I won't be at all surprised if Valve start selling ARM games as well as x86. I'm sure they'd like to not be tied to x86 in the future, just as these devices help to break the ties to Windows.

Having used wireless PC VR there's no way I'm going back to a cable. If I can play FPS games with wi-fi there's no need to have to drag a cable around and try to remember where it is so I don't trip over it or accidentally pull it out.

A good point, but thinking on the marginal transactional costs to process a sale of additional items after one, people deliberately buying two items to 'stick it' to the business and get maybe 5 cents off their purchase is actually benefitting the business, and the customer spending more time figuring out the exact cost before checking out than the five cents are worth.
Basically, I figure that the business could outright discount every item after the first by 5 cents, and still profit more per item when people are buying 3-4 items at a time rather than one.

I doubt that, especially with varying sales taxes screwing with things.
The draw to price everything in .99 is too high. Or even .95 or .97.

A lot of studies of paper vs plastic bills are looking at paper bills using scrap cotton and linen fibers and still having wood pulp.
US bills use the premium stuff and are 0% wood pulp. As a result, our paper money lasts as long on average as the plastic bills.
The math changes when one considers that we don't have to import our fibers into the country and can thus get the good stuff for less than other countries pay for scrap.

Good for you. Maybe Valve could have provided 2.5 Gb for those four markets across the US.

I can get gigabit here but it's twice the price of what I have and it would mostly be idle. So why pay another $1,000 a year to download Steam games a few minutes faster?

So how many people do you know who have 2.5 Gb at home?

My fibre is 150Mbps and Starlink is wi-fi so there's no reason for me to need 2.5 Gb other than VR streaming. It's not like I'm copying huge files from machine to machine inside the house.

There is no "glut of cars". China still has a lot of unmet internal demand. The problem is that EVs are becoming a commodity in China now. So all the business models designed to exploit high-margin expensive products are becoming obsolete.

Dealerships are suffering the most, there is simply no margin for them to exist anymore, so they're doing all kinds of tricks to make sure they appear to be useful to carmakers. The double whammy is the fast depreciation of EVs. Just like with computers in the 90-s, people know that in 3 years a new EV will be better in all regards. So why waste money on expensive value-add services provided by dealerships?

I have four routers and five LAN switches in my house and only one 2.5 Gb port. Which is used to connect the PC to the Wi-Fi 6 router for VR streaming.

Most people will either connect the Stream Machine to their ISP router which likely only has Gigabit, or to a cheap LAN switch which likely only has Gigabit. There's no reason to give people a faster Ethernet port unless you expect 2.5+ Gb fibre to be common for Internet access in the next few years.

Valve don't have enough employees to enshitify things. They have to concentrate on making things work.

That smells a LOT like BS. I'm just going to eat all this food in your pantry to make sure you don't get food poisoning, and such.

Compare, instead of the nobleman charging rent, the herdsmen do get together and own the commons in common, working out a fair deal between them for sustainability.

As for the NYC situation, if there's a glut, why don't prices fall? Where are the buildings for sale cheap to someone who wants to do a residential conversion?

Mecha-Hitler disagrees.

And "toxic" is just a code-word for masculine. Which has been declared "toxic" by our overlords, who don't want us to oppose them.

The Economy relies on ever-increasing amounts of debt to function. Banks are fine with lending money because they expect taxpayers to bail them out if the loans go bad.

> I feel like the entire world is caught up in snake oil salesmanship to the point of destroying the entirety of functional society, just because a very few people might make some money off of it. WTF?

It's been like that for years now. Society is collapsing and we're in the Looting The Treasury phase.

Without Moore's Law you can build more powerful chips by making them bigger, but they'll take more power to run. Which means more cooling to keep them running and more power plants to run them.

There might be improvements to chip design to make them more optimal for AI software, but that's likely to be a one-off.

Visual Studio and Eclipse are typically used for statically typed languages (C# and Java), so you get IDE magic like automatic refactors, renaming, jump to definition, etc. It's nice, and helps you program faster.

However, in the real world most people use dynamic languages like Python, which loses all that IDE magic (AI can kind of help here). btw IntelliJ has been more popular than Eclipse among Java programmers for more than a decade now.

The conclusion is that most programmers don't care about programming more quickly/efficiently.