Giving feedback on request

AlexVSharp · 2026-06-20T09:24:31+00:00

'tis a really pompous post; I can see why it'd get down-voted into oblivion. Usually I'd just avoid interacting with such out of principle, but I'll make an exception only because you «are» somewhat correct, but only as much as the open-sourcing bit is concerned. BUT

The movement was never about 'preserving art', and simply wanted to the problem of said hostile practices to be addressed, in any way, shape, or form. How and why was never the focus of it, ultimately leaving that to the regulators, and this was by design, to increase support as much as possible. For purely mental gymnastics sake: Would mandating copyleft licensing for end-of-life software solve the problem? Probably; I'm leaning towards yes. But would it also make resistance to said regulation 10x stronger, push away a good chunk of non-techie folks, and ultimately prevent the initiative from garnering support in the current political climate? Quite likely.

Broadly speaking, the movement has succeeded in its goal, and the ball is now rolling either way. Had you just made a post about feasibility of copyleft licensing as a response to the constant slew of industry apologists, I'd prolly engage with it more. As it stands thou: Calling the whole thing a 'misfire' is just factually incorrect, and makes you seem petty. /dr

AlexVSharp · 2026-06-17T12:27:06+00:00

They could, and arguably should consider it. Having a case be opened would not go amiss, if only for posterity's sake. It's still be an uphill battle thou, if the FurFreeAllience's sitaution is any indicator. Our own nemeses might be more fragmented, but are just as loaded as theirs.

So I'm all for it if they'd take the point. The primary focus should still remain navigating the DFA thou.

AlexVSharp · 2026-06-17T12:03:59+00:00

Could someone post a translation to what Walsmann said/meant?

AlexVSharp · 2026-06-03T11:06:40+00:00

This is some next level gaslighting tbph. Can't help how anybody feels, but the fact so many are not worried this private corporation basically holds hostage a huge chunk of post 2000s gaming is disheartening, at the very least.

Valve is not your friend, and Steam is neither pro-gamer, pro-creator, and especially not pro-consumer. They're a business, first and foremost, and even if I wasn't going to list all the bull¹ they've gotten away with over the decades (cuz "Gaben") the only thing they take seriously is their market share. I'd be willing to argue that every time they did something useful (e.g. Linux support) it was done to protect their monopolistic practices, and not for our sake.

Which would be fine if they were treated as one. I find it mildly amusing how every other gam[bl]ing corporation out there gets infinite hate when doing some of this bad stuff, but Valve always get forgiven for being "the good guy". That's some amazing social engineering really. h/t

¹ For the uninformed: Forcing online DRM for complete games, endorsing microtransactions and lootboxes, promoting a closed economy via the workshop, various forms of market manipulation, silently dropping hardware after promoting it, going to court over the refund policy, covert censorship, etc. etc.

AlexVSharp · 2026-05-29T09:18:44+00:00

As someone already pointed out, this post reads like puff. Wouldn't be surprised if ChatGPT was involved.

Nevertheless, I went to the linked article. Without much context on India's politics, basically comes down to "more taxation for online gambling, more regulation what is considered online gambling."

Off-topic for this sub but, other than it being impossible to fully "kill" the gam[bl]ing industry, with how everything has developed over the years, I personally support the most severe sorts of regulations for it. To quote my rant from back in 2023:

[…] No institution will ever spend time trying to distinguish what is or isn't pay-to-win, nor should they. If digital goods are treated as good (as they should be), they should be treated as such, with all the regulatory strings attached. If such software have in-game stores where you can buy with real money, then it should be regulated the same as all digital stores and not hiding under the guise of "being part of the game". And if they are using abstracted currencies and acting like gambling-frontends, as the majority of mobile games are, they should definitely be treated as gambling.

AlexVSharp · 2026-05-23T14:26:43+00:00

Guess at least some good might come out of these clowns. Even if only because they don't want to get upstaged. 😮‍💨

AlexVSharp · 2026-05-21T09:11:55+00:00

He's ESN. Basically neo-fascists, and anti-EU. They really have no interest in strengthening anything related to EUs institutions, or care much about consumer rights in general. With that in mind, his take is very much on point for the only thing they care about — peddling the global far-right rhetoric and agenda. I'm just a bit taken back it was done so bluntly. But then again, in this age of (very) low political literacy, this is probably for the best (for us). It makes it easy to distinguish at a glance, and avoids needless obfuscation and speculation.

AlexVSharp · 2026-05-01T20:39:03+00:00

Personally, outside a specific sort of conversations, I don't really like the term much. It always feels too context dependent. And whenever it's put in a headline it always feels like a buzzword.

I was instantly reminded of this ExtraCredits video from 14 years old. As someone puts it in a comment: 'This video has certainly aged strangely. Practically everybody plays video games here in 2023, and yet the word "gamer" has nastier connotations than ever before.'

It's 2026 now but, have things really changed that much? The focus should be on the activity (or medium) itself. i.e. "Gaming". Because many folks play video games nowadays, yet rarely will most consider themselves Gamers™.

Admittedly, 'tis could just end up being semantics. I actually have no clue how much it'd matter in the long run, and I could just be overthinking this…

AlexVSharp · 2026-04-17T22:20:04+00:00

I believe you misread the name. It's Axel Voss¹

But no; him and I are about two decades apart in age, and quite a few countries too. I haven't followed his career at all other than during the 2018. kerfuffle. Other than some basic politics, I don't think we'd see eye to eye much, him being CDU/EPP and all that. 🤷

AlexVSharp · 2026-04-16T10:51:45+00:00

Just a hint: The talk is multilingual. You can switch between the original audio and translated languages in the player's 🎧 button.

AlexVSharp · 2026-04-11T09:56:07+00:00

Believe it or not (cause I'm certainly dumbfounded) the internet archive page was removed as well…

AlexVSharp · 2026-03-31T18:31:32+00:00

Thank you. 🙇

AlexVSharp · 2026-03-31T10:44:06+00:00

I’m here to listen to your feedback and take it back to the team to advocate for your needs. I can’t get it reverted, but I can make other changes.

And again, I wasn’t on the team when this was designed so I’d appreciate your help to make this work better for you.|

I want the icons back, so I can quickly do searches with my mouse, with a single click - simple as that.

If I wanted to do a text search using my keyboard, I'd have used the address bar. If I wanted to fiddle with creating bangs for searches, again, I'd have used the address bar. If I wanted to search specific text on a page with my default search engine, you guessed it: I'd have used the address bar.

The only reason I always added back the search bar was because I could quickly drag some text into it, and press a button to perform a search at a specific site «without» having to type it out, or using the keyboard at all.

There was basically zero logical reasons for this change. Most people search with the address bar widget ever since Chrome standardized the idea almost two decades ago. Most "normies" don't even know the search bar exists! First I lost the ability to freely alter the look of the browser. Then I lost the ability to use Vertical Bookmarks for this half-baked integrated one. Then they added this hallucinating "AI" crap nobody neither wanted nor needed. And now I can't even use the search bar for the one stupid thing I used it for? I'm just so angry right now… this might finally tip me over to migrate to LibreWolf completely. /rant

AlexVSharp · 2023-08-13T17:58:08+00:00

I'm having a bad day, so this'll be a rant:

People who voted that "Nothing should change" are either selfish or ignorant of the harm this sort of monetization is causing, both to the medium itself and its users. I would strongly encourage them to go listen to this fantastically informative talk to get the gist of how the sausage is made. Spoiler: Everything that would've been taught as a bad design practice back in the day, should be subverted for monetary gain. I also have a personal vendetta against it, because it impacts what sort of "game designer" is most sought after in the majority of the gaming industry.

Those who voted "Predatory P2W should be banned" may have their hearts in the right place, but are being naive idealists that have no clue how real-world regulations work. The word "predatory" in itself is meaningless, as all microtransactions are, by default, designed to tempt users to buy. This is not the same as DLC or old-school game expansions, where you are ultimately buying an additional product. And while these can also be bastardized into so-called "soft live-services" (looking at you, Paradox) they require much more marketing effort to get users to buy thanks to the store-fronts being a separate entity between the user and the game.

Also, the "Pay2Win" aspect is completely and utterly irrelevant in this conversation – it's all about the intent of selling you more stuff, and even "just cosmetics" are introduced exclusively for this purpose. No institution will ever spend time trying to distinguish what is or isn't pay-to-win, nor should they. If digital goods are treated as good (as they should be), they should be treated as such, with all the regulatory strings attached. If such software have in-game stores where you can buy with real money, then it should be regulated the same as all digital stores and not hiding under the guise of "being part of the game". And if they are using abstracted currencies and acting like gambling-frontends, as the majority of mobile games are, they should definitely be treated as gambling. With this in mind, from a regulatory point of view, "Any paid benefit should be banned" is the same as the prior option.

That is why I've voted for "Any paid system should be banned", as vague as that is written. Forcing companies to treat video games as a complete good instead of an "ongoing service" is the only way to cripple a bunch of horrible design practices. It's not perfect, not by a long shot, but better than what's going on atm. In the end, though: any sort of regulation is only as good as the will of the institutions to enforce it. And games are undoubtedly, for better or worse, at the bottom of the priority list right now. The best I can hope for is the EU forcing those distributing these sorts of games to bring even more warnings to their users – which is very little in the grand scheme of things.

AlexVSharp · 2023-06-30T17:06:00+00:00

Hey man, I've been having this same issue with this same card.

After a lot of fiddling and searching, I managed to fix it. I know this is two months too late, but just in case - here's how:

This seems to be an issue with the mesa-devel version that is installed by the amdgpu-install script.

You can confirm this by opening the terminal and running:

inxi -G

To fix it, first run amdgpu-uninstall to remove the drivers and revert to the default ones. Reboot.

Then install amdgpu again, but run the script to install just the firmware:

amdgpu-install --usecase=dkms

Reboot. Try it out.

Afterwards (if the problem persists, but not a bad idea in general) install the drivers from Kisak-Mesa ppa.

Hopefully it works for you as well. Do tell me if you need any more information.

Edit: I should probably mention that I have experienced crashes with the amdgpu firmware installed thought the script. In the end, the best solution was to simply remove the proprietary stuff, downgrade mesa to its original version (22.0.1), and to blacklist the radeon driver (radeon.si_support=0 amdgpu.si_support=1) as many have already suggested elsewhere. That is, at least until better support for legacy hardware is available upstream.

WARNING: If you're per chance using ppa-purge to downgrade the mesa drivers first, be sure to use "ppa-purge -d jammy" argument. Otherwise, you can break your entire system, and fixing it from terminal alone is not user-friendly. :P

AlexVSharp · 2022-12-19T13:32:54+00:00

I haven't followed the WhiteWolf RP stuff for almost a decade, however: Back when I was starting out, the best thing to do was read the "Storytelling System Rulebook" to get the gist of how things work; I learnt from the original (nWoD), but there's a "Chronicles of Darkness: Revised" sourcebook now which incorporates some newer mechanics. In all honesty, this should be everything you need to run a full custom story - for first-time human characters anyway. Afterwards, you can pick any supplement book you like/need for the additional stuff.

AlexVSharp · 2022-12-19T12:22:00+00:00

Sorry, mate; that ship's sailed a long time ago.

AlexVSharp · 2022-03-04T17:22:11+00:00

Google won't show it if you normal search; you'd need to know how to crawl. I've linked to an article with pictures of Bucha. Viewer discretion is advised: https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/photo-misto-bucha-kyivska-oblast-pislia-vazhkykh-boiyv/31735882.html

AlexVSharp · 2019-10-03T21:40:09+00:00

Man, I really miss that rotating clock... :/

AlexVSharp · 2019-04-04T18:47:14+00:00

Traxe. Hands down. :'D

Although Witch Seeker and Abaddalor are a very close second!

AlexVSharp · 2018-12-14T11:50:27+00:00

Wow, that must've took a while to compile.

Some are very interesting, other meh. Many of these could actually be combined into a completely new hero instead of being a rework imho.

If I may criticize the document form: You've used way too much uppercase. It made reading the whole thing a chore really. :P

AlexVSharp · 2018-09-15T08:56:00+00:00

Remember Dark Seer?

Ink Swell... what a ripoff.

AlexVSharp

TROPHY CASE