Seriously? My Nvidia drivers broke every time I got a kernel update on Tumbleweed. Eventually I pinned the kernel to an old version. Gah.

Maybe my PC is just haunted.

With Lutris, I got stuck on an error about architecture. I tried changing WINEARCH to WIN32, but it didn’t work. Tried making a new systemwide default prefix in win32, didn’t work. Went down a bit of a rabbit hole on Google but I was not able to get the game to even install, let alone run.

With proton, games install and typically run, but not without issues. For example, when Return to Monkey Island launched, it was Windows-only, so I tried it in Proton. It worked for a day, then mouse input just stopped working entirely. Half an hour of trouleshooting later I decided it would be easier to just boot into Windows. That’s the general experience I’ve had with Proton, even for Steam Deck certified games. And then sometimes games run but with unacceptable performance, like Stray.

Until recently I was stuck on the 510 drivers because the newer ones broke CUDA in the Ubuntu repositories. That was recently updated to I think 525, but I haven’t tried any games since updating. But I also had similar problems on Suse with drivers from Nvidia, and the old Ubuntu LTS (18.04 was it?).

If Lutris is going to be so finicky about Wine versions and prefixes, I wish it would just bundle its own instead of using the system wine. I use Wine for other things and can’t easily nuke my whole config.

I’ve basically given up on playing non-native games on Linux. It seems like this is a “me” problem but I can’t imagine what’s so unique about my Steam install. I try to keep as close to stock Ubuntu LTS as possible precisely to avoid these issues, but here I am.

Gaming is the only reason I dual-boot back to Windows. Out of curiosity, what’s your distro and hardware config? I’ve had no luck with Proton or Lutris on Suse or Ubuntu. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to play a game all the way through without issues. Not sure if it’s my distro choices, Nvidia drivers, or the specific games I try to play. Even Steam Deck certified games do not work properly for me.

I remember some years back there was a news story about some chatbot passing the Turing test. The researchers decided to make their chatbot impersonate a young Russian boy, which made its limitations harder to identify as non-human by the native-English-speaking test subjects. So it wasn’t actually that impressive.

That will likely be the first kind of thing we’ll see for an artificial voice-chatbot as well. It’s a big world and many of the people I talk with on Discord (and even IRL) are not native English speakers and not from my country.

I’m not intimately familiar with the accents and speech patterns from everywhere in the world, so I’m conditioned to shrug off a lot of “strange” language. Because of this wide range of human speech patterns, I’m not confident that I could validate voices with a low enough false-positive and false-negative rate in practice.

I haven’t really dug into the latest voice generation AI yet so I’m not sure how capable off-the-shelf programs are. I am familiar with the general techniques, though, and I think adding realistic inflection is within reach. I don’t think it’s possible to automate the entire pipeline yet, at least not with publicly available programs, but the field is advancing quickly so I can’t take much solace in that.

There are already successfully convincing phone scams with AI. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/22/1165448073/voice-clones-ai-scams-ftc

This will likely get significantly easier, cheaper, and faster in the very near future. Voice generation is relatively easy. We’re going to need a whole new class of captchas and shibboleths to use online, but honestly, it’s such a fast-moving target that I think cutting-edge AI will forever be a step ahead. I think the best we can hope for is to have viable countermeasures for commoditized AI techniques. For now that might include logic problems (which ChatGPT and its current competitors are quite bad at) but I’m sure the big players already have more advanced language bots in development.

I reallllly hate the idea of online IDs but it might be the only way.

For anyone curious about this, it’s a safety feature. The front of a car is called the “crumple zone” — it’s designed to crumple up in an impact, which absorbs a lot of the energy and means the cabin (the place where humans are) will experience significantly lower forces.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumple_zone

I’m also on SDF. They’ve been in the business of offering free computing resources to the public since the 80s. So I feel confident that they won’t close up shop due to lack of expertise or resources.