Oh man, I remember marveling at BeOS in the day and for a brief moment in time when SSDs first hit the scene you could have a credibly fast Windows boot… Nowadays it’s worse than ever despite super fast storage, fastest CPUs, and gobs of RAM…

On your first point, ok, fine, perhaps some ‘save image as’ were in the files and people had no idea what it was… maybe… I think that’s a long shot, an odd image to retain without context of a related article or document clearly indicating what it is… It really strains credibility, but maybe possibly a misunderstood inclusion…

Ostensibly, they were supposed to be prepared to release the files ‘day 1’ of the administration, so they have had pretty much all year knowing this should be coming and preparing. Even if for some reason the deadline was unreasonable, it seems odd to just say nothing about that, not negotiate a different timeline with congress or something. It seems clear they were hoping that passing and have Trump sign that bill compelling the release was good enough optics and follow-up with token gesture was expected to be good enough. Which was absurd because Trump could have just done this anytime he wished, and for all the things he shouldn’t do unilaterally but does anything, this is where suddenly congress has to be all aboard…

There was a while back some Windows developer externally lamenting how ass-backwards they were and as a result their NT kernel was woefully under-featured compared to other contemporary OSes…

Then I think they forced him to take it back and say ‘um actually our kernel is actually super awesome, my mistake’.

They did not, they had some touch screen button.

They basically needlessly increased risk for the sake of avoiding optics of a safety driver with direct controls possible.

Well to say no one is deprived of anything is not necessarily correct, even though the specific “things” are not lost, out can have revenue impact, especially if it’s just completely accepted.

For example if a company wanted some distinct visual element, they might have commissioned it to be done. Now they just prompt their way to the soulless crap.

I think the point is the terminology isn’t right for “stolen”, it’s infringement. That’s not to say that it is good or right, just a matter of the right word.

Ah yes, a tortuously slow gui with late 90s “skin” design sensibilities…

Basically the anti-DRM stance. If I can buy through GOG, I will do that because I know that edition is not DRM encumbered. In steam it should be optional, but plenty of games that are DRM-free on GOG are DRM-enabled on steam. And while GOG galaxy is Windows-only, at least they do bother to provide Linux installers for some of the library.

I will grant that Valve are doing a lot more on Linux and ecosystem, with more integrated support and extending the Linux support to cover a lot of games where publishers didn’t lift a finger to enable Lniux. Probably stemming from having a significant more amount of money to work with and freedom from public investors to let them spend as they see fit.

One thing is that America hasn’t given a new presidency to the same party that held the office since the 1980s, at there’s already a tendency to waffle back and forth.

Trump got through the GOP primaries by virtue of energizing the racist hateful folks that people like McCain famously tried to talk down.

With the general election, people were miffed about Bernie, polling told them they could safely sit it out and Trump would still lose, and frankly people didn’t think Trump would be that terrible, even if they didn’t like him.

His first term made us a laughing stock and inflicted injustice at the border, but was mostly milquetoast otherwise until the pandemic, which tanked any chance at the election

Then various things contributed to a terrible economy with Biden, so people voted for “different”, and hey, Trump was not great but, pandemic aside, domestic situation wasn’t so bad…

So now here we are, an administration totally off the leash…

I know that’s the deadline, but are they actually doing it? I’ve been assuming they’ll declare some bs on why it’s not viable to do so, hoping that somehow everyone has gotten over it after the bill passed.

It’s funny how many super common phrases and words are “invented” just now according to him… like the word affordability…

He claimed that all these tariffs will cause just a ton of companies to build big factories all of a sudden next year.

He claimed that getting all those Hispanics out will mean more jobs and houses for the rest.

Basically that everything they’ve done is right, and depending on which minute he is speaking the economy is already great and everyone is lying about it or it’s bad but only because of Biden but in 2026 everything he did will finally work.

They’ve evidently already made the call that millions of people losing healthcare is a small enough percentage to not worry about. I’ve been presuming that they would pull off a seemingly better circumstance by temporarily unwinding their worst policies, but they may be actually true believers…

I will grant that particularly steam frame I don’t think Valve could have done as a public company, investors would be rioting over the attempt.

Public companies get heavily penalized for “labor of love” type endeavors.

Though CD Projekt seemingly does some things I’d have assumed investors would have balked at as well.

That’s a good point, also if you can compare like to like conditions and what the data does if you exclude teen drivers. Also if you can identify incidents related to bald tires and brake failures that wouldn’t apply.

Also would be interesting to compare human augmented driving miles to full autonomous miles. With the automated emergency braking/collision alert/lane centering assist. Anecdotally was teaching my teen to drive. Suddenly a car pulls out right in front of us, zero warning. If that happened to me, with experience on a formerly normal car, I’m pretty sure I would’ve wrecked. However my kids reflex to swerve triggered the cars “evasive steering assist” and did an action movie worthy maneuver, avoiding going off into the ditch and returning just right into the lane after getting around the other car.

Thing about autonomous driving is that it seems to get the stupid easy stuff wrong in dangerous ways, but if you have a demanding precise maneuver to make, it has a better chance once that maneuver is needed.

The challenge is one approach only needs to modify the transit infrastructure. The other means having to tear down and build new commercial and residential properties and force people and businesses to relocate in order to have a vaguely sane transit system. My area desperately wanted to do transit but even with rather significant hypothetical funding, they could only service about 10-15% of typical trips. They’ve settled on a plan that is much less money, but only serves like 5% of trips. To go with that plan, they are making restrictions around zoning to force mid density mixed use construction only, favoring one of the two chosen transit corridors.

They are trying but just people are distributed very awkwardly for mass transit.

Let’s put it this way. If you knew a person, and that person just had their fourth crash in 8 years having driven 160k miles, would you think “this person is a bad driver” or would you think “they only crashed 4 times, let’s see where this goes”.

Especially if you’ve seen this driver drive in the wrong lane, go straight in a turn only lane, and other dodgy maneuvers regularly.

A small sample size would just make the prediction highly uncertain, could be way better or way worse.

However others have made the observation that it’s reasonable to consider the miles driven as the sample size, and at over 300,000 miles, it is a bit more credible sounding.

Funny part was that tesla taxis also had a human attendant, but for the sake of appearance made them sit on the passenger side. They deliberately limited staff from being able to interact with steering and pedals.

They eventually moved those to the driver seat.

With respect to the cited companies, sure.

But if we had a GoG gaming ecosystem, then I would favor that in terms of consumer friendly.

I’ll even given them a name for a VR headset: GoGles

He’s right though, SteamOS was triggered the first time around by windows 8 and the associated store and surface rt launching as a “store only” device, widely considered a harbinger of Microsoft trying to get their whole ecosystem to be apple like (in house hardware design with software distribution platform that gives them a cut of everything).

When they came up short, they tried Windows S on x86, thinking that a Windows that could run fewer applications would somehow be seen as more valuable to customers because “security”.

I think they have learned their lesson, again, that long reaching app compatibility is the only reason their OS has a hold on the industry, but around window 8 release it was abundant clear they wanted to lock down the platform apple style. I recall at the time Valve said as much when they tried SteamOS and steam machines and pushing developers to do Linux versions. It was a flop then, but Valve ultimately revitalized it with Proton and the Deck.