The first couple episodes alone were a very cool story, but I’m not sure the premise has much lasting potential. Not that I mind a slower pace, the episodes now are still interesting to me. But it is starting to feel like they’re drawing it out, likely for some big twist in the final episode

AVP just isn’t canon. IMO that’s part of its appeal

Generally, games cannot tell what the performance bottleneck in your configuration is, especially taking into account things like upscaling or playing at scaled res. This is pretty significant for mid-range configurations. That people want plug and play doesn’t mean they’re happy for games not to take full advantage of their hardware.

Microsoft and Sony have no leverage at all over Valve when it comes to PC sales. Reneging on their deals to bring their published games to Steam would only mean fewer sales.

VR, controller, and console/PC that all interact seamlessly

I don’t see it as a killer feature. In fact, the main advantage of these individual devices (as in the new ones, not Steam Deck) is that you don’t need the others, rather than that they interact seamlessly.

e.g with Steam Frame, you don’t need a gaming PC to actually run Half Life Alyx to be able to play it. If you already have a gaming PC, at most it offers minor advantages over any other VR headset.

e.g with Steam Machine, you don’t need a gaming PC to engage with the Valve ecosystem and play on your TV. If you already have a gaming PC, you can already stream it to your TV for free.

Also, ecosystem maturity won’t fundamentally change that as a prospective steam machine customer, you will still need to configure game settings. You will still accidentally touch the trackpads in a way that causes issues in some games. Granted, the relative maturity and design improvements will make a big difference. But it’s more of a difference in customer retention and satisfaction than a difference that will get Valve’s foot in the door with someone invested enough in gaming to prefer a more open ecosystem, yet not invested enough to already own an equivalent console or equivalent/better gaming PC.

There are many ways they could leverage a lower cost which Sony/MS can’t/won’t, e.g. make generic controllers compatible, sell the console without one, recoup margin on steam controllers (one of the highest-margin tech product categories around these days)

They already tried that with the original steam machines and it flopped hard. It’ll be significantly better value or it’ll flop again, simple. They’re clearly optimizing for price based on the vram/ram specs. Yeah maybe it’ll go up after launch but out of the gate it’ll be sub-$500/512gb otherwise the whole exercise is pointless

US = bad, EU = good seems like a very tokenistic approach to the movement. As though its founding principle is nationalism lol

It’s extremely unlikely a massive liquidation event across most altcoins like this was caused by a Trump tweet. Most likely a big market maker like an exchange was liquidated.

https://archive.md/e0S3y

Price or multibuy promotions

First words of the article

Aus cannabis patient here, so I don’t actually know. But I’d have to think you could get it prescribed for sure - covered I doubt it due to the much higher cost.

Concentrate vapes are cheap but carts are much more expensive than flower. Whereas vapes for dry flower (that would be appropriate for medical use) would be very expensive.

Here literally all medical cannabis is either edibles or flower prescribed specifically for vaping. But there’s zero coverage (other than for the prescription itself)

I think you’re both right. The active boycotting part likely will blow over quickly for most. But it’s still an opportunity for a large group of subscribers, many of which are primarily subscribed due to FOMO, to reconsider the value of their subscription. Some segment of boycott participants will end up resubscribing. Some segment will remain unsubscribed and go without. Some other segment will remain unsubscribed and switch to piracy. Over the past 5 years since the service started, this kind of opportunity has only really happened around the annual price increase (e.g in Dec 2022, Oct 2023, Oct 2024).

I think it’s totally plausible that we would have seen another price increase next month, but won’t. It’d be too many reasons to unsubscribe, too close together. Even if they’re comfortable enough to increase in Dec instead of Oct, that’s still a hypothetical loss of 100s of millions in monthly revenue. That’s a significant win for the boycott.

I think “oot” emphasises the difference from US accents for parody reasons, and also it’s just not that simple to describe that difference by substituting a single letter of the alphabet. The best way I can think of to describe it (based on experience with friends from BC) is like a combination of “oht” and “oat”

https://store.steampowered.com/app/385380/Planet_Centauri/

They did kinda abuse early access to crowdfund development for a very long time. 100k+ copies sold is not a bad result overall. The bug is pretty unfortunate, but they didn’t exactly set themselves up for future financial success. Seems more like an unfortunate factor in the “flop” rather than the ultimate cause of it.

The game does look interesting though and if they can regain enough momentum off a daily deal and/or future discounts to fix some of the issues mentioned in the post-1.0 reviews, I’ll definitely consider getting it on sale.

You’re right, the messages would not be decrypted by the server but by the client making the report. Key rotation also shouldn’t be an issue because it uses a ratcheting chain key. But if the non-malicious client is already set up to send decrypted messages to the server, this seems antithetical to the idea that WhatsApp can’t read your conversations. There are clear caveats without even introducing the idea of a malicious client potentially exfiltrating decrypted messages elsewhere. Signal on the other hand receives the reported senders phone number and an encrypted message ID, presumably acting on spam reports by relying on multiple reports of the same message from the same sender, rather than by reading the message

https://faq.whatsapp.com/414631957536067/

Either the report function doesn’t work like they say, or messages are stored decrypted, or they can decrypt messages at will based on a simple request from another user

Edit: fixed

I think it’s more to do with the development process. There used to be a development use case for cheat codes to easily enable or disable features or parameters of a game for testing purposes. And then you could leave them in the release build because why not, cool easter egg.

These days devs can easily just spin up whatever development environment needed for testing. There’s no need for such primitive methods like a special code, instead it’s now something that would require additional resources to implement.

Yeah I don’t have many tools in general but I upgraded the blue slot on my crest first anticipating nice synergies between healing & damage reduction

Niagara launcher has “pop-ups” on swipe which can act as an app folder, or display app shortcuts or widgets. Not exactly the same behaviour but imo tidier & more elegant approach to basically the same use case.