MouldyCat

So HDMI 2.1 had been blocked by the HDMI forum, despite AMD having done a lot of work to try to persuade them that it should be allowed in the open source drivers. It's not clear to me why the forum was blocking it, although a comment on Phoronix says, "Which companies are shareholders in this organization? Ah...MS. Apple, Nvidia, Broadcom etc... Hummmm !!!"

Valve is rumoured to be behind some of the recent work on AMDGPU, motivated by the Steam Machine - a different comment on Phoronix says, "When the Steam Machine benchmarks came out, showing performance inferior to the PS5, I got the impression it was limited by software rather than hardware", which sounds plausible. Getting HDMI 2.1 working on the Steam boxes is likewise probably a priority for them, as some gamers won't switch away from Windows until it's there.

It's not mentioned in the Phoronix write-up, but I presume the implication is the HDMI forum has relented and finally given their blessing to this work, rather than Valve is just YOLOing it.

is it the thumbnail that appears in Lemmy for this post? I don't see where it came from, as I can't see it on the Phoronix article though

Outside of Big Picture Mode, the Steam client start-up performance is improved in general, improved CPU performance at runtime for Steam Input, and many bug fixes. The Steam client beta for Linux has improved download speeds on high latency connections, the SteamOS compatibility dialogs will now show in the desktop UI when installing games not verified for that hardware, and the desktop Linux UI will also show the SteamOS unsupported dialog when installing games that are known to not work with Proton. The Steam beta also improves its Linux distribution information collection for the Steam Survey to be more accurate. The SteamRT3 experimental beta has also seen several fixes.

The ridiculously slow start-up time has been an annoyance for ages, so I just switched to the beta to see if it's noticeably improved.

I did a quick unscientific test, timing start-up first on the standard client and then switching to beta, restarting my PC and timing the start-up again.

The non-beta time from double-clicking the icon until the UI was fully rendered was 25 seconds, and with the beta 18 seconds. Fingers crossed that's enough to make the start-up delay less bothersome in real-world usage.

ya .. I might have been trolling a little bit 😁

You are smart enough to suffer

Not disagreeing with your overall point, just want to say that being smart is not a prerequisite for suffering. I don't even think it's possible to have a "primitive consciousness", or a "sophisticated consciousness". A being is either conscious or, well, it simply is not - it doesn't exist. As an individual, you either exist independently or.. you just don't - not even blackness.

Let's say that bees are conscious. Each individual bee has a unique internal existence just as you or I have. If you are a human (actually I'm assuming you are) then your experience certainly differs from the experience that a bee has, but that consciousness, that isolated spark of being, that is the same. If you were to shut your eyes and still your mind, and we imagine a bee could also do that (just give them imaginary eyelids for this thought experiment) then both of you would be experiencing the same thing, for that brief time you are both in that state of wordless shapeless existence.

You could perhaps wake up from this meditative state as the bee, coming to with a shake of your head, and fly off away from the flower you'd been resting on. "Woah what a weird dream" you'd think in bee language, then a new enticing fragrance from another flower fills your olfactory glands and you are drawn irresistibly towards it, quickly forgetting that funny dream of being a great big thing stuck heavily to the ground with two arms and legs hanging off your body.

Gay space communist here. I'm not vegan, not even vegetarian - I do however only eat vegetarian at home, and most of the time vegan, but I'll eat non-vegetarian food when visiting carnivorous friends or even in restaurants, if the veggie options are unappealing.

Honey is something I stopped buying after hearing from vegans about the cruelty in its production - from what I recall, and I did also watch a video or two of the process, queen bees routinely have their legs pulled off to trigger a hive to be built, and while I don't know if bees are conscious, I know I would never pull the legs off an insect, so I can no longer in good conscience put a pot of honey in my basket as I walk around a supermarket.

Similar logic should also apply to cheese and ice cream, the non-vegan items that I still buy a lot of, but I did try giving up these items for a couple of months, and man I'm sorry baby calves but I just love those things too much.

Beats me. If the USSR had won the Cold War and taken over the world, we'd all have way better games consoles AND they'd be given out for free to everyone who asked.

Was it Andy Burnham by any chance?

Terrifying video

my god you weren't exaggerating, that is absolutely horrific

Nice cherry picking, the next paragraph of the wiki says:

This type of argument is sometimes used as a form of fearmongering in which the probable consequences of a given action are exaggerated in an attempt to scare the audience.[citation needed] When the initial step is not demonstrably likely to result in the claimed effects, this is called the slippery-slope fallacy.

You think your assessment that humans are a scourge on the planet is objective and clear, but you miss your own anthropocentric blindspots. Like it or not, your stance is not unique, on the contrary many humans also question the direction our species is going.

The withering criticism of human activity by yourself and the many others like you is simply evidence that humans are *not* wantonly devouring the planet with no thought for the future, unlike the cricket plagues you liken us to.

Whether that is sufficient to save our society remains to be seen of course.

You are using your human value system to declare humans unworthy. This is a human thing to do. No other creatures reflect on the impact their existence has on the environment. Viruses don't. Crickets don't. Not even the planet itself, nor the entire universe, cares whether humans even exist or how they carry out their lives.

It's only humans who have evolved a brain capable of making such assessments and using that to inform their behaviour. Can we use this power to rise above the bloody law of nature? Can we create a world that is fair and just, even in an uncaring universe built on the cold unbreakable laws of physics?