I've owned older USA made cars so a little panel alignment doesn't bug me. I like the lack of beer bottles stashed in the doors, missing screws, welds from the obviously inebriated, etc.
I'd question the idea that they treat developers poorly. Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee
Hell, they even buy timed exclusive access to certain games
I lack an informed opinion on the matter but I have to wonder what you think the one thing has to do with the other? Developers have very little choice but to go where the customers are.
I go to EGS once a week or so just to see which free game is on offer, and the experience is only barely tolerable.
If you're giving away free games and can barely manage to attract people to your storefront, you might be doing something wrong.
In their defense I suppose, most other competitors weren't much better. I don't think anyone misses Origin, and you'd have to pay me to spend any amount of time on Ubisoft's storefront. Only GOG comes close, and they earn a lot of good will in other ways.
The Epic Game Store is just kind of mid. The app feels spammy, the game selection is less, and it doesn't really offer anything over the existing options beyond the monthly free game gimmick. If they want customers to head there it needs to be better, not just good enough.
Who knows? Presumably because Steam hasn't done anything to drive them off, they've generally been satisfied with the service, and the titles they want are available. At least that would be my guess based on my personal experience but I assume Valve has a much better grasp of their audience than I do.
As a user of both EGS and Steam, the one thing that EGS doesn't have that Steam does is multi-threaded downloading. Steam can saturate any connection I've thrown at it, whereas EGS gets a few-hundred mbit/s and saturates a single CPU while doing it.
Perhaps game devs get a whole bunch of "gee whiz" features from the Steam Platform that Epic Games doesn't provide, but I -personally- couldn't care less about those.
> You don't need multiple threads to saturate a gigabit connection. Even many embedded SoCs can do it.
What I've observed is
* when Steam downloads are in progress, between four and nine logical CPUs worth of processing power on my 32-way Threadripper are being used and zero logical CPUs are running at 100%
* when EGS downloads are in progress, exactly one logical CPU on that Threadripper is pegged at 100%
It's true that you can do gigabit downloads without having a multithreaded downloader. [0] But it seems to be true that the two biggest PC-game-store clients absolutely cannot... for whatever reason. Given the prevalence of gaming machines that have CPUs with four or more logical CPUs, I expect it's not really worth the effort to make whatever Steam is doing single-threaded, or whatever single-threaded thing EGS is doing fast enough to saturate a 1gbit+ download.
It’s fascinating how (mostly western liberal) game developers argue in favor of 99% taxes for general population “for maintaining infrastructure” and yet cannot fathom paying a fee for maintaining actual infrastructure that is necessary for their business to function.
I'm not familiar with whatever strawman you're invoking here.
By "everyone" I mean game studio owners. They're desperate to not pay 30% to Valve / Sony / Apple / whatever.
The vast majority of people that work at game studios don't really care about that, they see a shrinking fraction of the profits of their employers and worsening conditions.
It makes a lot of sense for businesses to seek to reduce their costs wherever they can. But, from what I've heard about brick and mortar distribution, you used to pay quite a bit more and get a lot less than what Steam gives you.
From what I can tell, that 30% cut gets you -for the rest of forever-
* distribution for both the current version of the game and some number of older versions you choose to make available [0]
* a place in their searchable games index [1]
* "cloud" storage for your players' savegames
* basic forum and blog hosting for discussion of and news about your game
From what I could tell as someone who used to buy games in retail stores, in a bricks and mortar distribution unless you were -like- the Starcraft/Diablo/Warcraft boxed set, you got like maybe a half year of time on the shelf. I've heard folks say that you had to pay a 50->80% cut for that.
[0] Valve will even distribute games that don't work anymore. This is both good and bad, but Steam's no-hassles refund policy combined the existence of unofficial patches that make games work on current versions of Windows make me generally fine with charging for and distributing games that no longer work as-is.
[1] ...at least until the wrong horde of pearl-clutching busybodies demand that credit card companies require your game be erased from the commercial world because it is art that discusses those busybodies' bugbear du jour
I remember when the Dolphin emulator dropped Windows 7 a few years ago. The absolute consternation, whining and even threats(!) against the developers was utterly sickening
Even as someone who enjoys "retro tech" far more than anything modern anymore, I'm hardly going to berate people to bend over backwards to keep supporting my ancient systems with modern software.
If someone wants to backport newer software as a hobby (such as Cameron Kaiser with TenFourFox, and the many downstream derivatives that spawned over the years) it's a welcome delight. But it should never be an "obligation"
Many (all?) of the people using windows 7 as their only OS at this point are zealots. It’s not surprising that some would respond that way. It’s largely a group of people who will never willingly change their habits and any removal of support is an assault. There were many valid reasons to not upgrade to 10 but the rational people have given up and upgraded or migrated to Linux/mac over the past decade.
Why as their only OS? I assume many people connect their old PC to their TV and install a bunch of emulators. I suppose Linux could be an alternate solution for those machines.
A PC like this that doesn’t support Windows 10 is so outdated that even a $50 investment would get you a massive improvement.
The only reasons to keep Windows 7 are for niche SW/HW that only work on it and have no replacement, or because you want it out of principle. Neither of these are reasons to expect everyone else to bend over backwards to accommodate you.
Other than needing more RAM, all the hardware that works for Win 7 will work with Windows 10 and 11. Most software should as well.
Windows 7 drivers are compatible with windows 10 and 11 so there really isn't a reason you couldn't continue using basically any hardware after an upgrade.
I was thinking of the odd XP era PC which could run W7 but just barely. Those would be truly outdated machines with no reason to be around a livingroom.
I have netbooks which ran XP ok but W10 is a pain to run on them, or tablets with more modern Atom CPUs which ran W10 ok at the beginning but by the latest update they became close to unusable.
Yeah, I’m not sure who else would be raging about dolphin dropping support. Not talking about people who keep an extra w7 box around for legacy software which Dolphin is not.
These sort of windows users have been drawing lines in the sand at every version of windows thusfar, when push comes to shove they always fold and accept the new thing they resisted for years, declaring that to be their new line in the sand. They come up with all manner of innane cope like "every other version of windows is good", but take a step back and its obvious they're getting slow boiled. The ones dying in a hill for Windows 7 now were once dying on a hill for 2000 or XP, refusing to use 7, and in a few years they'll be dying on a hill for windows 10 or 11.
These aren't serious people. Serious people have either gotten off windows, or have made peace with sleeping with microsoft. Those clinging to the past can't bring themselves to do either, and therefore must not be taken seriously.
> These aren't serious people. Serious people have either gotten off windows, or have made peace with sleeping with microsoft.
I am one of those people. I am serious, as are most of the other people resisting updates. It's just that most of them are not technically competent enough to switch to Linux or oppose sleeping with microsoft in an effective way. I think it's very ignorant of you to not consider them serius.
I fought to keep every version of the old OS since Win98, as each version since that was worse than the one before.
I'm using Win7 now, isolated from the internet without a DNS or a valid route out. Access is via filtering proxy server from Firefox only. Fortunately Firefox uses its own proxy settings, separated from the rest of the OS. This is how I fight sleeping with microsoft.
I am prepared for the future. I know I can't win the fight. I have a Win10 ready to go, for that time when most websites stop working with FF 115. Just in case that doesn't work, I have a Linux machine with Gentoo and Firefox that I can run via VNC and then I can go back to at least WinXP. I'm using it now for Discourse forums (Discourse devs, I hope you all rot in hell!).
I never understood how devs could accept this kind of crap on their machines. You of all people should know better and fight harder. Maybe you get indoctrinated by your education buzzwords like "engagement", "metrics", "telemetry" and you can't think straight anymore?
I saw an exceptionally long and thoughtful post on Mastodon from "Space Hobo" https://teh.entar.net/@spacehobo that definitely deserves reprinting here
-----
I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when they're in the room.
Tridge almost walked backwards into implementing the Windows SMB protocol (he was just debugging some funny NetBIOS extensions IIRC). But his paper on the #rsync algorithm was groundbreaking, and actually writing the tool to implement it was brilliant. It's become one of those tools like #curl that just forms one of the major structural supports of the modern Internet. I still remember the day that the SSH transport became the default, and I remember being able to thank him in person when he came to the San Francisco office (although IIRC by that point he'd handed control of rsync over to mbp).
I remember at my next job he came to a summit of folks working on print driver/spooler software. When he pointed out that some problems were effectively a cache-consistency algorithm, we all kind of put our fingers to our temples and said "Oh wow, you're SO right!" He was always insightful and sharp, while being gentle and approachable.
I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with him in two decades, and only know what I see him put out. A friend of mine in Australia noted that he hasn't posted to the Canberra LUG list since 2020, thanking someone for congratulating him on receiving the Medal of the Order of Australia. He's very much alive, but from what little I see I grow concerned for him.
In 2024 he took over maintenance of rsync once more. The 3.3.0 release was the last one from the previous maintainer, and Tridge is currently working on 3.4.x releases.
The issue tracker for rsync has recently lit up with regressions, showing features that worked reliably for almost 30 years are suddenly coming crashing down in 3.4.2 and 3.4.3. People are scrambling to find ways to pin rsync to known-good versions. The considerate, incisive mind I briefly knew is letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him, and it just seems so astonishingly unlike the person I met back in the day.
I am still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope all is well for him, but I will not cast aspersions on his goals or his abilities. No, instead I draw this conclusion:
If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.
That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.
>I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with [Andrew Tridgell] in two decades
But err, don't let that stop you, Space Hobo! I'm not sure how anyone is taking this Mastodon post seriously. The author barely knows Tridgell, but is supposedly 'concerned' because he hasn't posted to his local LUG mailing list for a few years. Isn't this the logic of the terminally online?
I notice that Space Hobo has a lot of posts warning about the dangers of AI slop. Given the rate at which they're able to produce copious quantities of their own artisanal variety, I can't imagine they have much to fear.
> If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.
> That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.
I disagree. The amount of commits is not from somebody who is carefully reviewing the new code and considering the changes done. It's from somebody who thinks they are in control and think they can guardrail the AI.
I've seen this at work as well. Maybe it's a small case of the braineater that so many tech bros get when they get older. But they talk about the AI as if it were a being that can be reasoned with and not that it's just a statistical interpolator and autocompleter.
I know when I'm vibe coding. Just last week I needed 5 colors for a green to read gradient for visualisation some states. I ended up with a script that outputs arbitray color gradients in 5 different colorspaces (including a colorspace for which AFAIK there's no support in Ruby as of now) and additionally also considers different color vision deficiencies.
Is it useful? Yes. Would I run this code in production? Hell no.
This is a common fallacy: that vibecoding is not that bad if one carefully reviews the output. It's true in a vacuum, but what happens when you're late and stressed out and can't be bothered with doing a proper job.
Humans are lazy, and the mistakes of being lazy when vibe coding are orders of magnitude larger than being lazy when you have to do the damn thing yourself. In fact in the latter case, laziness is a feature.
If the AI-powered software world depends on humans not being lazy, we're all fucked.
or more generously, replace lazy with tired. even if you have all the intention of reading all the code in detail, when you are tired you are less attentive.
finally, reading code can never achieve the same detailed understanding that you would get from writing it. reading anything in general can't achieve the same understanding as writing. our brain tries to optimize. you see something familiar, you skip over it because you recognize it, and that causes you to miss subtle details.
the one thing i wonder though is, how much would it help if i use AI to generate some code but then, instead of just copying the whole thing, i type it all in by hand. does that give me enough attention to review? does that still give me any benefit of using AI with less downsides?
At what point it’s just easier to do the whole thing yourself, perhaps prompting AI to give you guidelines and which whom to discuss the design, but never using it to code?
But then again, the day one is lazy or tired, one will choose the shortcut of having the machine just write the code.
well yes, that why i concluded that at this point using AI to help me is just not worth it. i'll wait until the reliability goes up and the level of frustration goes down.
for myself i don't even want to use it to learn because i a afraid of being told things that are false or don't exist. i already had that experience, spending hours trying to figure out why my code wasn't working until i realized that the AI told me to use a property or function that didn't exist. i hate wasting time and effort like that.
“letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him” or “overwhelmed with publicly released vulnerabilities and using any tool he can find to stop the bleeding”; same same.
Won't someone think of the multi billion dollar corporations?!
If peop- THIEEEVES can just download old games forever, how will these companies make money by selling new games? Or reselling the old games in their half-baked emulation offerings!
Truly the author behind this software deserves a special place in hell for creating such an evil!
(Obligatory reminder the above is to be taken as hyperbolic sarcasm. The very idea that someone would jump to defend corporations against software designed for cultural preservation is saddening)
> Or reselling the old games in their half-baked emulation offerings!
You mean other people's emulators that they have badly packaged together with the game. Emulators from precisely the groups that also develop these kind of compatibility patches to get to the data.
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