Sure, people can use the presets, but on a lower end machine, those aren’t perfect for getting the most out of your specific hardware. What I meant there was that consoles, and by extension the steam deck/steam machine, have the exact setting loadout for that hardware dialed in.

Sure, he could pay someone to upgrade it for him, but at that point it loses a lot of the benefits that come with being able to upgrade in the first place.

The Fractal Terra is actually larger than all modern consoles. The Fractal Terra is 11.4 liters. The PS5 is 7.2 liters. The Xbox series X is 6.9 liters. The steam machine is 3.8 liters, 3x smaller than the Fractal Terra. When it comes to dimensions, the Xbox series X is smaller in all dimensions, and while the PS5 is longer and wider, it’s height is half that of the Fractal Terra. The steam machine is pretty similar in two of the three dimensions, but the depth is less than half that of the Terra. The Fractal Terra is a really nice, small case, but it’s only small for a PC, not a console.

As for normalizing incompetence, I doubt you have as extensive a knowledge as you do for computers for every single thing you interact with every day. Knowing “how to use one” is different from knowing how to build and upgrade one.

You come across as someone who is smart, and yet doesn’t fully understand that half the population is below the 50th percentile. The generalizations you make for yourself and those you regularly interact with cannot be made for everyone.

You really do, and you not thinking so is telling of how skewed your view of what common knowledge really is. Where does someone start when building a computer if they don’t know what goes into a computer? How do they pick parts if they don’t know what changes will make their computer better or worse? I love PC part picker, but let’s be real, it’s for people who already know what they are looking for. PC part picker makes things so easy for you and I, but drop any tech-illiterate person into PC part picker, and they won’t actually get anywhere. Plus, I’ve had it get the dimensions of a GPU wrong before, and without verifying through a different website, I would have bought a card that didn’t fit in the case I was using. Even the gold standard sources of information make mistakes.

As for the pre-built argument, to someone like my brother who knows nothing about computers, but regularly games on his PS5, the steam machine and a prebuilt are essentially the same. He wouldn’t know how to fix the computer without sending it off to the company, which is how he’d fix the steam machine as well. He also wouldn’t see the PC as something that could be upgraded. If a game wasn’t running well, he certainly wouldn’t know what part would need upgrading in his machine to make his experience better. In that sense, the pre-built is effectly non-upgradable. He might know to adjust the in-game settings, but wouldn’t know what settings to change. On a prebuilt, this would be an issue. On a device that millions of people use, all with the exact same specs, this information is readily available. Think of the steam deck, you could look up “<game name> steam deck settings” and get the best loadout for your exact hardware. Hell, a bunch of modern games have a “Steam Deck” settings loadout built in. With a prebuilt, that’s not possible. And finally, the steam machine is considerably smaller than any mini itx prebuilt I’ve seen on the market. Hell, a mini it’s motherboard couldn’t even fit in the steam machine’s case. To a lot of people, not having a big box in their living room matters. I’ve had a hard time convincing my partner to let me have a PC in a Fractal Design Terra case in the living room, and that’s a case that is small and clean looking.

Not trying to attack you or anything because you did say that you don’t see the appeal for your own case, but that’s because this product isn’t for you. If you see building a PC and putting it in your living room as an alternative, it’s not meant for you. This is for everyone else who doesn’t see those things as easy. Being someone who has been building/upgrading my own gaming PCs since I was a preteen, I understand how simple it seems to you. But not everyone has that perspective. What seems like simple step-by-step instructions to you is actually really complicated. Part compatiblity alone is difficult, and even the best sources of info can get it wrong, and that’s really demoralizing for someone who doesn’t even know what RAM is. Step-by-step guides seem easy, but there are many predatory ones out there, which suggest using a free trial of paid software to do the things FOSS software can do. You and I know how to avoid it, but if someone doesn’t even understand the concept of an .iso file, how would they know that better alternatives exist? Also, an extremely common case when following tutorials online is that they are out of date, or an unexpected error happens when following them. You and I can quickly RCA these issues and get back on track, but when you don’t even understand what the steps you are taking are actually doing, these minor hiccups leave you dead in the water.

What you are actually suggesting here is people do like, a year of introductory computer classes. It doesn’t feel like that to you because you’ve been figuring all this crap out as you go along, but having walked people through the most basic of IT problems, you are overestimating what a normal person finds intimidating when dealing with a computer.

I’ve priced it out for myself, and I couldn’t get a build that’s as good at that price, not on new hardware at least. Not sure how they worked out their numbers

My neighbors planted blackberries on their side of the property line. It takes a good few days each year for me to cut them back off my side. Please, if you want blackberries, plant them in their own little zone, and be mindful of how they can spread

Hey now, artificial neural networks aren’t always the bad kind of AI, they’ve been around a long time and I really enjoyed playing with them back during my time at University

You are also missing the huge advances they’ve made in their contributions to FOSS, like proton, FEX, arch, etc. Steam has done an insane amount of legwork to get Linux gaming off the ground. They are the one company that made migrating off of Windows and onto Linux a valid option for me, and a bunch of other folks. Linux was ~0.89% of their userbase in 2020, and since their contributions to these FOSS projects, it has gone up to 3.05%. That’s crazy, considering it had been at or below that 0.89% since 2016.

Just the other day I was researching potential solutions to a programming issue I had at work. Basically, I asked AI “Is there an API call available to tweak this config” It responded “Yes, you can do that with the tweak-that-config command”

I went to check the documentation for the “tweak-that-config” command. It just plain didn’t exist, and never had. Turns out there was no API call to tweak the config I wanted, and attempting to use AI as a search engine is, in fact, a waste of time.

As someone with a little insider baseball knowledge, it was just a few hours down of DynamoDB and DNS. However, that caused EC2 to go down for ~1 day, which causes pretty much 1/3 of the internet to go down. Once EC2 sorts themselves out, then teams/companies (almost all amazon services use EC2 in the back end) that use EC2 have to get their ducks back in a row, and that can take any span of time, depending on how well their code was written to handle failures + how many people they are willing to pay oncall/overtime.

E-reader support is still pretty clunky on Kavita, but doable. I normally host my books on Kavita, and then download them to my eReader, and that does a fine job, but it won’t sync progress across devices

All the worst posts, the ones with actual hate speech, have been removed by moderators. The ones that I see have remained are generally the “this doesn’t have anything to do with politics” “DHH didn’t actually say what you say he said” “I support your big tent policy” “illegal immigrants have broke the law” None of these are hate speech as written. I don’t like them supporting Omarchy, and I don’t agree with what the posts in support of Framework’s stance, but I would say Framework has moderated where necessary in that post

If you already pirate content, welcome to the rabbit hole that will simultaneously make your life way easier and way harder.

I love the idea of smart glasses, and would happily buy them. However, it’d 1. Need to have 3rd party app support and 2. Be able to work without connecting to any tech company’s servers. I’ve gotten used to my android phone that doesn’t have google play services, and I’ll never go back to having a device that phones home without my permission. In a perfect world I’d like to have some FOSS firmware and OS to run on them, but I’d be willing to go without as long as I could disable traffic to all major tech company servers.

Unfortunately these requirements will likely mean I won’t be getting smart glasses any time soon

Interesting. I played Riven as a kid, and recently played the remake on PC (no VR) and I really enjoyed it. Felt more or less like a faithful recreation, and I didn’t notice anything specifically catering to VR. What parts were disappointing?

Was on the fence for a long time, and I made the move just recently (after the pricing changes. Didn’t effect me since I was grandfathered in, but I saw it as a harbinger for worse things to come) With the creation of Wizarr, it solved my biggest problems with Jellyfin. I can just send an invite link, and it creates accounts for people on Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, and Kavita, and lets me set up introductory guides for everything. Despite the menu UI/UX being significantly worse than Plex, playback is smoother, load times are shorter, and it can actually handle streaming to really slow internet speeds, something that Plex had a lot of trouble with.

The only app I noticed missing was the Tizen app, but they are working on getting it approved. I only had one family member using a Tizen TV, so I just gave them an old chromecast to run off of instead.

How does this happen? I call them wall warts as well, and nobody around me does. I will follow up with “phone charger”

I think this is what Louis was going for. He doesn’t want to ask for no more companies, just companies that make a product (doesn’t even need to be a good one) where its sole purpose is to try (doesn’t even need to succeed) and be useful to the consumer.

I think he hit his mark pretty well for the symbol, but whether or not I agree with his view on things is a different story entirely.

I’m guessing you are only in programming communities, I’ve seen it talked about in plenty of circles outside of programming

Woah, i didn’t know that the effect would be so drastic. I want to point out to those struggling to get it to work that, as diverging mentioned, your arm needs to be fully extended. Also, the blind spot is about a thumb’s width, at least for me, and is only visible at a specific x/y axis location. Any deviation from that single spot will cause it to stop working. I could tell I was close to the spot when parts of my thumb would disappear, and just had to slowly move it around until I found the spot that looked like the thumb was gone completely.

Have you been in the American minimum wage job market in the last 10 years or so? Every job that pays minimum wage doesn’t give enough hours for the employee to be full-time, which means they don’t get benefits, retirement contributions, etc. In these cases, outside of the onboarding costs, a $15 an hour employee does in fact cost $15 an hour.