Steam doesn't need to lock down the Steam Machine to subsidize it with store purchases. The casual user could theoretically install another OS, but that doesn't matter because they won't (because they're casual users), and the dedicated user buys most of their games on Steam anyways because it's the dominant distribution platform.
The risk isn't that casual users all spontaneously decide to stop using Steam on their own. The risk is that businesses exploit the subsidy in various ways. For example, businesses could buy the Steam Machine in bulk as a workstation. Or a store competitor could produce an OS of their own that replaces SteamOS and promote it to users.
>and the dedicated user buys most of their games on Steam anyways because it's the dominant distribution platform.
It's also the most convenient by far, and the new Steam Family stuff lets you share all of your games with all of your siblings without any need for password sharing like you'd have to on e.g. GoG or Epic. I have 4 siblings and most of us are married. Our combined Steam library is well over 1000 games
They do need to lock it down if they want to subside it with store purchases, otherwise it's too tempting for non-gaming uses where they don't get any money after the initial sale.
I started dieting recently and I've come to understand the people who say that American portions are huge. An automat lets you sample a bunch of different stuff instead of the typical fast-food format of a main, french fries, and a drink each in a too-large portion. I'd like something like that.
Not only american portions. I'm a remote worker since 20+ years. My first visit to the main workplace eating lunch was a revelation. The portion size was gigantic! And my coworkers (none having a physical job) was done within 15 minutes while I took a lot longer to not even finish half of my portion. It was at least five times my normal lunch portion. Insane. And the prices were lower than our village.
I can't help but notice similarities with certain conservative attacks on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans people.
> A general subjective notion that the evidence "isn't good enough" with no reference to the level of evidence that is typically used to approve other treatments with similar risks and benefits
> The focus on randomized controlled trials as the only acceptable form of evidence, despite (or because of) their expense and length
> Common and easy-to-collect indirect markers of effectiveness (presence of antibodies, lower reported suicidality) are against them, so they insist on using only rare, hard-to-collect direct markers (prevented illnesses, reduction in completed suicide attempts) despite lacking any reason to believe the results will be different
> The insistence on unnecessary, lengthy trials or tests for treatments that are time-sensitive, to the point of overrunning the time when they ought to be administered (RCTs for flu vaccines that would delay them past flu season, vs insisting on a large and arbitrary minimum number of assessments before allowing puberty blockers such that puberty starts before the patient is approved). For the anti-treatment side in both cases, a long enough delay is effectively a victory that doesn't require them to prove any of their points.
So, what can we draw from these tactics? They want to make their opponents waste time and resources on long, difficult trials (the longer the better,) because every day it goes on is a day that treatment is delayed or a "temporary restriction" can continue. Plus, if they need more time, they can always push the arbitrary standard of evidence they demand arbitrarily higher. They can always demand more trials, or more specific and difficult-to-collect data.
But on some level, they know they can't say "THIS is the study that will prove vaccines/HRT are unsafe" because they understand that the results will probably not go in their favor (or, that they'd get caught if they faked it).
It seems like they understand that the evidence is against them, but that stalemate is in their favor.
The difference is there is no solid evidence that halting the puberty of children who feel that they identify with the opposite sex is the right thing to do clinically.
The NHS commissioned a review that concluded this, which indicates it's not driven by conservative rhetoric, but is an actual problem.
Come on. "type ffmpeg, then hyphen i then the input filename then the output filename". I would've understood this when I was 8. Because I was super smart? No, because I was making a genuine effort.
The portion you've overlooked is there is an entire population of users out there who have never seen, nor used, a command line, and telling them to "just type this out" ignores all the background command line knowledge necessary to successfully "just type this out":
1) They have to know how to get to a command line somewhere/how (most of this group of users would be stymied right here and get no further along);
2) They now have to change the current directory of their CLI that they did get open to the location in their filesystem where the video is actually stored (for the tiny sliver who get past #1 above, this will stymie most of them, as they have no idea exactly where on disk their "Downloads" [or other meta-directory item] is actually located);
3) For the very few who actually get to this step, unless they already have ffmpeg installed on their PATH, they will get a command not found error after typing the command, ending their progress unless they now go and install ffmpeg;
4) For the very very few who would make it here, almost all of them will now have to accurately type out every character in "a-really_big_filename with spaces .mov", as they will not know anything about filename completion to let the shell do this for them. And if the filename does have spaces, and many will, they now need to somehow know 4a) that they have to escape the spaces and 4b) how to go about escaping the spaces, or they will instead get some ffmpeg error (hopefully just 'file not found', but with the extra parameters that unescaped spaces will create, it might just be a variant of "unknown option switch" error instead).
They are using text inputs, where you press enter to send stuff daily. Most of the hurdle is just overcoming the preconception that at black in put window means hard mode.
They can right-click in the folder view of their OS file viewer. On Windows they can also just type the command into the path bar.
When you tell them the command, you could also just install it. Also you could just tell them to type the name of the app 'ffmpeg' into the OS store and press install. They do this on their phone all the time.
Well, you're cheating a bit here. You're basically assuming the user has never seen a text prompt before. Which is a good assumption.
But, if we assume the user has never seen a graphical application before, then likely all GUI tools will be useless too. What is clicking? What does this X do? What's a desktop again? I don't understand, why do I need 1 million pixels to change an mp3 to an avi? What does that window looking thing in the corner do? Oh no, I pressed the little rectangle at the top right and now it's gone, it disappeared. No not the one with the X, I think it was the other one.
Pretty much all computer use secretly relied on hundreds if not thousands of completely arbitrary decisions and functionality you just have to know. Of all of that, CLI tools rely on some of the least amount of assumptions by their nature - they're low fidelity, forced to be simple.
The difference is a lot of "computer education" (as opposed to computing education most in this forum have) has happened with GUIs. "Simple" CLI tools doesn't mean they're understandable or even user-friendly.
Heck, even computing education (and the profession even!) has been propped up by GUIs. After my first year in CS, there were like only three to five of us in a section of forty to fifty who could compile Java from the command line, who would dare edit PATH variables. I'm pretty sure that number didn't improve by much when we graduated. A lot of professionals wouldn't touch a CLI either. I'm not saying they are bad programmers but fact of the matter is there are competent professional programmers who pretty much just expect a working machine handed to them by IT and then expect DevOps to fix Jenkins when it's borked out.
Remember: HN isn't all programmers. There are more out there.
> But, if we assume the user has never seen a graphical application before, then likely all GUI tools will be useless too.
We don't even need to assume, we just need to look at history. GUIs came with a huge amount of educational campaigning behind it, be it corporate (i.e., ads/training programs that teach users how to use their products) or even government campaigns (i.e., computer literacy classes, computer curriculum integrated at school). That's of course followed by man-years upon man-years of usability studies and the bigger vendors keeping consistent GUI metaphors across their products.
Before all of this, users did ask the questions that you enumerated and certain demographics still do to this day.
> Of all of that, CLI tools rely on some of the least amount of assumptions by their nature - they're low fidelity, forced to be simple.
"Everything should be made simple, but not simpler." Has it occurred to you that maybe CLI tools assume too little?
I agree with pretty much all of this, I think where the divergence is what to do about it. IMO, tool wise, nothing - this is an education issue.
And onto your point about CLI tools often making too little assumptions: this is 100% true, and also a superpower. There's a reason that a tool like ffmpeg can spawn 1000 GUI programs from it, each with their own draws. It's a generic tool, not necessarily an application. Many CLI programs are like this.
That can raise the complexity but it's a tradeoff. Many GUIs are too "happy path" centralized, and that happy path is different for different people, so they become cumbersome and unintuitive in too many use cases. A great example would be just about everything Microsoft makes.
To add on to this, there's no standardized way of indicating what needs to be typed out and what needs to be replaced. `foo --bar <replace me>` might be a good example command in a README, but I had to help someone the other day when they ran `foo --bar <test.txt>`, not realizing they should have replaced the < and > as well as just the text.
This describes me somewhat. I use FEA software and only recently started using it to execute jobs in CLI. I still trip over changing directories. Fortunately notepad++ has an option to open CLI with the filepath of the currently open file. I also didn't know right-click is paste in CLI. Don't use ctrl+c accidentally. But ctrl+v does work in powershell (sometimes?). "Error, command not found" is puzzling to me. Where does the software need to live relative to the directory I am using? This is all still very foreign to me, and working in CLI feels like flipping light switches in a dark room.
To answer your last question, on your operating system there is something called “PATH”. It is a user- or systemwide variable that dictates where to look for programs. It basically is a list of directories, often separated by “:”
Further reading: https://www.java.com/en/download/help/path.html (this may have Java references but still applies)
The GP here appears to be on Windows, given their reference to PowerShell. And on Windows, the path separator is ";", not ":".
One of the things I've noticed is that people trying to help the true beginners vastly overestimate their skill level, and when you get a couple of people all trying to help, each of them is making a completely different set of suggestions which doesn't end up helpful at all. Recently, I was helping somebody who was struggling with trying to compile and link against a C++ library on Windows, and the second person to suggest something went full-bore down the "just install and use a Linux VM cause I don't have time to help you do anything on Windows."
The reality is that we've been infantilizing users for far too long. The belief that people can't handle fundamental concepts is misguided and primarily serves to benefit abusive tech companies.
Two decades ago, users understood what "C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents" meant and navigated those paths easily. Yet, we decided they were too "stupid" to deal with files and file paths, hiding them away. This conveniently locked users into proprietary platforms. Your point #2 reflects a lie we've collectively accepted as reality. Sadly, too many people now can’t even imagine that a straightforward way to exchange data among different software once existed, but that's a situation we're deliberately perpetuating.
This needs to change. Users deserve the opportunity to learn and engage with their tools rather than being treated as incapable. It’s time we started empowering users for a change.
It's not that they were expensive (the HDD + adapter probably being the most expensive part), but rather that the PS2s on the used market are so cheap no one was willing to pay the extra, even if it's been refurbished.
He said in the comments on the post that he valued the parts, units, and his time at about 100 bucks, and put them up for 150, which no one would pay. This was back in 2022ish.
I can imagine it. If I were the kind of person whose needs and desires could all be satisfied by mass-produced products sold by the top 5 or so largest retail corporations, and who did things like fill out consumer surveys for a chance to win gift cards, and who enabled all tracking in every app everywhere for convenience's sake, and who didn't care much about privacy because I had nothing to hide, I imagine that ad targeting might become effective enough that I would regularly encounter ads for products that looked interesting and which I might want to buy.
You'll need to explain this a little bit more, because the TC article seems to indicate the issue is that he is accused of targeted harassment. I doubt you could design a poll to make people vote 85% in favor of targeted harassment.
All social media moderation is "banning people for saying stuff people don't like". Most people don't like e.g. spam, or death threats, or racism, so social media offer communication platforms where those kinds of speech are restricted, with varying degrees of effort and success. The goal of banning Vance would be to have a social media site that moderates against the kinds of things Vance says.
This makes some sense if Vance was a minor, fringe figure. But he was on a ticket voted for by ~50% of US voters. This is effectively saying that the goal is to have a social media site where half the country is not welcome.
The problem with that is two-fold. One, it neuters any political impact - you're effectively driving away the very voters you need to convince. And two, it creates an echo chamber that distorts reality because everywhere you look people are agreeing with you. Then 2028 rolls around and you're shocked that "the bad guys" won again.
> This is effectively saying that the goal is to have a social media site where half the country is not welcome.
That seems like a good goal. I want to chat with friends about formula one or whatever, not have to have everything messed up by some weirdo who always wants to debate whether minorities have rights.
I don't like Vance at all, but him being on the same social media platform as you isn't the same thing as him showing up uninvited to your formula one conversation.
Exactly the GP's point though, that's essentially sending an indicator to 50% of the population that they're not welcome on the platform. Do you really think a platform that performs actions like that will be successful? In practice, it obviously just creates echo chambers where fringe beliefs are painted as the common majority, because all dissenting views are silenced.
Why wouldn't it be successful? Truth Social seems to be doing pretty well, and no one on the left pretends that they should be allowed post there, the left is happy for those people to fuck off and leave them alone.
Not everyone wants to debate politics all the time. Sometimes they just want to exist as trans people, share posts with their other queer friends and enjoy their day.
> Why wouldn't it be successful? Truth Social seems to be doing pretty well,
Is it? No one I know uses it at all, the only time I even remember it exists is when seeing screenshots of Trump's posts reposted on mainstream media and twitter from his account there. It's essentially the "trump-branded-twitter" and I never even hear of anyone else actually using it.
Compared to twitter, where most people I know still have an account in one way or another, including most notable mainstream figures.
> Not everyone wants to debate politics all the time. Sometimes they just want to exist as trans people, share posts with their other queer friends and enjoy their day.
Well they'd be poorly served by Bluesky, seeing as how someone merely existing on the platform without even breaking any rules has become a hot-button issue.
The whole platform is filled with politics, and people complaining about politics(/political figures). Perhaps politics they agree with are more tolerable than having to see opposing politics on their feed, but I find it hard to believe they truly are attracted to Bluesky for the total lack of politics.
Well, unless they go there for furry porn. There's so much of it for those that seek out such content, perhaps it really goes drown out any semblance of political discussion.
> Note that David never actually addresses the “far right” label on its merits — he just pivots to calling it overused, trying to direct your attention elsewhere like a magician distracting the audience as he performs a trick.
I'm not sure he's bringing it up for that reason. He thinks the label is losing its power because it really is losing power over him, because he's becoming more comfortable with it and beginning to accept it. Keep an eye out for if he starts to call himself a fascist "ironically".
Look, I've no reason to defend him. I do like Basecamp and the books that have been published by the team. That said, I don't care one iota if a millionaire formerly-cool guy digs himself a grave. Okay, that's my online-mandated disclaimer to come across as a neutral figure.
The label is losing its power. The central blocs have been labelling everything they don't like as either far left or far right. The party I mainly vote for in my home country has been accused of being far left, when they've stayed to their traditionally left/center-left discourse.
I think there's a case, in Europe, for accusing the mainstream parties of moving the far left/right goalposts so people who vote for these parties are seen as a marginal part of the electorate.
Another way of looking at it is that the library of Babel would be less useful than an equivalent quantity of blank paper. For example, you could use it to print books in English instead of gibberish. Multiple copies of those books, even.
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