Those are a related but still “acceptable” situation where they are contractors who are generally over leveraged to the point that a single missed deal is enough to kill them. Which is definitely not helped by (allegedly?) being told the contract is for 3 scenes, it getting bumped up to 5, and them not even getting the final versions of the costumes until a week before it needs to be turned in. And then getting told they can either deal with it or never work for totally not Marvel ever again.

Contract for, let’s say Ant Man 3, is done but they are already in the hole because of the resources they spent on that and having to turn down other movies and then they get told they won’t be getting the contract for Dr Strange 2 and to go fuck themselves. And, of course, the entire internet (especially the generative ai loving chuds at corridor digital) shit on their work because it is horrible and “looks like someone made it in an afternoon” which… they kind of did because they weren’t even allowed to know who the villain in that sequence was until a month before it was due.

Whereas what we are seeing more of, this year in particular, is effectively entire departments getting spun up for a project and then everyone laid off when it is done. Has cost and severance implications but it is how corporations are getting the kind of senior staff who don’t want the instability of contract work… more or less on contract work. Which is why this is still a big news story.

Nowhere near it.

The “corporate roles” are likely a case of downsizing after building out infrastructure and policies/protocols. A LOT of companies are doing it these days. They staffed up for a project, finished (or pivoted) the project, and now have full time staff that they don’t actually need. And rather than work on new efforts they just look for an excuse to purge the because they know they can rehire for the next big push. Ironically, that is a model that had a LOT of use in video games in the days before DLC.

And the warehouse jobs (what this is to “distract” from) are about attempts at automation. Which… okay, it is really hard to do worse than the grossly incompetent, and yet STILL horrifically underpaid, staff they already have so that will probably actually be a net positive to consumers. Which will, in turn, result in rapidly hiring back that staff when the warehouses all collapse because they got an extra shipment of SD cards and had nowhere to store them.

Let’s say you are a graphics designer. You use Adobe Illustrator and you pirate it. You work for Innertrode either as a contractor or a full time employee. You make their new logo.

Adobe’s legal team are bored. They see that new logo. They know it was made with Illustrator because of some of the visual quirks/tools (or, you know, because it is anything graphical so of course it uses Adobe). They know that Innertrode doesn’t have a license. So they call up Lumberg and say “what the fuck?”.

Lumberg then calls the person who was in charge of the new logo and they point at you.

If you are staff? You were given training not to pirate anything. It is all your fault. Innertrode buys a few years of a license and apologizes and fires your ass and makes sure to tell everyone they know about you. Or you are a contractor and you signed an agreement saying you had valid licenses for everything and they just give your contact info to Adobe and move on.

And Adobe MIGHT just want to shake you down. Or they might want to make an example and sue the fuck out of some people.

Also… it is a lot of hearsay for obvious reasons, but there are very strong rumors that some of the more prominent cracks tend to add digital watermarks for the purpose of automating this.

Okay, hear me out: How much of that is a function of ChatGPT and how much of that is a function of… gestures at everything else

MOSTLY joking. But had a good talk with my primary care doctor at the bar the other week (only kinda awkward) about how she and her team have had to restructure the questions they use to check for depression and the like because… fucking EVERYONE is depressed and stressed out but for reasons that we “understand”.

Aside from the windows and armory crate bullshit (both of which go away if you install bazzite…), the ROG allies are actually pretty good hardware for their price.

Because… you aren’t driving 4k@60 for under a thousand bucks. And the ROG Ally X whatever is very comparable to laptops with similar hardware. And while I do not at all think you need that power in a handheld, people are going to notice it when it gets compared to a PS5 pro or a PS6. Which it will.

Let Sony launch the PS6 at 1k or higher. Let Microsoft somehow get the xbox series 2 out at 2k because they are pulling a The Producers or whatever. And if there is demand? Premium ass Steam Box. If there is not? MAYBE do a more premium 500-800 USD NUC. And if people REALLY love the ASUS Bumfuck ROG Seventy Seven Y Y Z or whatever? Give ASUS 20 bucks to sell a shit ton with SteamOS installed by default.

The key difference is that Valve were trying to build a market with the Steam Boxes. SteamOS is already demonstrably viable for “console” gaming and the consoles are going to be selling bigass PCs in 2027 already. Let them take the risk and then let Valve swoop in.

Which… is kinda what they did with the Steam Deck. GDP and Aya Neo put in the work to make handheld form factor laptops at semi-reasonable prices. Valve rolled up and wrecked their shit with the Steam Deck.

All signs are that we are getting the new VR headset first.

And it is probably in Valve’s best interest to let other people drive the HTPC consoles. They are not going to be cheap since “1024 at 40 FPS” doesn’t scale all that well to a 50 inch 4k display. So let other integrators deal with that. Just release the steam controller 2 already.

And I’ll say that you can get a really nice AMD NUC HTPC for under 500 bucks that can handle “steam deck games” on a TV. And I THINK I have a way to get Display Port -> HDMI 2.1 that I need to sit down and test.

There are two layers to this (actually a lot more but)

What you are describing is mostly supply chain. It is the idea that the package manager’s inventory should be safe. And that is already a nigh impossible task simply because so many of the packages themselves can be compromised. It seems like every other year there is a story of bad actors infiltrating a project either as an attack or as a “research paper”. But the end result is you have core libraries that may be compromised.

But the other side is what impacted OP and will still be an issue even if said supply chain is somehow 100% vetted. People are inherently going to need things that aren’t in a package manager. Sometimes that is for nefarious reasons and sometimes it is just because the project they are interested in isn’t at the point where it is using a massive build farm to deploy everywhere. Maybe it involves running blind scripts as root (don’t fucking do that… even though we all do at some point) and sometimes it involves questionable code.

And THAT is a very much unsolved problem no matter what distro. Because, historically, you would run an anti-virus scan on that. How many people even know what solutions there are for linux? And how many have even a single nice thing to say about the ones that do?

And this for a $60 perpetual license program that i should buy anyway because it’s for work

Just to pile on: NEVER pirate stuff you use for work. Audits are a thing (especially if said software company gets suspicious for whatever reason) and you WILL be thrown under the bus at a moment’s notice and put on an industry wide shitlist because you are just too much of a liability after you get caught once.

Pirate for fun and hobbyist use. The moment you are getting paid, go legit.

I want to say that is one of the last bosses of the DLC “narratively”?

But yeah. From love stuff like that. Gargoyles and Maneater in Dark 1 and Demon. The gargoyle gauntlet in Dark 2. The idea being that it is meant to pressure you but is really just a thinly veiled DPS gate.

I forget if the tree fuckers are one at a time or if they can Four Kings to overwhelm you, but the idea is that you are going to take damage but that is what your estus is for. The idea being that you can spike DPS to minimize the damage you take per health bar. And then you cry when you realize you decided to do that on NG+ where you can no longer rush them.

The one which is like four bosses in a row?

Get more scadutree fragments to increase your DPS and look into weapon arts that drop a DOT blob on the field (e.g. a magma puddle) since those are meant to hurt enemies that walk past and do ridiculous damage on the biggies what barely move.

And if your build supports if (or you want to go hang out with mommy), Great Stars is RIDICULOUSLY good for the DLC due to healing per hit. And the Prayerful Strike weapon art is more or less cheating in the DLC because of a mix of strong healing and holy being one of the few elements DLC bosses tend to at least not be strong against.

Yes. I have a Steam Deck and an HTPC running bazzite. I am aware of what it does. I like what it does.

But what you are now describing is just defaulting all windows to launch in fullscreen. The rest is just the natural stack and focusing. if I double click Warframe in desktop and don’t immediately go off to do other stuff while it launches, it defaults to the launcher in focus. Just like if I launch it in big picture mode it defaults to the launcher in focus.

And you continue to assume that the asus xbox deck is the new xbox. Whereas this lines up with what MS have been saying since the last time they pivoted their entire division a few months back: the next xbox is what is going to do this and it is going to be heavily dependent on windows gaming mode. Which isn’t out yet.

That isn’t the point.

I was more just pointing out that most (all?) of what you said is… not anything special. In fact, the big advantage seems to just be that SteamOS closes your windows for you rather than expecting you to care about going through your systray to see if you actually need banzai buddy running while you play WoW.

If you shut off most of your other apps (like fucking discord) you don’t have the popups from that.

As for OS level shenanigans? Steam Big Picture alone can’t stop the mess that is KDE (Wayland?) whinging that steam input looks like a remote desktop session as far as inputs are concerned (although I finally found the setting for that after like 55 hours of Pillars 1). SteamOS/Bazzite “solve” that by having a ridiculously stripped down mode… which is not dissimilar from what MS is arguing as their “gaming mode” that will probably still not work but is conceivably that.

To be clear. Fuck ASUS. Their ROG Armory Crate shit is god damned malware.

But for a “new xbox” that is the “PC with gaming mode” that MS have been alluding to over the past few months? That is effectively what Valve are doing with SteamOS (and same with the Bazzite devs).

it intercepts how popups and game windows are drawn to the screen so that you never lose focus of the game window

Huh? That is kind of just how window managers work. The game launches so it is on top. It may or may not be exclusive fullscreen these days. The game spawns up another window as part of a social media thing or because you typed /wiki jennah's feet and then that is on top until you close it. That is, mostly, OS agnostic these days.

It doesn’t force you to get out a keyboard or use the touch screen to enter a login password or PIN

Big Picture 100% makes you do that if there is a text input. You can choose to use your controller to navigate the keyboard and… that is a love it or hate it. From a quick google, the asus equivalent (as of 2 years ago) is that you can switch your input to desktop mode to use the joysticks as a mouse. And while that is a step down from automagically “just working”… the fact that I know that it is steam+square kinda sums up just how automagic it is with Big Picture.

My understanding, heavily tainted by Dan Ryckert’s stupidity, is that the big problem the xbox decks have is the OS login window. Yes, Microsoft need to get off their fucking asses and make that work consistently. But Valve mostly bypasses that by having a shitty pin login. That is a “I left my SteamOS laptop on my bed and someone from a dorm down the hallway stole all my money” story away from being a debacle.

Yeah. People very much forget how horrible most online multiplayer infrastructure was back in the early 2000s. Voice chat was a case where you used teamspeak/ventrillo for atrocious quality audio that optimally depended on using an actual phone line in conjunction or it just never worked. Messaging was basically xfire or AIM. And servers were generally listen servers that someone in your clan left running in the background when they forgot about it.

Live provided a messaging system people would actually use and tapped into MS infrastructure for voice chat that actually worked… which was great for playing with your friends and learning all new slurs when you had it on in a pub. Game servers themselves were still generally all listen servers but that changed over time.

These days? Discord has a LOT of problems but it actually works and is a much more universal platform. Server hosting infrastructure is such that there isn’t really a point in paying the platform for it. And EVERYTHING needs to be social media for people to not whinge so having a messaging system loses its value.

But also… have any of the consoles really pushed the online infrastructure as why you pay for premium? Okay, Nintendo have but they REALLY shouldn’t considering what they are offering. It is all about the IGC and has been since Sony got involved as part of the PSN hack.

No.

The problem is that so much of the world just looks to others to think for them. Whether that is elders, celebrities, or mythical creatures.

God wants you to attack brown people, and wear a hat, is no different than God wanting you to accept that others will go to hell because they are wrong, and to wear a hat.

It is just deeply stupid. These were GenX and Millennial games.

I care less for “boomer CRPG” (mostly I just laugh because it isn’t like the genre has evolved significantly since Baldurs Gate. Mostly just polish and folding in more TTRPG mechanics) than I do for “boomer shooters”. Mostly because boomers were the ones trying to get all violent video games, and especially games like DOOM, banned.

Millennials increasingly feel like a forgotten generation that increasingly catches all the hell that boomers and genx have unleashed upon the world (and, in fairness, people don’t often realize that genx aren’t millennials), but whatever. Mostly it is just really stupid and… we can do so much better.

Like… Demon Souls is 16 years old. Let’s start calling Soulsborne games “boomer bonfires”. I mean, it is old, right?

Heh, my money was on it being shaders like most times this comes up. Steam+Proton gets a downloaded shader precache. Windows does it live.

For a (first) NAS, I generally discourage this.

Office liquidation desktops are great for home servers (if you aren’t paying for power). But they generally are very limited on storage. Limited bays to install hard drives and limited SATA ports. So you rapidly end up with drives just sitting on the bottom of the case and real jank pcie boards to extend your storage.

Which then becomes a HUGE issue when you have a drive failure. Because now you need to actually identify which drive is the failed one which involves reading off serial numbers and, depending on the setup/OS, making sure you get the order right when you plug them back in.

Whereas a 4-bay NAS generally has dedicated hardware and hot swap bays which make this trivial. You might never actually use the hot swap capability, but it makes checking which drive is the bad drive fairly trivial.

Also, a good 4 bay NAS is REAL easy to unplug and put in the trunk of your car during a disaster. Don’t ask me how I know.

I would argue it is more similar to the last few bubbles for this same kind of tech.

A decade or so the big deal was computer vision (think “recognize stuff through the power of AI”). Massive promises were made, a LOT of people specialized in glorified signal processing, and then it mostly faded away when it didn’t live up to the hype.

Except… a significant percentage of the smart home industry is all about paying money to have your video feeds analyzed for people. Same with image hosting services and so forth. Hell, youtube runs on it for DMCA purposes.

And we’re going to see the same thing with “AI” yet again. People will realize chatgpt isn’t going to suddenly manifest itself as Stana Katic and suck you off while telling you you are ten times the man Malcolm Reynolds ever was. But it really does do a lot of “admin work” and is one of the best tools out there for text based pre and post processing of human readable data.