That fox garbage is on TV over the place. I live in a hard blue PNW city- every real fucking bar has 3 TVs playing sportsball on mute and one spewing hate and fear on fox news at max volume. Super hard to avoid.

I actually used to like watching that goofy Tucker Carlson clown because his silliness was so far right it might as well have been parody. Now though? It's all just hate, culture war bs, and fear.

It's crazy how they're able to just dictate the conservative hivemind though. Interesting as hell to see conservatives do complete 180s on their views based on what the pornstar on fox news had to say.

I hope labor remembers this kind of shit when the whole dumb LLM spell finally breaks and these giant tech companies realize there's not actually a market for "Synthetic Culture" and the whole idea of AI replacing human labor goes up in magic smoke.

I love my LLMs- they make my life easier and help me learn new things- but the clowns thinking they can axe their lawyers creatives and rely on openAI or Anthropic or Metas latest offering are fooling themselves and their investors.

It will increase human productivity for sure- but you still need the human in the loop or you're going to have a computer confidently feeding you lies and fantasy with nobody to fire when it all goes shithouse.

Government behind the curve again. I suppose it's better than nothing, but these people can't spot AI filling their inbox with marketing everyday, AI attempts at all the same old scams, and AI appearing in media pretty much everywhere- but it took a fucking videogame to rattle their cage? You missed the six fingered children in the cereal isle and the endless pretend political theater being shoved in everybody faces? Videogames are the bridge to far?

It's already everywhere. You can't even discuss things online without running into low effort gpt copy-paste silliness in your replies.

This genie is all the way out of the bottle at this point. This was clear to me when I was arranging to meet a seller on craigslist and recognized the helpful style and prose of chatGPT in their replies when arranging the time and place.

Now I have a buddy hosting a couple of local generative models on consumer hardware and calling himself an artist.

Crying foul is not going to slow this down, its just too easy. We're already in a world where artist must cloak their work in AI poison to stop it from being stolen and regurgitated on command by big tech. AI is everywhere-

We missed the window to stop this thing. Now there's too much money involved to even slow it down. We need to learn to live in a world where the computers are actively stealing the collective works of the entire world and reflecting them back to use without attribution and our massive out-of-control tech companies are propping up our entire system while using generative AI to chase divinity. In this brave new world we'll all have our own personal surveillance model assigned atbirth cataloging our entire lives and training itself on our own human experiences paid for by the taxes we're all compelled to pay- and if that's not a reality yet it's only because the right ghoul hasn't yet pitched it to the right g-man.

I don't know what the right answer is, but I'm certain things will never go back to normal. I used to believe that we'd all have out own personal offline assistance models running on our local hardware but the direction the hardware is going I don't think we'll even have our own personal hardware at this point.

This shit used to be fun to think about. I only hope the models and weights eventually trickle down to normal tech people so we can actually make them useful and maybe use them to counter balance and filter the endless generated bullshit we're already shoveling though.
 

Right, but my understanding is that the only shareholders at Valve are Gabe Newell (50%) and his wife. (50%)

I have no idea how true or up-to-date this info is- Happy to discuss or be corrected- but right now my point stands.

Because they've got to please the legions of non-existent shareholders?

Steam is a private company. There's really no push for the kind of moves that lead to service degradation elsewhere- Steam is already the undisputed king of games distribution- so they have no need to artificially lower costs to gain market share.

Stream already commands a 30% cut of game sales and adds so much value that their market-place is a no brainer to publishers.

Enshitification is a thing, but it has specific reasons. Steam checks none of the right boxes.

I'm surprised these comments are so negative regarding steam. If we're going to live in a world where our software demands an always active internet connection and consolidated storefronts for everything, I'm glad there's at least one player in the space that's going out of their way to add layers of value to the system in the way that Valve has done with Steam.

Workshop.
Community pages.
Specific News.
Auto updates.
Easy compatibility layers.
Achievements.
Steam input.
Collectables.
Seasonal events.
Steam overlay.
Game Tools and server software.
Actual real person support.

Even the games curation and sorting features are miles ahead of everything else on offer.

I welcome a new ecosystem of Steam Hardware. A console that's backwards compatible with every piece of software released since the x86 based processor at launch is pretty steep competition. think Sony and MS will keep charging for multiplayer and gatekeeping software with that kind of competition in the field?

What do you have against supported HTPCs?

The only difference between this device and a traditional PC is be the form factor. All the hardware will be replaceable. It will run x86 software- including Windows. Just the same as the Steamdeck.

I'm hoping this means an official release of Valves official SteamOS for the legions of PCs that MS just kicked out of the Windows ecosystem.

We'll look back in anger from our dirt floors and boiling shoe dinners while asking "How could we not have seen this coming?"

Yes they do?

There are a ton of different storefronts.

You cant throw a stone in itch.io without hitting a title that's not available on Steam.

The games industry has earned a LOT of hate over the years, but this seems like astroturfing to me. Steam has earned it's Marketshare, it's users love it and if you want access to things like trading cards, early access systems, steam overlay, workshop, Steaminput, seamless just works proton, and community pages in your title, then you need to pay for it.

There's nothing stopping you from releasing your title on one of the other MANY storefronts, or even self publishing. You can save yourself ~20%, but you're leaving a lot on the table. I sometimes buy games a second time on Steam just for the value steam brings to the title. Workshop is a gamechanger.

Steam is not a monopoly, its just miles better than anything else, and priced as a premium service.

I use GOG a lot. Epic is a thing. Battle.net is a thing too.

These are choices. I mostly use Steam because a lot of the value ad is pretty good and my Steamdeck is fking great.

In a perfect world, we wouldn't need the onerous always online requirements that come with modern PC gaming. Steam checks that box for the suits, but they build in a ton of value-added goodies on top of it. Cloud synced savegames, autoupdates, workshop, community pages... there's a ton of extras.

This is America. We used to invent ways to get what we want without the things we don't have. I believe that spirit is still there, it's just drowned out by the unending mountains of garbage we import and endless propaganda and marketing in our media.

People just accept this kind of thing as totally normal. As we move closer and closer to the WEFs "Own nothing:be happy", it's becoming more and more absurd that people are just OK with this.

Watch them turn around and sell an identical product with a different color button or rounded corners or something.

I did the 1$/month promo when it first came out. I played through a single game and canceled it.

Gaming is sadly not nearly as magical as it was when I was younger. I've always been a pc gaming fan, and if feels like consoles peaked at Xbox/PS2 before the always online every game must be connected day 1 200gb patch bullshit. My favorite game of all time is still the OG XBOX softmod and hard-drive lock-key extraction game.

Even if this was true (which is dubious at best considering the constant conservative whining about cancel culture) This would be a clear cut example of a PRIVATE company exercising it's rights to deliver to it's own users based it's own internal classification of what counts as junk mail.

The standard conservative answer to this sort of disagreement used to be "Change providers", "Work elsewhere", "Spin up your own version" and "Buy a different brand". The standard liberal answer was always "Write your congressman" "Sponsor legislation", and "There aught to be a law"

It's like we're living in upside-down-backwards world. The conservative administration in power is buying stakes in private business, and clearly attempting to control commerce from the top down with tariffs, regulation, lawsuits and threats. They're insisting big government do something about every little thing they don't like, and choosing winners and losers based on political ideology, while the left is now crying for less government, fewer laws, and generally less executive power.

It really is a crazy time to be alive. It's gotta be confusing as hell for young people who're just beginning to pay attention to politics what with the fun new GOP armed troop janitorial units in DC and ICE jumpout black bag squads in blue cities and whatnot.. Especially considering the complete 180 so many of those in public office have performed on so many issues over the past year and half or so. I've been paying attention for a while and it's still damn hard to keep it all straight.

Private companies are still able to conduct business the way they want.. right? We as consumers are still allowed to choose what and what not to use/consume, right? The government is still the referee between the consumer and big business right? We're still against monopolies, right?

It's lead in what exactly? Unemployment? AI Slop generation? Homeless people?

If these tech companies get what they want we'll all be wage slave prisoners shuffling around in the dirt of their techno-utopia city-states while they invent creative new ways to entertain the idle rich and casually live out their lives in extreme wealth and opulence on the backs of the rest of us.

Fuck em..

I've already got a literPC under the TV running Debian for other projects. This fits right in there. Another project for the pile.