MudMan

I've said this elsewhere, but December is quickly becoming the time of the year when all the corpos tell us just exactly how much they spy on us and we all collectively go "Cool!" and tell each other about it for some reason.

FWIW, the median number of games played is four. Not forty, not fourteen, just four. If we're going to get spyware stats, at least let's put them in context. As it turns out, half of all Steam users are only playing the one game (given the numbers we know on concurrents, that'd be CS2/DOTA/PUBG or Apex, in most cases).

The play-everything, strong-opinion-haver user is a fraction of the userbase.

Also interesting, Steam is telling people how their playtime splits between Windows/Deck/Non-Deck Linux... but they pointedly don't share those stats platform-wide. Sometimes silence is data, too.

I genuinely don't know that I follow that explanation. For one thing, what reasons would there be to ban paid blind boxes, online or offline, while allowing outright games of chance with a monetary payout? In what world is a Magic the Gathering blister more of a problem (for a consenting adult, anyway) than an online casino?

But also, by the larger point you're making it seems like you'd be fine with a government saying "porn is banned for everybody because reasons" but not with "porn is banned for kids", at least in a scenario where that comes with age verification.

To be clear, I agree that both of those are... not good. I just don't know that I can wrap my head around the logic of thinking the more extensive issue is more acceptable than the alternative. You could argue that the porn ban is an excuse to add mass surveillance, but at that point we're not talking about the porn ban, we're talking about the mass surveillance.

Oh, and for the record, there is plenty of will someone think of the children regarding loot boxes. Both on its own and bundled together with a blanket assessment that gambling is immoral and/or illegal. It's actually a fairly close match to the porn issue, where concerns about children are being wrapped around a more targeted hostility around the concept from both sides of the political spectrum.

You can want better. Wanting better is good, actually.

What you can't do (and expect to be taken seriously, anyway) is to take the best you got and give them crap for stuff that's not under their control in any way. They don't own the games getting delisted, so they have zero control over the delisting itself and they have better mitigations for this scenario than anyone else that make the situation actually safe for buyers. They may be "out of stock" of these games going forward, but nobody who bought them has to worry about not getting to keep them, which isn't true on most other platforms, Steam included.

For the record, I also disagree on how "we're seeing Valve's practices get better". They have their own set of priorities and while I like a bunch of them I dislike a bunch of them also. I don't need to pick sides here.

Case in point, I agree that asking for a patreon-style contribution is a bad move on GOG's part. I don't need to like that in order for me to like their choice to stick to DRM free content or to provide downloadable offline installers.

Waterbeds also not a thing.

Not being American gets you 3 extra... years? decades? life units? Which does seem still accurate.

I... don't know where you're from, but actual gambling is legal here for adults. Are you suggesting that people should be able to place bets on actual sports but not buy a random loot box in a game? That seems incredibly extreme.

Which still leaves a bunch of other stuff people have used kids to attack on all sides of multiple political aisles, but hey, if that's the one you want to caveat I'm happy to flag how weird the caveat is.

Yeah, I read about some of the tightening at the time and I'm not disputing that there are technical ways of... you know, making your country's Internet a mostly separate bubble for non-techie users.

The point is it's both hard and extremely invasive to get there. You can't just wish upon a star for VPNs to not be used for a particular application without going to those extremes. Especially if the thing you're trying to prevent is people watching Superman two weeks early or wanking to a mainstream porn page.

I'm trying to be generic here. For these purposes I don't particularly care about manufacturer customizations beyond "does it tensor math good and/or talk to DXR/Vulkan raytracing. I guess that accidentally includes actually useless CPU-baked NPUs, but I'll accept that as being potentially part of it if someone actually used them for something.

For the record, even if I was wrong about or unaware of your kinda pedantic distinction, it'd still be irrelevant to the point.

It's kind of unfortunate how much this has been encouraged by petty online fights. People were very excited when "will somebody think of the children" was applied to, say, some social media content or gaming loot boxes because the Internet did not like those things, so they were very happy to ignore the pre-existing parental control devices and request blanket bans. Then people remembered that a bunch of old, prudish people on both sides of the political aisle don't like porn and it was too late.

Man, people love the "they first came for" argument online and I should have guessed the first time it really pays off in the 21st century it'd include the absolute most depressing things possible instead.

Anyway, this is bad and I don't like it, but UK politics are almost as bad as US politics, so I'm happy to let both stew in their own cautionary tale juices.

I guess that works for VPN services offering servers outside the country. That's not what VPNs are, though, and you still can't ban the concept of VPNs having a connection outside the country. VPN software is available open source and all it takes for it to connect abroad is my phone with a VPN connection to my home computer being abroad.

I mean, Russia (and even China) still have people using VPNs all over the place. This (and a lot of the push for age verification and comms backdoors) reeks of barely understanding the desired result and entirely misunderstanding how the tech works.

I strongly disagree with that take, but also the actual alternative is not better for some of the people involved, so let that caveat be up front.

The alternative is a manually curated storefront, which is still being done in other platforms to some degree. You can absolutely sell entertainment or videogames without it being an entirely hands-off, algo-driven gig economy setup. Valve's entire business model is cutting off all internal costs and automating the thing so it prints money by itself, but that's not the only possible business model for media, as the previous century of media clearly shows.

Now, the caveat is that this doesn't particularly help the small fry, which may be just gatekept out of the entire loop instead of being simply crushed by the soulless machine of making dream paste out of independent media. Whether that's better or not I'm genuinely not sure.

Nostalgia tells me that the old industrial model where you only got to play in the pool if you could afford to do it right was more consistenly professional and less sloppy. Also that fewer things fell through the cracks, so if you wanted to make shovelware you at least had to put some work in to get it published, which was somebody's paid job. Steam (and the similar mobile stores) have put all the cost and risk on the developers, especially since investment dried up and indie publishers have morphed from financers to service providers that come in after the job is done to sell you marketing and storefront SEO.

So I guess I personally would want Steam to hire a small army of content reviewers and moderators led by an editorial team that selects what to feature based on both business and creative considerations. But what I personally would want may not solve the problem the small indies this guy's talking about have, just... maybe not allow them to get that deep into the hole by keeping them from being able to get started in the first place. Mileage may vary on whether that's preferable. My personal choice is probably a side effect of being old.

See, there's a lot of online chatter about how much sense Linux folder structures make, with everything grouped by type all over the filesystem. And then this happens.

DOS 5.1 folder structure or bust, I say. Home directories are evil, if your filename doesn't fit in 8.3 characters you're doing it wrong and if you can't find it with dir . /w it shouldn't exist.

Cool.

So, anyway...

(For the record, tensor cores don't just accelerate calculations for raytracing, as is obvious from the entire AI bubble built on the technology, and I have no idea what GPU "performance boost" you'd want from additional raster graphics when you have RT-less stuff running at stupid framerates on current hardware and being consistently CPU-limited, but the Internet gets the memetic obsessions it gets. I suppose online nerds will pay for a 1080p 1000Hz monitor with no self-awareness as long as the two popular Youtube tech channels keep repeating the same memes and testing the same four games forever)