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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I do try to keep the “unknown unknowns” problem in mind when I use it, and I’ve been using it far less as I latched on to how OOP actually works and built up the lexicon and my own preferences. I try to only ask it for high-level stuff that I can then use to search the wider (hopefully more human) internet more traditionally with. I fully appreciate that it’s nothing more than a very incredibly fancy auto-completion engine and the basic task of auto-complete just so happens to appear intelligent as it gets better and more complex but continues to lack any form of real logical thoughts.


  • I believe accessibility is the part that makes LLMs helpful, when they are given an easy enough task to verify. Being able to ask a thing that resembles a human what you need instead of reading through possibly a textbook worth of documentation to figure out what is available and making it fit what you need is fairly powerful.

    If it were actually capable of reasoning, I’d compare it to asking a linguist the origin of a word vs looking it up in a dictionary. I don’t think anyone disagrees that the dictionary would be more likely to be fully accurate, and also I personally would just prefer to ask the person who seemingly knows and, if I have reason to doubt, then go back and double-check.

    Here’s the manpage for bash’s statistics from wordcounter.net:



  • https://thunderstore.io/c/lethal-company/p/ebkr/r2modman/v/3.1.45/

    Edit, for convenience:

    • Risk of Rain Returns
    • Hades II
    • Among Us
    • Ale & Tale Tavern
    • Screw Drivers
    • Nine Sols
    • Goodbye Volcano High
    • Gloomwood
    • Below the Stone
    • Back to the Dawn
    • Supermarket Together
    • Betrayal Beach
    • Arcus Chroma
    • Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor
    • Gladio Mori
    • Slipstream: Rogue Space
    • Panicore
    • Magicraft
    • Another Crab’s Treasure
    • Bopl Battle
    • Vertigo 2
    • Against the Storm
    • Lycans
    • Castle Story
    • Balatro
    • Content Warning
    • Plasma
    • Palworld
    • Voices of the Void
    • Cult of the Lamb
    • 20 Minutes Till Dawn
    • Sailwind
    • Meeple Station
    • Void Crew
    • Cities: Skylines II
    • Lethal Company
    • DREDGE
    • Last Train Outta’ Wormtown
    • Wizard With a Gun
    • Atomicrops
    • Erenshor
    • Sunkenland
    • Wizard of Legend
    • Will You Snail?
    • Garfield Kart - Furious Racing
    • Techtonica
    • Thronefall
    • We Love Katamari REROLL + Royal Reverie
    • Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
    • Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend
    • Sun Haven
    • Wild Frost
    • Shadows of Doubt
    • Receiver 2
    • The Planet Crafter
    • Patch Quest
    • Shadows Over Loathing
    • West of Loathing
    • RUMBLE
    • Dome Keeper
    • Skul: The Hero Slayer
    • Sons Of The Forest
    • The Ouroboros King

    (Emphasis mine, one of them humorous. There’s more, but formatting this on my phone is tedious and frustrating.)








  • With apologies to the rest of the industry, boots on the ground equipment reseller-wise: Upgrading scanner scales costs us ~$1,800/lane/store for a 7895 before our markup (and I don’t know the actual figures, I’m not a money guy), and we barely convinced store owners that EMV was needed because of the liability shift. I’m skeptical that UPCA is going away entirely, and would expect GTINs to be more complimentary than anything.

    We’re having a hell of a time convincing people to get off of POS applications that were sold ~10 years ago running Windows Server 2008 R2 and an app that is just recently past its support cutoff. They would need to completely replace their POS in order to upgrade.



  • I understand that you aren’t interested in responding, the only point I felt I wanted to clarify my own thinking about “is it justified just because they have the same service as any big company has?”

    I would happily and readily say that I don’t know of any other single *gaming company that provides the same amount of services to the general population and to, if we follow the tenets of OSS, humanity as a whole. They provide code and money to KDE, Arch, the Linux kernel, they work directly with AMD on Linux drivers, they are working on accelerating what I believe are common-sense additions to Wayland, they’ve pushed VR on PC from being a futuristic wishlist item to having a section dedicated to games for their headsets and the countless others (including Metas, whom they also directly support) on their store and helping maintain and develop the open source frameworks needed to make them.

    In my mind, Steam the storefront is how Valve does everything else that they’re doing, and I haven’t heard of anything that they do that I find reasonably objectable. I mean, maybe the TF2 stuff could count against them, and also given that there are 17 year old people who weren’t alive when that game came out any amount of work they keep putting into it is just wild from my perspective.


  • I’ll give my own experience as a Steam customer and aspiring game dev:

    I’ve never had a problem with Steam that wasn’t quickly and satisfactorily resolved. Usually, in ways that go above and beyond Valve’s stated responsibilities. They have been quick to respond to the two hardware tickets I’ve raised over the years of owning a Steam controller, two Steam Links, a Valve Index, and my own Steam Deck.

    In the many years that I’ve used all flavors of Linux and installed all manner of native games and non-native games, it has only been in the last 4 or 5 years that the process has become, in my own experience, painless enough for me to not only consider suggesting other less technical people I know to try Linux, but to enthusiastically recommend it. They were the strongest single driving force I am aware of in bringing day-one mass-market release games to Linux.

    I have, over the years of my dealing with them, come to believe that money spent towards Valve is materially making my life better in ways that just playing games through Steam doesn’t fully encapsulate.

    They provide development assistance and funds for open source projects in a way that truly gives back to the projects they work with, their company is run in a way that I find personally satisfying and aspirational, their leadership feels like they’re maintaining their relevance in the industry instead of being disconnected money-men…

    I respect their decisions enough to consider their cut reasonable as compared to the services they provide both directly and indirectly to the PC gaming industry as a whole.




  • If we’re talking about Digital Rights Management, steam is acting in that role to manage your digital rights on the steam platform. They could allow you to download games without requiring an account login or client download, and they instead do not. They could allow you to download free games from the client or the website without requiring a login, and they do not.

    GOG’s website is also DRM for the same reason. It won’t allow you to download games that aren’t licensed digitally to your account, including free games. GOG has DRM-free games and installers fairly universally beyond that first check, and that means you can download them from alternative sources, but downloading from GOG 100% requires interacting with DRM.

    To be direct: I don’t care that Steam is DRM because it’s minimally invasive and I currently trust Valve enough to use an operating system made by them as a daily driver. There are very few companies I’d say that about.

    The Steam client is DRM at its core, even if it’s acceptable DRM. I think it’s important not to allow your thinking to shift from the reality that it is DRM just because it’s personally acceptable.

    I don’t mind it, I will simp for Valve all day long, and if a company requires you to log in to an account with their server to check whether your account has the digital entitlement to then allow you to access a file or not, that’s digital rights management.