Yeah, the price parity thing seems to be a big misconception here especially. The price parity guideline comes from Valve’s page for Steam keys. Valve gets a 0% cut when keys are sold on third-party sites, yet they still use Valve’s infrastructure, so it makes sense for Valve to not want you to price them to have all your key sales go third-party.

As far as I can tell, Valve has zero interest in how you sell copies of a game that don’t use Steam keys.

Also something I noticed per their guidelines:

It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

As a frequent user of IsThereAnyDeal, I can tell you it’s more common than not for a game’s historical low price to not be on Steam, so Valve is definitely not strictly enforcing this. With this and the lack of legalese on the page and letting developers/publishers determine what “similar” and “comparable” are on their own terms, I’m not seeing anything Valve should be doing differently here.

I never called it reasonable. I just don’t think it’s especially egregious. Honestly, I would price the value of Valve’s contribution (which is definitely not zero) at maybe 15% to 20%, but that’s just a gut feeling.

I’m not saying the standard doesn’t suck, just taking issue with the implication that anyone using it is uniquely bad to do so.

But yeah, you’re right that getting me to admit Steam (overall) sucks would be nigh impossible. I genuinely don’t believe it does, so there’s nothing to admit. Maybe you could convince me to lie about it though? Lol.

I do admit there’s a few places it sucks, the gambling stuff being the biggest, but their positives eclipse those for me. I also acknowledge I’m in a privileged position being able to enjoy Valve’s efforts in VR, Linux compatibility, etc. directly and that I might have different opinions if I was on the outside looking in. I imagine that’s not quite the admission you want though.

Similarly, I have a spreadsheet I’ve been refining for years synced across all my devices for task management. No premade solution satisfied me. The columns I use:

• Task: short description of task
• Details: any helpful details to remember
• Did: date last done
• ↻: repetition interval in days currently going all the way from daily (1) to every other year (728)
• Do: next do/due date
• Meta Notes: usually hidden notes for future me about why a task is set up the way it is or placed where it is to avoid relearning certain lessons

I keep everything brief enough for the main 5 columns to comfortably fit both the width of my phone and a space I keep available on my left desktop monitor.

The Do column is calculated for me and is color coded from red (very late) through orange (missed a day), yellow (do today), green (near future), blue, purple, and black (far future).

Completing a task is usually as simple as Ctrl+; or F4 (or a calendar tap) in the Did column, and the immediate feedback of the color change keeps me invested in continuing.

I use this same layout for routines, projects, leisure, etc. which all have their own sheets. To give you an idea of how thorough these are, my routines one has about 200 lines.

30% is the industry standard though, and Valve’s contributions of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you’re not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn’t make that viable, that’s really on you.

The Ventoy thing reminds me of my minimalist setup:

• My car keyfob.
• My apartment key (on an extra keyring so it dangles lower to use immediately when I grab the whole set by the keyfob).
• My mailbox key.
• My work key.
• Minimal 256 GB flash drive partitioned into 100 GB for Ventoy and 150 GB for random personal files. This is my favorite minimalist shape for flash drives by far.

I have done geocaching and I’ve got a Steam Deck, so I may be borrowing the pen and adapter ideas, though I’ll probably keep the adapter with the Deck.

I’d add that “requirement” is relative. My city’s bus system has stops near enough to cover my home and work, so you could say a car is not required for the route. However, using the bus system would turn my 20 minute (10 minutes one way) daily commute into 3 hours. That’s just too impractical to consider.

Yeah, it’s actually been kind of a relief to have fewer new games to look forward to every year. I have a backlog of something like 700 unplayed games already in my library. I know I’m not going to play them all as much as they deserve before I die, but being able to make a much bigger dent in them is nice.

Mostly agreed. For me the actual biggest problem here is Nvidia presenting this as the assumed default experience everyone obviously wants and using a heavily genericized face as a win. The tech needs to be much more energy efficient and configurable on both the developer and end-user side before I’ll give it any serious attention.

Regarding future versions of this tech, I think “death of the author” still applies to video games, so changing artistic intent isn’t always bad, especially for games that get frequently replayed. I certainly don’t play stock Skyrim or Minecraft anymore. To use your example, yes, a photorealistic (attempt of) Ocarina of Time would probably be too off-putting, but give me style options like BotW, Spiderverse, Pixar, anime, etc.? I’d be down to try those.

So, I actually like generative AI (disclaimer I feel I have to include every time: local open models only), and my main problem with that image is how genericized the new face is. If you’ve seen a lot of AI images, it’s immediately recognizable as the default mixed Asian/Caucasian face you get when not prompting something more specific than “woman” due to the datasets dominating the training data. It heavily implies all faces will be similarly genericized.

I don’t think this tech will be viable unless creators can give the AI a reference image of what a character should look like when photorealistic, and that’s just going to increase the workload of running this in realtime.

#Wordle1728 3/6 Grade: A

⬜⬜🟨🟨🟨 C
⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ B-
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 A+

https://gradle.app/#SP8fDw9x2r54l9rD

N

Dang. I guess I’m more disconnected from the average consumer than I thought. My 48" has felt like plenty for even a good size living room for a while, and I’m used to 32" monitors and 7" phones, so it’s not like I prefer smaller screens. I had to go and fact check that 65" being the most popular. If you had asked me beforehand, I would have thought 55" was pushing it.

Not really my thing actually. I usually just want a song to be faster with no pitch change. If that’s your thing though, I’ve not listened to a ton, and I’m open to recommendations to convert me.

Everyone loves Technology Connections. Also, watching Alec rant about Christmas lights every year is tradition now.

deleted by creator

Roughly, it grades you by how much you reduce the pool of possible answers with each guess. The total pool of Wordle words is somewhere around 2300, so to get the answer in 4 guesses, each guess needs to average removing 85% of the pool, something like 2300 > 345 > 52 > 8 > 1.

Side note: This is related to why I refuse to play hard mode. Sure it’s technically more difficult, but it removes a huge strategic element of the game.

Let’s say you have _OUND where _ could be any of BFHMPRSW. In hard mode, you just have to guess one at a time and hope you get lucky. In normal mode, you can guess something like BRUSH or WHOMP and knock 4 words out of the pool at once.

Here’s my game today using this strategy for guess 2:

#Wordle1727 3/6 Grade: A

🟩🟨⬜⬜🟨 B
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ A
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 A+

https://gradle.app/#SP83VvGPfG9wTrV9

In hindsight, I should have done

Is that “1x is only used for music” or “all music is 1x?” I’m sure music purists hate the idea, but there’s a lot of music I definitely like more at 1.25x or 1.5x.

Interestingly enough, I don’t seem to have that exact problem. The content speeds I’m comfortable with are highly variable, and I think it has something to do with attention bandwidth.

My default speed for videos is 2.5x when I have it on a big screen and I can pump the audio directly into my head via headphones. Without the headphones, anything over 2x usually feels too fast, so I guess filtering ambient noise is using 0.5x worth of brain power. When I lose the visual component (as with audiobooks) to anchor attention onto, I’m most comfortable at 1.5x.

In real life conversations, so much of my attention is on other things (like what my hands and eyeballs should be doing) that 1x is back to feeling normal.

The only thing it maybe hurts is watching videos with other people, but I don’t do that a lot and can usually still get away with 1.25x or 1.5x. Also, I sometimes get the feeling that I’m talking too slowly, but I think I’ve always felt that.

Brain not broke. Priorities changed, and it’s okay.

As someone who has always loved reading, books just aren’t something you can multitask. And before anyone says “stop multitasking; people don’t actually multitask as well as they think they do,” it really depends on what tasks you’re pairing together. I can pair audiobooks with driving, dishes, laundry, etc. and feel like I’ve not hurt either task one bit while gaining time back, so that’s how I consume most of my books.

I think there’s still something to gain by sitting down and devoting yourself to actually reading a book, but I think it’s okay to save that for the very rare book that’s special to you for whatever reason and take your time doing so. And yes, LOTR is one of those for me too.