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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Valve gives you free steam keys for your game on request, which you can sell off steam, without paying Valve a cut. This has a specific rule that disallows selling those keys for a lower price. However, not sure if it’s this case, there was an email from a Valve employee submitted as evidence telling a game developer that selling their game for less in general would be undercutting steam, and something they wouldn’t want. If the email is real and not a misinterpretation, Valve indeed was/is pressuring developers to not sell games cheaper elsewhere.

    Also, sales and giveaways are exempt from the steam key price parity rule, which I would assume epic’s free games would fall under, if you applied the rule to that despite not involving steam keys.


  • I don’t think the example at the end of your comment is relevant, since to my knowledge it’s the publisher deciding on pricing and doing sales, and steam is still taking the same cut.

    I also think it’s generally not a great thing, since it basically puts the value of the game at $5, making it not worth getting off-sale, while also creating urgency to do so during a sale. I respect Factorio developers’ choice to just not do sales at all, and state so, so that buyers know exactly what the price is.


  • I’ve gotten such symptoms before when running out of RAM - I’m on Arch and never bothered setting anything up for that instance and I’m not sure what’s going on, but I think the system is struggling to recover memory or something before it resorts to killing processes, and would sometimes freeze for a minute like that.

    That said, yeah… Kernel modules (which device drivers often are) are allowed to run at a higher level of privilege, with less oversight, more access to hardware and better performance, so if they misuse that privilege they can break things badly. And with proprietary drivers, you have no idea or control of what it’s actually doing, so you can only try to downgrade or wait and hope the company fixes it.




  • I had to dig through the website shoving paid services down my throat and found the script builder, is that what you mean? If yes, I can see it generate either a command using chocolatey, or a config file (to feed chocolatey?), which seems to require me to install chocolatey manually first.

    Looks like it doesn’t meet the basic requirement of being a standalone script, and requires you to do extra setup first. I’m also very much not a fan of the website so far, but I can give it a pass since ninite being opinionated in the package choice is a subjective thing.


  • The great thing about ninite is how you can go there ahead of time and generate a single file, and when you’re done installing you just run that file. I suppose one could generate a batch script that installs stuff with some other package manager (you’d need to include install/update for it first, I remember reading about how Winget can come outdated with a broken version), but the issue with that is simply that ninite definitively exists and works reliably, while I don’t know any such service to generate install scripts.




  • Right, but that requires somebody to find and document exploitable firmware revisions, create and distribute hardware/software to exploit them, develop the aftermarket software/hardware, and all that potentially separately for each car model. And then that just becomes a war with the manufacturers, who might try to update their firmware more aggressively, lock things down more, and threaten/sue people working on such things.



  • I’m just gonna chime in to point out those are both realtime combat focused games, requiring reflex and quick thinking, which is a notable departure from roguelike. On the other hand, Slay the Spire is all about careful planning, making decisions one step at a time, taking calculated risks. There’s no turn time limit, no time-based combos or bonuses, or time-gated doors that give you extra items if you go fast enough.

    Oh, and also meta-progression. Hades and Dead Cells are both built with a central system of grinding out unlocks and upgrades - in slay the spire, the only meta-progression I know is having to beat the game with each character to unlock the next, and having to complete a few runs with each character to unlock all cards… And then the real progression, where you can continue beating the game with increasing difficulty levels to unlock the next.

    Ultimately, this might not matter for you, and even if it does, a slow strategic deckbuilder might still not be for you, and that’s completely fine.



  • some of my games didn’t launch, complaining about missing stuff.

    I don’t know Slackware, but I know on arch there’s the standard steam runtime version, and then there’s the unofficial steam-native-runtime, which uses system packages instead of steam’s own bundled runtime. And if we’re talking native Linux games, which is where the problem is, they tend to not work with steam’s runtime, presumably because they weren’t properly built to target it, and need to be launched with the native runtime (or switch to running the windows version with proton…)




  • I use KDE, but for my file manager I stick to Thunar, which I think is from a fork of GNOME. Does cause me some issues, since Thunar uses gvfs for stuff like mounting USB drives, whereas plasma loads kio, seemingly with no way to disable it, and they fight for control over devices.

    I remember one thing in particular that pissed me off about Dolphin is how it displays folders with 4 tilted miniature icons of files inside, with no way to turn it off, or even just make them not be randomly tilted. Such a minor thing, but when I was choosing it was between clean icons and a scrambled mess, I went with clean icons.

    Ultimately, I wish gvfs/kio wasn’t an issue, but I love to have the freedom to choose.


  • If it makes more sense to focus on your specialization while paying somebody who specializes in local food delivery to do the delivery… No, yeah, that kinda sounds right. The actual issues I see here are not valuing the labor of delivery and getting too lazy, and maybe an issue where people are generally too time-pressured to take a break to get the food.



  • One counterpoint - even with a weak speed to capacity ratio it could be very useful to have a lot of storage for incremental backup solutions, where you have a small index to check what needs to be backed up, only need to write new/modified data, and when restoring you only need to read the indexes and the amount you’re actually restoring. This saves time writing the data and lets you keep access to historical versions.

    There’s two caveats here, of course, assuming those are not rewritable. One, you need to be able to quickly seek to the latest index, which can’t reliably be at the start, and two, you need a format that works without rewriting any data, possibly with a footer (like tar or zip, forgot which one), which introduces extra complexity (though I foresee a potential trick where the previous index can leave an unallocated block of data to write the address of the next index, to be written later)