A pre-built gaming solution that comes with guaranteed software support, something that MS doesnt even offer BTW, sounds like a really good deal to me.

Oh cool, you have a motherboard with two WiFi 7 antennas and dual chip Bluetooth that also fits inside a 3.5 l case with a low noise cooling solution, that also happens to boot on controller input? Just ready to just, I don’t know, upgrade to a graphics card that is not even for sale to consumers?

That’s also research. Someone building a PC for you will also charge for labor, and that’s price parity with a pre-built. The hype is that Valve is front loading a bunch of labor free of MS shitty practices.

There’s more to building a PC than just the putting it together. Reaseach for parts, ordering, waiting for delivery, etc. I know because I have built almost all the computers I’ve ever own. It’s a hobby, not everyone has the same hobbies we do, and that’s OK.

Did you know that I make a mean risotto? It’s so fire. Like, I use all these high class ingredients, a delicious local cheese that tastes like magic. And I can get it to the perfect consistency, and I can do it for relatively cheap. Because I’m doing it myself, labor is not accounted in, I just pay for the ingredients. Thus I can use more expensive ingredients as well.

You know what I also like to do? I like to go out and eat at fancy restaurants with my friends and family. I also eat risotto when I eat out. Their risotto is also just as good as mine. Sometimes better, sometimes not so much. It is always more expensive than cooking myself of course. But you know what I don’t like to do? I don’t like to cook for dozens of people. It is too much labor. However, I can go with a party of 10 or more people and eat in a restaurant. And they will serve us, because they don’t care that there are too many of us. Because we are paying them to cook. I exchange money, for more convenience and less effort. Ain’t that wild?

So, anyways, I’m not talking about food.

This probably will be more powerful, and a value added upgrade, for over half of Steam’s users.

I’ve been building my own PCs since the 90s. I would not expect anyone to be able to or want to, build their own computers. It is a hobby, I invest countless hours and money into this hobby. I do not expect others to dedicate as much resources to a hobby as I do.

The reason you are being piled on is because Steam, the Steam deck, and most likely both the Frame and the Steam machine, are NOT walled gardens. It is not a console. Valve actively encourages people to use the hardware wherever and however you want, install EPIC, install Heroic, install GOG games, do whatever you want. You can buy a Steam Deck and play only and exclusively pirated games, and Valve won’t stop you, they can’t stop you, because it is just a computer. And it is open, and it is yours. This goes completely against all proprietary software and hardware tenets, and it is incompatible with your argument.

It is a big corporation, and it is a benevolent dictatorship. But Valve is not, and it does not try to behave like a monopoly, it is not proprietary (most of the development work on gaming in Linux is done under FOSS licenses), and it is not a walled garden.

Typical, “it is not for me, therefore I declare it is stupid and not for anyone!”

It’s ok to not be marketed to. It’s good that a product was not designed for you specifically. “I can build the same PC…” Shhhh, shut up. Go do it, let other people like and enjoy their stuff. You don’t have to buy it if you don’t like it.

There’s a technical difference. On a single drive, GRUB (or any other modern bootloader) can handle multiple OSs that coexist on the same boot chain. Windows doesn’t like this of course. On different drives it is the UEFI that chooses which drive boot sector to boot from, regardless of which bootloader it has. Here, Windows doesn’t get a say, and it is less likely to break.

Historically, the first case was called dual booting but the second is not called that. If the same result is achieved, maybe the distinction doesn’t matter anymore. However, in the olden days, there was only one disk allowed to have a master boot partition, the Device 0 in an IDE bus. Consumer PCs were limited to two IDE busses, with a device 0 and device 1 each, only one hard drive could have an MBR on the primary IDE. Now a days it is much easier to have multi-disk boot capabilities in hardware thanks to EFI system partitions (since mid 2000s), but it used to be necessary to fiddle with an MBR even if the OSs were on different disks.

It is an important distinction because dual booting, as a concept, almost always exists in relation with Windows. If you have two, three or more Linux OSs running on the same disk drive, it is not called dual booting, it is just booting and choosing your distro, as bootloaders like GRUB are multi-booting by default.

So, yeah, maybe it is dual-booting as well, but it is not what the original term used to mean. It is just Windows wasting space in a quarantined disk, which I still prefer.

Friendly warning that SD cards are not a backup. Those things die, frequently and without warning. They also bitrot fast. If you value the data being backed up, choose a more stable medium.

Here’s a literary recount of the events.

Don’t dual boot. Instead, invest in two drives and dedicate each to each os fully. Way less headache and far more control. Easier to keep windows oblivious of Linux existence so it doesn’t fuck with it.

Changing stuff on a single player video game is not cheating.

Cheating can only exist on a competition, like on multiplayer, because you are expected to fair play with another human being.

To think that playing on your own and changing the parameters of play is cheating is a limiting and constrained, and honestly sad, point of view. It’s like punishing a kid for imagining that a toy has super powers. Extremely soul crushing and anti-creativity. If you are playing on your own, then there’s no cheat. Your play, your rules, no punishment for changing your mind. The play field exist to play, not to impose arbitrary and oppressing notions of real life judgement. You can’t cheat, when you are just playing for fun.

That said, if you cheat to make the game easier and access content that you can’t access by skill. It is not cheating, it is a failure of accessibility features. There’s nothing more stupid that the sense of gamer honor.

They haven’t. Part of the reason the bubble is so bad is that NVIDIA has been giving credit incentives to openai and other llm companies. Essentially giving them money so they use it to buy NVIDIA chips, so they can claim higher sales numbers. But there’s no revenue. The AI bubble is 4 or 5 companies shuffling money to each other to inflate numbers so investors inject more money.

The only ones making bank are CEOs when they take their bonuses and cash outs. The companies themselves are bleeding. OpenAI needs something like $700 billion dollars more to survive until 2030. LLMs simply don’t make any money. Any savings from ai use has been from layoffs. It will all eventually crash out when it is obvious that AI use ultimately hurts revenue, no matter how much it saves in production.

Yeah, and you probably used libraries that abstracted the math away so you could focus on your simulations instead of thinking about transforming negative signs for the GPUs. That’s already figured out.

It’s okay. The equations have been done since a long time ago. Devs don’t have to think about it much. Essentially, computer simulations already have their own body of math that you probably were not taught in physics, because they aren’t relevant for real world physics study.

Not really. Youtuber Acerola has a great series on shader programming and dealing with negative numbers is a non-factor. The advantage of working with computers is that it abstracts that complexity away. You program with high level concepts, a dev rarely deals with direct calculations, unless they are actually writing the fundamental apis for it, like DX or Vulkan. Much less copy-paste formulas. It gets complicated fast, but the abstraction keeps it simple for the developer, like, the math is perhaps the easiest part of programming computer graphics.

Tradition, 3d videogames started doing it like that because of how computers worked 40 years ago, then devs got used to think about 3d space that way and it stuck. Essentially videogames think about visual depth. And yes, the physics engines for videogames usually account for that and use their own transformations of formulas because they are rarely simulating anything more complex than rigid body physics. Advanced simulations aren’t any harder for devs, all the transformations are abstracted away with libraries.

In the end they are just reference frames and up is whatever you want it to be. As Wikipedia puts it eloquently: “Unlike most mathematical concepts, the meaning of a right-handed coordinate system cannot be expressed in terms of any mathematical axioms. Rather, the definition depends on chiral phenomena in the physical world, for example the culturally transmitted meaning of right and left hands, a majority human population with dominant right hand, or certain phenomena involving the weak force.”

That’s just how subscription models work.

Lure, hook, boil.

Lure new customers, hook them with convenience and dependency, boil them with slowly increasing prices so they don’t notice they are being skinned alive for all they are worth while the service quality decreases. It has been like this since time immemorial and it is the only reason that first month, first time user promotions exists.