From my understanding, the first and second parties are the seller (Valve) and the buyer (you). They are the two who have a contract between them. A third party, then, is any party which isn’t signed on the contract. That is, an outsider to the contract.

Any other meaning of second party is probably a back-formation from a misunderstanding of the terms 1st and 3rd party.

Disclaimer: I literally have no idea what I’m talking about

*twice every day

The company may be big, but their hardware orders are nothing compared to the orders for compute farms. They’ve gone on record recently about the Steam Machine saying there are some components they could not secure at all, for any price. Their service contacts are just not attractive when the world-ending AI farms are happy to pay more per unit and ordering more units total.

I do think they really should try their hardest to keep those replacement parts coming, but from the outside it’s impossible to know how hard they actually tried. The only question is whether you give them the benefit of the doubt. You don’t seem to, and that’s fine (honestly I’m not sure I should give it either), but what I’m saying is there is doubt, the market is so fucked right now that this is actually believable.

I’d be shocked if not. There’s just no reason whatsoever for it to not work.

I like this variant (note, I’m slightly biased):

And Englishman, a Frenchman, an Israeli, a Spaniard and a German are sitting in a room when a man enters and asks, “Can you see me?”

They respond: “Yes.” “Oui.” “Ken.” “Si.” “Ja.”

I’ve heard that it named itself, and the oui+ja interpretation is a false etymology. This is also what’s written on Wikipedia at the time of posting this comment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija#Etymology

Awake while you play? Weird! :P

Kidding aside, if you can find or improvise any way for the Deck to stay where you want it to be without having to hold it with your hands (for example, place it on your lap), I still recommend the joy-cons. The arm freedom is amazing.

Other split controllers are available, for example certain VR controllers.

To the user who downvoted me and hasn’t posted on Lemmy in more than a year… Idk what to say actually, it’s weird that you’d do that.

I haven’t tried it on the Deck yet, but expect it to work:

Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons. Lean the Deck (or Switch) on its side on something, such that with your head on the pillow you can look at it. With one joy-con in each hand, you can reposition your arms however you want and independently of each other.

This method with Ace Attorney games on the Switch is my sleeping pill. Works amazingly well for me. After I finish my current Ace Attorney game, I plan to finally try it with the Steam Deck and a different visual novel.

Foreseeable caveat: charging the joy-cons will be annoying. If you put them in a Switch to charge (which is my only charging solution right now), they get paired to it automatically and will need to be re-paired with the Deck.

Also, leaning the Steam Deck on its side won’t be as easy as it is for the Switch. Might have to improvise something for that.

I was not aware that the diamond monopoly was broken. Neat.

In the Steam hardware survey, under Video Card Description, you can find: Steam Deck GPU - 0.45%.

Random sources online for which I cannot find a source (though I didn’t really look much) say Steam has 132 million monthly active users.

If we take both of those figures at face value, assume being a monthly active user on Steam is a good proxy for “in use”, then that makes 594,000 Steam Decks in active use.

This is far less than the sales figure that @breadsmasher@lemmy.world cited, which could be a combination of a lot of factors:

1. Steam Decks which have been sold but are not in active use for whatever reason.
2. The monthly active users figure for Steam seems low to me for a platform as big as Steam. It could be wrong.
3. It is possible that Steam Deck users are under-represented in the Steam Hardware Survey, and they make up a bigger percentage of Steam users. Maybe they are less likely to participate in it?
4. People might be using Steam Deck for other purposes besides Steam, so they are not active Steam users. Personally I doubt this is a significant factor.
5. Some users might participate in the hardware survey more than once, causing the calculation to be wrong. I’m not sure how the hardware survey works, but this could be a huge factor.
6. Who know what else I didn’t think of.

His name? Meow C. Escher

A tongue. Loophole!

If you’re in the CachyOS Discord and have a lot of patience, this is where I dumped all of my complaints and feedback on the day that I really tried to use it: https://discord.com/channels/862292009423470592/1500254688380063934

Keep in mind I was pretty new to Cachy/Arch and coming from Linux Mint, make of that what you will.

More specifically, this is what raised the alarm for me: https://discord.com/channels/862292009423470592/1500254688380063934/1500507281840668852 and following messages.

Basically, I tried to install openrgb-next-git from AUR using Shelly. The operation failed but was reported as successful. And the Shelly dev I was chatting with didn’t really seem to acknowledge the severity of the issue. After many more attempts, I eventually gave up on Shelly installed the package using paru. I don’t remember if there was any problem during that installation, but it did get installed in the end, which is more than I can say for Shelly.

This exchange was 2 months ago, so it’s possible that things have improved since then, but that’s not enough time for me to give Shelly another chance yet.

What I’m about to say is pure speculation, and I have no concrete evidence, just my gut: I think Shelly, or at least its GUI, is vibe-coded. Too many things about it are half-baked but with the appearance of polish. Windows and dialogs that look pretty but are too small for their contents. No way a human developer would push that if it was tested even once.

A Shelly developer explained to me that it’s not a wrapper for pacman or any other tool, instead they re-implement the functionality provided by pacman using a lower-level library. To this I say: Shelly has not earned my trust in their code to manage packages on my main PC. When it’s more mature, when it has more eyes on it, and when it doesn’t give me the half-baked vibe, I’ll happily give it another chance.

if I see “I wanna be”, the only song I think of is Pokemon.

Valve is in the same position of power, or an even greater position of power, as Sony. But Valve has never (to my knowledge) removed games from customers’ libraries without compensation. Valve has the track record of not abusing their position of power to the detriment of gamers.

Personally, I still don’t like the amount of power they do hold, which is why I prefer to get my games from GOG when I can. But historically, Valve is not anti-consumer. Valve/Gaben are no angels, they have their fair share of billionaire behavior, but there is simply no comparison with Sony.

CachyOS now ships with and recommends Shelly, and just from trying to use it I get the feeling it’s fundamentally flawed (both in the front-end and back-end), but I don’t know enough about package management to know for certain.

Literally reading this on a trolley where everything is fine.

(by which I mean train, I actually have no idea what a “trolley” actually is)

The article doesn’t mention a “million-dollar loss”, where is the picture from?

The only mention of money in the article is at the end:

… the unauthorised cat posed a serious risk at cruising altitude and could have cost the Irish budget airline thousands of dollars in damages.

There’s something much too sweet in that Pringles can.