Related: has anyone actually tried Alyx on Linux recently? I set up ALVR with my facebook quest the other month and every game except Alyx was fine. Half-assed googling makes it sound like that was a known issue but there are also probably like five people on the planet trying Alyx in Proton.
From everything we have heard… I would be shocked if it wasn’t pretty damned close.
Gamers Nexus touched on the pricing info they were given. Go watch the video to confirm but off the top of my head:
So what that translates to is
Which… sounds about right. The Steam Frame is going to use a comparatively cheap Snapdragon processor but it still needs all the HMD tech. The Facebook Quest 3 is around 500 USD and considering economy of scale… that is probably the price floor for the Steam Frame.
And the Steam Machine? That is rocking a proper Zen 4 with 16 gigs of DDR5 and 8 gigs of DDR6. Considering how expensive RAM already is and how that probably ain’t going down until late 2026 at the earliest… And it is worth noting that people lost their shit over the ROG XBOX ALLY X S 45 WHATEVER being 1k but… spec wise that lines up with similar laptops. The display is a decent chunk of that, which the Steam Machine won’t have, but… yeah.
Computers is expensive. Especially in a Post Liberation Day world. It will be a miracle if the base console price (because you can bet the PS6 is gonna do the same stupid bullshit MS did with the Series S…) is below 900 USD with the “real” price being well over 1k. And the Steam Machine is going to be priced along those lines because Valve (presumably) doesn’t have a bunch of warehouses full of parts from five years ago.
The good news is that if you already have a gaming PC, and don’t need the Valve branding, you can get a pretty solid AMD NUC for 300-600 USD that will run Bazzite perfectly and play a lot of your games locally with the rest streaming over Moonlight or Steam Link. GMKtec pretty much have this market on lock and I personally love my K11 (overkill but also really nice to not have to walk upstairs to wake my desktop for every single game).
You’ll have the same nonsense with HDMI 2.1 as the Steam Machine will (so VRR) and AMD but there are workarounds for that (basically you flash a displayport dongle to be REAL sketchy). And you’ll be able to take advantage of most of the software improvements Valve are pushing for SteamVR, SteamOS, and Steam Link that are going to be coming rapidly for the launch. MUCH less oomph but… people who are expecting proper 4k experiences out of a Steam Machine are lying to themselves.
You would need REALLY massive hands to touch those when your thumbs are resting on the analog sticks or the face buttons.
Not sure what drugs you are on but… gimme some.
But yeah. I am glad that the world is trying to minimize dependence on MS. Nextcloud… is very much not it. It is bloated and plugins break constantly and it is shockingly horrible for everything except file sync.
There is no such thing as an “ongoing ‘clean’ data source”. Because the people paying for these models are actively using it on those platforms. Whether it is because they are too stupid to express their own thoughts and “use chatgpt for coming up with ideas” or because they are running a bot farm.
And the reality is that… it doesn’t actually matter. People are on the “dead internet theory” bandwagon again. But… think back to the past five or six years. How often have you had a meaningful conversation on ANY social media platform? It happens occasionally, but mostly you can hope for someone to key in on a single sentence you said or actively misrepresent your post because they wanted to tell a joke they clearly have been workshopping for the past few days. More often you get someone who just keys in on a single word and pastes a copypasta that they know will do well (see: Basically any topic about “AI” on the fediverse…). And that is assuming you get a reply at all.
Let alone all the people who pretend the internet used to be a wonderful place where you get the answer to everything instantly rather than worrying if chatgpt hallucinated. Those motha fuckers clearly never spent much time on stack overflow or the intel message boards…
“AI” didn’t learn how to pass the Voight-Kampff test. Humanity now does so poorly on it that we have to grade on a curve.
So as for “sloppy” models? We are probably less than a year out before influencers start bragging that they love ShitGPT 7 because “it isn’t pretentious. It talks like me”. Sorry “Others disingenuous. ShitGPT speak truth gooder. Like, comment, subscribe and use my affilly linkle”
Like… OnlyFans ostensibly isn’t a porn platform. But they know what they’re doing. The credit card companies know what they’re doing yet turn a blind eye? How does that work?
OnlyFans corporate actively downplays the porn and STILL try to pretend it is about normal vlogging and fitness. It is a big chunk of why there was that former disney channel actress who made a huge deal about posting some bikini shots to OF. She made bank and OF got themselves in the news as “actually it is all not even softcore”. Similarly, OF has shockingly strict and well defined rules for the kinds of content that can be sold (stuff like “no fisting”).
And the payment providers generally don’t care until they are legally forced to care.
Same with Reddit. Karma farming is horrible for the site’s long term health, yet they seem to structure things to encourage it as much as they can.
Long term doesn’t matter but also…
Reddit’s product isn’t people pretending they are clever for referencing an eighteen year old joke from It’s Always Sunny or having endless arguments over whether someone is morally virtuous for posting a meme about someone they don’t like being a bad pet owner.
The product is the advertisement and “authority”. Having someone respond to “what wok should I buy” with a summary of why you kind of want the cheapest carbon steel piece of crap you can find with the desired diameter, bottom, and handles isn’t helpful. Blog sites already exist. Hell, you can check the heat map on the youtube search bar for how many people just skip to the end of a Project Farm video.
But by having the top result be whatever brand won that week’s fight? Suddenly everyone talks about how much they hate google and how the real secret is to search “best wok reddit”. And then if reddit suddenly starts charging for data scraping so google can’t see it anymore or API access to automate those kinds of “grass roots” answers?
As for long term? There is no long term. They have years of training data. They’ll get bought out by whoever wants it the most and then be done with it.
I kinda have a distant fascination with this whole ecosystem. Like, what drives all this money and attention to change hands? I don’t really see the appeal of idolization, myself, which is why I find it interesting I suppose.
Only Fans? People be horny and the most successful sex workers understand that it isn’t the stripper who shows her poon on stage that makes the most money: it is the one who can work a crowd and manufacture a “connection” with the guy who will pay for five lap dances a week. Its why so many of them will sell private videos and text messaging as an incentive (and then, when they make enough money, pay a service to do said texting). At which point it is the old screenshot of a kid commenting on a pewdiepie video that they are going to mow the lawn and then they are back… except it is someone typing one handed to a porn vod.
Advertisement and astroturfing? Advertisement works. People pretend they are above it but they aren’t. One of my genuine favorite examples was back during the pandemic when one of the WWE shows came on right before some reality tv show called Sex Island or whatever. You could watch in real time as people began by complaining they hate all the ads and it is trashy (it really lowered the vibes of the sex trafficker company…). But, after a few weeks, there were “ironic” watch alongs on all the major wrestling message boards.
And that is especially true on reddit and the like. There is a reason that “SEARCH STRING reddit” was a “lifehack”. And people are generally smart enough to call out the account with -20 karma that is talking about how awesome the Babish Wok is. They are less likely to do that when the account has 5k karma and the last few comments look legit.
And… if you know the right circles to look in, there are still orgs that will pay for “real” social media accounts either for one offs or for ownership.
Sometimes it is a hardcore simp who has keyed in on the complete lack of discoverability in the OF space.
More often… people are just deeply fucking stupid. Its the same reason you’ll see people incorporate the same obnoxious self-censoring that tiktoks do in their posts… because they know that pewdiepie is afraid of getting demonetized for saying “pedophile” so they might be too. Or… the dumbfucks who shout into a speaker phone in public because they saw kim kardashian do it on the tv.
And same here. They are keyed in enough to realize that sites like reddit are full of people who post porn to get their accounts enough karma to get past most filters without realizing that the goal of that is to then nuke the past messages and sell it to a marketing firm (which is why reddit finally added the ability to hide an account’s posts and comments).
I mean… the good news is that sex workers clearly think it is worth advertising here.
Except… probably not. A good friend of mine has her content posted somewhat prominently here and on mastodon. She herself is not involved in the slightest and it is just someone karma farming in systems without global (or local) karma.
“We are responsible for what we say and what we do, not the interpretation others do out of them.”
Yeah, fuck off with that Steven Universe bullshit. It is fun to tell kids to do what is true to them and to not care about what anyone else says. Until they are an adult who thinks dressing up like a school shooter and making “I identify as an attack helicopter” ‘jokes’ is fun.
Intent is excuses and apologies. Actions are… actions. And if someone’s take is that they totally get why sucker punch bent over backwards to protect chuds (at the expense of labor) and that they clearly don’t give a shit about the massive waves of abuse thrown at a voice actress? I’mma gonna assume they are a chud. And, because I believe in judging people by their actions, I 'mma gonna call them a chud.
Does that mean they are a chud? Of course not. There is a LOT of room to apologize and make it clear they are actually an ally. A half-assed “no, I didn’t do that” ain’t it.
And… if you aren’t an ally, you are an enemy. And a large part of allyship is doing what you can, no matter how small, to make people feel Seen and welcome. And when you have moderators siding with the people who don’t really give a shit what kinds of abuse a genderfluid actress received for daring to exist while making DAMNED sure we understand why the company that left them out to dry is gonna protect the chuds?
So, on that note: Decide where you stand. But, by all indications, you might as well ban me now because I’m going to continue to call out chuds. And I’d hate for that to get in the way of the hype train and posting daily blog posts.
Unfortunately, we didn’t create enough art for Joseph Gordon Levett to sell so Volnutt is forever stuck on the moon and we will never get an aged up Tron Bonne outside of the internet.
I forget a lot of 3. But 1 and 2 didn’t really do mission rankings along those lines and were generally built around having to push through multiple rooms and hallways. Whereas 4(a) heavily emphasized wide open spaces and rushing to get those objectives.
6 was a MUCH better balance where the S rank actually often required a certain number of kills and many missions had ways to justify the ammo expenditure so that it wasn’t just “get a karasawa and then human plus”.
I always preferred the chonky bois of AC1/2, but 4/4a did indeed feel REAL damned good.
My main issue is that everything about the mission structure encouraged just rushing the objective and DPSing it down. Which is fun sometimes but not when it is EVERY mission.
Its also a big reason I genuinely loved Daemon Ex Machina (the first one, at least). You had the blitzes and the arena missions but you also had some truly amazing slogs where you are just fighting nigh endless waves of MTs and are grabbing whatever gun you can off the ground to down a few more enemies.
Removed by mod
It was literally a joke about wondering if the killer would be named “mario”. It was far tamer than what many of the chuds have said.
It was sheer and utter cowardice and abandoning the people who actually make the games that got them there. And when even god damned paramount reversed course with kimmel, the head of Sucker Punch doubled down on standing by their actions.
As for Ishii: “Social media was being social media” sums up how much you care on that front.
And THIS is why GTA6 will sell like hotcakes no matter what happens.
Part of me thinks that this is going to be the one where no one fucking gives a shit because of all the BS that R* have been doing since GTA5,
Zero chance.
Sucker Punch fired one of their senior devs for a mario and luigi joke when kirk got got. EVERYONE was angry, the studio heads came out to say they stand by their decision, and plenty of people were keyed in to the hell that Erika Ishii has had to put up with on social media for daring to portray a female character in a video game.
Ghost of Yotei comes out. Metacritic of 86 and just about every outlet had to cover it and talk about how much they love it. A few of the more independent outlets stood true but… there are just so few video games that come out in a given year that you can’t possibly dare to deprive yourself of something over things like workers rights or politics. I mean, what else could you possibly play in September of 2025!!!
This is the Author’s Guild asking for internet providers to be able to block people without a court order.
Uhm…
Authors Guild Asks Supreme Court
That’s the question at the heart of Cox Communications v. Sony, a case the Authors Guild—joined by Sisters in Crime, Romance Writers of America, the Songwriters Guild of America, Novelists Inc., the Dramatists Guild of America, and the Society of Composers and Lyricists—weighed in on by filing an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on October 22, 2025.
This is asking for the court to decide in their favor.
As for
They can already go after individual infringers and web sites that aid in piracy. Now they want to be able to order providers to cut off users without the bother of going to court over it.
ISPs have been doing that for decades. That is where data caps came from with the ISPs tending to throttle the hell out of you if you downloaded too much in a single month or they thought you were running a website without paying for business internet. Back in the day, you just had to call and ask why your internet was so slow (for the fifth time that year…) and they would un-cap, but that eventually turned into an official system where they charge an arm and a leg for going over 1 TB or whatever nonsense.
ISPs are already doing whatever they want without court orders. They just do so in a way that lets them profit off the pirates (if there isn’t enough competition to prevent them from doing so).
I’ll also just add on: We very much do not want the ruling to be that ISPs have to document everything you do and collect evidence so that the rights holders can sue you. It will end very very badly. Because that won’t be the current model where if you get caught you get a letter and stop.
The local government is not banning repeat speeders from using the roads though.
Uhm… they do. Fuck up badly enough and your license is taken away. Does that stop people from driving? Of course not. But the penalties for getting caught go up really fast (if you aren’t a cishet white “good old boy”).
And while it is more associated with NIMBYism than safety, there are a few neighborhoods around the country where “no through traffic” is enforced very heavily. Usually there is no actual fine, but you get a rentacop who will make your life hell for the 30 minutes they spend “running your plates” and so forth.
That should remain the decision of the courts.
Uhm… what do you think this is?
I mean… why do you think new speed bumps and traffic signals get added to neighborhoods? Same with adjusted speed limits.
That IS the engineers (well, the local government that employs them) being held accountable for dangerous roads.
For this? I have very serious concerns for all the obvious reasons. But ISPs 100% know what we are doing. Like… there is a reason that comcast et al basically have like a 1 gig upload on a 100 gig down connection. Same with bandwidth caps… which “worked” up until everyone was teleconferencing from home and watching 4k netflix.
And… considering comcast et al love to sell bundles for “unlimited bandwidth” or “symmetrical upload”… they are very much profiting off of piracy.
Steam Frame is going to have a snapdragon processor and will “be a computer”.
So there will be an ARM native Steam client (and Steam OS that may or may not be SteamOS). Just a question on whether that gets a wider release.
But yes. Games themselves will be heavily dependent on FEX.