fartsparkles

I personally like literature about video essays about literature.

Thanks, I hate it.

Unless you’re reaaaally small

Give it to meee

I am Jack’s comprehension of subtext.

They could have gone Unix and not contributed upstream like PlayStation did.

Oculus was a device. Valve built SteamVR literally for the Rift (I had the original developer model and using Steam was pretty much essential). Valve also ensured that SteamVR supported other devices too when they came to market, levelling the playing field and enabling consumers to pick and choose hardware without having to buy games across multiple different marketplaces.

Valve pay their employees what they’re worth and share their success with them rather than devaluing them and extracting value from them. That’s pretty good going. And given how much they do with so few, it says a lot about their culture and ethic.

I don’t know about other gamers but I dislike EGS because it’s simply an inferior product and I vote with my wallet. If they offer me more value than a competitor, I’ll gladly use them. I use GOG, itch.io, and Xbox GamePass so it’s not like I’m averse to other platforms. I just don’t see why, if a game is on EGS and Steam (and not on GamePass), what value is there to me as a consumer with going with EGS?

Yet consumers get more value from Steam as a platform where that 30% cut has helped fund a powerful gaming platform, remote game streaming, driven developers to release builds for macOS and Linux and license users for all platforms with a single purchase, an open source handheld gaming device, an input library that enables practically any input device to be used and for controls to be remapped even if the game doesn’t support it, the best VR headsets and room-scale VR, popularising VR and making it mainstream, contributing to upstream to further gaming on Linux, enabling DirectX games to execute natively on Linux, several of the most popular multiplayer games on the internet, enticed PlayStation to release games on PC, putting indie developers on a level playing field with the biggest studios, enabling developers to release games mid development to help them self fund the game’s development, support the modding scene, and so much more.

Epic may charge developers less but that doesn’t offer me, a consumer, any extra value.

Instead their platform and its lack of investment and innovation make the purchases I have made in their store feel less valuable and cumbersome as their competition increase the value of their offerings.

I’m not saying they’re the bad guys but the argument that developers get more money doesn’t really matter if that 30% cut is felt justified to consumers.

And with the upcoming untethered VR offering from Valve on the horizon, which will no doubt be powered by open source with their improvements upstreamed, that 30% cut feels even more justified when Linux becomes fully capable of VR thanks to my purchases.

I’m not insisting anything; stating C is not a memory-safe language isn’t a subjective opinion.

Note I’m not even a Rust fan; I still prefer C because it’s what I know. But the kernel isn’t written by a bunch of Lewis Hamiltons; so many patches are from one-time contributors and the kernel continues to get inundated with memory safety bugs that no amount of infrastructure, testing, code review, etc is catching. Linux is written by monkeys with a few Hamiltons doing their best to review everything before merging.

Linus has talked about this repeatedly over the past few years at numerous conferences and there’s a reason he’s integrating Rust drivers and subsystems (and not asking them to fork as you are suggesting) to stop the kernel stagnating and to begin to address the issues like one-off patches that aren’t maintained by their original author and to start squashing the volume of memory corruption bugs that are causing 2/3rds of the kernel’s vulnerabilities.

No idea what you’re being downvoted. Just take a look at all the critical CVSS scored vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel over the past decade. They’re all overwhelmingly due to pitfalls of the C language - they’re rarely architectural issues but instead because some extra fluff wasn’t added to double check the size of an int or a struct etc resulting in memory corruption. Use after frees, out of bounds reads, etc.

These are pretty much wiped out entirely by Rust and caught at compile time (or at runtime with a panic).

The cognitive load of writing safe C, and the volume of extra code it requires, is the problem of C.

You can write safe C, if you know what you’re doing (but as shown by the volume of vulns, even the world’s best C programmers still make slip ups).

Rust forces safe(r) code without any of the cognitive load of C and without having to go out of your way to learn it and religiously implement it.

It’s visible in this image

Apathy is dangerous. Concerted and continued vocal distaste and increasing the visibility of these plans is the best way to respond if you disagree rather than muted apathy and sarcasm.

Who knows. They launched a hugely successful service via a Discord server…

That said, I’m not sure the designer behind the flop that was the Vision Pro will lead to a compelling “AI” hardware product.

Perhaps it’ll be goggles that’ll dream up interesting eyeballs for you to wear.