The Steam Machine is a victim of RAM prices exploding. It's price is fair considering the price of its parts but also causes it to be in a price segment where I am not sure who it is for.
People that can afford a Steam Machine at the current price point are likely to already have stronger hardware.
A Mac Mini a similarly sized with like half the price with dramatically better CPU. Or if you could get a PS5 pro, still for cheaper with vastly superior gaming performance.
Valve could have started with a premium model for the hardcore fans that are less price sensitive and released a budget version later when maybe the RAM apocalypse has ebbed.
> You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer
That has been true even without AI.
Solutions to create games with barely any programming knowledge have existed for a long time. You can create a full featured Unreal Engine game with just using its visual scripting language.
Lots of amazing games have absolute dogshit code. It doesn't matter. You can write super simple, procedural code without any fancy abstraction and just get the job done.
Programming is the easiest part of game dev.
Plus you don't have to be a solo dev. Sure, just being a game designer might be hard but if you bring artistic skills to the table as well then you are golden and can partner up or outsource the programming if needed. Honestly people with an artistic background often do much better than people from a software engineering background who are used to overcomplicate things.
So no, programming was never the hurdle and AI doesn't help here. It just helps people to produce more slop faster.
There is pleasure in making something yourself. There is learning. There is pride.
With generative AI you are just stealing other people's work. You are learning nothing. Anything could have generated the same projects. There was no skill involved, just enough disposable income to pay for tokens.
And yes some people develop some weird psychosis and think that they did the thing and not the AI. Everyone else is vibe coding but they got the special sauce, the perfect prompts. They are delusional.
That is all true but even as a hardcore Linux and Thinkpad user, I have to admit it is a hard sell when no one can offer the quality of Apple.
Apple is the only hardware company where you can buy a product and it is good hardware wise. Sure other companies have flagship offerings but with apple you get a really good base model.
And that is where it breaks down for me. Pay 20% more for freedom? Yes, absolutely. But pay more for much worse? Yeah, not many people are going to be so idealistic.
I don't know why no one else can produce a laptop with decent battery life with an near silent fan and good display and overall great production quality. Yes, it is much easier when you are as big as apple and can rely on economics of scale but that doesn't totally explain the lack of quality when it comes to the competition.
Policy makers are not stupid, the system is working as intended.
The intention is to destroy public education in favor of private schools. Same as public health care has been systematically destroyed. It's all part of the neoliberal agenda.
Or take mental health care. We have enough therapists but we don't allow them to work with patients on public health care. We give that license only to a select few ensuring that people wait 6 months to a year if they want to get a therapy spot. Otherwise too many people would get therapy and that would cost money.
The goal is to make rich people richer and ensure they have enough desperate and cheap labor to exploit.
Just because some researchers are infected with this idiocy that EY propagates does not mean that it is legit.
Maybe they should pay more attention to real problems like the sycophantic nature of current LLMs causing psychosis in people and worry less about theoretical AGI.
The combination of expensive hardware AND expensive games kills the switch 2 for me.
80 Dollar just to play Mario Kart?
Even older switch titles are barely ever on sale.
I never buy games at full price so the economics don't add up for me. I guess it works for the kind of person that buys games on release. If someone has that much money to burn they don't need to care about hardware cost either I guess.
If you follow established news media, yes. The war is pretty well documented by independent journalists, good information is just harder the find.
I guess it is a combination of established media not doing well financially and lacking in quality and expertise and the general rise of authoritarianism and death of (mainstream) critical journalism. Free press has been severely limited these days.
> This of course would assume that vulnerabilities are in fact unique (which is admittedly questionable).
Yeah, I don't think all that generated software will be as unique as people expect.
Considering it will be generated with the same LLMs that all share roughly the same training data we will se patterns of vulnerabilities will also be similar and so easily exploitable.
While Valve isn't the worst company when you buy on GoG you support a company dedicated to keeping things DRM free and preserving older games. Plus fight the Steam monopoly.
> if it was for the companies who use Denuvo and it added negative value then Denuvo wouldn't exist as a business and game publishers would happily post their games to pirate sites themselves.
Efficient market fallacy strikes again.
No, is is absolutely possible that use of Denuvo results in a net loss and it is still used. Executives don't always behave rational and it is not like you can AB Test that thing or even easily measure its impact.
> AI might become just another power tool for creative expression
It is NOT a digital tool to create art. Yes, people used to be snobbish about digital art. Some still are. This doesn't say anything about generative AI because that isn't a tool.
The closest equivalent is hiring someone on fiverr to create music for you and claiming you created the music because you wrote the "prompt".
There is nothing creative about using generative AI. Is is a form of management. The difference is that instead of extracting labor directly your are extracting dead labor from the million of artists whose work was stolen to train the AI.
> The point of types is to prove the absence of errors
Maybe for you. Originally static typing was to make the job of the compiler easier. Dynamic typing was seen as a feature that allows for faster prototyping.
And no, dynamic typing does not mean untyped. It just means type errors are checked at runtime instead of compile time.
You can have strongly typed dynamic languages. Common Lisp is a very good example.
Weak typing is a design mistake. Dynamic typing has its place as it allows you to have types that are impossible to express in most static type systems while avoiding the bureaucratic overhead of having to prematurely declare your types.
The best languages allow for gradual typing. Prototype first then add types once the general shape of your program becomes clear.
Because PHP is a amazing backed language for making CRUD apps. Always has been.
It has great web frameworks, a good gradual typing story and is the easiest language to deploy.
You can start with simple shared hosting, copy your files into the server and you are done. No docker, nothing.
Sure it has warts but so have all mainstream programming languages. I find it more pleasant than TypeScript which suffers from long compile times and a crazy complex type system.
The only downside is that PHP as a job means lots of legacy code. It a solid career but you will rarely if ever have interesting programming projects.
It also assumes free market competition which the AI space is already only in a very limited degree.
The whole business strategy for those companies is to be the one big monopolists that is left standing. That is why they are bleeding money offering token prices well beyond market rate so that they can grow.
Plus they can always lobby the state to ban foreign competition for security reasons.
> it's more likely that there's some social work that needs to be done, and that obsessing over running doom on curl is not a very productive use of one's time in a critical economic spot.
It can be a problem but it can be also just a human following their special interests that give them joy.
For me as a ADHD person engaging with my special interests is a hard requirement to keep my mental health in check and therefore a very good use of my time.
The average person is pretty empathetic. The oligarchs of the current Epstein-regime that start wars and fund genocide, not so much. They are trained to dehumanize people.
Without radical change of the current system any technological advancement will only make the rich richer.
People that can afford a Steam Machine at the current price point are likely to already have stronger hardware.
A Mac Mini a similarly sized with like half the price with dramatically better CPU. Or if you could get a PS5 pro, still for cheaper with vastly superior gaming performance.
Valve could have started with a premium model for the hardcore fans that are less price sensitive and released a budget version later when maybe the RAM apocalypse has ebbed.
Still hope it sells, the form factor is amazing.