"This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls,

That’s not ‘barely legal’…

Frankly, the Xbox One and the PS4 marked those vendors transition to ‘tiny prebuilts’, by the standards one might call this a ‘tiny prebuilt’.

One could fairly argue that Switch is “just a gaming tablet/phone”

I doubt this one. It would require that Trump ever would care about the pleasure of anyone other than himself.

There was no mention of motive, just of the consequences. Microsoft going the Apple/Google path was/is an existential business threat to a company like Valve. Microsoft’s coming up short on MS Store mitigated the risk, but still you have a platform that is geared toward Microsoft subscription revenue.

Just because those business concerns factor in, doesn’t detract from the positive ways that it has gone so far.

Pretty spot on, it was so worth it to remember, that Valve actually seemed to remember.

Their first go at it was “make a viable platform and the developers/publishers will make the effort to come over, and hardware partners will step up with offerings because of Valve’s brand strength and fear of the Microsoft Store screwing everything up”. That didn’t work, and Microsoft Store also didn’t pan out as far as Valve and others feared, but they have been kind of screwing up the platform particularly for games as they chase other things that would be subscription revenue instead of transactional revenue.

Valve learned they needed to work harder to bring the platform to the Windows games, so heavy investment in Proton. They learned that they had to take the hardware platform in their own hands because the OEMs aren’t committed until they see proof it can work for them. They learned that the best way to package their improved efforts was with a “hook” with mass-market appeal, enter the Steam Deck, recognizing the popularity of the Switch form factor and bringing it to the PC market at a time no one else was bothering.

So now they have a non-Android, non-Windows ecosystem that covers handheld, console/desk, and VR with a compelling library of thousands and thousands of games…

This is more thinking about material cost rather than relative value. If you save money on the passthrough and incur a few costs above the Quest 3 but nothing dramatic, then I’m just saying the pricing needs to be in the ballpark of Quest 3. Better value by making smarter choices that may not have a cost impact (e.g. using a maintstream high end SoC instead of a niche SoC, putting the battery at the back instead of making it front heavy).

Of course they may be hampered by different business needs. Meta affording to risk more money than Valve can risk might drive higher price point, but it would be unfortunate.

The SoC may be better, but I don’t know that it would be more expensive. Meta went with a more niche SoC and Valve selected a more mainstream, newer SoC. Better specs, but also larger volumes so cost wise I think Valve should be fine. Comfort certainly seems like it should be better, but I don’t know that I see more cost as a factor versus just making better decisions.

The wireless dongle certainly can be a thing in it’s favor, just thinking that on balance there’s some things that should contribute to BOM price and some that should save on BOM price and it should, roughly, be in the ballpark of Quest 3 when all is said and done, not 2x the cost.

A $1k would break it in this market… The specs suggest a little lower end generally than Quest 3 hardware wise, or in the ballpark (comparable display and optics, lower quality cameras). The only notable improvement is including eye tracking, which is nice, but not $1k nice…

$500 should be a good target, some tradeoffs with Quest 3 (worse ‘AR’, better eye tracking and PC connectivity).

They did at least do: https://www.meta.com/experiences/sid-meiers-civilization-vii-vr/5781689118524197/?srsltid=AfmBOoqbqaOcZk-uwva84T4NpmPU5A6M8h1LPhsJc2EkCyD5ujrcFI_m

No idea if it is vaguely any good or not…

Oh dear god I think you are joking but I know people who seriously do LFS as their production setup and get pissy anytime people say they are doing it wrong if they want to work with anyone else in the industry.

I think a key difference is that firefox is a eternally evolving codebase that has to do new stuff frequently. It may have been painful but it’s worth it to bite the bullet for the sake of the large volume of ongoing changes.

For sudo/coreutils, I feel like those projects are more ‘settled’ and unlikely to need a lot of ongoing work, so the risk/benefit analysis cuts a different way.

It’s more like saying “why tear down that house and try to build one just like it in the same spot?”

So the conversation goes:

“when it was first built, it had asbestos and lead paint and all sorts of things we wouldn’t do today”

“but all that was already fixed 20 years ago, there’s nothing about it’s construction that’s really known to be problematic anymore”

“But maybe one day they’ll decide copper plumbing is bad for you, and boy it’ll be great that it was rebuilt with polybutylene plumbing!”

Then after the house is built it turns out that actually polybutylene was a problem, and copper was just fine".

If you had an ancient utility in assembly that did exactly what you wanted and no particular issues, then it would have been a dubious decision to rewrite in C.

Of course, the relative likelyhood of assembly code actually continuing to function across the evolution of processor instruction sets is lower than C, so the scenario is a bit trickier to show in that example.

However, there are two much more striking examples: COBOL continues to be used in a lot of applications. Because the COBOL implementations work and while it would be insane to choose COBOL for them now if they were to start today, it’s also insane to rewrite them and incur the risks when they work fine and will continue working.

Similarly, in scientific computing there’s still a good share of Fortran code. Again, an insane choice for a new project, but if the implementation is good, it’s a stupid idea to rewrite.

There’s not a lot of reason to criticisize the technical merits of Rust here, nor even to criticize people for choosing Rust as the path forward on their project. However the culture of ‘every thing must be rewritten in Rust’ is something worthy of criticism.

I think the criticism is more about deciding to try to re-implement a long standing facility in rust that has, by all accounts, been ‘finished’ for a long time.

About the only argument for those sorts of projects is the resistance to the sorts of bugs that can become security vulnerabilities, and this example highlights that rewrites in general (rust or otherwise) carry a risk of introducing all new security issues on their own, and that should be weighed against the presumed risks of not bothering to rewrite in the first place.

New projects, heavy feature development, ok, fine, Rust to make that easier. Trying to start over to get to the same place you already are, needs a bit more careful consideration, especially if the codebase in question has been scrutinized to death, even after an earlier reputation of worrisome CVEs that had since all been addressed.

I would argue a rewrite of sudo in rust is not necessarily a good thing.

Sure, if you are starting from scratch, Rust is likely to mitigate mistakes that C would make into vulnerabilities.

When you rewrite anything, there’s just a lot of various sorts of risks. For sudo and coreutils, I’m skeptical that there are sufficient unknown, unaddressed problems in the C codebases of such long lived, extremely scrutinized projects to be worth the risks of a rewrite.

A rust rewrite may be indicated for projects that are less well scrutinized due to no one bothering or not being that old anyway. Just the coreutils and sudo are in my mind the prime examples of bad ideas of rewrite just for the sake of rust rewrite.

This assumes this is an annual thing and not a one-time stunt.

I think this is a potential component in a ‘2025 sucks to make 2026 look better’.

Imagine that they use part of the tariff revenue over 18 months to issue a check roughly that size right smack dab in the middle of midterm campaign season. Maybe also implementing one of those random tariff pauses, say, 90 days covering the tail end of election season to get prices to maybe come down. If there’s one thing they should have learned is that the average person sincerely loves getting their own money back without interest and views it as a ‘nice bonus’, like they do every April.

So they drive prices up in 2025, then use some of that to ‘stimulus’ the voters as they implement pricing relief…

I think everything is coming together for them to win the midterms. People have already forgotten about USAID and similar, and maybe associate that more with Musk than Trump. People are pissed about the inflation but this would likely erase that concern particularly if they ease up for election season. They endangered people by taking away SNAP, but democrats caved and the Republicans have a chance to make short term healthcare extension and vindicate their ‘democrats caused this by being stubborn’ narrative. Further, since open enrollment closed and it’s “too late”, one thing I heard floated was implementing the subsidy as a cash rebate to those that would have benefited, and just like this refund here, that goes even further than reducing the costs in the minds of the voters. If they want a little boost they can also do things like throw RFK Jr. under the bus and install a vaguely credible person in his position, to illustrate they can improve things.

Well this is pretty much exactly what Republicans needed.

They pitched that they were perfectly willing to be reasonable and the democrats were the crazy ones.

Now they pass an extension, specifying to block the non-existent illegal immigrant gap and say “see, we were ready to take care of the people, but the democrats forced things to be bad, and these few democrats reluctantly came over which just proves they were in the wrong”

Another chunk of what I assume is their strategy: Make 2025 bad in ways to make it easier to make 2026 feel great by comparison.

For there to be any kind of real “civil war” there would need to be a very clear distinction between sides and goals alongside states declaring

That’s how the US Civil War happened, but frequently a national Civil War does not have such clear boundaries and sides. See Syria for a very messy conflict where about the only thing defining one ‘side’ was ‘not Assad’ and very little agreement other than that.

Civil war would be the worst possible outcome to be sure, but a messy situation can just as easily feed a civil war.

They believe the “proper” stewards of society are the wealthy. In order for the wealthy to make the best of things, they need that money, so low taxes.

But the wealthy need something else, a desperate working class that will do anything the wealthy says just so they can eat and have some chance at things like decent healthcare. One of their favorite refrains is “nobody wants to work anymore”, and in part they blame government assistance for this perceived lack of workers or workers that are so uppity as to demand a living wage.

Of course desperate people can do something other than nicely do the things the wealthy tell them to. So that’s where “law and order” principles come in. Make a big authoritarian police force to discourage the more dangerous path that mass desperation can cause.

Well I’m not exactly happy about him so not the greatest example of who I would vote for.

To the extent that people are in his cult, he was a national celebrity heralded as the leader of multinational business concerns. That distinction should have carried huge burden of those concerns being crap, but the apprentice made him out to be smart supreme businessman.

As compelling as AOC might be. Her track record even in theory is a single congressional district.