I know for me personally, I don't want a second launcher. Steam does everything I need it to. I can't think of a single feature that would make me switch, there's simply no reason to.
If 50% of the games I want to play in the future decided to move to a different store front and launcher that was incompatible with Steam that would honestly be a worst-case scenario.
It would be a bit of a dishonest question in my opinion. Take the oil and car industry in the US for example. They've spent the past 70 years or so dismantling alternative transport infrastructure (among other things...). So how are we now going to assign the blame to the guy driving his car to work, instead of taking the bus that takes 4x as long, requires 3 transfers, and has people openly taking drugs on it? In the ideal world, sure, there would be a fair and even playing field of alternatives and the blame would 100% lie with the consumers who choose from this totally even field of possibilities. But we don't live in that ideal world.
What if the guy in the car voted for pro-oil politicians whose campaign explicitly included expanding fossil fuel consumption and cutting budgets to trains and other public transit?
Because ultimately the way we organize society is we have a democracy and we vote on representatives to make the laws. Companies actually don't get to directly cut public transit, they have to convince voters to do that.
Most people weren't voting age 70-50 years ago when public transit systems collapsed, so mostly they didn't vote on this. Even in places that have consistently voted pro transit for decades at this point, they quite literally still have decades of baggage to get rid of in the form of antiquated or hostile laws that were designed to slow them down, require workarounds or blow through their budget. You can't undo all of that even over multiple terms in-office.
And there's the whole thing about the US political system, which discourages any more than 2 parties, which disincentivizes members of those parties from actually following through on campaign promises vis a vis lobbying money for their reelection campaign and future positions on the boards of companies whose laws they decide on. Then the information who to vote for comes from media companies owned by...
Plus, some people's votes are simply more equal than others’. And sometimes we can ignore some people's votes by cheating just a little bit (see Bush vs Gore).
There are simply so many factors at play here that I still think twisting this as an "individual choice" problem is disingenuous at best. There are people who have the power to make changes, but it's not your average Joe on an average salary.
This is a massive dodge of the question - do voters not bear some level of culpability for the candidate they choose to vote for?
I'm not talking about candidates reneging on their promises, places that are voting in favor of public transit but got messed up by their ancestors, etc. - I'm talking about people voting today for politicians that are clearly pro-oil and follow through on that.
Sure, if the guy voted for a pro oil candidate and drives a massive 10mpg lifted diesel truck some of that is surely on him. But there's still the massive media machine owned largely by billionaires, decades and billions of dollars of lobbying and propaganda by the oil and car companies, and foreign interests (some of which sell oil, some of which just want to see the US fail) that influenced him along the way. If we turn it around, how many people would still vote for pro oil candidates if these weren't there?
I use Zen as my work browser but weirdly the developers seem to have a few Arc features they are actively opposed to despite ... let's say taking heavy inspiration from Arc otherwise. Two examples I can think of off the top of my head are the auto closing of tabs, and preventing websites from taking over certain keyboard shortcuts.
Plus sometimes these apps have specific requirements. One thing needs Postgres 16, the other needs Postgres 18... maybe it works to point both at 18, maybe it doesn't. Easier to just give everything its own instance and use whatever the recommended Postgres version is. I doubt there is any major difference in resource usage
They do. But not in large numbers. They are not cheap, take a long time to train and come with maintenance I understand. But apparently they work very well.
I have an LG OLED as well, and to be honest I don't care. It is pretty obvious that every TV manufacturer does it by the fact that they all have to make their TVs "smart", perhaps save for the tiny/unknown ones that don't have an ad department or a contract with an ad company. Five minutes of using any smart TV interface should be able to dispel the notion that it somehow exists for the benefit of the user, and not for other reasons. My TV simply never goes on the network, which makes this a non-issue
Isn't the whole point of UBI that it is universal and equal, e.g. everyone gets XX$ no matter what? If it is tied somehow to behavior then it is not UBI anymore, but more like a tax credit
I've had my code editor's configuration set to auto save for at least 15 years at this point. I've never had the problem of not being able to throw something away that I wanted to throw away - either it's in the git history (broad edits), or it's in the undo-history (fine edits). It helps to have an undo history that survives restarts and that preserves branches, which I guess may not be a default for every editor
Yeah, just barely, and only if you don't value warranty or build time. I'm also not super sure you could get something together that is somewhat compact like the steam machine and still be cheaper.
I've built two PCs in the last 5 years and both have had parts that were broken from the factory... There is something to be said about being able to hand off troubleshooting and replacement. I had ASRock pointing fingers at everything else to the point where I had swapped out CPU, PSU, and RAM, until they relented and replaced the motherboard (the replacement which is broken again now 5 years later by the way...)
I always get the highest end components I can find, and I try to stick with Asus and not the cheapest PSU. I've never had anything fail, and I do this every 5 years or so. I hate having to put the fan on the CPU after sticking that in the motherboard, and the cabling is always annoying (although 5x less annoying than it was in the days of IDE and SCSI ribbon cables).
Do you trust the brand and models of the gear you're buying? Use Newegg for reviews even if you buy from Amazon?
I bought from Newegg both times. The first time it was an ASRock MB that was dead, and to be fair, the issue here was that some part was on backorder so by the time everything arrived and I put it together I had to deal with ASRock RMA rather than the Newegg returns department. Typically I choose pretty high end components as well, I do Corsair PSUs & RAM, Samsung SSD, ASUS GPU. Definitely learned my lesson on the MB and went with ASUS for the latest build as well... though that MB's DIMM_B slot was dead. I'm just glad I ended up getting 2x16G of RAM right away instead of starting with 1x16 like I originally planned, because I would have never realized the problem until getting the second stick
I build and/or service all of my PCs, servers and laptops. I never had a single component die on me. I still have my first 128GB Samsung SSD serving as a boot drive in my NAS. Sometimes I buy used parts. Sometimes I sell used parts. I never had any problems with DOA parts no matter if new or used. I'm always careful with static electricity (no sweaters, carpets, cats etc near components). Maybe I'm just lucky or maybe some people are not careful enough with sensitive electronics.
We don't have carpet, and I use the grounding armband from my iFixit set. I've never had an SSD die either even when swapping them between various systems over the years. My oldest M.2 is about 10 years old, a 120GB that I now also use as a boot & VM drive for my NAS. Maybe I'm just unlucky ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Though if a component dies due to ESD from an imperceptible spark then the manufacturer skimped on ESD testing
I've been in the same boat since it seems something about the memory controller on my gaming PC's MB is broken, but price wise it feels like it just doesn't make sense. I could get something from eBay relatively cheap but then I'd probably spend an hour disassembling and reassembling just to maybe learn that the eBay unit has some equivalent issue or is slightly broken in some other way. I could old new stock for outrageous prices. Right now I'd rather just wait until either an upgrade would be REALLY worth it or at least prices come down.
That's actually not bad, last time I checked the only ones that were in stock cost 300+ (IIRC all x570). My plan then was to maybe get a new case and rebuild it on a micro ATX board which are generally more available and seem to have a few decent options in the ~80 price range.
Anyway, again it's a question of is it worth it spending several hundred and the time it takes to rebuild. It currently "works" fine except it takes 5 minutes to boot and is unable to save any BIOS settings like XMP, fan curves, and so on (and yes I changed the CMOS battery - there's a long thread on the ASRock forums of others having the same issue even after the battery is swapped). The non-optimal settings probably eat a few % of performance but other than that it's mostly annoyance, so it still feels like if I'm going to invest any more in it, it better be more worth it
If 50% of the games I want to play in the future decided to move to a different store front and launcher that was incompatible with Steam that would honestly be a worst-case scenario.
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