It takes some practice to beautify it. You’ll also spend more time doing that than the whole time taken to build the core.

The weirdest thing is that steam doesn’t have a natural or self reinforcing monopoly. It wouldn’t take much for another company to copy their business model, and provide a competitor. In practice, however, they all fall flat on their faces.

Steam’s model is to give up short term gain for a smaller long term gain. Over time, this has snowballed into what we see now. Gabe is happy to get ever richer from his golden goose laying away. The competitors get started, then try and gut the goose for a quick buck.

In short, Facebook are incentivised to increase conflict and hate, it improves user engagement. They have also leveraged their large user base to boost numbers in threads significantly. Threads is already a cess pip of bigotry and hate.

Federating with them would be like connecting your house’s drinking water pipe with the sewage pipe of an industrial pig farm. It would pollute our community to the point of destruction.

They might try and control this initially. Unfortunately, it would almost certainly be part of an embrace, extend, extinguish attempt. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish ). They play nice till they have control of enough communities, then they stop the controls, to increase profits.

I think the key difference is that it’s “easier” to apply a meta to a RTS game. In shooters, the meta often involves quick reflex decisions, where to hide, where to shoot etc. This is hard, and requires practice. It also means there is a significant number of players not applying it, or doing so sub-optimally.

With RTS games, the metas are easier to apply. This means that, in human Vs human games, the newer players often get flattened. It also means that far more complex metas can be developed and applied.

Shooters tend to back load the difficulty curve. It’s easy to get into them, and not do badly, but hard to do well. RTS games tend to front load the difficulty. You need to get over the initial hump to get “ok” with it. Once over the hump, the curve smooths off and you get good fairly rapidly.

One of the big differences between nerds and normals is that nerds enjoy punching through that wall. The difficulty is seen as a challenge, not an impediment. Most people want a faster feedback loop on the dopamine reward. FPS type games deliver that extremely well.

Early access is extremely effective, when used correctly. It lets smaller studios get an income stream a lot earlier, which helps significantly. It also lets them form a tight feedback loop with fans. They can find out what works and what doesn’t. Some examples of it working well would be Rimworld, Kerbal Space Program, and Factorio. All released as amazing games, primarily due to early access.

Unfortunately, a lot of companies seem to be abusing the idea right now. Particularly bigger studios.

Valve are the only ones confident enough in their systems to do that. Valve’s mindset seems to be that trying to lock people in is a losing strategy, long term. Instead they are just making sure that their offerings are better than anything else available. If done right, it has all the advantages of locking people in, with none of the downsides. It also combines with the perceived openness, which gains you a lot of credit with the geek community.

Microsoft are too reliant on lock-in to risk opening it up.

Ok, and how many of those points would be improved by going public?

People want sequels because they trust value to to them justice, not roll out stale cookie cutter versions like FIFA etc.

Would investors demand that valve take a smaller cut, or would they demand they take a bigger one in future?

Would they cut support for older games?

Would they add ads to the overlays?

Would you then be able to get “Steam Premium” for an ad free experience?

Please let me know what bit of steam’s business model would be improved by them constantly chasing a higher profit every quarter?

Both line pockets. The difference is the focus. The shareholders for valve have been invited. You can’t just decide to buy a bit of valve, then tell them what to do. Publicly traded shares mean that the people investing are often only interested in the value and dividends, anything that boosts that is good. If the company dies from it then who cares, they’ll jump ship and invest elsewhere.

Valve’s current mentality is that keeping the customers happy keeps the money flowing. It has now reached the point where compounding effects make up for the short term reduction in dividends.

Customers are happy, share holders are happy, and no-one can barge in, demanding a piece of the pie.

Stock market shareholders want constant growth from their investments. Enough of them also only care about short term growth, even at the cost of long term.

Valve, being privately owned, only answers to its own shareholders, no-one can just buy in and start demanding more profit seeking. They have collectively decided that slow but reliable growth is better. This results in them not actively pumping their customer base for ever more profit. They have no intention of killing their golden goose.

I’ll admit, I’m willing to pay a couple of £ for the convenience of having them available on steam.

I limited LLM would run on a lot of newer gfx cards. It could also be done as a semi online thing. If you have the grunt, you can run it locally. Otherwise, you can farm it out to the online server.

You would need a properly layered engine. The full lore is baked into the global engine. Each NPC gets their own biasing in the engine. A subset of knowledge they have, as well as things they explicitly do or don’t know.

Generating the underlying knowledge set, in a way that is easy to work with will be the challenge. It’s ok for AI to fill in the gaps, but the story designers will need an easy way to get them to behave properly.

There will also be a lot of unintended consequences. A good team would be able to do amazing things with this. A bad team would produce a complete mess.

Nothing like thinking “I’ll just play for 1/2 an hour, then have breakfast.” Next thing you know, the wife is coming in, and you’re still in your pajamas, having not eaten at all.

With mods you can! More specifically, a grappling hook!

I’m currently using space trains, along with the space exploration mod. The trains run on batteries, and they are blazingly fast. I easily lose track of them through my orbital rail grid.

The value for money of it is unbelievable. I’ve used mine a lot, and I can’t see many ways it could be improved (none without worse tradeoffs).

I wouldn’t recommend it as a laptop replacement, but as a gaming system, it’s incredible.

It also plays nicely with both the steam controller, and the steam link. Both can be picked up dirt cheap now.

I’ve ran into it, and it’s very slightly off-putting. At the same time, I fully understand why they’ve done it that way, and actually agree with them. The use of flat packs as an alternative makes the problem irrelevant. They maximised openness, while also protecting it from being completely borked up by a newb running random commands.

If it’s done well, it’s an excellent process. It lets smaller studios start getting paid earlier, which helps significantly. It also lets them establish a strong feedback loop with their player base.

Factorio is an excellent example. The player base provided instant feedback on the gameplay, as they brought in more features. They also weren’t afraid to change things that didn’t quite work as well as planned. It also helped guide where to focus efficiency efforts.

Unfortunately, a number of big companies have jumped on the bandwagon. They don’t quite get what early access is good for, and just use it as an excuse for bugs, as well as to drum up cheap advertising.

The slowness we can deal with, it’s the 16Gb storage that’s the killer.

I’m familiar with android and it’s ecosystem, as is my daughter. I’ve a personal dislike of apple, so would rather not have to deal with their systems.

As for her current tablet, it’s still working remarkably well. Unfortunately, 16Gb of storage is extremely limiting, when it comes to installing modern apps. I don’t think LineageOS will help much with a lack of physical memory, and modern software bloat.

My daughter is currently 4, the steam deck is far too advanced for her to use reliably, and far too easy to damage. As it stands her current tablet is in a thick foam case, that makes it almost indestructible to normal damage. It’s also old enough that I wouldn’t be too upset if she decided to try and colour in on it, using Sharpies or snapped it in 2.

I’m also limiting to android because that’s what I’m most familiar with, and so is she. I’ve no interest in learning the apple ecosystem, with it’s lock in effect.

She is currently learning to read, so I need to stay ahead of her regarding cyber security and information access. Unfortunately the current tablet is so restricted on memory that I can’t install any parental control apps. I had to strip the cache from most of the less used apps, just to free up enough space to install a battery health monitoring app (accubattery).

My hope is the next tablet will do until she’s old enough to have a phone herself. At the same time, I’d rather not throw huge amounts of money at it. It’s still a tablet for a preteen, and so could get broken very easily.

That does look like a promising option. It’s one I hadn’t run across too.

6" screen is likely too small. Her current 10" seems to be the right balance for us. I also suspect a 5 year old design will soon have the same issues we currently have. Ditto for the 32Gb internal storage.

Appreciate the idea though. Thanks.

I have a steam deck, along with a steam controller, and a steam link.

The steam is definitely not a good replacement tablet for a young child.

I’ve heard quite a lot of issues with the Fire.

I’m also trying to keep my daughter as ad free as possible, for as long as possible. The Fire seems antithetical to that as it’s possible to be.

That looks like a good option. Thanks!

I had completely missed that one.

The current tablet is as fast I as I can make it. I’ve also disabled, and uninstalled all I can, to free up space. 16Gb doesn’t go far, when most streaming services don’t allow installing or buffering to an SD card.

It’s also not had a security update since 2020.

His annoyingness is part of the core plot. The progression works excellently.

• “This guy’s an idiot”

• “This guy’s an idiot, but funny.”

• “Ok, too much of idiot guy, I want glados back.”

• “Oh, hi glados”

• Idiot guy gets really annoying.

• Hey glados, can we go kill idiot guy together?"

• Space Space SPACE, SPAAAAAAACCCCCCEEEEEE!!!

For those confused, discworld dwarfs have both males and females. However, both are stocky and have beards. They also are very egalitarian regarding jobs etc. They long ago gave up correcting the surface races regarding their gender, who assume a burley minor in heavy armour, and a thick beard, is a male dwarf.

Imagine an Americano coffee. That’s portal 2. Now imagine a mug full of espresso coffee. That’s portal reloaded.

Basically it’s amazing, but mind bending. It throws in temporal mechanics to the original portal setup. For what it is, it’s also impressively coherent.

Cheap money (in the form of loans) has reduced. This means that investors are suddenly putting a lot more pressure on the top. In good companies, this is dealt with by the leadership team. Unfortunately, a lot just let the shit roll downhill.

There is also the issue of compartmentalization. In larger companies, the people dealing with the complaints have little to do with the people who actually need to change things to fix the root cause. This leads to the schizophrenic/sociopathic behaviour we see. The mouth has very little idea what the hands are doing.

Assume from the various pd fun that could be occurring, it could be voltage related. Android phones often set their charge current by the input voltage. If the voltage sags, the phone assumes it is overloading the cable and backs off. If the Iphone and Android phone are sharing a 5V rail inside the charger then this could be an issue. If the combined load of both phones causes a voltage sag, the android phone will back off. However, if the Iphone doesn’t also slow down at the same rate, you will get a bias. It might be that 90% of the power is going to the iPhone simply because the android phone is being polite, and being screwed by the deal.

The best way to test this is to install a charge monitoring app on the android phone. I personally use AccuBattery. It shows me both the voltage and current draw of my phone. The pulsing effect of a bad cable is very obvious with it. I suspect it would help you diagnose what is going on.

I’m hoping Google and apple will work out an option for that. The ability to tell them that a tag is tracking something stolen and not to alert. It will have to be tied strongly to an identity however, and potentially a police report.

How long that takes, on the other hand, is anyone’s guess.

By that point they have already stolen the bike. The tag doesn’t give an instant warning, only if it seems to follow the phone.

The issue is that AI detection and AI training are very similar tasks. Anything that can be used reliably to detect an AI written article can also be used to improve it’s training, and so becomes obsolete.

Meanwhile, a lot of people write in a manner that “looks” like an AI wrote it. This leads to the FAR more serious problem of false positives. Missing an AI written paper at school or university level isn’t a big deal. A false positive could ruin a young person’s life however. It’s the same issue the justice system faces.

It can be done, but it requires proper planing, fore thought, and research. I could easily see a rushed, budget conversion leading to a getto like environment.

Such changes will take time. Right now, no-one is sure if WFH will stick. The last thing they want is to initiate a change, only to find it’s far less profitable than just waiting. Local government won’t push it yet, for similar reasons.

The best thing right now would be to gather case studies and planning research into EXACTLY what is needed, both short term (1-10 years) and long (20-100 years). That can then both accelerate the process, once it gets going, as well as make it long term sustainable.