We are a very niche group. This product will appeal to a lot of people who aren’t here, but also to some who are. In the end, this will be good for PC gaming as a whole, and it will probably either hurt Microsoft or inspire them to make some serious changes. I’m betting that this also makes people a little more curious about their hardware and software. The steam deck proved to me that leaving windows could be pretty simple and not a downgrade. I’ve been looking to build my own steam machine ever since, and now I might not need to depending on the price.

I built my first PC in 2009. You’re right that it isn’t very hard, especially now with resources like what you linked plus videos on YouTube. But not everybody is interested in tinkering like that. There’s research to be done to even know what half this shit means. Your average gamer hasn’t built a PC and doesn’t know AMD from Intel. Younger people these days tend to expect something quick and easy, so they’ll be more likely to buy something prebuilt. People 35ish+ these days tend to be too busy working multiple jobs and/or school and/or managing homes, so they’ll be more likely to buy something that just works when they get an hour to spare.

It’s getting to be exceedingly rare for a person to have the knowledge necessary AND time AND money to build and troubleshoot a modern PC.

As somebody who probably could do it, I might still just buy a steam machine. Because I don’t need cutting edge shit and I just want to sip on whiskey and relax, not have yet another fucking project on my hands. My laptop is old and dying, and I’m looking for a reason to not buy a PS6. This would cover both.

Yeah, and when it comes to my phone, I’m the same way. Sure, I could get Graphene OS, but I just don’t see enough benefit to go through the headache of making the change and probably finding issues to troubleshoot. I’m not disliking my current experience, so why look for a fix? These people feel this way about Windows. They’re not giving Steam Machine a chance unless there’s an incentive, and it’s not gonna be significantly cheaper, so they’ll skip it.

But I think there will be enough people buying this that the industry will feel a shift. Enough people are pissed at Microsoft and/or modern console experiences and/or need to upgrade their system.

Agreed. I don’t blame CoD players or people who play other games that use kernel anticheat, and I don’t blame Valve for using something other than Windows here; the issue is lazy corporations choosing to use a shortcut for anticheat which doesn’t catch all cheaters and locks Linux out.

But the reality is that most people interested in giving this product a shot are not the people who play CoD, and if they do then they’re either happy on console or on their Windows PC already. Steam Machine isn’t for them, and the people interested in a Steam Machine aren’t interested in these games. It’s like somebody looking to buy a Corvette being told that it can’t tow a boat. Yeah, cool, that’s not what I’m trying to do with it, but I guess thanks for pointing that out so people who don’t know any better won’t try?

I wonder if it could support an external DVD/BD drive via its USB ports. I assume yes, but that would be an extra purchase for you.

My Steam Deck feels about on par with PS4 in terms of power, and they say Steam Machine will be more like a PS5, so it sounds like it would be an upgrade over your PS4. Just more expensive, especially if you’re buying a disc drive.

I think that this thing coming out will only be beneficial to PC gamers, especially Linux users. This will encourage further development and standardization.

Fewer choices is a drawback, and it will limit the market share, but I think most people who would be interested in a Steam Machine probably don’t care that much about the kinds of games that utilize kernel anti cheat. Some buyers might just be displaying sour grapes, and some console CoD-like players might be looking to make the switch to PC but this is a nonstarter for them. I do truly feel bad that they won’t get a welcome mat through this path, but it’s neither their fault nor Valve’s fault.

I’m not naive enough to think there could be a change to how these companies do anti cheat, but if Steam Machine sells really well, it’d be cool to see these companies at least start developing with Linux in mind. Microsoft fucked up with 11, doubled down with terminating support for 10, and now Linux distros are blowing up; then Valve comes in with this? Idk what % of market share Linux would need to hit for EA to start giving a shit about potential revenue that they’re just declining to chase, but I think we’re about to see unprecedented numbers that could tempt them. If nothing else, maybe a separate Linux release that isn’t cross platform, but is a sort of compilation game. CoD BlOps Linux: whatever the latest one’s campaign is, plus its multiplayer, and like top 10 maps from the past few games or something. Idk. Do a Linux release less often but still capture those customers.

Exactly this! I bought a used steam deck and found that I could trust Linux nowadays. Then I wiped my laptop before Windows 10 lost security support and put PopOS on it and it worked fine. All the while, I’ve been loosely planning a desktop build to replace that laptop from 2015 because it’s old af but just couldn’t justify spending $1500 on parts when I already have a PS5. My plan was to not buy a PS6 when that comes out and just build my own Steam Machine and throw Nobara or Chimera or PopOS onto it, but now I probably won’t have to!

And that’s a big part of why I don’t miss reddit. Most chuds didn’t migrate because they couldn’t figure out how to do it, so a lot of the toxicity got passively filtered out.

I’m skeptical. They couldn’t find the shooter. Then they found a bag that looked like his, filled with monopoly money (no weapon). Then somebody at a McDonald’s calls because Luigi kinda looks like the guy. Luigi decides to hang out and eat his shitty fast food at a leisurely pace. Cops show up and supposedly find the weapon on him.

I think it’s more likely that they found the weapon with the bag, but opted to keep that quiet so they could plant it on whoever they grabbed. If Luigi is the shooter, and he still had the gun when he left NY, then why the fuck wouldn’t he have tossed it into a random river along the way? Wasn’t it a “ghost gun” that he could easily dispose of and not have traced back to him? Wasn’t that the point of it? Isn’t that why it would’ve made sense to leave it with the bag?

The job of the jury is to either find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt or let him go free. I have reasonable doubt. I’m not sure what evidence they’re gonna reveal that will convince me, but I’m also not gonna be selected for that jury. I just don’t believe in ruining the entire life of somebody whose only provable crime was that he enjoyed McDonald’s in Altoona.

UwU this poor wittle tigey-wigey is surrounded by big bad wolfies. I wonder if it’s enough to bring me the little death that I swell and ache for…

I installed Pop OS on my ten year old laptop two days ago. I’m not sure it’s my forever distro, but it’s running fine now that I got the right nvidia driver set up. In any case, now that I’ve gone through the process, I feel a lot more confident that I can build a Linux desktop instead of buying a PS6 in a few years. I’ll probably go AMD to simplify the setup.

I recognize that this probably qualifies as “picking holes” as he said, but his questioning of Hamas seems to be more of a rhetorical device than a sincere request for information. It’s not like things had been good in Palestine before the October 7 attack, so questioning why they did it sort of implies that it was out of the blue and not in response to decades of failed attempts to peacefully end settlement expansion and violence against Palestinians. And while acknowledging the horrors that Israel is raining down on them, is it not obvious why Hamas would still have hostages? The hostages are their only bargaining chip, and without the hostages, Palestine would’ve already been wiped off the map.

I’ve been a Radiohead fan for a long time, and I’ll continue to be, but this was an unexpectedly neoliberal take to criticize both sides and yearn for going back to how things used to be, completely ignoring that how things used to be is how we got here. That’s how time works.

I think of this quote from JFK pretty often, and it just refuses to stop being relevant, and apparently more people need to hear it. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” That’s the reason for the attack. The reason for having hostages is “to cling onto hope for survival against an otherwise guaranteed complete genocide.” They’re holding on and hoping that the world that is watching actually does something to help them, and we just aren’t.

I wasn’t really thinking of covid. Biden made sure we got free test kits mailed to us when they were impossible to find, but yeah otherwise he just kept on course. Covid vaccines were maybe the one thing that I agreed with trump on. And he could’ve sailed to reelection if he had just let the experts talk to the people instead of sowing doubt about masks and lockdowns. If he had just sold red masks that said “trump 2020” on them, he would’ve won reelection while lining his pockets.

Biden’s first half achievements that I was referring to were things like the infrastructure bill and the chips act. Inflation cooled, shit got fixed, manufacturing started coming back, and we started investing in a greener path forward. He should’ve communicated those accomplishments much better because most people don’t really get a glimpse beyond what catches their attention in everyday life. Like egg prices. But there’s a very good reason that egg prices rose, and it has very little to do with Biden and everything to do with bird flu, culling, and supply & demand; reduce your egg use for 6-12 months and the prices will come back down.

The same strategy will not be so effective in the incoming crisis due to tariffs, mostly because trump is such a stubborn dipshit that I’m not sure he’ll ever fully walk it back. He always chickens out of the high rate shit (probably mostly as a pump and dump scheme) but he’ll never admit that he was wrong about what tariffs are and what they do when deployed the way he insisted on doing them. His whole thing is pretending to be brilliant at business, but he doesn’t know basic shit that most people know before even enrolling in econ 101, so that’s pretty damning for the knowledge of the tens of millions of people he managed to trick into believing that he’s even remotely passable at business. His multiple bankruptcies are evidence of either incompetence or maliciously fraudulent looting, and the latter is only really necessary if you’re so bad at business that you have to cheat to get ahead despite the monumental inheritance left to you.

Sorry for the wall of text lol.

I would say that Biden did better than I had expected in the first half of his term and then more or less coasted off of that momentum through the second half. The probable dementia can’t be ignored, but even without that he should’ve been doing more. He mostly stabilized shit, which is what a status-quo neolib is supposed to do, and he even expanded equitability and built framework for a better tomorrow, but he was I guess too humble to brag about it? He should’ve been holding up graphs every week and told the people “this is an improvement, and you may not be fully feeling it yet, but you will over time. I’ve expedited relief to get to you faster, but that means it’s on the scale of years instead of decades. The downside of bureaucracy and democracy and proper checks and balances is that solutions can take time, but that’s also a benefit in that any would-be malevolent authoritarian couldn’t break everything overnight. Just hold on. We’ve stopped the bleeding, and now the healing takes a little time.”

Instead, we got bounced from our hospital bed and immediately started picking at the scabs with a rusty knife. We’re fucked. Tariffs? What a fucking moron. We’ll be referring to turned-out pockets as trump flags by the end of the decade.

First time playing BG3, but I’ve played a good bit of 5e and a little 3.5e. I’m trying a monk for the first time. Way of the Open Hand. I named him Rick O’Shea. He goes up front and bounces between enemies, fucking 'em up. I can’t remember every choice I made, but I know for sure he took the Athlete feat, but that makes less sense outside of BG3. I can’t remember his level, but I’ll probably pick Mobile for another feat.

My favorite 5e character I ever played was a high wisdom, low intelligence human cleric. He would occasionally do a stupid thing that came back to bite him, but he would learn from that mistake and not do it again. He would also relay metaphorical farm wisdom to the party, always formatted as “Pappy always said…”
E.g. “Pappy always said never milk a cow if you ain’t brought your bucket.” Meaning don’t start shit before you’ve figured out subsequent steps. Don’t try to pick a tough fight and then realize you’re out of spell slots lol.
He was a cleric of Helm but somewhere along the way he was convinced to serve another god instead who had pretty much identical goals in mind (idr the details) and I think his name was Pyxis or Pryxis or something. Idk, the cleric could never get it right so he would call him Pixar and he was like sure, fine, close enough. Anyway, so for flavor, Spirit Guardians was always Toy Story characters flying around.

Not to be overly morbid, but what’s the point in saving up for retirement if the job is killing you? Financial security is important, but so is your mental health. And based on your general field, I don’t think I need to explain that stress has real, quantifiable consequences. I wouldn’t be surprised if reducing your stress level actually raises your ability to do some stuff for yourself that you’re currently finding pretty impossible. Less stress at work might give you more energy to exercise, cook healthy meals, better maintain your home, etc.

You might need to adjust some of your “extra” spending to make it work, but if that’s the only real sacrifice in the switch, I’d say make the switch. You’re obviously unhappy with what you’ve got or you wouldn’t be looking at other options and asking the internet.

FWIW, I’m in my mid 30s and changed careers ten years ago. I was a chef and loved what I did, but I had a boss that completely killed my passion to grow or even sustain. I literally got a raise when I quit for a job scrubbing toilets. I found my footing in power plants and now I’m an operator in-house. It’s never too late to make a change. You’re never in too deep. And in many cases, it’s gonna take a step down before you have a chance to rise up higher. Never stop learning and growing. Cheers and good luck :)

I know you phrased it as “losing” here, but it still made me think of that moment in Firefly when somebody refers to Mal having fought on the wrong side in a battle, and he says “May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one.”

When a person has convictions and is put at a certain sort of fork in the road, they would rather do anything else before ever seeing themselves transform into the sort of person who would take one of those paths. Some would sell their souls to survive, and some know that their cause is worth several times more than their souls are worth, and the bill comes due at some point.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

That’s your choice, but you don’t get to then complain about the prices set by the people who read the manual for you so that you could enjoy your life instead. You either pay them or pay yourself.

Why always with the clickbaity headlines?

Because it gets people to click. Duh. So thanks for saving us the click and reducing their site traffic with your comment.

Big if true. They are claiming a lot of things, which would be exciting if I had any reason to believe that they’re anything more than claims, probably to juice investment. Sodium ion battery tech is infamous for being heavier per kW such that it’s less ideal for EVs, last for fewer power cycles such that it’s less ideal for EVs, and the cost savings to switch just hasn’t been enough to justify. Here, they’re claiming comparable energy density, 2.5-5x the power cycles, and under 10% of the cost compared to lithium ion, all without mentioning how they’ve managed to achieve all of this. I want this to be true, but I’m not jumping for joy until I see them actually selling this product that they claim will exist at this price that they claim it will be.

I would’ve been on board with sodium ion tech for home battery solutions connected to smart power management on a market adjusted power plan before ever seeing a breakthrough like this. Imagine subsidizing your home power needs with a battery during the hot summer day and then charging that battery overnight at 2am when there are minimal power needs on the grid. That application doesn’t really care about weight, and if you could just call somebody to come swap out your batteries every couple years, then the power cycle limit doesn’t really matter either. As for cost, early adopters of the idea could inject the capital for these companies to scale up production which would drive costs down. Suddenly, 20 years from now, who the fuck bothers to have a gas/diesel backup generator at their house anymore? Now if these claims turn out to be true, every home and business could utilize this plan.