Most people don’t own flagship GPUs

Spec sheet culture has warped our expectations

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We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that everyone and their dog owns bleeding-edge hardware when they really don’t. Only a tiny percentage of users run cards like an RTX 4070 Ti Super or above. The overwhelming majority are on midrange builds with similar VRAM and system memory to what the Steam machine is going to ship with.

Repeating this, because it needs to be repeated.

It is extremely not normal to own a high powered GPU.

Very, extremely, not normal.

Further, you can make a lot of good arguments that nobody fucking bothers optimizing anything anymore, that gameplay, story, writing, art design trump pure graphical realism power.

Real time ray tracing is still a ludicrous, unsustainable, elitist, exclusionary paradigm, from every way you look at it.

Beyond that, … I’m looking at a potential Steam Machine buy… because there will probably be a way to plug an oculink adapter into one of its M.2 ports, figure out where to cut a hole in the case and snake it out, and then you can just attach an eGPU of some kind, with its own PSU, to it, if you want to crank up the gfx even harder.

Then, your next upgrade path is along that paradigm: A superior mobo+cpu combo.

Somebody on github I saw already mocked out how you could get close-ish to M.2 long term storage transfer speeds out of the Machine’s fancier USB port, or you could just run it all off of an SD card if that doesn’t sound like its worth the trouble.

Oh, also, a default Steam Machine?

Way less power draw than a comparable PC, more like a beefed up laptop.

If you’re worried about either sustainability, or just the power bill going up… worth considering.

Half Life 2:

C1: This is how it always starts. First a building, then the whole block.

C2: They have no reason to come to our place.

C1: Don’t worry, they’ll find one.

my piceses, my piceses!

goblin monches on raw wriggling fish

I… am not entirely certain whether or not the tech actually existed, when the Dark Night came out, to build the hyper spy system…

But it definitely exists now, to at least some extent.

Fortunately, the Antichrist Peter Thiel is probably more or less in charge of it, so, all good!

If you mean to use a different definition of aura, as in just a glow of light, then sure, technically all living matter has an imperceptible aura.

Could these UPEs play some kind of way into extremely short distance cellular interactions? Yes!

But thats… not what people mean, 95% of the time, when they’re talking about a person’s aura.

This is the whole problem of using woo woo terms.

You can’t conflate two different meanings of words and then act like that is not what you are doing.

You also should specify what you mean, in cases where a word has different meanings in different domains.

• Myself, from the comment you replied to.

He wasn’t.

You can’t see the biophotons.

Humans have no way of detecting, experiencing them, without complex instruments.

They do not factor in to any decision making activity in our brain, because we have no senses capable of receiving them as input.

Read your own source.

The way that people colloquially use ‘aura’ is as if they have some kind of magical ability to see things other people can’t, that indicate things about that aura-haver’s emotional or mental or spiritual state.

They can’t, biophotons do none of that, they’re just a nearly undetectable form of light that’s emmitted by essentially anything that has an active metabolism, ie, is not dead.

They’re just using a made-up concept to describe internal herusitics in their mind, ie, their intuition.

Sure, they’ve used their mind in the way that your last two sources sort of hint at, but its a delusion, its failing to understand their own mind giving rise to a psuedo religious concept.

The only reality, the only power in ‘auras’ as a concept is sociological, indirect, as a reference with no referent.

Auras being a thing be people can see and use… that’s on the same level of ‘real’ as ‘Christ died for our sins’.

If you mean to use a different definition of aura, as in just a glow of light, then sure, technically all living matter has an imperceptible aura.

Could these UPEs play some kind of way into extremely short distance cellular interactions? Yes!

But thats… not what people mean, 95% of the time, when they’re talking about a person’s aura.

This is the whole problem of using woo woo terms.

You can’t conflate two different meanings of words and then act like that is not what you are doing.

You also should specify what you mean, in cases where a word has different meanings in different domains.

You can map out the inside of a building and figure out where objects are, and when and where movement occurs, with WiFi.

You cannot do this with magic woo woo nonsense that equivocates and conflates terms across different domain specific meanings, and then attempts to build a world view out of confused, meaningless/contradictory gibberish.

But you can’t exchange loot box rewards for money.

You can.

Steam has a market place for items that result from opening lootboxes.

Thats… the entire CS2 gun skin market.

You can sell those for actual money, that money is now in your Steam Wallet, and you can now say, buy a game with it.

I’ve done this a few times, selling off a bunch of random crap items I forgot I had, from a game I don’t play anymore.

Then go buy a $10 - $20 game with it.

Hell I think I very partially bought my Steam Deck using similarly generated funds, paid roughly for the sales tax or whatever.

Beyond that, the actual lawsuit has whole sections dedicated to showing that Valve knows people buy/sell/trade these kinds of things on third party platforms, and they have very inconsistent policing of this.

I don’t know enough about the law specifically to know if that in and of itself is some kind of actual crime, but it certainly doesn’t look good that in a fair number of instances, Valve knows real money is changing hands for these items, and chooses to do nothing.

Hell, going further with all this:

I once knew a guy on a the dev team for a game that had been approved for Steam Marketplace items.

If him and a buddy wanted to try some new game?

He’d look at the Steam Market to see what of his game’s in game items were very rare and thus highly priced.

Then, being the dev, he’d poof some of those items into existance.

Post em up for sale on the market and hey in 30 minutes, now he’s got the Steam Wallet money to buy a game.

tl:dr: you very much can exchange the lootbox results for money, even technically literally physical tangible goods.

To be frank, lootboxes are gambling, and Steam is a functional monopoly.

(Note that being a functional monopoly and being an exploitative monopoly are not the same thing, though it does get complicated when you consider all the laws of all the countries in the world)

I think this particular lawsuit is legitimate and should proceed.

But!

The other part of that is that Valve is basically the only major player in the gaming space that isn’t currently completely imploding or massively downsizing or dissapointing investors or having to get bought out by foreign royal families.

So, they all really hate that Valve can ‘do nothing’, and continue to win.

Valve doesn’t have a board of investors… they’re a private company, that’s their secret sauce… and… all the other publically traded gaming companies?

You got a whole bunch of people who sit on multiple boards, of multiple different companies in the space, at the same time, and/or just cycle through actually working for one of them in an executive position and bounce around from one company to another, every roughly half decade.

They either know each other or literally are the same people, and functionally constitute a big club, that Valve isn’t part of.

So, those people can work together, literally conspire, to pull various levers in various game industry lobby groups, and talk to other people to convince them they should really go after their shared, common competitor.

Corporate tactics.

Losses from legal outcomes are literally a cost of doing business: These people factor that in to the moves they make.

They do not ‘play fair’. If they did, they wouldn’t be on these boards.

Ironically… you can describe and model this kind of behavior, tactics and strategy… with game theory.

Is the Wendy’s account still around for people to like, offer her a cigarette, tell her she looks like she needs one?

Reply hazy, try again.

(eventually something will catch)

If you steppy on snek, its just ‘what the heck?’

If you hug a nope rope, you’re probly dead, dope.

If you kiss a danger noodle, you’ll need a whole kit and kaboodle.

(in the spirit of the milk vs coral snake sayings)

Ah, I love them!

Good work!

Huzzah!

Probst! … … ?

Is… does it make sense to say ‘Probst’ outside of a drinking context?

… its been a long time since I’ve gone drinking with Germans, lol.

… Can we get a Blorb with an Orb, pondering?

According to my ss-ss-sources, the preferred nomenclature is ‘danger noodle’.

Good lord the blorb.

What a well fed pigeon.

Man, I dunno if you’ve heard,

BUT THE BIRD IS THE WORD

BA BA BA BA BA BA OOH MAH MOW MOW

OOH MOW MAH MOW

WELL DON’T YOU KNOW, ABOUT THE BIRD

WELL EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT THE BIRD IS THE WORD

Oh dear.

Yes, that is what I meant, but … I now realize I should have specified that.

Yes, you don’t need to mainline the coconut water for it to be good for you lol!

Ahem, well lets hope it wouldn’t end up petrifying you. =P