make everything stiff and unbreakable.

Raytracing is that solution. Plug and play, the lighting just works when you blow stuff up. DOOM: TDA is the best example of this currently (although still not a direct part of gameplay), with a bunch of destructible stuff everywhere, and that actually blows up with a physics sim rather than a canned animation. All the little boards have perfect ambient occlusion and shadows, because raytracing just does that.

It's really fun, if minor, and one of the things I actually look forward to more games doing with raytracing. IMO that's why raytracing has whelmed most people, because we're used to near-flawless baked lighting, and haven't really noticed the compromises that baked lighting has pushed on us.

For me personally, I love it. I bought a pretty large SSD for my gaming PC, the space used by non-game apps is basically irrelevant.

But the convenience? Unmatched. Compatibility is a non-question, it's virtually impossible to break any app. Everything has exactly what it needs, if I go to make a bug report, my details are 1 line long, "Flatpak version", I don't have to consider whether X wants Y python when Z wants 2 versions later, just let each install its own version in its sandbox and update that version when it's ready to.

Want to try an app? Alright, look up the thing you want on bazaar, install 3 apps that do it, and try them. Effortlessly delete them when you don't like them, and it's even cached so that you can one-click reinstall it with your data if you later realize one was your best choice. Deleting something completely cleans it from your system, dependencies and temporary files and all.

Yes, it takes a little bit to understand permissions and such once you need them, but that's all not nearly as complicated as the problems I learned to solve before flatpaks came along, and Flatseal makes managing that stuff pretty darn straightforward too. Flatpaks are 10/10 easy to work with, and absolutely deserve to become the default way to install Linux applications in the way they have been.

Only recently moved over to Linux, is SuperTuxKart actually... good? Like, me and my wife have put tons of hours into modded Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, the physics are really fun, the accessibility options are good enough that she can reasonably keep up with me, and the graphics are super appealing. Is Tux Kart worth my time to look into? Does it have a chance of appealing to my very casual wife?

I do really think they fumbled the bag here with "Welcome Tour". Could've been a cool pack in, would've been reminiscent of Wii Sports, and apparently it's a decent quality package that probably would've been well received, and helped build hype for the console.

Instead, they charged a pittance for it. No way are they getting many sales, and they gave us an easy narrative that they're greedy and have lost their way since Reggie and the Wii, just as they launch a hella expensive console with big price increases and don't need that kind of PR.

They turned an easy PR win that might have helped move units into a PR disaster in a touchy time, for chump change next to their profit margins on the console + games like Mario Kart World. Also lost a chance to advertise and show off what the new hardware can really do, the whole thing looks like a big advertisement anyways. Hell, it even looks pretty neat, but there's not a snowballs chance in hell of me paying for it.