At least that makes sense and has a logical reason

Yeah, I just meant for explaining the function of what the thing does.

It’s basically an analog version of an HDMI cable. Except no audio, only video.

It’s like the yellow RCA cable, but for computer monitors instead of TVs

I’d actually bet it’s something different…

It’s less that you game on a steam deck because it’s portable, and more that because it’s portable you can game. There are people here and there that are like “yeah, I have a steam deck so I use that instead” but the sentiment I see more often is “I wouldn’t be able to game at all if it wasn’t portable - I can’t sit down for that long, I only have time on the train, I need to be near my kids” etc.

And this changes the dynamic. It’s less that these people have “desktop gaming” and “portable gaming” and are choosing to play the AAA games while portable. They only have portable gaming. And they choose to play the same good games everyone else is playing. The only gaming they do is on their deck. And they’re not going to be like “oh, why play a good game like BG3 if I can play a shitty portable game like xyz”.

These are just people’s primary gaming devices now. And if they can, they will choose to play the same good games everyone else is choosing to play. It doesn’t matter if it only runs OK, playing a good game with OK graphics is still better than playing a shitty game.

Yes, it requires it runs well with default settings, everything is accessible with the standard deck controls, that all the control displays use the steam deck icons, and it doesn’t reference controls the deck doesn’t have. It’s a very high bar.

I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments “because I like clean code. If it’s not in the git log, it’s not a comment.”

Pretty sure I would quit on the spot. Clearly doesn’t understand “clean” code, nor how people are going to interface with code, or git for that matter. Even if you write a book for each commit, that would be so hard to track down relevant info.

That’s great and I’m glad that works for you.

But most people buying portable gaming handhelds are not doing that. And the people looking for things like that are likely landing closer to a surface or standard laptop, which Windows already supports well.

I don’t know that Microsoft has any business trying to make Windows support these devices better…

Windows is entirely built around two pillars:

1. Enterprise support for corporations, and team machine management
2. Entirely open compatibility so they can run almost any hardware you put into it, plug into it, and backwards compatibility for all that for as long as possible.

Portable game machines are not an enterprise product. Nor do you care about broad hardware support or upgradability. Nor do you care about plugging in your parallel port printer from 1985. Nor do you care about running your ancient vb6 code to run your production machines over some random firewire card.

Windows’ goal is entirely oppositional to portable gaming devices. It makes almost no sense for them to try to support it, as it’d go against their entire model. For things like these, you want a thin, optimized-over-flexible, purpose built OS that does one thing: play games. Linux is already built to solve this problem way better than Windows.

But, Microsoft will probably be stupid enough to try anyway.

Now we just need that GFX software from intel / amd / nvidia that is available on windows, taking advantage of that newly supported hardware

Stop, you’re making me too hard. I might be able to like, ditch Windows if that happens.

Exactly this. Amazing engineers can still be run by brain dead management. Turns out being a manager gets you more decision making power though.

TL;DR: Employees say his actions led to a lot of direction changing that forced management to scramble, and the lower workers had to bear the brunt of this. They also complained that OW2 needed more work or would be review bombed on Steam and his leadership refused. Shareholders are still happy to fellate him though because he made them a lot of money.

So, no actual news here.

Google Assistant is definitely getting worse and worse all the time. When the Google Homes first released they were actually pretty useful and handy. I was willing to pick a few up and they served a good purpose. They ran CIRCLES around Alexa and all those.

Now many years later, the devices don’t hear questions correctly, have to ask them four different times, they can’t even pick up my wife’s prompt words anymore, don’t even give reasonable answers when they do get the question right… It’s made hundreds of dollars worth of devices infuriating and useless.

I bought a product that worked. It no longer works because it’s been “updated”.

I’m not up on EU politics all that much, so I hope someone more informed comes along and posts a better answer, but…

My distant view + guess for as to why it’s different is that they have more than one party. Partisanship is at its worse when there are only 2 of you, as demonstrated by the US system - it’s all finger pointing and “us vs them” that just polarized everything.

In the EU there are (at least?) 7ish “major” political parties, and while some are bigger than others, many actual hold seats and power unlike the US Green and Libertarian “parties” that are essentially meaningless.

As such, any “partisanship” seems at least less extreme. It’s a lot harder to crucify one bad guy when your time and attention is split between 6 “bad guys”. And different parties back different things, so even if 3 were anti-abortion, you’d have to split your slander and hate to three different groups with different OTHER ideas. So it gets a bit lost in sauce.

And on the other side, if you take a strong stance on one issue (such as this one), there are likely multiple parties on your side for that issue since there are unlikely to be 7 opinions, and even if they are, the similar ones can “tag team” a little bit since they’re more in line with each other than the opposing sides are.

If you’ve ever played video games, games with more than 2 teams play very differently than ones that are just one or the other. Dynamics are much more complicated and constantly evolving than they are in a simple “team a vs team b”.

As such, my understanding is that all of these extreme takes are severely diluted since there are more shades of gray and more nuance to the conversation and not just a constant “red vs blue”.

I mean, sort of?

We created a big problem by injecting a lot of shit where it shouldn’t be. If we stop that, some pieces will bounce back.

Injecting more shit in another place means we have one big problem, that we haven’t stopped, and now a new problem that we don’t know the repurcussions of or how to reverse.

So uh, yeah, I’ll stick with the one beast we know over one we know and also another we don’t.

But why not just like… Do that somewhere where the mass actually makes a difference? You’d be better off dumping acres full of this shit instead of regrowing a forest. Doing it in individual tanks, sparsely within a city, is both an inefficient use of resources and fucking ugly.

Trees only purpose in a city is not to clean out CO2. It’s not even their primary purpose in a city. If it was, they’d be selecting specific species etc.

Yeah, that’s a good way of looking at this… I didn’t understand the Microsoft move at all. Why would an “open” non profit want to build business relationships with tech monoliths. It seemed antithetical, but I honestly had assumed that was more of a board/share holder decision… Sounds like that probably wasn’t the case.

Seems like monopolistic practices rather than competing on services.

It literally is? They’re literally not competing on services, they’re competing via artificial scarcity.

I still don’t understand the English insistence on borrowing words from other languages, yet refusal to standardize spelling into ways that actually make sense within the language.

So I still blame English for being silly with their transliteration.

It sounds like you’re not from the US. Our consumer protection services ara a joke. You’re more likely to solve the problem by yelling into a pillow than complaining to US consumer protection.

Counter counter rant: both can be true.

Just because there’s a workaround doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem.