I wonder if they(valve) sponsor servo
I don’t see why that would interest them.
Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
261–270 of 327 posts
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry my point is that the Steam Deck is the only product of theirs that really supports beneficial open source in software and hardware. If you don’t think fossing the case is enough then you’re making my point for me that buying the machine, frame, or controller doesn’t do anything for foss. It’d be like donating to Mozilla and expecting the money to go to Firefox development.
Valve paying for the development of KDE, Wine and adjacent projects is beneficial for FOSS.
Adjacent projects to those have if anything only eroded the credit is where credits due. Ask any non-technically inclined Steam Deck owner who contributed to Linux to make it desktop useable and people will tell you desktop computing wasn’t possible until Valve did something. Valve does a very good job scrubbing the OS to look like Steam OS and not Wine, KDE, or Arch.
So while their adjacent projects have moved users to Linux, it is not the reason the desktop is a good experience.
Again Valve’s contributions have been mainly beneficial for Valve. They are perfectly comfortable taking money from Windows and Linux users and claiming to fight some sort of freedom of technology war, but the benefits for wider non-entertainment computing remain to be seen.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d wait to see if they open source the Machine, Controller, and Frame before assuming buying their products supports open source that matters for everyone. Right now the Steam Deck is the only product that open source and supports that vision. Even this article it is not clear how beneficial some of their open source work is for everyone except Valve.
For a few years before I eventually got a Steam Deck, I played a lot of games that I bought outside of Steam, and over the past decade, the experience of doing this on Linux has massively improved. Plenty of their improvements get upstreamed to Wine, and there's nothing stopping you from obtain proton (or even one of the various unofficial tweaks of it) to run games that you don't buy through Steam to get the benefit…
Exactly they have no track record so the benefits remain to be seen how gaming improvements to Linux are advantageous to people who use FOSS beyond paying Valve for Steam DRM’d games without requiring a Windows license.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Though I am not outspoken about it, I think individuals need to come to terms with telling themselves no. This really resonates with me. I feel like self-control has gone out of fashion, but it has a lot of merit.
If self control were reliable we wouldn't need seatbelts, antilock brakes, bumpers, and other safety mechanisms. We would all just drive safely all the time. But that would be silly. Self control is not as simple and reliable as we want it to be. Sometimes systematic solutions are better.
I agree that humans are fallible, but the analogy is still off despite being catchy, yet flawed. Seatbelts are passive mechanical systems; self-control is a complex, context-dependent cognitive function. Conflating the two oversimplifies how human behavior actually works.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS. Cynical: Valve doesn't sell hardware or operating systems, they sell games. These devices are merely another storefront. Optimistic: Valve has also figured out how to turn good will into a commodity. Blowing cash on Steam sales is a bit of a cultural centerpiece of the PC gaming community. Gabe has proven that you can make stupid amounts of money by [mostly] doing…
No one is hiding anything. No one is pretending to be something they're not. Life is not a Saturday morning cartoon. There are no good guys vs bad guys. There are just businesses trying to earn more profits. Valve is a business. When Microsoft introduced a Store they threatened Steam's market share. In theory Microsoft could one day update Windows so that it's hard to buy games through non Microsoft stores. Valve res…
The discourse is not valve good others bad, rather it is consumer/product focused good and next-quarter/short-term-profit focused bad.
With the context that a lot of modern enshittification, outsourcing, layoffs, anti-consumer practises follow from these short term approaches
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
But even the most powerful apple silicon GPU is terrible compared to an average Nvidia chip
While I agree with the general point, this statement is factually incorrect - apple's most powerful laptop GPU punches right about the same as the laptop SKU of the RTX 4070, and the desktop Ultra variant punches up with a 5070ti. I'd say on both fronts that is well above the average.
That simply isn't true. I have an RTX 4070 gaming PC and an M4 MacBook Pro w/ 36GB shared memory. When models fit in VRAM, the RTX 4070 still runs much faster. Maybe the next generation M5 chips are faster but they can't be 2-4x faster.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is simply not true. Hats have always been cosmetics only. Some unusual hats even give you a disadvantage as they broadcast your position through sounds.
This video describes how, in the past, certain item sets, which included hats, gave stats boosts when worn together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZDIqnS0FcI
The author is completely ignoring that you didn't have to BUY these hats. For example, you could (and still can) craft the Milkman hat with 1 refined metal + 1 special delivery weapon.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
It bewilders me. Software's gotta be easier than hardware right? Not that either is easy but as a software engineer, the engineering that goes into modern hardware mystifies me.
It's different definitions of "easy." With hardware, you have about one billion validation tests and QA processes, because when you're done, you're done and it had better work. Fixing an "issue" is very very expensive, and you want to get rid of them. However, this also makes the process more of, to stereotype, an "engineer's engineering" practice. It's very rules based, and if everything follows the rules and passes…
> intentionally hostile kernel interface
If open-sourcing your entire kernel is being "hostile", I don't think that there is or ever was a "friendly" OS.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat. Employees have 100% control over their time. By not centralizing decision making, you create the conditions for good ideas to form and connect with the problems they are going to be best suited for. The dynamics at work here are very well understood (see Ackoff / Sycara / Gharajedaghi, and yes I had to look the spelling up). Hierarchies an…
> The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat. I'm too lazy to dig up references, but there have been semi-exposés over the years by ex-employees stating that Valve's flatness was anything but. Namely, in the absence of formal hierarchy an informal one will inevitably arise, and can be equally constraining and pathological, without the benefit of having known avenues for redress. To…
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat. Employees have 100% control over their time. By not centralizing decision making, you create the conditions for good ideas to form and connect with the problems they are going to be best suited for. The dynamics at work here are very well understood (see Ackoff / Sycara / Gharajedaghi, and yes I had to look the spelling up). Hierarchies an…
> The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat. I'm too lazy to dig up references, but there have been semi-exposés over the years by ex-employees stating that Valve's flatness was anything but. Namely, in the absence of formal hierarchy an informal one will inevitably arise, and can be equally constraining and pathological, without the benefit of having known avenues for redress. To…
The point being that the informality arises organically. People are capital-b Bad at risk assessment and planning; we are much, much better at responding to current stimuli.
Also, flat is a structure (albeit a simple one). To use an abstraction, think of a house. When you move in, the house is flat (organizationally speaking). There are floors, and that's it. This means you can place things anywhere they make sense to. Sure, it's inconvenient to have to add a dresser here or a shelf there when one doesn't already exist, but you can adapt the space to your current problems. Over time, you add things and change stuff to be less flat, which means that if you've been living there a long time there is more friction to implement things that you may not have known you were going to need at first. Your fridge is insufficient, but instead of getting one that works for what you need you now need to move all the things between the fridge and the door, move out the old fridge, and only then can you move the new one in.
With a 'flat' org - you start each project with this fresh slate. Each project can adapt it's policies and org chart to match what's important for that project. This way, you don't end up using an organization that is primarily suited for content distribution to make a game (a win that i think is obvious in Valve already) or using an org built around an advertising platform for a browser (a deficiency blatantly obvious in Google).