Grofit

The Internet used to operate fine before this ad riddled slop was spoon fed to us.

I'm pretty sure back in the day you would get some ads on geocities sites and other free Web hosts, and it was fine, I don't expect ads to vanish, you are making out like it's an all or nothing proposition.

The paradigms for "content" is all wrong now, rather than the ads being needed to fund the content, the content is produced as a way to keep eyes on ads.

There are literally design/ux guides around how to best waste a users time to get more ads shown without getting them to leave, click bait shouldn't even be a thing.

Now you can say "this is why we need to support people so they don't need to do this", but I don't feel they do NEED to, they choose to do this as it maximises income, but why do you need to get paid for every thing you do?

Its like people used to Stream and make YT vids because they enjoyed it, uploading new vids whenever there was a reason to, not because some algorithm required it.

I'm not against people making a living from YT or streaming, or even the Internet, but there is a difference between someone who enjoyed doing something and made it big vs people who just want to make money and YT is the vehicle for it.

Too much of society is focused on money.

The Internet used to feel like a university with clever people sharing knowledge and discussing all manner of topics, with some fun student bars to hang out and chat.

Now it feels like a noisy bazzar full of pick pocketers and stall vendors with fake smiles yelling at you to support them and buy their merch (and or their sponsors).

Its a cess pit.

I feel like it's a mix of quite a few things, social media is DEFINITELY a big part of the problem but the monetisation of EVERYTHING is the main problem.

When the Internet was becoming more mainstream around the world (late 90s) most people who put content on there didn't do it for money, they did it just to share knowledge/thoughts or just be part of a small niche community.

This meant while there was less content it was more meaningful, and it got to the point quickly as it didn't need to show you ads etc.

Recipie sites show this perfectly, people used to just post family recipes in cooking forums, now it's all personal blogs riddled with ads splattered between the person's life story and multiple requests to subscribe to related guff.

Ultimately the goal of the Internet shifted from "sharing knowledge/communicating" to "show as many ads as possible". This makes 90% of each site filler to stop you getting to the 10% too quickly, so you get snagged on ads etc.

This is why AI is great for companies, they can put in the important 10% and have it make up the 90%, but it's just adding more noise to the Internet.

Also pair this problem with search engines that now take advantage of the noise to provide "summary" blurbs which mean you don't even visit the sites directly so they don't get the revenue, the search engines do, I think there is a term for this "one click results" or something.

Its such a shame, I loved the Internet from like 1995-2005, you could search for something and get really good information and facts on the subject quickly. Now the same sort of things are lost amongst the filler sites that just aggregate information and regurgitate it as their own, or just out uninformed opinions (maybe even AI results) as content as if it's from experts etc.

I could go on for ages on the subject as there are so many facets to the problem but I can't see any real solutions, it's just a midden heap.

In some games it's super obvious that it's doing upscaling and looks awful, some games with without upscaling look awful (TAA), it's odd that in some cases tools like Dlss can look better than native TAA.

For the most part though it feels like the FLAC vs Opus or whatever, most people can't notice difference and don't care enough about it, but some people can tell the difference and want the best, I don't think either are wrong it's just down to how much you notice/can tolerate before it's annoying.

It's a personal preference but I would take occasional smearing over janky frame rate, I don't know why but if you are not a solid 60,90,120 it just feels really like there is a stutter every second or two even though it should be fine if it's above 60fps.

For some games I'm happy to turn it on as it drops power/temps and provides virtually identical output (as far as i can tell anyway) to native, but my fans don't need to go into overdrive mode.

I may even put on frame gen too if I just want to bump a stable-ish 80-90fps to stable 120fps, and again drops power and temps slightly. That sometimes does cause smearing but for the most part I don't notice enough to be annoyed. Without them I would probably be running with more power draw and higher temps, and possibly still not even hitting lower resolutions at 120, some games as you say though can hit 120 no problem even without and the gpu won't be stressed.

The challenges thst existed to use technology no longer exist, so there is no longer a reason to look under the hood for most people. It's like how a lot of generations after boomers don't know about how to change a tyre or spark plugs etc, cars got more reliable and industries created services to stop you needing to worry about that stuff.

As a kid I remember WANTING to play games with a friend on PC, he knew we needed a null modem cable and we went to pc shop 2 towns over got one and tried to figure out how to play together using it. Then when the Internet came out and we had to fight against Internet connection sharing so one computer could share Internet with friends pc. Trying to use no-cd patches just so we didn't need to keep grabbing cds to play games etc.

There were so many things you learnt back then but it was because we had no alternative, I get why tech knowledge has vanished and I don't blame them, they have had no need to solve the same problems and haven't grown with technology, it's been already established and they have had no need to concern themselves with it.

Problem is the working world still heavily needs PC skills and basic analytical ability so there needs to be more focus on those old "computer driving license" style courses so people can certify they know how to find a file and end task when something hangs.

DULLARD 😅

Also a bonus code I won't forget:

ADE-NAI-WRA-LKA

You can all guess what games they are from.

I often wonder if Hideo Kojima is actually a time traveller as it feels like we are living through the MGS series. With AI and government propaganda and control measures it feels like we are at the MGS2 phase

Erm... Ok

The consensus seems to be that AMD priced their cards higher expecting Nvidia to price higher than they did.

Then Nvidia priced lower than they expected (still too expensive imo) and AMD needed to react and price their card cheaper. Problem is retailers already paid for shipments so AMD needed to settle some sort of reimbursement process for the soon to be out of pocket retailers.

This was a big issue for them, but also they realised they could generate more frames if they wanted to, and match Nvidia so they would be able to also claim crazy high FPS figures (it's all nonsense, we care about raster performance).

To be able to do this they needed a couple of months to dev and test it before reviewers get it.

So delaying launch let's them solve both problems with the extra time, but in reality they are missing a window to gain market advantage while also being able to align the narrative with what gamers care about (pure raster performance).

Not answering your comment directly, and I don't even use Linux, BUT..

One reason a lot of us don't use Linux even if we really want to us because it's biggest strength is also one of its biggest weaknesses, that being it's modularity.

There isn't a single packaging system, window manager, file system, shell, etc etc.

This makes it hard for companies (and devs in general) to target Linux for releases. For example you want to release something for Windows, you build a single exe, apple is a dmg (I think) etc so you just build for one single platform with a consistent API.

When you want to build for Linux there can't be just one build/package. This has actively been cited as reasons why some commercial software doesn't support Linux, as it takes far more effort to support all major permutations of platform and package management.

So back to your question, why is Valve's Steam OS going to help? Because it's going to be a single platform with a single way of doing things. You can always go and replace the bits like any Linux distro but out the box it will be easy enough for vendors to support, it will hopefully also get more adoption because it has commercial support.

Look at Android as an example (I know it's not entirely the same), but that is just a customised version of Linux, but as it's consistent and has a single way to manage packages it's widely adopted.

I am pretty sure Linus himself said how one of the reasons why Linux desktop doesn't have mass adoption is because no one can agree on how things should be done, so we have hundreds of libs all doing the same thing in a different way. Valve will pick what they think is best (even if it isn't technically the best) and through that we all have a singular point of effort and adoption to centralise on.

Recently, I would say Roadwarden, was such a great game with such a unique feel to it.