Yeah they make the same point in their subscribers-only podcast. They did say that they earn enough to be sustainable, so it sounds like they aren't having to dip into their savings anymore. I hope they get more than that though as everyone deserves to thrive.
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Yeah it stops converting numbers too. At my job we have a lot of ids that start with 0, and it was super annoying to have '000123' turn into '123', now it keeps it as text.
I'm not sure what version got this, but there's a setting now where you can disable auto-conversion and it's amazing.
https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-excel-disable-setting-auto-conversion-data-into-dates
Not even just AAA studios, but I've seen a lot of indie studios that used to provide Linux builds aren't anymore in their newer games. Two games that come to mind are Everspace 2 & Talos Principle 2.
I wouldn't call it collecting in the sense of owning them all, but I've been building up my game library on GOG and archiving all the installers on an external hard drive. It at least gives me more of a sense of ownership than my Steam library does, because if GOG went away tomorrow I'd still have my games.
removed claims their OS needs less RAM (I have no clue) but for OP running Windows 8GB is no where near enough.
Sometimes I like to think of the economy as a small village where people directly goods with each other. The invention of money means you can make a living off of selling to just one person and still have something to offer the farmer, but for this thought experiment this I want to focus on the actual, real, goods and services of the economy.
So imagine a small village. You have the farmer who grows food. You have the blacksmith who builds car parts, and the mechanic that builds cars and tractors. And you also have the village fool who makes people laugh in exchange for tips. The mechanic gives tractors to the farmers in exchange for food, and gives some of that food to the mechanic in exchange for parts. When any of them need a laugh they'll give something to the fool to hear a joke. And you have your other industries, etc. One day a new person comes to town, who will represent the new tech industry. They realize that they can build a machine that tells the farmer the best days to plant and harvest which will help the farmer grow more food. The farmer happily accepts, paying the tech person some food in exchange. Similarly they're able to help optimize the other industries, and with the value they're providing and them being in short demand they're able to get great wages.
With their prosperity, other tech people start coming to the village and helping the other industries get more efficient. Most of the concrete efficiencies are optimized, so they start working on more abstract ones. Someone builds an app to help the villagefolk find someone to trade with ("I have 2 gears but I need 3 loaves" gets matched with "I have 2 wheat bushels and need 2 gears" which gets matched with "I have 3 loaves and need 2 wheat bushels"), in exchange getting a small cut of those resources, and a larger cut if someone pays for preferential matching (advertising). Other tech people find work helping the other tech people at their jobs (IDEs, libraries, issue trackers, etc.) And other tech people build animatronic village fools to entertain the village themselves (video games).
More tech people come as they've heard of how much they can earn at this village. Eventually they start having some trouble finding work to do, everything seems optimized. Some of the wealthy members of the town (let's say the farmer of the biggest field) says to many of these tech people that they'll pay them food in exchange that the farmer gets a portion of whatever the tech person ends up earning with what they build (low interest rates). With all the good ideas used up, the projects these tech people are working on aren't working well (crypto) or are duplicates of already existing tools (how many social media apps do we need, etc.). Still though, the farmer is giving them a lot of food so yet more tech people come to the village, and many of the children of the village (like the farmer's son) are becoming tech workers too.
Eventually, after a bad crop season (maybe because the farmer's son didn't help harvest), the farmer is short on food and stops lending out food to these tech workers. They try to go around to the other villagefolk but most have already been optimized. The tools that optimized life are already built and the required tech people for maintenance is a lot less than those needed to build it, and the number of truly new opportunities to help new industries isn't enough to provide work to all the tech people.
TL;DR
Tech people earned their crazy salaries when they were helping migrate the non-digital world to the digital world. There were so many obvious opportunities for efficiencies and not enough tech people to go around. 'Spreadsheet' calculations literally used to be a day-long affair with a team of people - of course a business would pay anything to a tech person to automate that. Now that times the whole economy.
These obvious efficiencies are finite but we treated them as infinite and kept training new tech workers. Low interest rates helped keep us employed for longer than we should have as we were paid to work on bad products in the hope that maybe there'd be a diamond in the rough and yet we STILL kept training new workers. Meanwhile other careers that provide more concrete value, like mechanics & HVAC professionals, have had a labour shortage as Tech attracted so many young people to itself. This eventually led to persistent inflation which then ended low interest rates. With higher interest rates a lot of speculative tech can't get funding; Tech is only getting paid for the actual new value it can provide today, which is way less than it used to be.
I'd like to see an active Pathfinder 2e community, and I also miss the /r/LocalLLaMA community (running LLMs locally).
Yeah I think for the typical user non-rolling distros introduce more problems than they solve. It makes sense in a server environment, but it was so frustrating to look up a severe bug, find its bug report, and see that it had already been fixed upstream 6 months previous. Glad that there are better options now for users of different skill levels.
That hardware issue I encountered was actually because the Nvidia drivers bundled by Ubuntu were old and didn't support my card, not because Nvidia's latest drivers had issues. Crazy that Ubuntu was okay with having their latest release just not work on a mid-range GPU (Nouveau also didn't support the card yet).
Sometimes a game just takes off like this and then dies back down to reasonable levels. Remember when Valheim was released? It dropped out of nowhere, everyone and their friends played it for a month, and then it decreased down to a lower level. Sometimes a game just scratches an itch people didn't know they had and explodes for a while, which can explain why no one hears about it until the day it releases and people start telling their friends to play it too.
I've used Linux exclusively for several years now, but problems that killed earlier attempts were:
- I'd encounter a hardware driver issue I didn't know how to fix (Nvidia...)
- I'd dual-boot Windows for playing games and maintaining both OSes was too much (this was pre-Steam client on Linux)
- I wanted to customize some setting that the desktop environment's control panel didn't support, and I'd have to copy/paste terminal commands I didn't understand, usually breaking something which necessitated a reinstall.
- Ubuntu would provide outdated / buggy versions of software, and installing the newer version meant installing PPAs which could conflict with other packages / cause other instabilities I didn't know how to fix.
The first two have seen massive improvements but I still find most desktop environments limiting if you aren't a terminal expert / Arch type of user, and Ubuntu still provides buggy versions of programs.
FYI I've had a really good experience with using Headscale for a true open-source Tailscale experience. It helps that the Tailscale clients work with it too and that Tailscale (very unofficially) help support it.
It's not released yet but it's one of Valve's goals.
I don't think the poster is saying that we shouldn't make these games, just that there's a ton of competition.
Barely related, but this kind of relates to my fear of increased automation and unemployment this time around. In past periods, like during the Industrial Revolution, the jobs lost by automation were eventually replaced by new jobs as people used the lower prices to consume more. Making clothes needs less labour and so gets cheaper, so consumers buy more clothes, which needs more labour - this but on the scale of the whole economy. Of course it wasn’t this simple (jobs created in other industries, switching industries is hard, new jobs take a while to form, displaced workers never recover, etc.), but given enough time it worked out.
The difference this time is that consumers now spend a ton of money on digital goods for which there’s a weaker relationship between increased consumption and jobs. Unlike physical goods where increasing consumption requires new factories & jobs, digital goods are a zero-margin product. If you doubled the number of gamers in the world you wouldn’t have a ‘game shortage’, you’d still have the insane amount of selection you find on Steam. Yes there’d be more opportunities for profitable niche games but you wouldn’t double the number of game developers as the generic mass-market games would also double their revenue despite not needing to hire anyone new.
Add onto this that:
- As the world gets more developed there are more gamers coming in but also more game developers, often able to work for lower salaries.
- Older games can stay competitive long after they’ve been made. How old is Skyrim and it’s still selling well? How many game developers are being paid to work on it still?
To tie it all together, basically I worry that this time around we may not create enough new jobs as a result of automation. The current number of game developers is more than enough to satisfy market needs and making games cheaper isn’t going to result in people buying enough new games to make replacement jobs for game developers. I used gaming as my example here but this also holds for music, TV, movies, software, etc. The one silver lining that keeps me from despair is that this can be solved by shorter workweeks which would both help spread out the remaining jobs while also giving consumers more time to consume digital goods.
I really like the positioning of the Incan and Korean one, as to me it really has the vibe of Gandalf blocking the way yelling "You shall not pass!"
It hurts to do it because right now Valve is an amazing company, but I've started buying games where possible on GOG and archiving the installers for exactly this reason. If some horrific Valve-EA merger ever happens in the far future they won't be able to hold all of my library hostage
I don't think their Linux support is bad, but it's not Linux first. If Windows users had to run a command to fix a display bug it would have been held back until it was fixed. With something like System76 you get a laptop with Linux preinstalled that just works, no commands necessary.
Keep in mind I called them Linux-conscious / Linux-second. They still focus on making it a fantastic machine for Linux users, but I think it's a little less than some other shops provide for Linux.
Just want to add that Framework isn't quite Linux first, more like Linux second / Linux conscious. With some tweaking it works great but there are sometimes little issues that crop up, especially if you're using the newest machines.
For example, when I got my Intel 12th gen Framework last year, X was super laggy (opening a terminal and typing a few characters might take several seconds). You'd have to end up disabling some kernel power management setting. That was fixed in later kernel releases and was because it was new hardware, but their focus pre-release was making sure Windows worked well on it, not Linux. Technically even now there's some kind of conflict between the ambient light sensor and the screen brightness keys and the fix has always been to disable the light sensor, so I've never actually used that feature on my laptop (unsure why Windows is unaffected).
It's still a great laptop and I absolutely love them, but I think other shops like System76 should get credit for their top-tier Linux support.
I suggest checking out their discount brands Kimsufi and SoYouStart. I pay like C$12/month for a dedicated server with a few cores, 8GB of RAM, and 2TB of hard drive space.