For instance my 11 year old Steam Link box, discontinued in 2018, got a firmware update 17 hours ago by Valve.

That kind of support.

So if I buy Valve, I’ll gain the benefit of support and the hardware. Nice!

Given Valve have been the ones keeping older AMD GPUs working and up to date on Linux, pushing upstream etc, I’d argue we kind of do rely on a company to provide support.

I’d rather spend my money on something I have stronger confidence will have developers maintaining and committing patches etc for all the components in the box than a box of components I can’t be sure will all have the same level of support across all its components into the years to come.

Take x86-64-v1/v2 (and even v3 in some cases) CPUs for example. They’re “supported” on Linux but many distros’ packages don’t support it, meaning you’re often compiling from source to get a package functioning. Sure the kernel isn’t the issue but the rest of userspace is.

With Valve seemingly having no intention of ending maintenance support for their hardware even after end of sale, and their huge contributions to Arch and other parts of the Linux ecosystem, it’s nice to have an option to buy a complete system that will be maintained, and remain a target/reference platform for their distro (which means binaries will be around should I want to distro hop).

Wasn’t it legit as early HDDs needed spinning down before the power could be cut?

And in some cases it’s essential for brain development and function like iodine.

It’s Sir Kier Starmer, ex Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

I know three console-only people who have signed up to the list/queue for the reason it’s both a PC and a console.

To many foreigners, ranch dressing is an iconic cultural export of the US that oddly hasn’t physically exported. Ketchup, yes. Ranch, no.

If Epic spent half as much money as they are suing organisations and instead funded developing their shop into a gaming community platform like Steam, they’d probably have caught up by now.

Especially since Adblock Plus take payment to whitelist adverts.

The trick is to reply to posts about it saying something like “I can’t believe Nintendo are supporting the actions of ICE. I refuse to let my kids anywhere near Nintendo products!”

If this passes, piracy websites can rebrand as AI training material websites and we can all run a crappy model locally to train on pirated material.

Inkscape and GIMP etc are fine tools in their own right (I have had them installed for years) but where things have always broken down is when you’re working in larger teams and working towards a larger goal.

Inkscape, GIMP, Krita, LibreOffice is an awful chain when you compare it to say Affinity where you can shift between vector, pixel, and layout workflows within the same tool (or copy and paste seamlessly across Adobe tools).

Until the FOSS community sits down and works with creatives and end users who don’t use the tools (which Audacity did thanks to Tantacrul and the results speak for themselves), we’ll be stuck with proprietary tools.

The problem is when new users turn up to give feedback to say Inkscape for some of their weirdness like opening a blank doc each time the app opens, different tabs for fill and stroke color, weird behavior with fonts changing when you backspace out to an empty box, blah blah, the community goes “skill issue” or “this isn’t Adobe”.

Yet they fail to understand the design decisions as to why other products have more obvious behaviour patterns - they want the tool to be relatively self explanatory and try and align to user expectations as much as possible.

Tantacrul did a great talk at FOSS Backstage Design conference that is really worth watching if you’re interested in the topic.

Just like a corner store!

Soccer is a British word though, but predominantly southerner / Oxfordian.

Association Football used to get contracted to Assoc or Soc to differentiate it from Rugby Football.

And in Oxford, they historically liked to add -er to the end of things; still in parlance today is calling Rugby “rugger”, £5 note “fiver”, the Bodleian Library “Bodder”.

Assoc became “soccer”.

It’s not an American thing. It’s a posh southern England thing that got exported to the states by American students at Oxford returning stateside and bringing the game back with them.

It’s more likely because cheat codes were development / QA tools to make testing the game easier. They got left in because they were behind hidden, strange button sequences etc, removing the code risked breaking something that would be harder to test without the codes, and they can be fun.

With better development tools, debuggers/profilers, and easier ways to distribute builds, they stopped being left in the game. And with the gamification from achievements/trophies, cheats would devalue/trivialise unlocking achievements etc and break their purpose.

They’re raising it because of RAM needs of browsers and GNOME.

If you’re a shell nerd like me, you’ll still be fine running it on a potato.

Half-Life was the same. The game doesn’t spoon feed you a narrative, the same way real life doesn’t have a narrator (at least one outside of your head).

You need to pay attention to your surroundings, listen in to NPCs talking, read posters on the wall, etc to piece together the story.

It was and is one of the cooler ways to do storytelling in my opinion. Cutscenes etc are fine but for a first person game, I love the immersion of the story happening around you rather then being loredumped on you while your agency is taken away from you.

Gabe Newell talked about this years ago.

“When you look at the fact that these people have $2000 PCs and they’re spending $50 a month or more on their Internet connections, clearly they’re willing to spend money.

So, from our point of view, what we saw more and more was that piracy is a result of bad service on the part of game companies...”