The most galling/depressing thing to me is that our population is so overwhelming that if even just 1% of us are bad actors, that's still so many that catastrophes like this (environmental and otherwise) become mathematically inevitable.
It isn't so much that 1% can even do this though. What can I or you possibly do that can wreak havoc on this scale? We cannot pull the sufficient levers. We don't have authority. We don't have actual power.
But the real danger is that we have given certain members of our species superhuman abilities to unilaterally make decisions, where these then go on to cause harm on a scale that would never be possible as just 1% of our species operating within the scope of what 1% of our species can reach with their two hands. We've creating living gods essentially. We've even created nonliving gods: pools of capital people are beholden to grow that they themselves do not even own or control, but are enslaved to them nonetheless. Decisions are what is good for the nonliving god: what grows the money pile in the quarterly time frame, not what is good for our species or even what is truly individually good for the people believing themselves to have any control over these pools of capital.
> What can I or you possibly do that can wreak havoc on this scale?
Build a bunch of drones that carry explosives and leave them outside chemical plants, refineries, and nuclear plants across the world and then launch a simultaneous attack on infrastructure.
Budget $1000-$2000 per drone and then whatever your costs of transportation for the road trip are.
I understand there's probably just not the data in API you're pulling from, but it'd be cool if smaller races like the Philly Classic could also be tracked in your app. When you're at the race, it's a little hard to find where the peloton is at a given time so I was using your app to try to find it, but no such luck.
As someone who used to be into console gaming but has been out basically since the PS2, this is an interesting summation of the current state of things. Do you have any color you'd add with regard to the Steam Machine and its potential?
Video games are still video games. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are still the main platforms.
Microsoft is trying to reason about how gaming fits into their computer-centric empire. They've been using the Xbox brand for a new gamepad shell in Windows, for their cloud gaming subscription service, and for the gaming section of the Windows Store.
Steam has built the most popular computer game download service. They're renowned for having sales - you can get the Arkham Trilogy for $5 with some regularity when it would cost you $30 on Nintendo's eShop. It's a meme that most Steam users end up impulse-buying hundreds of cheap games and only playing dozens of them.
Microsoft and Sony have both bought a lot of previously-independent game studios. They've often let them continue publishing on other platforms. For instance, Sony's Spider-Man games are also available on Steam.
There are rumors that amid Microsoft's clusterfuck of an Xbox strategy, the next Xbox is going to share a lot of infrastructure with Windows, including the ability to play Windows games. This has spooked Sony into pulling its new titles from Steam - they don't want people buying an Xbox to play Spider-Man games.
> This has spooked Sony into pulling its new titles from Steam - they don't want people buying an Xbox to play Spider-Man games
That's not what happened, Sony's decision is more about the poor saels of its single player titles on Steam, they are now focusing their PC releases for online multiplayer games instead
Microsoft sells less consoles each month than the previous gen Nintendo Switch sells today
A lot of publishers are skipping Xbox, citing not enough players/sales
Yeah. Obvious MS the company is not in any danger and everything will be fine.
Xbox the division has been losing money and each generation has a smaller and smaller share of the install base. They’re arguably close to irrelevancy at this point. Knowing Microsoft, they won’t give up, but it might actually be smart to stop trying and not have another Xbox generation.
You forget that XBox is also the umbrella brand for Microsoft Game Studios, for Microsoft PC is also XBox, although the whole marketing around it is a mess.
This is fairly outdated, it was certainly true in 2013 but these days xbox is pretty much dead, playstation is stable but flat for a long time, PC has overtaken both, and mobile has shot to the moon.
The Steam Machine is a very niche product, but PC gaming is the main gaming platform outside of phone games.
XBox is PC as well, at least in what relates Windows being owned by Microsoft, and the of studios that are still owned by them.
Steam Machine also has the issue that they don't have any significant number of native games, they are dependent on Windows gaming ecosystem as source.
As someone with a Steam Machine, somewhat low potential. It has a console like experience but not everything in the store supports it. It's open then other things but there are plenty of multiplayer games that refuse to support it due to Anti Cheat.
It feels like R&D project that Steam is doing so in case Microsoft gets really aggressive and locks down Windows 11 to point that Steam no longer works, they have fallback option.
Whatever anticheat company can come up with a decent enough anticheat for linux (stay out of my fucking kernel) and pair it with some kind of server side anti cheat heuristic may win the day. I know a lot of people who are steamdeck kids and are experimenting with steamos or other linuxes on the desktop because they are sick of windows in general.
I'm about ready to pull the trigger on my windows gaming pc to move it to linux because I honestly don't really play anything that requires anticheat anymore. Too old to bother with multiplayer that isn't co-op anymore. I think the last game I have with anticheat in it is elden ring and I don't pvp there either so I can just disable the online stuff and ignore the anti-cheat all together.
The new Steam Machine is a horse of a different color. Unlike AppleTV, the hardware supports the same Proton compatibility layer that people know and love on Steam Deck. The majority of Windows-only titles on Steam run without issue, making the Linux experience quite tolerable.
Apple's policy on macOS, iOS and tvOS is to prioritize native ports at all cost. The difference in compatibility is thousandfold; even games that have native ARM/Mac builds like Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding and No Man's Sky only work on macOS and not iOS/tvOS.
The Steam Machine will probably still flop, but Apple's failure vis-a-vis making gaming work is self-inflicted.
Not an person you're address your question for, but I would say that Steam Machine is a thing Valve released as an addition to their library. Average Steam user has a library for a few hundred of dollars, he can buy a console that guaranteed to has games on it. Its potential depends on PC gaming overall which is bright as people still buying PCs and love to play games on it.
Steam Machine owner here! As of like three weeks ago.
The Steam Machine's biggest problem in general: it's launching into a headwind, because of hardware shortages. It should have been like $650-$700 for the base model, instead it's $1100ish.
The Steam Machine's biggest strength, overall: the Steam library. Absolutely massive.
The Steam Machine's nerd-gamer appeal: you can also run emulators, use it as a desktop, and play games from other stores (Epic, GOG, et c.). Nb this all comes with a big asterisk, as you're very much into non-console-like operation with any of this—I had to intervene with Heroic's installation of The Outer Worlds (from Epic) once to get it running with functioning cutscenes, which took me probably 30 minutes including a lot of trawling Reddit and forums to figure out the most-recent version of Proton that would work [I doubt I found the most-recent one, but I did find one more-recent than the first suggestion I saw], and then again on about my fourth play session when an update caused it to misplace its own saves (my only indication was all the saves had disappeared—they hadn't moved, it just wasn't finding them there anymore) for some reason, which I doubt would have happened on for-real Windows, and also any time it has an update available it silently fails to launch until it's updated, but I'm not notified of this until I re-start Heroic itself. This is some real computer-gaming and Linuxy bullshit (which is to say, it sucks and wastes your time) not a console experience. Still a benefit that it's there, but comes with a caveat that someone who just wants it as a console won't/can't/shouldn't engage with any of this.
Where the Steam Machine struggles as a console: Yes, it has tons of games available from many, many consoles of multiple generations, running natively (not emulated console games—though, mostly through proton, but Wine Is Not [an] Emulator), including very recent games, giving it a library that dwarfs that of any (... non-"hacked") console. HOWEVER:
1) Couch multiplayer sucks. Very few PC-first games include it, and a lot of console ports will have had it removed (since, who local-multiplayers on a PC now that the Internet is widespread? That hasn't been a normal feature for PC games since, like, the DOS era). If you want lots of couch multiplayer options you're gonna need to deal with console emulation (and I can tell you, bluetooth pairing is better on here than most Linux systems I've thrown together, but it's still bluetooth pairing under linux... hope you like either cords, or headaches) most likely, not just playing Steam games, at which point you're outside the space of treating the Steam Machine like a normal console and into wrestling with a computer.
2) Parental controls basically don't exist. You can have restricted-library child accounts after you jump through some very annoying hoops ("sorry, this just-created kid's account seems to be in another country from the family you're adding it to, based on its purchase activity... which doesn't exist, there has been no purchase activity")... but there's no PIN-locking, anyone can just use anyone else's account unless you want to log all the hell the way out every time you use it. It's a total joke compared to a Switch or PS5, neither of which are, themselves, exactly amazing at this. In short, its account management is tacked-on crap, they do not adequately-well support having multiple people using one of these, even if you don't factor in the various ways a person could get around it on account of the thing actually being a fairly ordinary Linux OS.
Where the Steam Machine struggles as a gaming PC: Hope you don't love playing the very-latest online multiplayer games. Odds are pretty good you'll be excluded by anti-cheat.
This leaves it a damn nice device for, almost exclusively: 1) people like me, a (to put it mildly) power-user who can benefit from its more computer-like aspects while also appreciating just putting it in its default Steam-only environment and relaxing, and who doesn't give a damn about online multiplayer, AND who can afford it; and 2) people who want to treat it as a console and play almost exclusively local single-player games (and have some money burning a hole in their pocket)... and this'll probably only be a great use-case if they already have a largish steam library, since otherwise their needs are likely covered by a Playstation or X-Box and starting from scratch on a steam machine with no owned games won't be very appealing. Which means it's kinda only a great deal for people in this category who were also already PC gamers.
That's a pretty small market of ideal customers, IMO. I'm rooting for the thing overall but I'd hesitate to recommend it to most gamers.
> but there's no PIN-locking, anyone can just use anyone else's account unless you want to log all the hell the way out every time you use it.
This part does not make sense to me, because as far as I'm aware the Steam Machine runs basically the same OS as the Deck and my Deck absolutely prompts me for my PIN every time I bring it out of suspend, the same as my Xbox does. I'd find it really strange if the Machine wasn't capable of doing the exact same thing.
I have a Deck and never figured out how to make it do that. I also researched all this again when I got the Steam Machine and was setting it up, hoping something had changed, and found nothing but other people complaining about this still being absent (as recently as this year) and info on the rather painful set-up for creating a restricted library for children's accounts (which worked, but, still no PIN lock for accounts).
Maybe it's a PIN to unlock the device period, but not per-account? The former is a lot less useful to me than the latter, and I may have overlooked it. I don't want to have to intervene any time someone else wants to use it, I want to let other people use it without worrying they'll (intentionally or accidentally) end up seeing the wrong library, or messing with anyone else's saves, or anything like that.
If that functionality does exist and I've just not found it, I'd love a clue to send me in the right direction.
I just fired up my Deck and it's Settings > Security which seems like a pretty obvious place. I have mine set to trigger a lock screen on wake/power and if desktop mode is requested, which are the only two options on that entire page.
It's a very buried feature, but the deck actually supports home directory encryption as well, though you have to SSH in from another machine to set it up. I really think it should be made default because of the very real use case where users use desktop mode, sign in to things in the browser and then take the device out in public where it could be stolen.
This is a setting somewhere in the Deck or your Steam account, my Deck comes right up into my account without ever asking for a PIN or password or anything.
Yep, I remember playing everything without a 3D card and then being completely blown away when I got my Voodoo2 and all the pixelation and jerkiness was suddenly gone. I left the little "3DFX" splash screen enabled for a while there just because I was so enamored with the whole experience.
Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive. If the US magically stopped being repressive enough to hail snowden as a hero, he would suddenly turn into a liability for Russia: proof that a repressive government can be changed by ordinary people fighting back. A very dangerous thought for any authoritarian government to allow unchecked, Russia and US alike
> Something tells me in that future he would never be allowed to leave Russia. His entire value to the Russian government is to prove to Russians that the US is also repressive.
They don't need him to be physically in the country for that though. What he leaked is proof enough and there's plenty of evidence that's come to light since.
I do wonder how easy it'd be for him to leave if the US welcomed him back and he was willing to risk returning though
Doesn't really seem possible. The two party system is so deeply wound into the structure of the u.s. political machinery that a new party doesn't really stand a chance.
Wrong phrasing, a new political party could absolutely come into power. It would just replace one of the two-parties ideologies but be called the same thing and you still have 2 parties.
His only condition for going back to the states is a fair trial, in which he can make his case in front of a jury. Something that the constitution guarantees, but is "prohibited" under the Espionage Act. He's not asking for anything close to a pardon, just basic due process. Yet the government denies him of that basic right.
He's got more moral integrity than all of us combined. But nice high horse you have there.
The Constitution guarantees Snowden an impartial jury trial on the criminal charges against him. It does not guarantee him the right to have the jury decide whether breaking the law was morally justified or beneficial to society. The Sixth Amendment requires a jury to determine the elements of the crimes; it doesn't constitutionalize every defense a defendant would like to make.
Taking refuge in a country isn't an endorsement of their political system or leadership. He was fleeing political persecution. Most of us would do the same thing in his place
Right? The charge that "he took refuge, incredibly hypocritically" is a blatant lie, and then the GP moves the goalposts. As we all know, including the blatant liar, Russia was not Snowden's destination and he was trapped in the airport because the U.S. cancelled his visas. The claim that choosing to accept Russian citizenship months later as an alternative to spending a lifetime in a U.S. prison is hypocritical is vile.
Fleeing the country, to a rival country no less is not the best way to come back as a hero. If he really wanted to stand as a hero, he would have stayed in the US and stood for trial, all while being as loud as possible.
It would probably have ruined his life, but being a martyr makes an even stronger point.
Instead he chose to live a (hopefully) good life in Russia, I mean, good for him. The archive is out, he did his thing, he doesn't have anymore duty to anyone. But he pretty much burned his chance to be recognized as a hero in the US. He has his chance in other countries however. He has overwhelming support in countries like Germany and the rest of western Europe, these are nice countries that value privacy and freedom, that's probably where he should go (should he want to and can leave Russia) instead of the US.
He destroyed his life and he is a hero for that. Movie type symbolisms and ethics would offer nothing more and good for him that he was lucky and resourceful enough to save his physical self.
A disgrace that although he is available and what he revealed is now more relevant than ever, he has been buried in the media, which is another continuous signal on the limits of freedom vs elite interests and control.
I think it's unreasonable to expect whistleblowers to volunteer to be tortured or killed. The US would likely seek extradition from most countries that don't have antagonistic relationships with the US and the fact that his passport was revoked would have limited his ability to travel around looking for protection anyway.
As loud as possible? That's naive. They would have black bagged him instantly, no trial. In fact a public trial is his only stipulation for voluntary return - that this has been denied should tell you everything.
I'm not a photographer and I think the bokeh makes the picture look bad because the tree looks so weird that it's distracting. I'm not one who normally thinks about bokeh, but it's glaringly bad.
> Even if I agree that you have to use your brain, when my boss is literally telling me to stop questioning whether AI automation is the right answer in team meetings/chats I'm just going to shut up and give them what they want.
Some would tell you that you need to find a different job with a better boss, but I'd say that this is quickly becoming something very hard to escape from. Investors want line to go up, and they all talk to each other about this "AI" thing that lets them cut staff and keep productivity, so naturally we're all getting it crammed down our throats.
Finding a better boss is like picking up the good cop. There are none. The whole industry has gone completely bonkers, and bosses are the ones doing it. The problem is systemic and if there are any good bosses out there, then there are systems in place to ensure that their ideals and behavior are not allowed to stand.
reply