• 5 Posts
  • 384 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Install it and use it?

    Their PDS is self hosted, but it does still rely on the central relays (though you COULD host that yourself if you wanted to pay for it, I suppose?).

    It’s very centralized, but it’s not that different from what you’d have to do to make Mastodon useful: a small/single user instance will get zero content, even if you follow a lot of people, without also adding several relays to work around some of the design decisions made by the Mastodon team regarding replies and how federation works for those kind of things, as well as to populate hashtags and searches and such.

    Though really you shouldn’t do any of that, and just use a good platform for discussion, like a forum or a threadiverse platform. (No seriously, absolutely hate “microblog” shit because it’s designed to just be zingers and hot takes and not actual meaningful conversations.)





  • Yeah, it doesn’t appear that PSSR (which I cannot help but pronounce with an added i) is the highest quality upscaling out there, combined with console gamers not having experienced FSR/FSR2/FSR3’s uh, specialness is leading to people being confused why their faster console looks worse.

    Hopefully Sony does something about the less than stellar quality in a PSSR2 or something relatively quickly, or they’re going to burn a lot of goodwill around the whole concept, much like how FSR is pretty much considered pretty trash by PC gamers.


  • really effects performance that much

    Depending on the exact flags, some workloads will be faster, some will be identical, and some will be slower. Compilier optimization is some dark magic that relies on a ton of factors, but you can’t just assume that going from like -O2 to -O3 will provide better performance, since the optimizations also rely on the underlying code as to what they’ll actually make happen… and is why, for the most part, everyone suggests you stop at -O2 since you can start getting unexpected behavior the further up the curve you go.

    And we’re talking low single digit performance improvements at best, not anything that anyone who is doing anything that’s not running benchmarks 24/7 would ever even notice in real world performance.

    Disclaimer: there are workloads that are going to show different performance uplifts, but we’re talking Firefox and KDE and games here, per the OP’s comments.

    Also they do default to a different scheduler, which is almost certainly why anyone using it will notice it feels “faster”, but it’s mainlined in the kernel so it’s not like you can’t use that anywhere else.






  • makes you dizzy

    Fun story about VR and being dizzy.

    I had huge problems with VR dizziness and blurriness and it turned out I had strabismus which was not normally noticeable as it was mitigated by my glasses and by being only a modest amount of cross-eyed-ness, but would absolutely make itself known after about 20 minutes of playing VR, to the point I was absolutely certain I was just getting motion sick.

    Might be worth talking to your optometrist the next time you’re there, since boy, it’s shocking how much better my eyes got after dealing with it.


  • Fallout and Skyrim VR

    takes a lot of modding

    To be fair, so do the 2D versions. VR Skyrim, at least, is super fun once you get the modding done.

    As for general value: it depends.

    I mostly play various “exercise” games like Beat Saber, Synth Riders, Pistol Whip and Thrill of the Fight. The Quest is fantastic for those, because you can untether and go stand outside in a nice open surface and whilst you look like an absolute idiot, it can be a hell of a workout if you put in the effort.

    As for like, traditional games, it’s less rosy: there’s very little market, thus very little software support, thus very little market, which means there’s very little software, which means…

    There’s a ton of gems all over the place if you’re after slightly more social activities, but I’d say for single-player game experiences you’re going to be limited for good options that run exclusively on the headset.

    That said, there’s a LOT of options in PC-tethered VR that are fantastic, assuming you can/want to tether to a PC. If you don’t, that’s fair, but all the really really in-depth experiences require a pretty beefy gaming pc. Stuff like HL: Alyx, because it’s (still) probably the best VR-native game that’s been released so far.

    There’s also the VR-versions-of-PC-games like Flight Simulator and various racing and space games that are worth checking out if you’re interested in them, and VR adds a lot to those experiences, if you can run the VR versions with sufficient performance which eh, is a whole different ball of problem.


  • richest companies on the planet

    What kills me is how fucking awful their choice of slop is, since you’d assume their marketing budget is larger than the GDP of several small countries combined.

    Like if you want to peddle slop, at least peddle good slop, and not something that would have been laughably bad years ago.







  • not as chatty as it used to be back in the days

    I think that’s kinda a generational problem. When you played WoW 20 years ago, all the chatter was in the game, because where else would someone be asking where Mankrik’s wife was?

    Kids these days (and old people who are paying attention, too, I guess) just join the Guild discord because it’s persistent chat outside of the game with push notifications and streaming and you can listen to shared playlists while raiding and all sorts of shit you just can’t do in the game.

    So sure, MMO people don’t chat in game as much anymore, but there’s still a vibrant meme-sharing-and-yelling-at-the-hunter community in Discord now.