• 21 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 10th, 2025

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  • Here’s my approach to this, as a dude:

    I mean, really I don’t have a broad preference for or against bush at all…

    … but, if you want me to smooch things down there, please tidy up a bit.

    I just don’t like having a mouth full of hair.

    Don’t worry, I will tidy up too, for the reverse scenario, if partner also dislikes mouthful of hair, and! … this also applies to my facial hair… I’m not that attached to it, and it will grow back, if you want to smooch my face but don’t like the beard/stache.

    Maybe I am lucky in that I at least I think I look decent both with or without a beard/stache.

    This is to me completely fair and reciprocal, and … really is not that conplicated.



  • I am actually amazed that they open sourced it.

    ARMA, old ARMA, Op Flashpoint, is jank as a fuck as an engine, when not running on a supercomputer, but also… it does some pretty insane shit in terms of detail and scale and number of AI/NPC agents active at the same time. And we basically all have ‘supercomputers’ now, by the standards of when it originally came out.

    … there could be some interesting patterns/techniques in here, maybe not to emulate or use exactly as is, but try to learn from, if one is insterested in having a game that is basically also a big simulation, in 3D space.


  • Let’s pick Oct 2025 as our ‘pre RAMpocalypse’ time frame.

    Data source: pangoly.com

    (I removed BestBuy from the visuals because it is an extremely erratic dataset that basically bounces around the average of others, but makes the graph nearly unreadable)

    16GB DDR5 Crucial RAM

    Oct 2025: ~$50

    Jun 2026: ~$275

    2TB NVME M.2 Crucial SSD

    Oct 2025: ~$140

    Jun 2026: ~$300 (if you remove Adorama)

    512GB NVME M.2 Kingston SSD

    Oct 2025: ~$50

    Jun 2026: ~$200


    $275 - $50 = $225

    $300 - $140 = $160

    $225 + $160 = $385

    Thus, the 2TB variant has an effective ~$385 upcharge due to the RAMpocalypse.

    2TB variant MSRP is $1349, thus it would be ~$964 pre-RAMpocalypse, meaning that the RAMpocalypse % upcharge is ~39.9%


    Do the same with the 512GB variant:

    $275 - $50 = $225

    $200 - $50 = $150

    $225 + $150 = $375

    $375 effective RAMpocalypse upcharge.

    MSRP of 512GB variant is $1050, thus it would be ~$675 pre-RAMpocalypse, % upcharge of ~55.5%


    Obviously this methodology is not perfectly correct, but I’d argue its quite reasonable ‘napkin math’… you could maybe make a more exhaustive index of all prices of all brands of RAM/SSD in exact performance spec matches to be slightly more accurate, but yeah, roughly, the RAMpocalypse made the Steam Machine, about $380, or 40% to 55% more expensive than it otherwise would have been, depending on 2TB vs 512GB.

    Also I guess we are here just assuming Valve is just selling these things basically at cost, neither subsidizing nor gouging the price, in all scenarios, which I am also confident is and always was basically the plan.

    Also also, economist brain says:

    ~50% inflation in less than a year for pretty much an entire segment of the CPI is uh… pretty fucking bad, to use the ‘formal’ terminology.


  • Can you clarify what you mean by this?

    Are you saying… $10b annually in harware sales?

    Using the $1128 price for the 512GB SM + Controller, that’d be uh… ~8.8m units sold annually.

    That’s totally absurd, imo.

    That’s roughly a quarter of 2025’s PS5 (any variant) console sales numbers.

    Valve would have to pivot into basically only/primarily being a hw manufacturer, they’d have to … somewhere between 10x and 100x the amount of money/capital they’re currently using to source components, do assembly and then ship things physically.

    They do not have that much money.

    Valve has like a total of less than 500 employees, their entire business culture is built around having a very small number of incredibly competent and often multi-domain skilled employees.

    They’d have to radically shift the entire fundamental structure of what the company is, to do something like that.

    … but perhaps I misunderstand what you mean?


  • Its actually not that expensive, for what it can do, and that’s from the Steve directly, in that video.

    He does a price comparison to nearest equivalent parts you can actually currently buy for a DIY PC.

    He ends up with $979 for the DIY vs $1050 for the 512gb Steam Machine, a 7% difference.

    There are currently, right now, many, many prebuilt PCs that cost this amount or more, with worse hardware.

    … and also, this video here, from ETA Prime,.that I linked, that is this post, that apparently no one is actually watching, is also full of game test benchmarks, though not as much crazy specific technical.shit as Steve gets into.

    It outperforms a PS5 Pro on say, RDR2.

    1440p, high/ultra settings, no fsr upscaling, gets ~75 fps in complex/open areas, significantly better inside of rooms/houses/buildings.

    And, as stated in the main post body… the Steam Machine is going to support FSR4 upscaling either on launch or very soon afterward, so you could use that, not lose much graphical fidelity, and get more frames.

    A PS5 Pro cannot run RDR2 at a stable 60 fps, at 1440p.

    It has to be locked to 30 fps to run 4K, which it does via upscaling, and a checkerboard rendering technique, which makes it not actually the same 4K as a PC would render, but w/e.

    To get 60fps, it has to be locked at basically 1080p, though I think technically it is doing dynamic resolution scaling, so maybe effectively a slightly higher average resolution than that, maybe 1/4 or 1/2 way to 1440p.

    A PS5 Pro costs $900.

    If you think a PS6 is going to cost less than a PS5 Pro, you are wrong.


    EDIT:

    Now you can argue that a PS5 Pro, part of why it costs so much, is the 2TB SSD, vs the 512GB Steam Machine.

    But, the PS5 Pro is the only PS5 variant with an RDNA 3 GPU, so its going to perform substantially better than the other PS5 variants with RDNA 2.

    Right now, a 512 GB nvme ssd goes for about $200, a 2TB goes for about $300.

    So basically you could say that a more fair price/performance comparison would be to knock $100 off of the PS5 Pro’s price, to $800, presuming a hypothetical PS5 Pro Lite variant, or something like that.

    In that case, you’re paying $250 more for… what, something like 35% higher framerates, if you just resolution locked this hypothetical PS5 Pro Lite to a consistent 1440p, and had it use its already existing upscaling on basically auto mode?


  • You seem to be deliberately missing the part where I said ‘in my local area’.

    In my local area… no, so far in my experience using fetlife, you are wrong.

    The woman I am talking about is absolutely exceptional in terms of physique, compared to her peers in the same area, I have yet to see anyone comparable… though of course, again as I previously said… I’ve only just started using the site.

    Sure, if I look … across everyone on the entire site, everywhere, then yes, I will most likely see more 55 yo women who have great physiques.

    But I don’t live in New York or LA or Paris or something.

    I live in a ‘city’ with a population significantly under 500k, and its a poorer city, in a poorer state.

    You are the one who decided that what I originally said and meant was ‘no 55 yo women exist who have exceptional physiques’. You interpreted it that way, ignoring pertinent context and then explicit statements from myself where I made every attempt to explain that no that is not what I meant…

    … and you are trying to spin this as extracting a confession from me.

    This is bad faith in the extreme.


    I also never said that most older women are invisible to me. I talk to a fair number of older women in my apartment… somewhat regularly, when we pass in the halls or what not. I enjoy their conversation, occasionally I help them out with some kind of chore type task, they help me out with some kind of chore… I just am not generally sexually attracted to them.

    I explictly said that it would be ridiculous to have the same physical expectations for a 30 yo and 55 yo woman, yet you persist in insulting me and painting me as a misogynist who thinks all old women are ugly.

    Also, I’m not the one downvoting you. Somebody else is doing that. You could verify this if you wanted to, I believe there are tools by which possible to do that on lemmy, or you could ping a mod or admin if you really want, i think they could as well.

    I hope you do not consider it ‘stalking’ to reply to a conversation chain that you started and are continuing.

    People can be ‘not in 100% agreement with you’ and not be a stalker-misogynist.







  • Not in person, not in real life, not ‘in my local area and looking to mingle’, no.

    I don’t regularly… go to gyms where 55 yo women are, and … I think all of my intimate partners have been within a max of +/- 3 years of my own age.

    I’m not trying to nor did I say that all older women are decrepit and ugly.

    I’m saying that generally speaking, women (as well as men), kinda tend to let themselves go a bit, as they get older… and honestly there is nothing wrong with that, that is completely normal. Getting old hurts, it makes staying in shape hard… it would be ridiculous to have basically the same general physique expectations for both a 30 yo and a 55 yo woman, or man.

    What is very not normal is to actually encounter a 55 yo women in approximately similar physique condition as ~55 yo Selma Hayek or Cate Blanchette.

    It is so not normal to me, that I literally didn’t believe it.

    The internet and celebrities != real life.



  • I am totally open to other people having different stances, but at least for myself, worth it.

    I already have an OLED Deck with a 1 TB drive… lost my old pc in lets summarily call it a series of unforunate events, been daily driving the Deck with a dock thingy and M+KB as my main PC for a few years now.

    So, I can get the 512 GB + controller bundle, and just swap the drives, reflash em with appropriate OS.

    $1128 for a ‘pc’ that can run RDR2 and Cyberpunk 77 at pretty darn good graphical settings, at 1440p, at or over 60 fps average? And fancy pantsy controller?

    Good enough, my eyes are starting to go a bit anyways lol, 4K is very likely wasted on me, and I’d love to have a Steam Deck that’s basically easier to hold and lighter, as a control option.

    That’d be a steal, imo, looking at it in PC pricing terms… which is the way I’m looking at it, because that’s the way I’ll mostly be using it.

    Also I can dress it up as a companion cube.

    Ratman loves companion cube, cannot stop testing, needs to keep testing.


  • Yep.

    I was initially hopeful that this thing might be surprisingly affordable, due to… basicslly the theory/rumor is that the ‘semi custom’ apu was initially intended to be used in a planned but cancelled Windows tablet/Surface kind of thing…

    But yeah, then, tariffs, rampocalypse, strait’s closed due to raids = shipping costs go up bigly.

    I’m pretty sure the way Valve does their internal finances is that that 30% cut of all games?

    Sure some of it goes toward Steam server costs, but I think most of it just goes into a giant war chest fund, from which they ‘experiment’, with things like this.

    Makes sense to me that they at least want to break even… business wise, that works if it makes more people use Steam and/or increases their reputation as actually innovating in some way.

    But being a loss leader would simply be too dangerous, too risky. They are small fries compared to the major console/pc hw manufacturers, and I am very sure the last thing they would ever want to do is owe some outside actor a lot of money.