The majority of his presidency he’s kept them with too few members to have a quorum and therefore unable to do much of anything.

Last I’d heard, Trump was officially allowed to dismiss members of the NLRB at will. His administration is basically the definition of corruption and regulatory capture.

Don’t get me wrong - I’d be happy to see things go well for unions but I have zero faith in anything good happening. Shit is so fucked I’m legitimately worried about any legal challenges to anything because we might get another Roe v. Wade.

And yet, they did it, very quickly, and will do so again when the market shifts again.

These aren’t typical conditions. There is a world of difference between “Yo, here is a truckload of money. Give me all your RAM for the next two years!” (AI right now) and “We need to align our capacity to the current needs of the market in order to not flood the market with product we can’t sell.” (normal conditions).

Look at the memory market before this AI shitshow. It’s cyclical as the fabs try to match demand without flooding the market. It typically takes several quarters to ramp capacity up and down, causing shortages and then oversaturating the market because they can’t do it fast enough. Returning to that kind of production is also likely to be more difficult than it would otherwise be to adjust while already in it. There are so many unknowns in this wild situation. How much DRAM should they commit to making?

Anyway, I’m not even a business person so what the fuck do I know. I’m getting tired of this conversation. It would be great to be optimistic, but that’s not something I’m capable of right now. Best of luck. I hope it pops and prices plummet.

Please indicate the point at which we no longer agree.

• The price of consumer hardware, like RAM and SSDs, is high right now.

• Supply for consumer hardware is low right now.

• The reason that the price of consumer hardware is high right now is because supply is low.

• The reason this supply is low is because manufacturing capacity that used to be committed to consumer variants of this hardware has been converted to manufacturing datacenter variants of this hardware.

• The reason for the manufacturing shift is that, because of the AI bubble, demand for datacenter hardware is high.

• It takes time and money to convert manufacturing capacity between consumer hardware to datacenter hardware.

• This conversion also includes changing investment, R&D, and employment priorities. Companies like Micron (one of the three major/noteworthy memory suppliers in the world) have cut/gutted their B2C divisions to focus their resources entirely on the more profitable datacenter B2B efforts.

• Datacenter variants of this hardware are substantially different than consumer variants and are not interchangeable.

• Higher prices, slimmer margins, and lower sales have caused some consumer electronics businesses to cut back, focus on narrower market segments, pivot to other markets, or exit the market entirely.

If we agree on all of the above, I’m not sure why you are confused.

If the bubble pops today, it very well may cause demand for datacenter hardware to crater, assuming they don’t get creative and find a way to pivot hard toward other SaaS somehow. Since the parts are not at all compatible with consumer electronics, this would not provide an instant increase in consumer hardware supply nor would it crater consumer hardware demand.

If the crash is bad enough, some of the businesses that pivoted to B2B/datacenter hardware may fail or have to be bailed out by their governments. Even if they all survived, fewer consumer product businesses exist in the market to sell to consumers and they have fewer product lines in development. Companies like Micron, who abandoned their established brands and/or relationships with resellers or partners that would use their parts in consumer products, will need to rebuild those things. Manufacturing would need to be converted, updated to the latest consumer hardware needs, taking more time and money.

It would take quite a while to rebuild consumer hardware supply. Without that supply, demand will not be met and prices will be high.

My apologies! I didn’t realize you were the arbiter of what I do and don’t need. I feel so relieved that I can just ignore all of the demands on my life and just hand over such authority to some opinionated jackass I met on lemmy.

Why would it be immediate? Where is the new supply coming from to alleviate the demand?

I feel like you didn’t read what I wrote. If the bubble pops today, how long do you think it will take for prices to drop?

…why would it need to be?

It doesn’t need to, but if it were that would be the only reason I’d say prices might drop anytime soon. A glut of used consumer-compatible parts would push prices down. That or maybe if the rising Chinese suppliers manage to ramp up and find a way to enter the western market.

The price is currently high and is rising because resources and manufacturing capacity are limited. Those who own the capacity have found that providing for a small number of companies that are flush with cash and will throw money around just to ensure their competitors don’t gain an advantage is far more lucrative than providing for consumers or businesses that integrate parts into consumer devices. The entire market segment is shifting away from consumer and focusing on datacenter hardware.

The longer this goes on, the further the major players will be from being able to pivot back to consumer products… and there are only major players in the memory and NAND industry. You can’t just form a new memory or NAND company and start manufacturing this stuff. It takes years and a lot of investment to build the facilities and the kind of capacity we’re used to.

Edit: I’ve also seen a number of non-tech folks excited for cheap used datacenter memory and gpus to flood the market after the bubble pops, as if the parts were at all compatible with consumer devices. I wanted to make sure that was not part of your calculation.

Once the bubble pops, assuming it doesn’t take economies with it, none of the product will be compatible with consumer devices. Manufacturing will have to be reoriented back to consumer products, then those parts will need to be manufactured, then the rush of people trying to get the parts will have to pass. THEN maybe prices will come down.

I suspect the datacenters will just pivot and repurposed to rent consumers “cloud compute” and cloud subscription services and continue to fuck the entire consumer market for years to come.

But then again I now hate everything so maybe I’m just pessimistic.

Just in time for RAM, SSD, and HDD prices to skyrocket and make personal computers unaffordable.

I guess if you can afford one now, at least you’ll be able to repair it.

When new video game stores were opening that charged much lower commissions than Valve, I decided that I would provide my game “Overgrowth” at a lower price to take advantage of the lower commission rates. I intended to write a blog post about the results.

But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM. This would make it impossible for me, or any game developer, to determine whether or not Steam is earning their commission. I believe that other developers who charged lower prices on other stores have been contacted by Valve, telling them that their games will be removed from Steam if they did not raise their prices on competing stores.

https://www.wolfire.com/blog/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action/

It seems it was not explicit in the agreement regarding non-key sales, but allegedly threatened and possibly enforced in practice.

The practice I’ve found the most concerning is the alleged “most-favored nation” clause/provision in the Steam Distribution Agreement. I haven’t been able to actually find the actual Steam Distribution Agreement anywhere, which itself is concerning. I just see it mentioned alongside an NDA that must be signed.

The MFN basically requires that Valve never be undercut in any way, whether or not the game is distributed elsewhere using a Steam Key or not.

No discount. No bonus content. No perks. Steam key or direct download from your own website without any involvement of Valve whatsoever - it doesn’t matter.

Edit: It seems it was not explicit in the agreement regarding non-key sales, but allegedly threatened and possibly enforced in practice.

When new video game stores were opening that charged much lower commissions than Valve, I decided that I would provide my game “Overgrowth” at a lower price to take advantage of the lower commission rates. I intended to write a blog post about the results.

But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM. This would make it impossible for me, or any game developer, to determine whether or not Steam is earning their commission. I believe that other developers who charged lower prices on other stores have been contacted by Valve, telling them that their games will be removed from Steam if they did not raise their prices on competing stores.

https://www.wolfire.com/blog/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action/

While Steam is more or less the best big solution we have, it does leave a lot to be desired. The only reason they are the best is because they clawed their way to the top early, kept themselves “good enough” compared to the competition, and haven’t yet sold out their entire customer base.

At this point, they completely dominate. It’s insanely difficult to compete with them. So long as they make half of an effort to improve things and continue to be somewhat benevolent they’ll likely keep their crown.

However, Valve is not ideal. They are still looking out for themselves, primarily. Many of Valves improvements have just been reactions to competitors and other threats not an inherent desire to deliver the best product possible or do the right thing. It’s just the fact that most competitors are more obviously greedy and immoral that makes Valve look like the heroes.

Without Epic and others throwing cash on the fire trying to compete I doubt we’d have seen even the slow upgrades to the Steam experience we’ve seen in recent years.

Without the Australian lawsuit, we’d have no return policy.

Without the clever abuse of arbitration by a group of lawyers, Valve would still have forced arbitration in the agreements.

Steam OS was only a thing, and Proton only got backed by Valve, when Microsoft first started positioning itself to eat Valve’s lunch by exerting control over Windows and pushing for things like UWP and the MS/Windows/XBOX storefronts on PC.

The vast majority of Valve’s storefront improvements are algorithms and crowd sourcing solutions. They want to be as hands off as possible because being hands on is hard and comes with liability. The whole skins market and gambling fiasco kind of shows that they’d much rather just not get involved if possible - same risk/reward cost/benefit analysis used by every greedy company. If that means lying about how aware they are of it that’s what they’ll do.

Don’t get me wrong. The least worst is, unfortunately, the best we’ve got. I love gaming and use Steam a lot. It’s just that the other big players are just so terrible that I think Valve gets a free pass. Hell, much of the tech industry is swallowing tactical nukes hoping that the radiation will somehow mutate them into a good business. In the meantime they are using the illusion of “expansion” from the resulting explosions to make themselves look bigger for investors. I support anyone not doing that.

the hoops… [they]… make you jump through with regard to layering

I played around with a few atomic distros and it seems like rather than layering, running things in containers is the preferred solution.

It won’t be the solution for everything that layering could “fix”, depending on your situation, but it is something that I wasn’t initially aware of when I started playing with Bazzite, Fedora Atomic, and now Aurora.

Basically, if you could just run whatever you need to run in a container, that might be another solution.

Just reiterating what others have said but… if you have an IP you like and want more of it in the future (regardless of medium!) then its success in any other medium will likely impact whether or not you get more.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where:

• Money matters more to most IP holders than the IP itself

• New IP is seen as risky

• Those in charge don’t have to take responsibility for their failures

If there is a commercial failure of an IP, there is a good chance that its failure will be seen as the IP generally failing or falling out of poluarity instead of the failure to best utilize the IP that likely occurred. As a result, priorities will often shift away from the IP to something else in all mediums (ex. ASOIAF/GOT). Unless the IP is absolutely gangbusters in all other mediums, it will suffer. Similarly, success will likely lead to more utilization of the IP in any medium.

It’s unlikely that the IP owner will sell or license the IP in the near future because at one point it was popular and new IP is hard to make. It would be better to hoard IP and maybe try again in a decade when they need a trick up their sleeve. Plus, another failure might damage the IP even more.

Admittedly, I’m not attached to any brands or IP in particular and so I’m not invested really. I just makes me a little sad when some IP I thought well of has this happen… or when the person who benefits from the IP turns out to be a person I’d rather not give money to. Occasionally I’ll ponder what might have been if things had gone differently and feel a little bad.

Most big game corps just shutter studios, usually letting them know via the grapevine after a board meeting or twitter post…

I thought Embracer Group was fine. I was almost a fan of their hands off investments in game studios.

Then they had a major deal go through that cost them a lot and they have been gutting or closing a lot of great studios they invested in ever since. Anything that isn’t currently making or isn’t guaranteed to make them money hand over fist in the near future, regardless of past performance, is at risk.

I had already narrowed the size down to a smallish (I forgot what I used for comparison) electronic cooking appliance so a full oven was already out. “Toaster oven” was negative, so I tried microwave oven route instead.

Is it an oven? 👍 Is it a microwave oven? 👍 Is it a countertop microwave oven? 👍 Can it grill food? 👍 Is it a grill microwave oven? - exceeded the question limit, big reveal, answer was “microwave”. Interesting but I wasted a lot of questions trying to determine what kind of microwave it was because “microwave oven” was not accepted.

It was not advertised as a game-pass like catalog when I was cancelling my preorder. I literally cancelled because it wasn’t that. It was Destiny and 4k 60Hz with TBD games coming in later months.

I only had a gaming computer and a Shield TV so Stadia would have been pointless for me unless it was in the living room with a controller and some interesting games.

After committing to several Google services only to have them shut down I wasn’t willing to risk it again.

Did they refund the subscription fee? If I knew they’d refund it all, I might not have cancelled my pro preorder.

I was willing to potentially be let down again but once I heard you had to buy almost all your own games (again, if you already own them) to play them on the service I cancelled. I was aware that they’d give you Destiny (a game I have zero interest in, especially with a controller) for free. I didn’t seem worth sinking money into the service.