I’m skeptical of AI coding as it exists today, and while I’m bullish on long-term prospects for AI writing software, am very dubious that simply using LLMs is going to be the answer.
However.
Startups typically do lose money. They’ll burn money as they acquire a userbase — their growth phase — and transition to profitability later. I don’t think “startups in area X tend to be losing money” is terribly surprising.
Not disk space exhaustion.
Okay, yeah, that should work with it. I’m pretty sure that I run it with a newer version, but I see people running 8.0 without issue.
Next thing to try, I agree with the folks above, is probably to hit the Steam logs, unless you want to jump all the way to taking the extreme route I mentioned above of moving the Steam directory, starting up Steam, reinstalling the game, and seeing if that does it. If it does, that’d probably narrow it down to issues with Steam settings, the Steam installation, the game installation, and the Proton installation.
Hmm. If this is the original Half Life, that’s Linux-native, so it won’t be using Proton. Valve indicates that with a little SteamOS “gear” icon in the list of supported OSes on the game webpage.
Don’t know what else might be unique to Half Life.
I wonder if it might be something breaking Proton.
EDIT: Can force a Linux native game to instead run the Windows binaries under Proton by going to the game’s properties and choosing “run this game under a specific compatibility tool” and selecting a Proton version. If nothing is chosen, Steam will prefer to use Linux-native binaries, if available. If you do that and it makes Half Life not work, that’d be a good argument that Proton isn’t able to function at all.
EDIT2: I guess “gear” isn’t the right term for the SteamOS logo. “Cam”, maybe? This thing:
All that happens is that I will pick a Proton version I know it worked with, click Play and then it does the stupid Vulkan shaders bit. I click Skip which would normally be fine, and then it just crashes and says Play again in green. Haven’t been able to get it to work.
Okay, so then what you’re seeing is no dialog or anything coming up, just the “Play” button going green again after a while?
And you already mentioned setting a Proton version, which was going to be about the next thing I was wondering about — which version is it that you’re using?
EDIT: Also, I believe that if you let it complete the Vulkan shader processing, it won’t need to do so again until the next time a game updates, so if you’re going to be launching a game multiple times in a short period of time for troubleshooting or something, you might want to let it complete the pass once.
EDIT2: If you have the hard drive space and a reasonably fast connection and want to try this, one thing you might try, though it’s a bit of a brute force method, is quitting Steam, renaming the .steam directory in your home directory to something like oldsteam, and then relaunching Steam and reinstalling Fallout 4. I have seen Steam get into a broken state before on at least three occasions over the years that it could not recover from on its own after I had my machine lose power while Steam was updating itself. That may not be necessary, but it’d rule out a number of potential issues.
Okay. Probably easier to focus on one, get that working, and see if the problem is common to the others.
I see Fallout 4 and Steam on there. What specifically happens when you try to launch Fallout 4 out of Steam?
EDIT: At least it looks like that’s an older Sandy Bridge CPU. I had a 13th gen and 14th gen Intel CPU do the “destroy themselves internally” thing, which manifested itself as an increasing rate of crashes everywhere until finally it couldn’t even boot without all cores but one disabled. Was hoping that this wasn’t gonna be someone else getting hit with that.
EDIT2: And I’m assuming that, at least for troubleshooting purposes, this is a clean, unmodded Fallout 4 install, right?
There are some packages that aren’t compatible, that are alternatives that do the same thing, so apt won’t let you install them at the same time.
Speaking of debian - anyone here running debian testing as a daily driver?
I do, though usually not early in the release cycle. Normally I use stable, then pull the occasional thing in from testing if I want it and it’s not in stable, and switch to testing if there’s a bunch of stuff I want.
Right now, I’m on stable because trixie just went stable.
Firstly, I have been trying to run it with
PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1 %command% --skip launcherthinking that was one command
The text that goes into the Steam Launch Options field? Well, that I can explain. So, Steam probably is passing what you specify in that field off to /bin/sh, the basic shell on Unix systems.
Basically, in bash (or sh, ash, zsh, probably all or nearly all Unixy shells), you can set an environment variable like so:
$ FOO=bar
That will set the FOO environment variable to the string “bar”. It will only be set for the bash process, won’t be set in commands run from that shell.
If you want to set the environment variable for commands that you run, then you do this:
$ export FOO=bar
$ baz
That will run the baz command and subsequent commands with FOO set to “bar”.
There’s a shorthand form, where one can, in one line, set FOO to “bar” and export for a single command, and invoke the command baz:
$ FOO=bar baz
Okay, so far so good.
Steam’s Launch Options was originally just intended to be used to add extra options to a command. So if you set Launch Options for a game to --fullscreen --debug, then it would run whatever command Steam runs, and add the extra options. Internally, Steam is executing something like:
all-sorts-of-stuff-that-ends-something-like '/mnt/steam/tal/debian-installation/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental'/proton waitforexitandrun '/mnt/steam/tal/debian-installation/steamapps/common/Steel Division 2/SteelDivision2.exe --fullscreen --debug'
You can see where it tacks on --fullscreen --debug.
But…Steam never provided a way to set environment variables, just adding extra options after the command. So they added a feature where if the Steam Launch Options for a game contains “%command%”, instead of running the regular command and then passing whatever is in that field as options on the end of the command, it runs whatever you have instead. So you can do FOO=bar %command% --fullscreen --debug and it’ll run something like:
FOO=bar all-sorts-of-stuff-that-ends-something-like '/mnt/steam/tal/debian-installation/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental'/proton waitforexitandrun '/mnt/steam/tal/debian-installation/steamapps/common/Steel Division 2/SteelDivision2.exe --fullscreen --debug'
So that’s what’s going on with the %command% and the other text you’re putting in the field. If you tell it to use PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1 %command% --skip launcher, it’s going to be setting the PROTON_USE_WINE3D environment variable to 1, then running the command that it’d normally run for the game, and tacking on --skip launcher to the end of that command.
PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1…So I tried --skip launcher having read a lot of the issues with the game on Linux is the EA launcher. It almost started then I got a crash.
Windows has a 3D API called Direct3D. That doesn’t natively exist on Linux, but lots of Windows games make use of it.
So part of making those games work is translating Direct3D calls into something that Linux does.
WINE is a software package for Windows compatibility on Linux. Proton is Valve’s version of WINE. WINE has two different ways to translate Direct3D calls into something that Linux can handle.
One way is to translate Direct3D calls into OpenGL calls. This is an older route, and generally doesn’t perform as well.
The second is to translate Direct3D calls into Vulkan calls. The subsystem in WINE that does this translation is called DXVK.
Setting PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1 will force Proton to use the older system.
DXVK_HUD is built into DXVK, and DXVK is built into Proton already – you won’t need to download anything to use it. However, if you’re setting PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1, then I don’t expect that setting DXVK_HUD will have any effect, since you’re instructing Proton to use the older route rather than the DXVK one, where that HUD is built in, at the translation-from-Direct3D-to-Vulkan layer.
It looks like mangohud should still work in that case, as it looks like it supports both Vulkan applications and OpenGL applications:
https://github.com/flightlessmango/MangoHud
A Vulkan and OpenGL overlay for monitoring FPS, temperatures, CPU/GPU load and more.
I also tried launching with mangohud and your command for that added to the skip launcher, that totally crashed Steam.
Hmm. That kind of surprises me, as if it’s just going in the Steam Launch Options field, it shouldn’t be directly affecting Steam, just what Steam is running. I could maybe see that if you were running Steam itself under MangoHUD, or the game crashing, but crashing Steam seems odd.
thinks
Okay. I think that diagnosing any 3D rendering issues is going to be easier if you can get one of those two HUDs working. Probably mangohud, if you’re potentially going to be using the PROTON_USE_WINE3D=1 setting, since it should work with that.
You said that you don’t have any other games on this system. There’s a small “test” program that uses OpenGL called glxgears that shows some spinning gears. There’s also a Vulkan version called vkgears. It’s probably in the mesa-utils package on your distro, so if you don’t have it:
$ sudo apt install mesa-utils
should fetch it.
Also, small digression — for future reference, since you were trying to figure out how to install something above, if you want to know what package a given command is in on a Debian-family Linux distribution, there’s a program called apt-file which will let you search all of the repositories for a given file and tell you what package it’s in.
$ sudo apt install apt-file
$ sudo apt-file update
$ apt-file search vkgears
That’ll install apt-file, update its database of what files are in what in packages, and then search for files containing “vkgears” in their name, listing packages that you can download with apt that contain these. Don’t need to do that for this, but it might be helpful if you’re trying to find where programs are in the future.
Anyway, getting back to The Sims, once that’s installed, if it isn’t already, can you run glxgears under mangohud?
$ MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full mangohud vkgears
$ MANGOHUD_CONFIG=full mangohud glxgears
In both cases, you should see a window with spinning gears. MangoHUD should put some text in that window showing a bunch of performance information about your system, including how loaded your CPU cores and GPU is, the framerate, and so forth.
There should be some text like “OpenGL 165FPS” (or “Vulkan 165FPS” for vkgears), and beneath that, something like the name of your GPU. If it instead says something like “llvmpipe” there, then it’s using the software renderer, not the GPU. Would just like to rule that out first, so that it’s sure that you’re using hardware acceleration. Also would make sure that mangohud can run on your system without problems.
I’ll just avoid sites and services that require this.
It’s not the site wanting to do it. It’s a requirement from Parliament in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
The Online Safety Act 2023[1][2][3] (c. 50) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to regulate online content. It was passed on 26 October 2023 and gives the relevant Secretary of State the power to designate, suppress, and record a wide range of online content that is deemed “illegal” or “harmful to children”.[4][5]
The Act creates a new duty of care for online platforms, requiring them to take action against illegal content, or legal content that could be “harmful” to children where children are likely to access it. Platforms failing this duty would be liable to fines of up to £18 million or 10% of their annual turnover, whichever is higher. It also empowers Ofcom to block access to particular websites. It obliges large social media platforms not to remove, and to preserve access to, journalistic or “democratically important” content such as user comments on political parties and issues.
I mean, you don’t have to go there if you want, but it’s probably Parliament you want to be irritated with, not websites following British laws.
“You have to be very careful,” Simone Fischer-Hübner, a computer science researcher at Karlstad University, told Aftonbladet, warning against using ChatGPT to work with sensitive information.
I mean, sending queries to a search engine or an LLM are about the same in terms of exposing one’s queries.
If the guy were complaining about information from an LLM not being cited or something, then I think I could see where he was coming from more.
Building on efforts to ensure quality healthcare accessibility for the people of Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker signed legislation on Friday that protects patients by limiting the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in therapy and psychotherapy services.
Poor ELIZA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967[1] at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum.
The most famous script, DOCTOR, simulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school (in which the therapist often reflects back the patient’s words to the patient),[9][10][11] and used rules, dictated in the script, to respond with non-directional questions to user inputs.
Decades of emacs having M-x doctor.
M-x doctor
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time you are finished talking,
type RET twice.
Checking git, the initial work on doctor.el appears to precede its initial commit into a version control system in 1991, but the initial copyright message on doctor.el appears to date to 1985.
If I understand aright, the complaint is that a 4790K doesn’t support TPM 2.0, required for Windows 11, and Windows 10 is EOLing.
I mean, sure, you can put Linux on it. I use Debian myself, but I’m sure whatever major distro would be fine. I think that most people are likely to tell you to use whatever distro they use.
Debian tends to be a little more conservative about doing new major stable releases than a number of distros, usually about once every two years. Ubuntu, for example, does a new release every six months (or did last I looked). That could be good or bad, depending upon how frequently you want to deal with upgrades, how much testing you want your application software to get, and how recent you want it to be. I tend to use Debian testing on the desktop, rather than waiting for stable releases, but I’m also comfortable fixing the machine if anything goes wrong.
Is it a reasonable machine to keep using? I mean, I dunno. Depends on what you’re doing with it. If you were happy with performance as things have been, sure. Serial compute performance hasn’t been increasing very quickly since about the early 2000s. Lots of tasks rely on serial compute. Will it play the latest AAA game as well as the newest hardware? Probably not. Linux will give you more flexibility to maybe use a lighter desktop environment if you want, but a given game or web browser is still gonna have to run the same calculations. Putting Linux on it won’t normally make a game run twice as quickly or something like that.
Not saying getting smaller hardware is the wrong move, but have you tried just reducing power with software on your existing machine?
I mean, if you’re happy with it other than on idle power usage, I imagine that one can probably do things like:
Set a power-down time using hdparm on the rotational drives, so that disks that you aren’t using spin down. On my system, I’ve coupled this with an autofs mount, which means that the mount point doesn’t have to be visible and rotational drives don’t get spun up by anything just touching the filesystem and looking in /mnt or whatever. Handy if you have a drive that you do want to have a rarely-touched filesystem on.
Run # powertop --auto-tune.
Run powerprofilesctl set power-saver if you’re using power-profiles-daemon.
I dunno if and how Xeon on Linux exposes any ability to force a core to power down, but maybe cat 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online and so forth.
I imagine that it’s probably possible to lower the minimum fan speed in whatever hardware control Dell provides.
That being said, I haven’t used terribly large hardware, so I don’t know how far one can go in bringing minimum power usage down.
It’s also going to cost more, because you almost certainly are only going to be using your hardware a tiny fraction of the time.
First ad that comes out that bitches mouth, I’m taking a 12-gauge to every motherfucking one of them, patch the roof later.
“Further work from our user experience team has resulted in several recommendations, including revising the Google Mini for the North American market to add a Kevlar layer to the case and using data from the accelerometer to treat an abrupt, rapid acceleration with a threshold above a certain level as “undesirable behavior/behavior needs improvement” user feedback to Alexa+'s prior prompt response.”
Probably possible to have something like a Selenium or whatever the kids use to automate Web browsers these days Python script that automatically builds a credible viewing history that looks like an adult’s.
I used putty for tunnels on windows machines.
Fair enough, and come to think of it, I think I have too. Just was pointing out that not all SSH implementations have tunnelling functionality.
But if they ban VPN it will be harder for them to prove the SSH is being used for the purpose evading their stupid law.
Yeah, that’s true.
Spanish ads for womans deodorant.
Google’s data-mining software knew pretty well who 1D10 was. It had simply concluded, based on its extensive database spanning vast numbers of users around the world, that he would look magnificent in a flamenco dress.
In the sense of isolating games like a mobile app or something? It doesn’t, not as it’s installed normally. If you can do something, the game you’re running can. Steam doesn’t isolate individual games, and Steam is not, as it’s normally installed, isolated.
Wayland won’t let a random window on the screen see keystrokes going to others, but because the games aren’t normally running in isolation, they can fiddle with the environment such that they can do whatever. Wayland’s “keystroke” isolation is only useful if the software also can’t muck with your files.
I understand that it’s possible to use Steam packaged as a flatpak, which will isolate the Steam environment as a unit, including Steam and games.
investigates
https://flathub.org/apps/com.valvesoftware.Steam
Assuming that those are the only filesystem permissions it has — and I don’t have experience with flatpak, so I wouldn’t use me as an authority — then it should prevent anything in the container from doing things like grabbing SSH and GPG keys, stuff like that. A malicious game in the flatpak could still grab your Steam credentials or information from other games and muck with those.
Not an issue if you’re using Wayland, since it’ll be using xwayland, which itself is isolated.
You cannot deny network access to the flatpak, as Steam will need that to work.
Some Steam games can be run outside of Steam, don’t need to talk to it, and for those, you can explore other isolation options. Can maybe cut off network access using
firejailor something like that.