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

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 “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

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.

Only a couple extra permanent ones from actual mask shards though, right?

I think the tools are this one’s intended combined damage mitigation, e.g. the magma bell reducing fire attacks to 1 damage. It’s not really that every significant enemy does 2 damage and that’s that, instead you gotta gear up synergistically.

I get what you’re saying though. I think probably they wanted to make other gear more meaningful than in HK where mask shards & silk spools are kinda the only collectables worth a damn.

As soon as I realised I was getting hit for 2 masks, what I read from it was “at some point in this game I will have at least 7 masks”. I don’t want to spoil myself, but I only really agree with you if that isn’t the case. If you haven’t reached that point either, just imagine how nice it’ll feel

Oh they figured it out alright, that’s how the current players were handed the keys to the industry and why they take the more insidious DRM approach to controlling the content they own. They understand it’s less likely to cause customer to revolt than the fundamental problems with the movie/tv show distribution business model that came before. And tbh they’re right - yeah I pirate, but mostly because that’s what I’ve done for 30+ years at this point. People have been saying the most recent anti-consumer decision by Netflix will finally be their downfall for like a decade - their stock is now at all time highs.

You aren’t wrong that people will prioritise convenience/features highest but make no mistake, these companies are fully aware of the impact of their shitty practices. It’s all calculated.

A custom skin with widgets on the home screen pulling from Trakt, TMDB, IMDB etc lists - here I have the “New” category set to “Trending Recent Shows” from Trakt to highlight actually new stuff, whereas “Trending” category is set to “Trending This Week” from TMDB to cover returning shows. This approach inevitably leads to duplicates but at least covers everything important without the perpetual The Office, Breaking Bad etc results. When a title is highlighted, network badge is shown where available. The categories that point to individual episodes autoplay upon selection, the ones that point to series go to the ‘folder’ type browser

Search page overriding default kodi search, categorised by movie / tv show, also includes trakt lists.

Heaps of navigation and backend customisation, too much to show or mention but some notable things being the play next dialog including display prompt being based on end of subtitles track (with time-based backup), customised context menu including option to play trailer (displayed via long press on remote, requires youtube API key for HD trailer playback), codec prioritisation/blacklist, overriding local watched/unwatched status with trakt, partial playback resume including auto resume option

FWIW these examples are on a minimally configured proof of concept instance, when I set this up for family I need to test and tune it a bunch to ensure codec compatibility with the device/display, auto resume if that’s the behaviour they want etc. Base Kodi also allows to prefer non-hearing impaired subtitle tracks, audio tracks in a specific language or original language etc. The end result being they get what they want spoonfed to their home screen the vast majority of the time, and otherwise can find it easily with the search without hassling me lol. In the worst case scenario I need to show them how to rescrape/source select from the context menu, but that’s only happened once where an older title’s only cached release had russian-only audio. The rest of their time they can just choose an episode/movie without having to understand any specifics about whether the top result is the best stream or not. It’s enough that I’m still finding more UX improvements to add, years later.

I’d love to have this set up for usenet but don’t have any issues using torrent cache on torbox essential so just can’t really justify the cost difference

https://archive.md/Pxhh3

The Kodi add-on I’m using uses torrentio in the backend, but has way more customisation than the stremio app + trakt integration, autoplay using preset quality filters etc

Stremio app is more seamless experience when there’s no hits for the title already in debrid cache but that’s pretty rare these days even on torbox

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