Are you talking specifically about LLMs or Neural Network style AI in general? Super computers have been doing this sort of stuff for decades without much problem, and tbh the main issue is on training for LLMs inference is pretty computationally cheap

I disagree, there are loads of white papers detailing applications of AI in various industries, here’s an example, cba googling more links for you.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7577280/

I don’t mean it’s like the dotcom bubble in terms of context, I mean in terms of feel. Dotcom had loads of investors scrambling to “get in on it” many not really understanding why or what it was worth but just wanted quick wins.

This has same feel, a bit like crypto as you say but I would say crypto is very niche in real world applications at the moment whereas AI does have real world usages.

They are not the ones we are being fed in the mainstream like it replacing coders or artists, it can help in those areas but it’s just them trying to keep the hype going. Realistically it can be used very well for some medical research and diagnosis scenarios, as it can correlate patterns very easily showing likelyhood of genetic issues.

The game and media industry are very much trialling for voice and image synthesis for improving environmental design (texture synthesis) and providing dynamic voice synthesis based off actors likenesses. We have had peoples likenesses in movies for decades via cgi but it’s only really now we can do the same but for voices and this isn’t getting into logistics and/or financial where it is also seeing a lot of application.

Its not going to do much for the end consumer outside of the guff you currently use siri or alexa for etc, but inside the industries AI is very useful.

A lot of the AI boom is like the DotCom boom of the Web era. The bubble burst and a lot of companies lost money but the technology is still very much important and relevant to us all.

AI feels a lot like that, it’s here to stay, maybe not in th ways investors are touting, but for voice, image, video synthesis/processing it’s an amazing tool. It also has lots of applications in biotech, targetting systems, logistics etc.

So I can see the bubble bursting and a lot of money being lost, but that is the point when actually useful applications of the technology will start becoming mainstream.

I love SteamOS for gaming and I think going forward that may get more and more adoption, but a lot of day to day apps or dev tools I use either don’t have Linux releases (and can’t be run via wine/Proton). I would love to jump over on host rather than dabbling with it via vms/steamdeck but it’s just not productive enough.

One especially painful thing is when certain libs I’m developing with need different versions of glibc or gtk to the ones installed by default on OS, and then I die inside.

I just wish we could have less ways to do things in Linux.

I get that’s one of the main benefits of the eco system, but it adds too much of a burden on developers and users. A developer can release something for Windows easily, same for Mac, but for Linux is it a flatpak, a deb, snap etc?

Also given how many shells and pluggable infrastructure there is it’s not like troubleshooting on windows or mac, where you can Google something and others will have exact same problem. On Linux some may have same problem but most of the time it’s a slight variation and there are less users in the pool to begin with.

So a lot of stuff is stacked against you, I would love for it to become more mainstream but to do so I feel it needs to be a bit more like android where we just have a singular way to build/install packages, try and get more people onto a common shell/infrastructure so there are more people in same setup to help each other. Even if it’s not technically the best possible setup, if its consistent and easy to build for its going to speed up adoption.

I don’t think it’s realistically possible but it would greatly help adoption from consumers and developers imo.

Most companies can’t even give decent requirements for humans to understand and implement. An AI will just write any old stuff it thinks they want and they won’t have any way to really know if it’s right etc.

They would have more luck trying to create an AI that takes whimsical ideas and turns them into quantified requirements with acceptance criteria. Once they can do that they may stand a chance of replacing developers, but it’s gonna take far more than the simpleton code generators they have at the moment which at best are like bad SO answers you copy and paste then refactor.

This isn’t even factoring in automation testers who are programmers, build engineers, devops etc. Can’t wait for companies to cry even more about cloud costs when some AI is just lobbing everything into lambdas 😂

We did something similar, it’s how we saved all people in Dead Rising. We used to do this for so many single player games, it was such always such a laugh, and we got to finish games I probably wouldn’t play by myself.

I was/am kinda hoping that with the slow adoption of VR/AR that we can kinda bring hanging out on the couch taking turns on games together.

There are apps like Big Screen that already let you share a screen together and hang out, but not easily play games and you can’t share controls. EmuVR let’s you share controls and hang out in a room with people but only retro games via retroarch.

If we could get a mix of the two where I could just put on my headset/glasses (in the future) join my friends room and we both kinda exist in each other’s real life room via AR sharing screens it would be pretty good.

This is probably like a decade away, but for those of us with IRL friends who have moved really far away so hanging out in person frequently isn’t an option, it could be a ray of hope.

Would still rather just meet up and crash over at one of our places with takeaway pizza taking turns on Resident Evil 1 until 3am.

Ironically in our group it’s the people with kids who have the most availability/flexibility to meet up, but the ones who are single or don’t have a family who are always busy.

Oddjob, knives only in aztec

As a steam user I would love to see that but unsure how they could do it without the keyboard vendors agreeing to a standard, or having some bespoke drivers/hardware stuff like they do for ps4/switch controllers etc.

Also I imagine steam input would just map let’s say wsad to gamepad left axis, but some games will lose their mind if you try to use gamepad for movement but mouse/keyboard for other keys.

I appreciate there is limited benefit outside of gaming, maybe for media players to ffwd/rewind based off input amount etc.

This is a pretty complex topic, as a quick knee jerk I agree AI art isn’t art in the common sense, but one thing I disagree with is that all art has intent or even needs it.

I don’t think AI art is going to or even tries to replace art as a creative pursuit. If anything it’s more likely to replace certain photography related jobs.

Currently the main use cases are

• Generating stock photos
• Generating texture maps
• Generating concept art

None of these things really care about intent, you could argue concept art does, but a lot of the time it’s just there to set a vibe/direction/theme. All of the above will still replace jobs but not the typical everyday artists jobs, maybe stock or texture photographers though.

I’m not against early access as a whole, if devs want to get player feedback earlier on in the life cycle and players are happy to be pseudo testers then it’s fine.

I get some people would rather wait and buy when it’s finished, and some studiosd/devs would rather bypass EA and just release the game outright, but I feel both paradigms can exist as long as both parties (devs/consumers) continue to benefit.

I think part of the problem is down to how a lot of games come out as “Early Access” which implies it’s more bare bones and will get fleshed out over time.

If a game releases as EA then the expectation is you will get more content until release, if a game just comes out without EA then it’s assumed it has all content and anything new is dlc/mtx/expansions.

I’m not gonna bother addressing Live Service games, wish they would go in the bin with most other MTX.

This tool is great for people who play fullscreen games, but if you play windowed it currently won’t work properly for you (even in windowed mode).

I got it to try and bump my 1440p@60fps to 1440p@120fps without making the GPU want to take off via the frame generation, and unfortunately while it does have a windowed mode that either draws over your window (it’s wonky and slow) or a mode where it just does fullscreen but with black space to pad to your window size, which looks silly.

I like what it does but I have other stuff I want to see on my screen while playing so want to keep my games windowed.

I would also say if you are playing a game that supports dlss/FSR with frame generation, just use that instead as it will use frame buffer data to drive the upscaling/frame generation, which is pretty efficient and the data is already on the gpu. Lossless scaling is basically taking REALLY FAST screenshots of your game and upscaling/frame gen then drawing it over your screen quickly.

There is too much to respond to all, will be interesting to see how the wolfire case continues then.

I just wanted to chime in on the last bit.

So as you say steam wins on features, and Epic and MS have both chosen not to compete on features. It’s not that they can’t, they both have the means and money to do so, they just don’t want to invest the money on the infrastructure incase it’s a big flop I guess.

Either way you are making out like the only valid perspective here is focusing on the game price, but as I said to me the feature set is VERY important. Literally the only reason I use steam over other platforms is the features, being able to use any controller and remap it to however I want. Knowing my saves can be transfered to any computer, streaming to the TV so the kids can play games on it etc.

I appreciate not everyone else uses these features, but some of us do, and this is why steam is the better platform. If MS let me stream games to my TV and use controllers properly etc I would happily get game pass, but their platform is rubbish, same for EGS.

This whole thing is just crap platforms complaining they can’t compete when they havent even tried, they just want the free publicity in the hope they can get more users “in the door”.

Wolfire v valve was thrown out right? So they didn’t successfully prove valve were doing anything anti competition.

To my knowledge the price parity is only on steam keys sold elsewhere not for you selling a game on another storefront, happy to be shown evidence that isn’t the case.

In terms of what is a “fair deal” we could quibble about the 30% but that’s literally the only thing up for discussion right? And at the moment that’s an “industry standard” so by all means lower it if they can, I’m all for savings as a consumer, but not at the expense of the service they provide.

For example if Valve personally came to me and said “you can either have games 10% cheaper but we would have to retire X features” I would happily keep the features and forgo the discount.

Also being realistic if Valve were to drop their cut to 20% game prices wouldn’t change, the publishers would just pocket the difference, as we have seen with Epic.

Again most other mainstream platforms take 30% and while I do think they could ALL trim that down a bit, I don’t see why Valve should be the first one to cut back when they offer the most bang for buck, get Sony and MS to reduce their cut and start offering more basic features, then once the competition is ACTUALLY competing we can turn our eyes to Valve.

I think that sums up my perspective here, most storefronts are not trying to compete, they are just offering the bare minimum for same cut and then wondering why everyone wants to use the more feature rich store front… Why wouldnt you?

I don’t think it’s quite as simple as “let’s crack down on steam like other monopolies” as what do you crack down on?

They do little to no anti competitive behaviour, clutching at straws would be that they require you to keep price parity on steam keys (except on sales).

All these other monopolies do lots of shady stuff to get and maintain their monopoly, so you generally want to stop them doing those things. Steam doesn’t do anything shady to maintain it’s monopoly it just carries on improving it’s platform and ironically improving the users experience and other platforms outside of their own.

Like what do you do to stop steam being so popular outside of just arbitrarily making them shitter to make the other store fronts seem ok by comparison?

The 30% cut is often something cited and maybe that could be dropped slightly, but I’m happy for them to keep taking that cut if they continue to invest some of it back into the eco system.

Look at other platforms like Sony, MS who take 30% to sell on their stores, THEN charge you like £5 a month if you want multiplayer and cloud saves etc. Steam just gives you all this as part of the same 30%.

Epic literally does anti competitive things like exclusivity and taking games they have some stake in off other store fronts or crippling their functionality.

Steam has improved how I play games, it has cloud saves, virtual controllers, streaming, game sharing, remote play together, VR support, Mod support and this is all part of their 30%, the other platforms take same and do less, or take less but barely function as a platform.

Anti monopoly is great when a company is abusing it’s position, but I don’t feel Valve is, they are just genuinely good for pc gaming and have single handily made PC gaming a mainstream platform.

It saddens me as Windows 8 was absolutely awful and the first step towards the mess we have now. Windows 10 was better but still inconsistent in loads of areas and still felt faffy to use.

If you ignore the ads and bloat ware in Windows 11 it’s not that much better than 10, the UI feels more consistent but still more painful to use than Windows 7.

We have no “good” versions of Windows to use, they are all bad and getting worse, I would love to jump to Linux but that has its own raft of inconsistencies and issues, just different ones.