You know, as long as their management structure stays relatively similar to what it is, I think I’d be more fine with them being the big evil, compared to basically anyone else.

Edit: and also as long as they stay a private company, that would also be a big concern, but I guess that’s maybe the same as saying their management structure stays the same

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

Not to sound like a ancap idiot or whatever, but I’d imagine that has to do with the fact that streaming services don’t actually compete with one another. Exclusivity deals mean they don’t actually compete in terms of user experience, features, ease of use, higher video or audio quality than their competition, improved bitrate, whatever. Instead, they just compete based on who can snap up what IPs for the cheapest, which is just a game of whoever has the most money, whoever can outbid their competitors. Then, you’re not going to netflix or hulu or disney+ because of the features of the platform, you’re going to them because they have some IP that the other platforms just straight up don’t, and if you want to watch both IPs you gotta pay for both. So, it’s not really competition, in the conventional sense.

The idea is less that someone makes a competitor and then they actually compete. The idea is that a competitor service is able to lock away one or several big titles, like, say, overwatch, league, fortnite, or whatever else, behind exterior launchers that are maybe more free to do data harvesting. Then, that competitor theoretically eats away more and more of the largest market share, and tries to drive those users from just using their platform for a single game, to maybe using multiple games, maybe with something like a games pass or with free weekend deals or whatever. Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they’ll be selling customer data at a profit and steam won’t be, maybe with some sort of exclusivity contract baked in, purposely undercutting steam. Then, steam’s been put on the back foot, and the rest is just kind of what has happened to streaming services.

It’s a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition. It’s like age of empires 2, the first couple minutes of the game is the part that matters the most. That being said, steam has been around for quite some time, and has a good amount of brand loyalty and goodwill built up, and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon as they keep one-upping their competition with actual improvements to their platform, like family sharing, screencasting, big picture mode, increased controller support and reassigning, and a full standalone version of linux, that basically all their competitors seem incapable of. So maybe steam has enough of a headstart that, even with a long term gains strategy, even with a, basically, non-evil mentality, they can stay afloat. Who can say.

I mean it’s not as though that’s not a problem in normal companies. It’s just that normal companies can sort of use the guise of structure or professionalism to harangue whatever employees the clique ends up disliking. The cliques are baked in, in a normal company.

Bring it back as an HTPC like the peeps are saying, low-ball it on the price like 500 bucks or less, maybe even take a hit on it or just a hit on the profit margins, pre-install all the stuff people might need, and then blam, you’ve guaranteed that most people will be casual users who want a lower-end computer and a smart TV/console replacement, and not higher tier hobbyists who want a more powerful machine. Confining your audience to that specific market share basically guarantees they won’t take advantage of the lower or negative margins on the hardware itself, and will probably buy some amount of steam games. They’re also using a device in your ecosystem now but idk what you do as far as that goes to make a good profit while not being a scumbag

cause it’s cool and I like it, which should be reason enough. more practically it works for cases when you lose your remote, maybe cases where you want to change the channel on some TV in a pub somewhere, shit like that. it’s fun.

Every time it comes up I must lament the switch to screens too tall to watch content, the decision to remove wired 3.5mm jacks in order to drive sales of wireless headphones, the switch to increasingly fewer physical buttons. No more IR blaster.

Yeah, there’s not really a great solution that’s going to be reliable and also be fast. The best case scenario I can think of for a smart gun is maybe a car gun, or something that people might otherwise have kept in a safe, but gun safes and locks aren’t really expensive enough to justify these kinds of purchases, and obviously they’re going to be more reliable than any digital security you might wanna go for. These sorts of things are also somewhat spoofable, even just with modification to the gun, so I don’t really think smart gun systems would really help cut down on gun trafficking, either. At least, not with any actually feasible, normal solution.

BTW - I generally avoid anything with Ian McCollum, since he’s been pretty clear that he doesn’t support 2A rights for everyone (e.g., the poors, LGBTQ+ people, non-white people, etc.), and has generally been acting like a right-wing grifter. Which is unfortunate.

Yeah I saw the whole uhh, brownells thing that happened between him and inrangeTV, and that kinda sucked, plus the azov battalion book which seemed like pure grift. Also the HEAT rig collab he released sucked. I dunno that I’d call him a right wing grifter too much on that front, as much as just, a pure grifter, which is maybe right wing depending on how you’re judging your personal overton window. I don’t really think whatever his political beliefs are tend to infect his actual content much, if at all. It does kinda suck, though, just generally. Luckily I have adblock so I don’t really have to be supporting his grift while I learn about cool historical stuff, and he’s a pretty good resource with his disassemblies of obscure stuff. Overall, he sucks more than I like.

People have definitely tried.

You have This., and This. Like everything, it seems like it’s mostly just a political issue. You’d probably get more gas out of a smart holster, honestly, but there’s just not very much demand from the people who buy guns for actual safety measures, including police departments and militaries. The closest I think you’ll find that gun owners commonly want is access to suppressors, mostly out of the convenience of not having to wear hearing protection, and also maybe that it makes them feel like a cool epic black ops guy.

Just get a CRT with speakers instead, and then that’s basically the same thing, with the bonus that it wiggles and your eardrums split open when you play anything at a volume higher than 10

This is kind of the same situation I’m in, but I’m not quite as tech savvy and I’m more resistant to learning linux even though I’ll still probably want to migrate over at some point.

What I don’t really understand is, or, what I understand, but I suppose I find mildly amusing, or confusing, is how many criticisms I’ve seen of windows that kind of just don’t apply to LTSC as much, if at all? It’s kind of to the point where I wonder why anyone would really use any other version.

I’m still just waiting for windows 11 ltsc, to see if that’s any better when it ends up coming out.

I thought it was generally a better go to strat to rub it in your underwear if you want to stay awake

only person that cites sources instead of just being a kind of aggressive tool, this post deserves to be at the top fs