Propaganda is powerful. You convince your followers that some classes of people don’t deserve kindness, you convince them that everything out of Hollywood is part of a leftist agenda, and once they believe both of those statements it’s very easy to spin this as further proof of the narrative they’ve already bought into.

It would not be onerous for them to continue supporting a couple of old versions of Windows, they would just have to hire a few more people to do it.

You literally did say support.

I am aware that some corporate infrastructure is hopelessly tangled up in legacy systems. But we are talking about consumer support here, which I know you know is very different.

Why would a smaller screen make framerate not matter? Textures and resolution, sure, but framerate always matters.

That’s not what I asked. You said you wanted Valve to hire people to support Windows 98. What company still supports Windows 98 like that?

Can you name any other company that supports Windows 98 in 2025?

That is not a d-pad. That is a touchpad with a plus drawn on it.

Where?

No d-pad is an instant dealbreaker.

Edit: Y’know what I’ll properly expand on this. The Steam Controller failed because it tried to replace vital functionality people expect from a controller. The Steam Deck learned from this mistake and just supplemented that functionality.

TBH, the way I see it, the Steam Controller was designed for games I don’t want to play on controller, while being bad for games I do want to play on controller.

I think there’s an argument to be made that some level of retention strategy may be a necessary evil in today’s market, especially when all your competitors are doing it. No developer wants to run the risk of letting that playerbase dry up. You can have the best multiplayer game in the world, but all the brownie points for playing fair wouldn’t mean much if I’m sitting in an empty queue with no one to play with.

It’s fine line to walk to make sure players are coming back for the right reasons, but you do want them to come back.

What is the comparison you are trying to make?

Define what you mean by ‘crash’. What’s been happening will continue to happen, but if you’re expecting any kind of singular dramatic moment, what would that be?

I hope you stub your toe and it really really hurts.

There are more tells than just that.

Actually, the biggest tell is that for how long it is, it’s mostly noise with little signal. Some of it doesn’t even make sense, “check what instances or users you’re federated with”?

Maybe whatever automated detection service you’re using can’t reliably tell, but a human who knows what to look for can. This whole format just looks very obviously out of place compared to any typical reply you’d see on this platform.

AI writes formal. No one replies to a discussion thread in this kind of format. Where on Fedi do you see an ‘average’ that looks anything like this?

em dash spotted

The problem with a hat like this is that if I saw this person from a distance, I wouldn’t look closely enough to read it.

Do you think that these are in opposition to one another? What is the comparison you are trying to make?

I don’t understand streaming music as a concept. My collection of individual tracks stands at about 1,700 (clocking in at 190 hours – that is 22 hours more than a week), and there are several full albums atop that.

Streaming is very useful for people who don’t have such a curated collection already. Especially younger generations who didn’t grow up on physical media.

you don’t want to choose what you listen to

You can though? You can always pull up a specific artist, album, or track. You can even curate your own collection of favorites on these services, and shuffle from there.

But for a lot of users, there’s added value in discovery algorithms that’ll find new music for you. It is radio with extra steps, but those extra steps of telling the system what music you like and dislike do result in much better results than radio stations that weren’t tailored to your exact tastes. Before you built up your collection, how did you use to discover new music back in the day? I’m guessing probably from the radio, this is that for the current generation.

The slow death of being able to own things is sad. But unlimited access to nearly all music, with discovery tools, is a pretty dang tempting deal. The average user doesn’t really care about whether not they ‘own’ their music, just the practicality of being able to listen to music.

Consider that music piracy is way way way down compared to how rampant it was in the 2000s, because people are really happy with streaming now. There’s an old saying that piracy is a service problem, and after unsuccessfully trying to fight it head-on for so long, the industry won in the end by simply offering a better service.