Imagine you were asked to start speaking a new language, eg Chinese. Your brain happens to work quite differently to the rest of us. You have immense capabilities for memorization and computation but not much else. You can’t really learn Chinese with this kind of mind, but you have an idea that plays right into your strengths. You will listen to millions of conversations by real Chinese speakers and mimic their patterns. You make notes like “when one person says A, the most common response by the other person is B”, or “most often after someone says X, they follow it up with Y”. So you go into conversations with Chinese speakers and just perform these patterns. It’s all just sounds to you. You don’t recognize words and you can’t even tell from context what’s happening. If you do that well enough you are technically speaking Chinese but you will never have any intent or understanding behind what you say. That’s basically LLMs.

Essentially ULWGL will allow you to run your non-steam games using Proton, Proton-GE, or other Proton forks using the same pressure vessel containerization and runtime that Valve use to run games with Proton

This is the crucial piece of information. In less technical terms: Proton is designed to run in a very specific environment and it might be incompatible with your system. Steam runs Proton inside a bubble so that it interacts less with your system and so the incompatibilities don’t become a problem. ULWGL aims to create the same bubble so it’s the correct way to run proton.

From the naming it’s clear that GE wants this to be the new standard, but it’s not really a new standard. This is porting Steam’s launcher, which already exists, to non-Steam clients.

This is great. Proton is getting a lot of testing just based on Steam’s userbase and it is backed by Valve. We also have a lot of data on proton’s performance and potential game-specific fixes in the form of protondb. Making sure that non-Steam launchers can use all that work and information is crucial to guaranteeing the long-term health of linux gaming. Otherwise it is easy to imagine a future where proton is doing great but the other launchers are keep running into problems and are eventually abandoned.

One thing that I am curious is how this handles the AppId. If this AppId is used to figure out which game-specific fixes are needed, then it will have to be known. Do we have a tool/database that figures out the AppId from the game you are launching outside of Steam?

If you have a large enough bank roll and continuously double your bet after a loss, you can never lose without a table limit.

Unless your bank roll is infinite, you always lose in the average case. My math was just an example to show the point with concrete numbers.

In truth it is trivial to prove that there is no winning strategy in roulette. If a strategy is just a series of bets, then the expected value is the sum of the expected value of the bets. Every bet in roulette has a negative expected value. Therefore, every strategy has a negative expected value as well. I’m not saying anything ground-breaking, you can read a better write-up of this idea in the wikipedia article.

If you don’t think that’s true, you are welcome to show your math which proves a positive expected value. Otherwise, saying I’m “completely wrong” means nothing.

So help me out here, what am I missing?

You’re forgetting that not all outcomes are equal. You’re just comparing the probability of winning vs the probability of losing. But when you lose you lose much bigger. If you calculate the expected outcome you will find that it is negative by design. Intuitively, that means that if you do this strategy, the one time you will lose will cost you more than the money you made all the other times where you won.

I’ll give you a short example so that we can calculate the probabilities relatively easily. We make the following assumptions:

• You have $13, which means you can only make 3 bets: $1, $3, $9
• The roulette has a single 0. This is the best case scenario. So there are 37 numbers and only 18 of them are red This gives red a 18/37 to win. The zero is why the math always works out in the casino’s favor
• You will play until you win once or until you lose all your money.

So how do we calculate the expected outcome? These outcomes are mutually exclusive, so if we can define the (expected gain * probability) of each one, we can sum them together. So let’s see what the outcomes are:

• You win on the first bet. Gain: $1. Probability: 18/37.
• You win on the second bet. Gain: $2. Probability: 19/37 * 18/37 (lose once, then win once).
• You win on the third bet. Gain: $4. Probability: (19/37) ^ 2 * 18/37 (lose twice, then win once).
• You lose all three bets. Gain: -$13. Probability: (19/37) ^ 3 (lose three times).

So the expected outcome for you is:

$1 * (18/37) + 2 * (19/37 * 18/37) + … = -$0.1328…

So you lose a bit more than $0.13 on average. Notice how the probabilities of winning $1 or $2 are much higher than the probability of losing $13, but the amount you lose is much bigger.

Others have mentioned betting limits as a reason you can’t do this. That’s wrong. There is no winning strategy. The casino always wins given enough bets. Betting limits just keep the short-term losses under control, making the business more predictable.

prageru is a known disinformation platform. That link is worthless.

The ongoing war in Gaza, is HAMAS against Israel.

And what about the Palestinian lands that are occupied and the Palestinians that were uprooted from there? What about the Palestinians that have been killed by Israel? The recent events might have been HAMAS, but historically this is a Palestine-Israel conflict. If you can’t be bothered to learn and understand the context, why comment at all?

I don’t know of anything about nvidia being “way behind”, apart from wayland support. The only case I can think of the top of my head where the bad wayland support comes into play is if you have multiple monitors with different refresh rates. But maybe even that is not an issue anymore with new nvidia drivers. Maybe others can comment on it as I no longer have an nvidia card to check.

Use protondb to check whether your games play well on proton. It shows each commenter’s system specs as well, so you can see if a game has issues on nvidia specifically.

https://www.protondb.com

One warning: don’t try to install software, including the nvidia driver, as you would on windows. On linux, you don’t go and download it from nvidia’s website, you get it from your distro’s package repositories, and you let it get updated automatically via your system updates. Depending on the distro you install, it might be as easy as checking a tickbox to automatically install “Additional drivers” or “Proprietary drivers” during installation.

EDIT: I assumed “way behind” to mean that nvidia is behind amd on linux. If you meant how much linux gaming is behind in general, that’s another story. Linux does tend to lag behind in implementing newer features like newer DLSS versions. If you’re worried about this, then perhaps you will get more information if you post a question about what specifically you care about.

I’m not sure federation is that important on sites that aren’t built around socializing. I think it is sufficient for a wiki to provide a good export mechanism so that it can be archived or mirrored by others.

I’m wondering if a fundamental separation of users from content would be the best way to go. Apart from simplicity, I’m not sure I see any benefit to the current model of instances holding both our identities and the content we want to browse.

I see several comments talking about this being a wrong decision, or Beehaw needing to change its attitude etc. I think these opinions come from a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of federation. Federation is not about all the instances coming together to cater to our needs. It’s about each instance doing its own thing, and communities will form around the ones that cater to them. In other words, we don’t need Beehaw to budge on its decision, we need to build the community we want without Beehaw, while Beehaw caters to the users who aren’t in this with us.