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Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

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Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#801
post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing? Valve makes it money selling the games on the store. Right, so my question is how does better compatibility with (non-game) Windows apps help them make more money?

A better Linux desktop experience means it's more viable as a daily driver, which makes it more likely to be used for gaming instead of Windows. Valve wants independence from Microsoft Windows, a better Linux desktop is part of that.

It's also possible they'd strike a deal and sell the software via Steam platform. I don't see why would developers object that, after all it would be a new market for then previously out of reach. Doubt Microsoft would agree, but smaller devs for sure.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#802
post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaters don't have to play like normal people to avoid detection. They just have to make it expensive to police them. For example, the game developer may be afraid of a even a 10% false positive ban rate, and as a result won't ban anyone except perhaps a small number of clean-cut cases.

Most cheaters are playing well outside of human limits and doing huge amounts of damage to the legitimate player experience. A 10% safety margin beyond human play sounds reasonable. A world where cheaters can only play 10% better than humans is a far better world than the one we are in at the moment.

"A world where cheaters can only play 10% better than humans is a far better world than the one we are in at the moment."

My world is pretty fine, as I don't play games on servers, without active admin/mods that kick and ban people who obviously cheat.

ML solutions can maybe help here, but I believe they can reliable detect cheats, without banning also lucky or skilled players, once I see it.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#803

Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact. The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.

Their absurdly high 30% cut combined with having the only otherwise decent store with real network effect driven market share is a very real criticism

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#804
post #802
post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most cheaters are playing well outside of human limits and doing huge amounts of damage to the legitimate player experience. A 10% safety margin beyond human play sounds reasonable. A world where cheaters can only play 10% better than humans is a far better world than the one we are in at the moment.

"A world where cheaters can only play 10% better than humans is a far better world than the one we are in at the moment." My world is pretty fine, as I don't play games on servers, without active admin/mods that kick and ban people who obviously cheat. ML solutions can maybe help here, but I believe they can reliable detect cheats, without banning also lucky or skilled players, once I see it.

Human administration is not scalable.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#805
post #688

I think Valve is not some kind of God who free the human from the hand of Microsoft, they are a private company, they are just protecting their business and protecting their business "accidentally" also protecting the customer's benefits. The movement towards Linux benefits Valve the most since they have invested on Linux Gaming for 10 years now and that movement "conveniently" benefits the gamers too. That's a win-w…

I always think Valve as the "ideal" capitalist company, because what they do fits the idea of "invisible hand" perfectly, that each individual acting in their own self-interest end up benefiting everyone. And you'd be right, that Valve is nothing special, if that idea is correct, because in that case most companies will be like Valve. But just look around, do you see many companies like Valve? No, that's because capi…

Valve cuts 30% of your revenue no matter how much you earn. They also cut 15% of the transaction by being the middleman on the market.

They also ignored the gambling/trading plague for too long, until a lot of countries threatened them to stop indirectly promoting gambling (which definitely hit them financially).

They are sitting on a money printing machine and their job is making it print no less to buy GabeN another yatch. They are like the cigarette company who donates shit load of money to the charity and cancer prevention lab while making more cigarrate then ever because people love smoking it.

I don't think they wanted or planned to be monopolized, but they are definitely taking the advantage of being it.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#806
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jim Keller goes into some detail about what difference the ISA makes in general in this clip https://youtu.be/yTMRGERZrQE?si=u-dEXwxp0MWPQumy Spoiler, it's not much because most of the actual execution time is spent in a handful of basic OPs. Branch prediction is where the magic happens today.

Jim Keller has to say that.

The stage is yours if you choose to refute him.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#807
post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major reason is they are a private company with good business. The don't have a need to keep adding to shareholder value ie stock price instead just need to generate a yearly income. We have reached a point where the shareholders are a companies real customers and that is who they all try to attract.Everytthing else a company does is just to attract shareholders

There's a little known alternative: Steward-ownership [1]. It's the kind of structure used by Novo Nordisk, Bosch or Patagonia. LLM summary: "Steward-ownership is a model where a company’s control stays with long-term stewards (founders, employees, or a mission-aligned foundation) while profits are limited and the company cannot be sold for private gain. The goal is to protect the mission permanently." The key, if I…

Plenty of countries have corporate laws that are less shareholder focussed than those of america. In the Netherlands for example boards are obligated to take into account broader sets of interest such as employee in their decisions and this is enforceable in court.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwing in ML jargon and going straight to modelling before understanding the problem reduces your credibility as a data scientist in front of engineers and stakeholders. As always, one of the most difficult parts is getting good features and data. In this case one difficulty is measuring and defining the reaction time to begin with. In Counter Strike you rely on footsteps to guess if someone is around the corner an…

Appreciate the feedback, you're right - armchair speculation is different than actual data science. Without actual data to examine, we're left with the latter and that can still be a fun exercise even if it doesn't solve any business problem. We're here to chitchat and converse after all.

Yeah, apologies if it was too harsh. I was more irked by someone else who kept trying to asset it's an easy problem, and confused it with your display of raw curiosity, which is something I don't wish to discourage.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#809
post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny, because Zach Barth (of SpaceChem and many other wonderful games fame) worked at Valve and then described them as the ideal anarcho-communist type of organization.

oh that's funny. do you have a link to where he had said that? i guess Yanis Varoufakis did work at Valve, so there's some basis. but then again, what an organization is internally and how the organization behave as a whole can be different.

He said it in this recent interview. I'm not sure of the timestamp, somewhere in the middle, I think. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ho0F_jdfSs&t)

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#810
post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll make you a deal. You agree to give me a trillion dollars, but only if I make you 8 trillion dollars. I don't think he'll deliver and I think it's based on fantasy economics, he's been really losing it recently, but as a deal it's not entirely irrational if he could make it happen.

The thing is, the compensation is only based on it happening, not on him making it happen. “I make you 8 trillion dollars” rests on a strong assumption that it all comes from the CEO. This particular CEO is on the more influential end of the spectrum, but I think executives generally get too much credit for outcomes. If this does happen, it won’t just be because of the CEO, but also because of ~100,000 other employee…

Speaking honestly as a foot soldier employee, I look around myself and I think you could swap out most of the people around me, including me, for most other people in our industry and the company would continue just fine. In fact that happens naturally over time anyway. The work we do is essential, but as individuals we are not essential. If I quit and move on, how many investors will reconsider their position in my company? Give me a break, and they would be right to not care.

It's about leverage. It's all about where you stand and how long your lever is. Musk stands at the top and he has a very long set of levers. He's also much more closely personally involved in engineering aspects of a company that most CEOs know little to nothing about. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad, because his decisions have massively outsized effects because of this. Leverage.

If Musk makes good or bad decisions over the next few years, that matters much, much more than the decisions of anyone else at Tesla, especially because he hires and fires everyone else at Tesla. They're all only there, as individuals in particular, because of him anyway.

As it happens I think his decision making has deteriorated significantly recently, in some respects but not all. Also Tesla just doesn't have the magic special sauce SpaceX has had since they developed reusability. There's no special engineering insight in the Tesla architecture. Other vehicle manufacturers already caught up. That catch up is happening in space tech as well with BO's recent booster recovery, but SpaceX still has a very significant lead there, based on a truly revolutionary concept (which Musk championed personally) that they had exclusively for 10 years. Starship still doesn't work though, so we'll see.

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