I agree with all of that, pretty much.

If Asus or whoever else dropped a “steam deck killer” I’m pretty sure Valve wouldn’t even blink.

Valve didn’t make the deck because they wanted to make money on hardware. I expect very much they made it specifically because they wanted to encourage the move of steam gaming from the PC to the couch, and they needed some hardware to prove their point with - like with the Steam Link where they tried this before, and that time failed.

If it later ends up being other companies in the long run who make the hardware then no worries, the mission was already accomplished.

This is a tricky one, honestly, because the steam deck straddles the line between PC and console.

If you were a Sony fan, you’d be rightfully upset if Sony released a new PlayStstion every year, and made new games only for the new hardware. It’s just not long enough to feel the hardware has ran its lifespan, and you feel cheated.

Conversely in PCs, the expectation is that the hardware slowly improves constantly, and new hardware doesn’t stop you playing all the latest games on your old hardware; the only limiting factor is how far your old hardware can be pushed before the performance is too poor. And that is YOUR choice as a user, not an artificial choice imposed on you.

I’d expect that any Steam Deck 2 is going to be more like the PC model - it won’t create exclusives or stop people playing the new games on their old deck, it will simply be better and faster.

So on that basis I wouldn’t personally have a problem if Valve put out a deck every year.

All that said however, I think waiting several years is the smart business move. People have longer to enjoy their hardware while still feeling like they have the “latest model” - it’s psychologically better from the consumer perspective.

There may also be an argument that longer release cycles makes things less complicated for devs (less devices to test on) and also keeps the hardware going for longer, because devs will be incentivised to optimise performance for the current deck (which they might not be as much after a new one comes along)

Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.

The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn’t really connected with the browser’s main responsibility, which is browsing the web.

Just because torrents come from the web shouldn’t make it the browser’s responsibility to deal with them.

People should do whatever the hell they like.

There’s no harm in trying out a lot of different distros for the fun of it if that’s what you find entertaining, and it’s educational to see the state of what’s out there.

Not needing to stay locked to a specific distro is part of why Linux is great, and very unlike Mac or Windows.

If you like being loyal then be loyal, that’s a fine choice too, and freedom of choice is what this is all about.

The answer is very much “Don’t run Photoshop”

(Fuck Adobe. There, I said it)

What don’t you like about Signal?

If a tree falls in the woods…

Pop!_OS is the next big

(It finished there)

AI is absolutely going to be transformative but a lot of the hate right now isn’t the technology itself but the way companies are jumping on it and forcing it down the throats of people who don’t want it, in a way that worsens their customer experience. Yes, let’s force AI into every software product. Yes let’s take away the humans you used to talk to and make them all bots instead.

Even from within tech itself there is huge resentment because you’ve got corps pumping billions into AI while at the same time slashing their workforce to afford those billions, with no clear return in sight.

Tech is treating AI as the next dotcom boom and pumping everything into it, but just like it did then the bubble of investment will burst, and there will be losers as well as winners.

I’m running self-hosted LLMs at home and I’m having huge fun experimenting with their capabilities. I just wish LLMs could have been implemented in the real world with space for ethics and the human factor, not the pure profit chasing bullshit we actually got.

I hope thats “10” in binary

You answered your own question. If OP can’t use it, maybe they’ll buy a subscription, thinks Adobe.

Super scummy.

Haha yep. Not the support process you want. Glad you managed to let them eat some humble pie at least.

The support process you want is this: “We’ll make you a channel on our Slack, if you’ve got any issues you can talk with our devs direct!” - yes please!

Any company that hides their documentation has an awful product that they are actually embarrassed about, from a tech perspective. They are hiding it because they are afraid to show it.

I’ve seen this so many times, and it’s a big red flag.

These companies work on the basis of selling their product the old-fashioned way, directly to management with sales-people and business presentations and firm handshakes, and then once you’re sold then developers (which management doesn’t care about by the way) have to do the odious task of getting everything working against their terrible and illogical API. And when you need help implementing, then your single point of contact is one grumpy-ass old dev working in a basement somewhere (because they don’t care about their own devs either) and he’s terribly overstretched due to the number of other customers he’s also trying to help, because their implementation is so shitty.

Conversely, public documentation is a great sign that companies took a developer-led approach to designing their solution, that it will be easy to implement, that they respect the devs within their own company, and they will also respect yours.

When I am asked to evaluate potential solutions for a problem, Public docs is like the number one thing I care about! It’s just that significant.

Side story - I once worked with one of these shitty vendors, and learned from a tech guy I’d made friends with that the whole company was basically out of office on a company-paid beach holiday - EXCEPT for the dev team. Management, sales, marketing, finance, they all got a company trip, but the tech peeps had to stay at home. Tells you everything you need to know about their management attitude towards tech.

Ah, awesome. I just read through your comment and that makes a lot of sense.

I stand by my ideology, but your comment helps me appreciate the reality of that situation, and that if you are smoking or doing other non-alcohol things, you should probably keep that very much to yourself.

From the perspective of an attendee who is going completely ‘cold turkey’ on everything, I can see how even the idea of someone else using different substances could be offensive, because it could feel like it undermines the effort they are putting in, and is confrontational that you get to have this other vice, while they are doing it ‘the hard way’

I dont really agree with that perspective, and in some ways it seems toxic in its own right, but I can understand why people would feel that way.

I have not, and my take is purely my ideological viewpoint.

Care to share your perspective? :)

I assume you’re asking the question on the basis of hypocrisy, I.e. “Is it hypocritical to smoke weed while you’re an AA member?”

My take is that no, it wouldn’t be.

People who are in AA are there because they struggle with alcohol addiction and they need community and support around that. And that’s why you’d also be there too. There’s nothing hypocritical about having other vices in your life aside from alcohol if those vices are not the source of your troubles. You can still attend in good faith for the right reasons.

You, SubjectNameHere, must be the pride of SubjectHometownHere

I actually enjoyed the first Despicable Me, but the existence of the Minions absolutely ruined this entire franchise.

There are lots of reasons why governments might desire to get rid of physical currency.

1. Crime - Physical money is the option of choice for criminals as it allows them to make off-record transactions so their activities are hard to trace

2. Tax - When otherwise legal business is conducted in cash, it’s possible for business income or employee pay to be undeclared or underreported, meaning the government is losing out on tax revenue. This is huge, and the gov really wants their slice of that cash.

3. Manufacturing and distribution - A minor point, but it is expensive to make physical currency, as well as to keep improving it to prevent forgeries and such. Getting rid of physical currency removes this problem.

I’m sure there are other reasons but those are what came to mind.

Despite these factors, any move to a fully cashless society is controversial, because not everyone is in a position where being fully digital is feasible. It has the worst effects on those who are already marginalised and disadvantaged in society, like the homeless, who may not even be able to open a bank account.

So I think it will be quite a long time until it might happen.

It’s good practice to run the deployment pipeline on a different server from the application host(s) so that the deployment instances can be kept private, unlike the public app hosts, and therefore can be better protected from external bad actors. It is also good practice because this separation of concerns means the deployment pipeline survives even if the app servers need to be torn down and reprovisioned.

Of course you will need some kind of agent running on the app servers to be able to receive the files, but that might be as simple as an SSH session for file transfer.