I explained why it needs to be left running: because opening it is too much of a hassle to even bother with. Thus I don’t, and I don’t plan to open it any time soon.

GOG Galaxy is a nonsequitur. I’ve never installed it and it’s never been required to download or play any game. I use GOG’s website to buy and download games. Galaxy might as well not exist and I’m fine with that.

It kills my laptop’s battery. It doesn’t matter if it’s not using much CPU, it keeps the CPU from sleeping and thus wastes a ton of battery. This is a well-known problem with software that uses its own timers and doesn’t optimize for battery life. Thus I do not want to leave Steam running all the time and so my experience is degraded.

When I want to play a Steam game that uses DRM I need to start up Steam, log in, do multi factor authentication, then wait for Steam to do all its updates, then restart while the patches are applied, then finally get to my library so I can start the game. It’s like a 10-15 minute process that is usually enough to kill my desire to play the game in the first place, so I don’t bother.

As for DRM, well none of the games on GOG have DRM. Some Steam games have DRM, some don’t. If Valve wanted to, they could decide to stop offering DRM and then they’d be DRM free too. If developers didn’t want that they’d have to take their games off Steam and lose those sales. This would incentivize more developers to go DRM free.

But they don’t. Thus Valve benefits from DRM and so they deserve blame for it, not just the developers. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too.

I find it very hostile compared to, for example, GOG which lets me download games DRM free and run them without running an app.

Steam is a battery hog and is designed to entice you to keep it running all the time. I hate leaving it running which means I don’t have access to most of my library.

None of what I wrote was intended as a defence of Epic. I don’t like the company at all these days. The last game of theirs that I played was Gears of War. I loved the original Unreal but that was so long ago they might as well be a completely different company.

Anyway I think Valve has some kind of gamer reality distortion field going on. Gamers step up to defend it the way Apple fanboys defended Apple back in the Steve Jobs days. Have people forgotten that Gabe is a billionaire who just got another megayacht?

Proton is a really cool project and Valve has contributed a lot to it but it’s not charity. Valve profits a ton off Proton because it supports game sales on Steam. Linux and SteamDeck users buy a lot more games because of it, games they otherwise couldn’t even run.

The fact that Proton is open source was only partly Valve’s choice. The project is based on Wine which has an LGPL 2.1+ license, which requires Valve to release the source code to their modifications of Wine itself. The extra Proton parts don’t have to be open source, but in practice it creates a lot more work for Valve if they have to maintain their modifications as a fork rather than upstreaming as much as possible.

I don’t see how SteamOS is any different from iOS in this regard. Apple spends a ton of resources developing APIs to support all kinds of optional functionality that 3rd party developers can take advantage of. None of it earns any direct profit.

Not sure why “direct profit” is important.

Proton is basic infrastructure for Steam Deck (which runs Linux). Valve has sold millions of units that I doubt would have been sold without Proton. There’s just a ton of games that will never be ported to native Linux.

Proton isn’t only Valve’s doing though. It’s heavily built on top of Wine which is a very mature open source project that has seen extensive leadership and contributions by CodeWeavers.

They developed the Unreal engine. Not sure how “like Proton” you meant, but it’s used by lots of games and is quite a complex and well-regarded 3D engine.

No way man. Having dry skin in the cold is way easier to tolerate than damp skin. When I come out of the gym covered in sweat and it’s -20 outside it’s 10 times worse than when I go in.

I think they’re trying to kill Patreon for some reason. Maybe they’ll launch their own Patreon competitor? Maybe they noticed developers were giving away iOS apps and getting crowdfunded on Patreon?

A thing of beauty. What a handsome lil man!

For being a science meme group, I’m seeing a distinct lack of understanding of how psychology, especially cognitive bias, works.

If they’ve got ADHD. Then the meth is literally self-medicating them and allowing them to function. Non-ADHD people on meth are a different story.

Construction often ends up with the worst sorts of people. I have multiple friends and family who have worked in the business and they’ve dealt with people who would regularly no-show (not even call in sick), show up drunk, high on meth, and do all kinds of dangerous / stupid stuff including throwing heavy tools down from upper floors, walking around without paying attention (and falling off scaffolding etc).

My uncle also had to deal with mafia guys involved with construction unions.

There’s a numerical asymmetry to stuff like this. You could have only 1 in 1000 men be catcallers yet a single catcaller could catcall thousands of women on their way to work (stereotypically from a construction site as they walk by).

And yet everyone waits until a few months before tax time to put their money into RRSPs. I have seen it first hand. The money just floods in.

It doesn’t have to happen on one day to move the price. Prices move whenever there are more buyers than sellers or vice versa.

She was also a vegetarian, a lifelong animal rights activist, close friend of Paul Watson (founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society), and the founder of her own Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the welfare and protection of animals.

People are complicated!

The taxes aren’t on one person though, they’re on everyone. Everyone looking to sell their stocks at tax time => price goes down because no one is looking to buy.

Liquidity issues.

For example, loads of elderly people in California own homes that have very low property taxes which were assessed decades ago. If their property values were re-assessed today they wouldn’t be able to afford the property tax and would have to sell their home and move (possibly flee the state).

Now that’s not the situation these billionaires are in. They aren’t tied up in a single house they’d have to sell. Their issue is that they’d have to sell a lot of stocks to pay a wealth tax, an event that could trigger a huge market drop in the price of those stocks.

You can be extremely asset-rich while being relatively cash-poor. I say relatively because these billionaires likely have millions in cash sitting around but that might not be enough to afford tens of millions in taxes every year (which must be paid in cash, not stocks).

Ahhh. I thought that was just the haze of the red planet!

There isn’t enough CO2 for that either. Mars’s total atmospheric pressure is way less than 1% of Earth’s. Mars is closer to the Moon in terms of atmosphere than it is to Earth!