Huh. I've used Sony's site recently and I just opened it to see if I noticed anything broken but it seems fine. Of course somebody not seeing a bug doesn't mean the bug doesn't exist, it's not that I don't believe you. All I'm saying is I've been primarily on Firefox for a while now and that hasn't been my experience.

... Is it?

I genuinely haven't encountered anything broken using it, short of Youtube. And that's less Firefox and more all the extensions trying to make it usable, I think. There are a couple of bits of functionality missing, but in terms of sites working, it seems perfectly fine.

Thanks for the link! International press is still running the 33% estimate they probably got from the French morning papers or have taken down the results, so my references hadn't updated the number.

For the record, the image is not new, there was a lot of international coverage regarding Le Pen's presidential chances in 2022. But presidentials are presidentials, only one person gets to win. Legislatives raise a lot of questions about parliamentary dynamics, alliances and the potential for the second round to generate another bout of Macron shooting himself in the foot followed by him shooting everybody else in the foot for good measure. That, and there is more paranoia about the tilt right across the EU and internationally about the US.

No, please, free me from this. Because in my head I'm super annoyed at how well this seems to work and I need rescuing from an expert.

FWIW, I'm seeing projections based on the counts that still have them at 34, but I guess we'll see.

I agree that a resurrection of the cordon sanitaire is probably a positive and I agree that Macron was extremely clumsy, like much of the EU's centre and demochristian right, in sliding towards far right positions they just can't defend any better than the actual fascists. But still, from an international perspective France is now firmly in the club of Central European countries with a major fascist problem in a way it wasn't yesterday, even if the outcome was already understood to be going this way.

I've genuinely never felt the need, but I also don't post for clout or proactively, I'm more of a reply guy in that I prefer the version of social media where I talk with people rather than at people and I do not give a crap about followers, upvotes or starting popular threads. Believe it or not that tends to do a lot to minimize the use cases for blocking, in that people rarely take the time to chase me around or specifically target me, even when things get heated.

But hey, if somebody is bothering you block away. I don't have a moral stance on it.

I get that immersion tends to normalization...

... but man, 34% is still a LOT. Especially when it's 2x the previous result and the largest bloc.

It'll be good if they are prevented from having easy access to legislative action, but it's still an underpants-threatening result in my book.

I don't think that's true of either. They're not saving all this video in RAM. Steam's system even asks you during setup to choose a temp folder for the video to sit in until you choose to save it as a clip. I don't know when it flushes that cache, but I'm assuming it doesn't and simply overwrites it when it runs out of the allocated space to allow you to go back and save something after you close a game.

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.

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.