Yeah. This is a giant nothing burger

ANY gaming, or even tech, company looking at possible acquisitions is interested in Valve. In the same way that everyone would be down to clown with Ryan Reynolds if he knocked on their door but we know it won’t happen.

Same with the “rumor” of buying Nintendo.

I would say that ACTUALLY being “cancelled” is the exception.

The vast majority of shitheads just pivot their grift fully to the chud base and then present themselves as a persecuted victim. And then “mainstream” media tries to rehabilitate them in a few years.

Exactly

If you have a beacon? Even an insanely directional connection to a GPS satelite is still going to bounce off clouds and the like.

And a beacon that triggers the moment it crashes? The expected crash location is not The Hardy Boyz Compound. It is Iraq or Russia or China. Every minute we can buy to “dispose of” any of the juicy bits matters.

Equity is good. It encourages people to give a shit as to whether a product is launched or not and so forth.

The issue is more that we have this convoluted scheme to let people cash out their shares throughout their time with the company because it makes 'total compensation" higher

Personally? I would have almost no issues if it were just put into an escrow account and treated more like a retirement/severance package. Working at InterTrode? Those shares are untouchable. Leave InterTrode? YOLO.

The reality is that there is no one size fits all engine. Unreal and, to a much lesser extent, Unity come close, but they still favor very specific scales and styles of gameplay.

Like, for as dated as it feels, Bethesda’s fork of gamebrio or whatever it was is a REALLY solid engine for the kinds of games they make. Geometry interactions are still a bit funky, but it allows for massive scale and high fidelity because exterior regions are broken into cells in a way that favors (what we would now call) streaming. But if you want a game where you seamlessly go in and out of buildings (similar to the recent Yakuza/LAD games), it is laughable and, to my knowledge, still treats every building as its own world even as of Starfield.

And when you try to make one engine do EVERYTHING? you get star citizen where a refusal to do any form of load masking means that they need to be able to simulate space ships light seconds away from each other AND infantry centimeters away from each other and you basically see the physics engine explode every few seconds as a result.

Maybe you aren’t a fan of the in house engines. If it does one thing that “wows” then that is likely how they got their publisher

Also: it is obviously corporate backed, but Unreal Engine kind of is that. Sony has put >400M USD toward Epic/Unreal Engine and other studios/publishers put smaller amounts in.

Most UBI solutions (which I very much support and voted for Yang in the primaries for…) tend to be built around the idea of providing cost of living for “free” but encouraging people to still suck capitalism good if they want more money on top of that. Which is “good” because it is how you get those rock star developers focused on major products.

But that more or less makes the same problem. Sure, there are going to be people who genuinely want for nothing more than three meals a day and spend the rest of their time doing hardcore development. But, even then, they likely are never going to be “challenged”. I’ve worked with some AMAZING developers over the years and have learned a lot from them. And I would hope they learned from me. Because, during a code review, you see how Nancy solved a problem and might try to incorporate that pattern into your own workflow and so forth.

But when you are more or less the sole “ninja” developer on a project and are mostly working with college kids who can remember what the various design patterns are called? You are likely not being challenged in the slightest and you “stagnate”.

And most people who live and breathe “awesome code” are doing so because it lets them do fun stuff on the weekend. Which, until we live in a post scarcity society, needs money/resources.

Hell, if I haven’t already pissed off more than enough people with this, I’ll add on that I have never met what I would consider a “good” software engineer who doesn’t “work for the weekend” as it were. Because if all you want to do with your entire life is code? You never stop iterating. You always want to make the code better and I need to regularly “check in” with you to make you push code to a repository or remove the WIP from your MR. Whereas the people who want to finish their job so they can go climbing or take a trip to the beach with their family or just blow money on hookers and blow? They are able to realize when something is “good enough for production” and they get a LOT more done.

That mostly is a symptom of actually trying to offer a Product. Donations alone aren’t cutting the full time staff that you need to provide any kinds of guarantees. I mean, look at Lemmy. There was a CVE a few months ago and people were losing their minds that the two main devs didn’t take time to do a proper writeup and instead focused on fixing the issue while keeping an eye on the community discussing it and informing others. It was amazing that they were able to get it fixed so quickly but “NOT GOOD ENOUGH”. And… the way you get the resources to be “good enough” mostly involves monetization. And, shockingly, most of the people who get angry when something is added and say they would have donated otherwise aren’t speaking in good faith.

As for RedHad: Disclaimer, I am currently in the process of working with partners over the debacle of Red Hat seeming hell bent on killing Rocky. And… this is after they killed CentOS. As a developer, having a “free” version of the OS we are targeting is incredibly useful. It lets us nail everything down at low cost and run a limited subset of paid nodes for final debugging before we send it to the customer who requires RHEL.

But also? A LOT of end customers also run a metric shit ton of Rocky nodes. Unless it is outward facing or can’t tolerate any downtimes, use the “good enough” free version. Which then leads to discussions of “okay… if most of the fixes end up in Rocky a day or so later than in RHEL, do we really need to pay for a couple hundred licenses when we could instead split Fred and Chris’s time for internal support?”. Which rapidly leads toward most of the paid customers of RHEL not being paid customers anymore.

It is shitty but… that is the difference between consumer and enterprise. When a failure leads to an hour or two of my personal time to set Nextcloud up again because the underlying infrastructure hates the idea of containerization? Whatever, I genuinely find that fun. When a failure leads to a bunch of angry customers who now have lost faith in me and a bunch of employees working frantically so that we don’t lose a customer and, thus, revenue? We aren’t going to be risking anything to a hobbyist platform that is prone to catastrophic errors because there just isn’t time to fix it (also, Nextcloud has a paid version which makes this even funnier).

But as a consumer? Those fuckers are putting ads in the start menu and making it harder for me to remember what the GE proton update tool is called.

I am a strong supporter of open source tech. Specifically the proper FOSS flavor.

It is NEVER going to be a valid alternative when there is a massive multi-million (if not billion) dollar alternative with an affordable license. Because it takes time to develop these feature sets and time is money. Even someone working in their spare time can’t put in a full day of work… and are likely burned out FROM a full day of work.

And that ignores the tendency for GPL-like licenses that are straight up cancer as far as companies and products are concerned. I respect the ideology but… that is WHY companies are less likely to pull a Valve and dump massive amounts of money into supporting open source projects. Like, every time someone pushes a cool piece of software with a GPL-like license I just think “Cool, you are actively making sure your feature set never improves anything”

The best we can hope for is the model used by Ubuntu and the like. An open source project backed by a corporation that sells support. And… the open source community almost instantly turns on that and decides they are evil and starts going out of their way to shit on it at every step of the way.

As for the overall idea of “do we even own anything in this world of subscriptions?”. That, much like with the “I bought the disc so I own this game” mindset is very much a fallacy. Because you can get a life time license to version 1.2315151651616 of FooSoft. hell, you can even get 1.x of FooSoft. That… doesn’t matter because the moment a CVE is found in FooSoft or its dependencies you need a new version. Which is WHY we tend toward these subscription models because we know we need the updated version.

Like, as a good example: Basically ANY new hardware or software suite needs support for Red Hat, and to a lesser extent Ubuntu, if they are planning on selling their products. Because any company worth its salt is picking a distro with a support model. Which basically means RHEL and whatever the paid Ubuntu is. Because even ignoring any tech support aspects, a support contract is a guaranteed timeline for fixing vulnerabilities.

I use the 8bitdo

In theory, having a whole new button would be nice. But understand that games are specifically designed around the 18+1 button setup and there is rarely a need for a 19th and a 20th. And if I am going full steam craziness: I tend to prefer modal mappings at that point anyway.

I could see something like a flight sim or an elite game benefiting from ALL THE BUTTONS but… at that point I want the HOTAS form factor. Or we are talking something like the x series where everyone knows the game is meant to be m+kb but we still try to make it work.

And people will praise them. Because did you see how bad Sebastian Stan’s hair looked in that movie? Why are we paying these horrifically overworked VFX staff anything?

Oh, no, sorry. People will clown on Marvel because this means everyone’s hands and feet will look bad because nobody understands how training data sets work or why The Simpsons have four fingers. And then lose their minds when it looks “good enough”.

But yeah… more power to the VFX studios and I hope this spreads so that we have fewer “you have one month to do the money shot for our entire movie” debacles. But… I don’t see this ending well.

Also: how much does marvel have in post-production right now? Since they can’t film anything. Feels like it might be easy to “wait out” a vfx strike. Especially since they tend to be even more underpaid than the writers.

If you live in an area where power outages are common enough that you need a backup generator: Sure. but also learn how to properly install that (an improperly installed backup generator can injure or kill the utility workers trying to fix an outage) and how to safely operate it (carbon monoxide, yo). Also how to properly store the fuel and how to maintain the generator so it works for more than one year… and you don’t set your garage on fire.

Although, there are also arguments for solar power and the associated battery storage in those cases. Similarly, vehicle to load which turns a car into a battery in the event of isolated blackouts.

But if there is a power outage, the grid is already not “resilient”. So…

While I do agree that management is genuinely important in software dev:

If you can rewrite the codebase quickly enough, versioning matters a lot less. Its the idea of “is it faster to just rewrite this function/package than to debug it?” but at a much larger scale. And while I would be concerned about regressions from full rewrites of the code… have you ever used software? Regressions happen near constantly even with proper version control and testing…

As for testing and documentation: This is actually what AI-enhanced tools are good for today. These are the simple tasks you give to junior staff.

Conflicting requests and iterating on descriptions: Have you ever futzed around with chatgpt? That is what it lives off of. Ask a question, then ask a follow up question, and so forth.

I am still skeptical of having no humans in the loop. But all of this is very plausible even with today’s technology and training sets.

Just to add a bit more to that. I don’t think having an AI operated company is a good idea. Even ignoring the legal aspects of it, there is a lot of value to having a human who can make irrational decisions because one customer will pay more in the long run and so forth.

But I can definitely see entire departments being a node in a rack. Customers talk to humans (or a different LLM) which then talk to the “Network Stack” node and the “UI/UX” node and so forth.

I mean, I am going to be a gatekeeping little shit and brag about how I got all the endings without needing that.

But it is a really good idea. Because there are very clear “meta” weapons and builds. And a lot of late game encounters and AC/HC battles more or less require them because of all the adds and attrition (especially on the NG+ missions). You either go “meta” or you are fighting bullet sponges and may not even have enough ammo to finish the encounter

And especially in Chapter 1, your arm weapons very much feel like they exist for adds and bubble popping with all your DPS coming from shoulders. We could even see that in the PvP showcase stream. Which is kind of the opposite of the rest of the game where weapon bay to carry 3-4 arm weapons is the way to go.

And it fits with the style of the game. Screw up once and the enemy will chain you for like 4000 AP.

So I have a few wyze cameras but it isn’t the end of the world as I specifically placed them where they would benefit me but i wouldn’t care if cops got access to the footage (so specifically pointing at my front door, not the street).

But apparently amazon has both the coral USB dongles and yet another pi 4 that I really don’t need on sale so… yolo, let’s frigate.

Anyone aware of any good wireless outdoor cameras that play well with that ecosystem? Will eventually run ethernet for POE and the like but “eventually” is not any time soon.

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Keep in mind that will likely instantly void your warranty as well as prevent you from receiving OTA updates to your software and the like. Some of which may be safety related.

And that is assuming it doesn’t instantly trip a check engine light or even partially brick the car.

Almost 100%

The radios are used to push software updates and I think you can turn on emergency onstar/onstar-equivalent for a lot of vehicles. You are mostly paying to use the radio yourself and to cover additional data overheads.

I mean, NY is already connected to Texas https://www.amtrak.com/plan-your-trip.html

Assuming all of those tracks (or comparable ones) are upgraded: It would still likely not be something someone wants to take as opposed to a direct flight. Because the train would likely need to stop in New Jersy, DC, Virgina, Charlotte, and Atlanta before you change trains to get to Houston or Dallas.

Which… is normal. That is how trains work. I always reference it, but Makoto Shinkai’s works LOVE the imagery of someone frantically trying to navigate an imperfect public transportation system to get to the one they love. And… that is reality. Even in Japan (basically the gold standard for public transportation) you are changing trains pretty regularly, have a LOT of stops along the way, and may need to do the last leg on a bus route that only runs twice a day.

Its a fairly common issue that crops up when you google the symptoms. Ended up doing a logging run and figured out it was hanging in (I forget the official term but the stage where steam installs dependencies into the prefix). And the way to reset that is to clear the download cache in Settings/Downloads.

And yeah, nvidia. But the Warframe shaders are apparently a pretty well known issue. No idea why, but I do know DE are a lot closer to old school iD these days in that a lot of people there enjoy doing fun graphics/engine stuff. Just amuses me that Warframe will take 40 minutes after an update/new proton version whereas Hitman is like 40 seconds.

They are literally in the process of needing to unbundle Teams from office in Europe.

Regardless of the reasoning, MS has had eyes on it since the 90s and need to be incredibly careful what they do and don’t bundle together or preinstall. Whereas Apple can do whatever they want. That is why Apple comes with a bunch of shitty office products that only one person at any given company uses and Windows comes with a link to download them.