Not my top guesses, but not surprised either. I guessed the UK and Russia would’ve been opposed too.

I’m going to guess that historically prolific colonisers voted no.

I don’t know the exact situation with Rainbolt, but it’s common for stream clip channels (even “official” ones) to be operated by people other than the streamer. Example.

Suddenly want to play Half-Life 2 again, wonder why

I thought they were wearing prison jumpsuits.

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It’s called lexical analysis or lexical tokenization. It existed long before LLMs (as long as high-level programming languages have, since lexical analysis of the source is the first step of compilation), it doesn’t rely on stolen code, and doesn’t consume a small village’s worth of electricity. Superficial parallels with chatbots do not make it AI – it’s a fucking algorithm.

Besides, there is a world of difference between asking a clanker to spit out a Python function that multiplies two matrices, and putting the knock-off Shadowheart from TEMU in a million-dollar game.

Maybe some people, who are an ocean away from me, have been gaslit into thinking they can’t be anything other than consumers. I know it can be difficult to grasp the concept, but you can refuse a service if the terms are unacceptable. It is possible to go into a transaction with open eyes and full knowledge of the rights granted to you by law and responsibilities demanded of you by the contract.

That’s why I say “customer”. It’s a reminder to myself that I should demand equitable treatment, even if the chances are slim unless the courts get involved. You don’t have to jump into the meat grinder willingly.

consumers

This is very much a pet peeve, but be careful about how you use “consumer” versus “customer”. They each imply completely different power dynamics.

I want to see puzzles that are implemented using the physics engine. And I don’t mean “toss the axe in the proper arc to trigger the gate” physics. I mean “stack the bricks on one end of the seesaw to balance it long enough to make the jump to the next platform”. Or “use the blue barrels’ buoyancy to raise the platform out of the water”.

They absolutely are, in terms of gameplay. Ozzy Mandus and The Crank Hog Machine sacrificed most of the gameplay Frictional’s Amnesia became known for. There are no light mechanics. Barely any physics puzzles. The pigmen are braindead, which removes the challenge and the tension. Even if it’s a better story and atmosphere than The Dark Descent, it’s a lesser game. Even Still Wakes The Deep only goes as far as “throw the object to make the thing look away” when you’re not just responding to non-diegetic prompts.

You can make the argument that walking simulators have a place in the gaming landscape, and you’d be right, but by their nature, they are the exact opposite of what Bloodlines 1 was and what Bloodlines 2 should have been. Why Paradox decided it was a good idea to entrust with it a studio that has only made things that it never should have been is a fucking mystery to me.

There is a massive secondary market for in-game items (primarily CS skins) that Valve refuses to combat or even officially acknowledge. Some of it is legitimate, some of it is literal lottery for children. And since every transaction takes place on Steam, they get a cut of that.

Valve revolutionized Linux gaming; Tim categorically rejects it.
Valve banned shitcoins and blockchain scams; Tim welcomed them with open arms.
Valve enforces honesty regarding AI slop; Tim wants to literally deceive people.
All that on top of what they did with third-party exclusives.

He’s like that annoying kid who didn’t get invited to a birthday party and vowed to always do the opposite of what the popular kid does. Petulant fucking overgrown child.

For over-the-shoulder games, separate field-of-view AND CAMERA DISTANCE.

For player-hosted games, an option to reject hosts using unsuitable hardware or low bandwidth, high latency networks. My gripe is specific to Warframe on the Switch 1, but if the developers of any game can’t/won’t operate public game servers and choose to offload the responsibility to the players, the choice should belong to the players.

You can, technically, but there are some caveats.

SteamOS is not a general purpose OS. It is optimized to run on the Steam Deck (plus the Frame and Gabecube I guess). Its software components are tested on a limited range of hardware (specifically AMD silicon), and it might not have certain optimizations and compatibility fixes that are required by other consumer hardware. It also probably has some proprietary bits, especially the firmware.

The best option is Bazzite. It’s not based on SteamOS, but it is built with a robust gaming experience in focus. You can even get it to boot directly into Steam Big Picture. Watch this loud Aussie man do it!

The other option is HoloISO, which is an independent reimplementation of SteamOS. Their intention is to get as close to the real SteamOS as possible. Hardware support is limited (especially nvidia).

Why split physical and data link when they are so closely related?

You can run Ethernet on any medium that has the capacity to transmit digital signals. It can be copper, optical, over-air laser, radio, on top of an analog carrier wave (ASK, FSK, PSK). The Ethernet traffic can be completely independent from the physical medium by using encapsulation (L2TP or any other protocol that encapsulates Layer-2). It can be pigeons carrying printouts of the Ethernet frames, scanned and reassembled at the destination. The same can be said about most Layer-2 protocols.

As long as the proper interfaces are present, the physical layer is completely transparent to the data link layer.

(edit) I should point out that Ethernet, specifically, transmits extra data before and after the frame (the preamble and inter-packet gap) that are used to configure the Rx circuit for reception, but the Layer-2 frame will be identical regardless of the medium.

Floating point values: making your software misbehave out of nowhere since the year NaN.

Superfoods aren’t even the worst kind of snake oil. They’re ultimately not directly harmful.

When radium was discovered, scammers advertised it as a cure-all: if radiation kills healthy cells, a little radiation must surely kill only weak, diseased cells. Radium was put in everything. Face creams. Toothpaste. Butter. Underwear. Men were told to strap radium to their nuts to improve their stamina. Radithor was just vials of water with radium in it. It was an insane time.

It’s all conjecture… but the more you describe what it is not, eventually the shape of what it is will emerge.

Why does this guy sound like Filip Miucin? “We didn’t plagiarize, and if we did, we only did it by accident, and you’re the bad guy, actually, for reporting on it!”