cardanome

The Steam Machine is a victim of RAM prices exploding. It's price is fair considering the price of its parts but also causes it to be in a price segment where I am not sure who it is for.

People that can afford a Steam Machine at the current price point are likely to already have stronger hardware.

A Mac Mini a similarly sized with like half the price with dramatically better CPU. Or if you could get a PS5 pro, still for cheaper with vastly superior gaming performance.

Valve could have started with a premium model for the hardcore fans that are less price sensitive and released a budget version later when maybe the RAM apocalypse has ebbed.

Still hope it sells, the form factor is amazing.

You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer

That has been true even without AI.

Solutions to create games with barely any programming knowledge have existed for a long time. You can create a full featured Unreal Engine game with just using its visual scripting language.

Lots of amazing games have absolute dogshit code. It doesn't matter. You can write super simple, procedural code without any fancy abstraction and just get the job done.

Programming is the easiest part of game dev.

Plus you don't have to be a solo dev. Sure, just being a game designer might be hard but if you bring artistic skills to the table as well then you are golden and can partner up or outsource the programming if needed. Honestly people with an artistic background often do much better than people from a software engineering background who are used to overcomplicate things.

So no, programming was never the hurdle and AI doesn't help here. It just helps people to produce more slop faster.

He clearly had fun building these products

The author did not build those products. AI did.

And I don't read anything indicated they had fun.

There is pleasure in making something yourself. There is learning. There is pride.

With generative AI you are just stealing other people's work. You are learning nothing. Anything could have generated the same projects. There was no skill involved, just enough disposable income to pay for tokens.

And yes some people develop some weird psychosis and think that they did the thing and not the AI. Everyone else is vibe coding but they got the special sauce, the perfect prompts. They are delusional.

That is all true but even as a hardcore Linux and Thinkpad user, I have to admit it is a hard sell when no one can offer the quality of Apple.

Apple is the only hardware company where you can buy a product and it is good hardware wise. Sure other companies have flagship offerings but with apple you get a really good base model.

And that is where it breaks down for me. Pay 20% more for freedom? Yes, absolutely. But pay more for much worse? Yeah, not many people are going to be so idealistic.

I don't know why no one else can produce a laptop with decent battery life with an near silent fan and good display and overall great production quality. Yes, it is much easier when you are as big as apple and can rely on economics of scale but that doesn't totally explain the lack of quality when it comes to the competition.

Policy makers are not stupid, the system is working as intended.

The intention is to destroy public education in favor of private schools. Same as public health care has been systematically destroyed. It's all part of the neoliberal agenda.

Or take mental health care. We have enough therapists but we don't allow them to work with patients on public health care. We give that license only to a select few ensuring that people wait 6 months to a year if they want to get a therapy spot. Otherwise too many people would get therapy and that would cost money.

The goal is to make rich people richer and ensure they have enough desperate and cheap labor to exploit.

Just because some researchers are infected with this idiocy that EY propagates does not mean that it is legit.

Maybe they should pay more attention to real problems like the sycophantic nature of current LLMs causing psychosis in people and worry less about theoretical AGI.

Yeah and

A C compiler written in Rust used to be a graduate thesis. It isn’t anymore.

Or maybe like a little recreational project for multiple weekends.

There is that weird myth that writing compilers is super hard. Writing a toy C compiler is not that big of a deal. It is a pretty simple language.

Now production-grade is another beast but that is something AI can't do.

The combination of expensive hardware AND expensive games kills the switch 2 for me.

80 Dollar just to play Mario Kart?

Even older switch titles are barely ever on sale.

I never buy games at full price so the economics don't add up for me. I guess it works for the kind of person that buys games on release. If someone has that much money to burn they don't need to care about hardware cost either I guess.

If you follow established news media, yes. The war is pretty well documented by independent journalists, good information is just harder the find.

I guess it is a combination of established media not doing well financially and lacking in quality and expertise and the general rise of authoritarianism and death of (mainstream) critical journalism. Free press has been severely limited these days.

This of course would assume that vulnerabilities are in fact unique (which is admittedly questionable).

Yeah, I don't think all that generated software will be as unique as people expect.

Considering it will be generated with the same LLMs that all share roughly the same training data we will se patterns of vulnerabilities will also be similar and so easily exploitable.

While Valve isn't the worst company when you buy on GoG you support a company dedicated to keeping things DRM free and preserving older games. Plus fight the Steam monopoly.

if it was for the companies who use Denuvo and it added negative value then Denuvo wouldn't exist as a business and game publishers would happily post their games to pirate sites themselves.

Efficient market fallacy strikes again.

No, is is absolutely possible that use of Denuvo results in a net loss and it is still used. Executives don't always behave rational and it is not like you can AB Test that thing or even easily measure its impact.

AI might become just another power tool for creative expression

It is NOT a digital tool to create art. Yes, people used to be snobbish about digital art. Some still are. This doesn't say anything about generative AI because that isn't a tool.

The closest equivalent is hiring someone on fiverr to create music for you and claiming you created the music because you wrote the "prompt".

There is nothing creative about using generative AI. Is is a form of management. The difference is that instead of extracting labor directly your are extracting dead labor from the million of artists whose work was stolen to train the AI.

The point of types is to prove the absence of errors

Maybe for you. Originally static typing was to make the job of the compiler easier. Dynamic typing was seen as a feature that allows for faster prototyping.

And no, dynamic typing does not mean untyped. It just means type errors are checked at runtime instead of compile time.

You can have strongly typed dynamic languages. Common Lisp is a very good example.

Weak typing is a design mistake. Dynamic typing has its place as it allows you to have types that are impossible to express in most static type systems while avoiding the bureaucratic overhead of having to prematurely declare your types.

The best languages allow for gradual typing. Prototype first then add types once the general shape of your program becomes clear.

Because PHP is a amazing backed language for making CRUD apps. Always has been.

It has great web frameworks, a good gradual typing story and is the easiest language to deploy.

You can start with simple shared hosting, copy your files into the server and you are done. No docker, nothing.

Sure it has warts but so have all mainstream programming languages. I find it more pleasant than TypeScript which suffers from long compile times and a crazy complex type system.

The only downside is that PHP as a job means lots of legacy code. It a solid career but you will rarely if ever have interesting programming projects.

It also assumes free market competition which the AI space is already only in a very limited degree.

The whole business strategy for those companies is to be the one big monopolists that is left standing. That is why they are bleeding money offering token prices well beyond market rate so that they can grow.

Plus they can always lobby the state to ban foreign competition for security reasons.

it's more likely that there's some social work that needs to be done, and that obsessing over running doom on curl is not a very productive use of one's time in a critical economic spot.

It can be a problem but it can be also just a human following their special interests that give them joy.

For me as a ADHD person engaging with my special interests is a hard requirement to keep my mental health in check and therefore a very good use of my time.

I wish I were less observant.

My neurodivergency makes me feel actual distress over those corners. I am not being dramatic. It sucks.

Iran is currently exporting more oil to China than before the war. That is a fact. Not sure what your point is.

The rebuilding was referring to the destruction of Iranian infrastructure in general. The oil is still getting exported.

The average person is pretty empathetic. The oligarchs of the current Epstein-regime that start wars and fund genocide, not so much. They are trained to dehumanize people.

Without radical change of the current system any technological advancement will only make the rich richer.

For better or worse, well mostly worse, most of the software people use these days is either directly running in the browser or is electron based so running perfectly fine on Linux.

Gaming on Linux is a mostly solved issue for anyone that doesn't do competitive multiplayer gaming. If a game isn't using some root kit level anti-cheat or copyright protection, it is going to run just fine. Same with running most other software.

The only part where Linux is sucks is for certain creatives fields. If you need Adobe products you are out of luck. Video editing well you use Da Vinci or free software. There are some good DAWS but no Ableton.

Yes, you have to compromise but Linux is definitely getting there. Not everything runs on Mac either and people cope just fine.

Iran is financially supporting both Hamas and Hezbollah so it has a degree of influence on these groups but it does not mean that they them.

Oct 7th was planned by Hamas, specifically Hamas in Gaza.

It is obvious that neither Iran nor Hezbollah knew about the date or they would have coordinated their attacks. In fact Iran did not seem very happy about October 7th because they didn't want the escalation.

The genocide against the Palestinians has not started after October 7th though but long before the Islamic Republic of Iran even existed. In the Nakba of 1948 as much al 750k Palestinians lost their homes.

Hezbollah came to be as a resistance group against the invasion of Lebanon by Israel.

The reason both Hamas and Hezbollah exists is because Israel.

There can not be peace in the region as long as Israel exists. They are a settler colonial state build and sustaining itself by the dead bodies and suffering of the Palestinians.

the rest of the world would have strongly condemned it to the point of military intervention on behalf of Gaza / Lebanon.

That is completely delusional.

I Iran had fallen ten years ago, there would be no Palestinians anymore. No one would have stopped Israel from killing them. Israel would have annexed South Lebanon, part of Syria, Egypt and so on and created Greater Israel.

Mossad has literally admitted to that.

Let me even quote an Israeli newspaper:

On December 29, what is dubbed the Mossad X/Twitter account in Farsi encouraged Iranians to protest against the Iranian regime, telling them that it is literally physically with them at the demonstrations.

“Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” the Mossad wrote. “We are with you,” it added. “Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.” [...]

Foreign actors had armed Iranians to help them fight against the regime’s forces being used to crack down on and oppress protesters, Channel 14’s Tamir Morag reported Tuesday. Iran’s foreign minister retweeted the report for his own agenda.

https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-883524

Many of these leaders decided to not hide underground but to become martyrs.

It is really not an accomplishment to murder someone in their own house when they have not been hiding.

Khamenei was already very old.

His security begged him to evacuate but he asked them if they can evacuate all Iranians. If they can't why should he get special treatment?

He knew he could serve his country best by becoming a martyr.

Meanwhile Israeli leader Netanyahu is so afraid to come out of his hole that people are wondering if he is still alive.

I am saying it is bad to murder people. Period.

Don't start wars. Don't assassinate neither political nor religious leaders.

Yes, they are absolutely using civilians as human shields. Just like Israel has been doing for ages.

That is why they constantly lie about Hamas using human shields. Every accusation is a confession with these people.

There is massive video evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TOcnVe86Vo

There are massive protests in favor of the Republic every day. You can not deny the evidence.

The attacks against Kharg Island were relatively limited as even the US wanted to avoid that level of escalation. The war has been painful but Iran could rebuild, if you destroyed Kharg island it would take decades to rebuild the Iranian economy, that would be a complete scorched earth point of no return.

Maybe there have been further attacks today that I missed but if true that would be an huge escalation.

My last information was that China has no problem getting oil but that was like two days ago.

Hundreds of people died when security forces sought to crush the demonstrations, along with dozens of members of the police and Basij militia. Iranian intelligence operatives internally concluded that some of the violence was being encouraged and facilitated by Israeli operatives, according to the sources. “Foreign actors linked to Israeli intelligence services had, over time, established contact—through various social media platforms and under diverse cover identities—with a significant number of Iranian citizens, particularly young people,” the Iranian intelligence official alleged. These Israeli handlers, he said, “encouraged and incentivized the performance of specific tasks through a combination of financial and non-financial rewards, as well as the provision of material support, including small arms and other equipment.”

“Foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms, which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed,” wrote Tamir Morag, the diplomatic correspondent for Israel’s Channel 14, during the uprising. “Everyone is free to guess who is behind it.” Morag and his network are well known for their close ties to Netanyahu.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/iran-ministry-of-intelligence...

You also find the some information in a Israeli Newspaper:

On December 29, what is dubbed the Mossad X/Twitter account in Farsi encouraged Iranians to protest against the Iranian regime, telling them that it is literally physically with them at the demonstrations.

“Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” the Mossad wrote. “We are with you,” it added. “Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.” [...]

Foreign actors had armed Iranians to help them fight against the regime’s forces being used to crack down on and oppress protesters, Channel 14’s Tamir Morag reported Tuesday. Iran’s foreign minister retweeted the report for his own agenda.

https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-883524

See also interview with Prof. Marandi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-tcwcon30M

He claims the a nurse was burned alive in a clinic by rioters.