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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Nope, the PS3 was just an example of why you can’t sell at a loss with an open platform. Selling at a loss was the central point of the discussion, if that flew over your head it’s fine, but don’t try to make it my fault that you jumped in the middle of a discussion about why Valve can’t sell at a loss and said:

    The Steam Machine is a standard x86 computer that can’t match the ubiquitous ThinkCentres in price/performance.

    Which implies that even with the Steam Machines being sold at a loss a ThinkCenter would have a best price/performance which is just impossible.

    This is going in circles and bringing nothing constructive.


  • It wasn’t a standard accept/continue/yes prompt, it wasn’t something that he could just press enter or something easy and continue without noticing, he had to have read the message to know what to do, it was something akin to:

    WARNING The following essential packages will be removed. This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you’re doing! … You’re about to do something harmful, if you’re sure of what you’re doing type the phrase “Yes, do as I say!”

    The message couldn’t have been more clear about it. Plus most users wouldn’t need to use the terminal, he just happened to use the distro during the brief window that that bug existed.

    As a Linux enthusiast I can definitely tell you I never encourage people to just type words in the magic box and get it over with, and always tell them to understand what they’re typing.



  • I never said $800 would be selling at a loss, in fact I said that there’s a good possibility that they can sell it cheaper than 800 and still make a profit because they buy things in bulk. You were the first one who even mentioned it being profitable for them selling at a loss:

    They could totally make money selling it at a loss.

    Which is completely false, if they sold at a loss by definition they would lose money on each sale, and because it’s an open platform people would just buy the cheap hardware to be used for any project which would make Valve bleed money like Sony did with their PS3 until they closed the system.




  • I hold a very similar view, I usually express it like so:

    If you were to develop a simulation of a universe you would have to make some concession to be able to run such a large simulation:

    • You would have to limit causality, since the communication from one part of the cluster to the next would not be instantaneous you would need to limit the speed at which those communications can happen, that way you guarantee that one part of your cluster can’t interfere with another, think of it like a loading screen.
    • Speaking of loading screens, you could make the vast majority of the thing empty, that would limit stuff going over from one part to another.
    • You could gain lots of performance by only simulating the micro stuff when required, so an electron could be a wave of possibilities until they need to be somewhere, think of it in the same manner as current games don’t draw what’s not on screen.



  • No, it won’t. $800 will get you a machine that’s around 50% faster. Controller included.

    Care to share a link to a PCPartPicker with that? Here’s a link on the same thread of someone building a similarly speck machine for 800 https://lemmy.world/comment/20649777 and that is without the controller. In case you haven’t noticed, RAM prices are a bit crazy at the moment.

    It’s literally a laptop CPU with a laptop GPU.

    It’s literally not, they custom developed it for the product, similar to the Steam Deck one, it is based on the architecture used on laptops, but so are Playstation and Xbox AFAIK.

    Also not true. A 1k prebuilt is around 70% faster. Controller not included, though.

    Can you provide a link to such a prebuilt? Here’s the first prebuilt I could find with similar specs, and it’s 1k https://periphio.com/gaming-pcs/firestorm-7600-prebuilt-amd-gaming-pc/

    Sure, but that’s an argument in favour of it costing less.

    Yes, that was my point, the top of what this should cost is the same as a prebuilt with similar specs since Valve buys stuff in bulk it should be cheaper than that.

    Yeah, and the best selling console of the generation is $450 for the digital-only version.

    And the other one is 700, your point is?

    Stop this delusion. If this was an actual possibility, it would already be happening with the Steam Deck. Yes, I know you know someone who did it. I know someone who bought a Surface to put Linux on it. There’s dozens of us!

    It didn’t happened with the Deck because it’s not sold at a loss, so it’s cheaper to assemble a similarly built PC for you. But I definitely saw several posts through the years recommending people just buy a Steam Deck as their machine in certain conditions. If the Steam Deck costed 300 I guarantee you people would be using it as their daily drivers or building clusters of them.






  • It’s a lot more than that, it’s:

    • Knowing what parts to buy, I don’t think most average people can cite every piece in a desktop
    • Selecting parts that are compatible, try plug-and-play an AMD CPU on an Intel MOBO.
    • Selecting parts that fit the chassis you selected, unless you went with a full ATX that’s a concern.

    Now that you bought the components:

    • Knowing to ground yourself before doing anything, currently I’m getting static shocks daily where I live, if I didn’t know about this I could very easily fry a RAM by picking it up wrong.
    • Cable management is not easy, most cheaper chassis don’t have enough or dedicated space for it.
    • Correct amount of thermal paste is something lots of people get wrong.
    • Some pieces require strength to lock in place, others break if you even look at them sideways.

    Now that you’ve assembled everything:

    • Installing OS
    • Installing drivers
    • Installing Steam
    • Depending on your OS and controller of choice pairing controller and getting it to work could be difficult

    I’m not saying that assembling a computer is hard, but is definitely far from plug-and-play, and not something I would recommend for someone without technical knowledge who just wants something to play games.



  • It was known beforehand and was fixed already by the time he released his video, he just happened to luck out and encounter it during the short spam it existed.

    I disagree that he approached it as a complete idiot, he approached it as someone who knows what they’re doing, when he definitely doesn’t, and that was the issue. Anyone without technical know-how would have panicked at the system asking him to type “I know what I’m doing”, and anyone with enough technical know-how would have paused at that and read the message carefully and moped the fuck out. He had enough knowledge to think he knew what he was doing, but not enough to actually do, and the boldness to think he knew better.

    That being said, I agree that there’s plenty of other stuff to bash him for, and that was not a great example, lots of people would have found themselves in that same situation, and I don’t think it’s unfair to say the fuck up there was not entirely on his part.