The weirdest thing is that steam doesn’t have a natural or self reinforcing monopoly. It wouldn’t take much for another company to copy their business model, and provide a competitor. In practice, however, they all fall flat on their faces.

Steam’s model is to give up short term gain for a smaller long term gain. Over time, this has snowballed into what we see now. Gabe is happy to get ever richer from his golden goose laying away. The competitors get started, then try and gut the goose for a quick buck.

HDDs can be made tolerant to it. Constant rotation still puts significant extra strain on the bearings, when spinning however. The drive will likely fail faster than an SSD.

Your best bet might be to use a laptop as the basis. They are already designed with power efficiency in mind, and you won’t need an external screen and keyboard for local problem solving.

I would also consider having a raspberry pi 3 or similar as a companion. Services that must be up all the time run on the pi (e.g. network admin). The main computer only gets kicked out of sleep mode when required. The pi 3 needs less power than the newer pis, while still having enough computing power to not lag unless pushed hard.

I definitely agree with SSDs. HDDs don’t do well when rotated when running. Boats are less than a stable platform.

I’ve got a similar battery bank. It’ll turn 4 hours of capability into 12, with no issues.

Mine is a veektomx MAX65W. 20,000mah.

Just be aware of capacities. The limit is either 100Wh or 160Wh depending on the airline. That works out at 27,000mah or 43,250mah respectively. Most power banks are below this, but not all.

Depressingly, that’s around 2x the cost/Tb.

Valve are the only ones confident enough in their systems to do that. Valve’s mindset seems to be that trying to lock people in is a losing strategy, long term. Instead they are just making sure that their offerings are better than anything else available. If done right, it has all the advantages of locking people in, with none of the downsides. It also combines with the perceived openness, which gains you a lot of credit with the geek community.

Microsoft are too reliant on lock-in to risk opening it up.

I personally make use of the sonoff pow smart plugs, with Tasmota firmware. Though any Tasmota compatible smart plug with power readings will work.

The key thing is that with Tasmota, you can properly calibrate the readings. I have a friend with a high quality power meter. I used that to calibrate my smart plugs, they seem to track within a few % of the expensive one, once calibrated.

Depending on if you have access to an expensive meter or not, this will either be the best bet, or completely useless to you. Your local Hackspace might also be a good option for getting your hands on an expensive meter for an evening.

Ok, and how many of those points would be improved by going public?

People want sequels because they trust value to to them justice, not roll out stale cookie cutter versions like FIFA etc.

Would investors demand that valve take a smaller cut, or would they demand they take a bigger one in future?

Would they cut support for older games?

Would they add ads to the overlays?

Would you then be able to get “Steam Premium” for an ad free experience?

Please let me know what bit of steam’s business model would be improved by them constantly chasing a higher profit every quarter?

Both line pockets. The difference is the focus. The shareholders for valve have been invited. You can’t just decide to buy a bit of valve, then tell them what to do. Publicly traded shares mean that the people investing are often only interested in the value and dividends, anything that boosts that is good. If the company dies from it then who cares, they’ll jump ship and invest elsewhere.

Valve’s current mentality is that keeping the customers happy keeps the money flowing. It has now reached the point where compounding effects make up for the short term reduction in dividends.

Customers are happy, share holders are happy, and no-one can barge in, demanding a piece of the pie.

Stock market shareholders want constant growth from their investments. Enough of them also only care about short term growth, even at the cost of long term.

Valve, being privately owned, only answers to its own shareholders, no-one can just buy in and start demanding more profit seeking. They have collectively decided that slow but reliable growth is better. This results in them not actively pumping their customer base for ever more profit. They have no intention of killing their golden goose.

I’ll admit, I’m willing to pay a couple of £ for the convenience of having them available on steam.

I limited LLM would run on a lot of newer gfx cards. It could also be done as a semi online thing. If you have the grunt, you can run it locally. Otherwise, you can farm it out to the online server.

You would need a properly layered engine. The full lore is baked into the global engine. Each NPC gets their own biasing in the engine. A subset of knowledge they have, as well as things they explicitly do or don’t know.

Generating the underlying knowledge set, in a way that is easy to work with will be the challenge. It’s ok for AI to fill in the gaps, but the story designers will need an easy way to get them to behave properly.

There will also be a lot of unintended consequences. A good team would be able to do amazing things with this. A bad team would produce a complete mess.

Nothing like thinking “I’ll just play for 1/2 an hour, then have breakfast.” Next thing you know, the wife is coming in, and you’re still in your pajamas, having not eaten at all.

With mods you can! More specifically, a grappling hook!

I’m currently using space trains, along with the space exploration mod. The trains run on batteries, and they are blazingly fast. I easily lose track of them through my orbital rail grid.

The value for money of it is unbelievable. I’ve used mine a lot, and I can’t see many ways it could be improved (none without worse tradeoffs).

I wouldn’t recommend it as a laptop replacement, but as a gaming system, it’s incredible.

It also plays nicely with both the steam controller, and the steam link. Both can be picked up dirt cheap now.

I’ve ran into it, and it’s very slightly off-putting. At the same time, I fully understand why they’ve done it that way, and actually agree with them. The use of flat packs as an alternative makes the problem irrelevant. They maximised openness, while also protecting it from being completely borked up by a newb running random commands.

If it’s done well, it’s an excellent process. It lets smaller studios start getting paid earlier, which helps significantly. It also lets them establish a strong feedback loop with their player base.

Factorio is an excellent example. The player base provided instant feedback on the gameplay, as they brought in more features. They also weren’t afraid to change things that didn’t quite work as well as planned. It also helped guide where to focus efficiency efforts.

Unfortunately, a number of big companies have jumped on the bandwagon. They don’t quite get what early access is good for, and just use it as an excuse for bugs, as well as to drum up cheap advertising.

His annoyingness is part of the core plot. The progression works excellently.

• “This guy’s an idiot”

• “This guy’s an idiot, but funny.”

• “Ok, too much of idiot guy, I want glados back.”

• “Oh, hi glados”

• Idiot guy gets really annoying.

• Hey glados, can we go kill idiot guy together?"

• Space Space SPACE, SPAAAAAAACCCCCCEEEEEE!!!