You'd be surprised how difficult that actually is. Take the role of a DJ for instance - a good DJ will know what genre they're doing, play well know things from that genre but also introduce new music to keep it fresh. They might also step outside the genre a little - not too far so it's not dissonant with the rest of their set, but just far enough to give a break and a moment of "ah, that's nice/romantic/gnarly/metal/" for the listener.

It's a skill, and if you haven't got that ability to start with then you're unlikely to be able to give the correct prompts to create it. You might well get a lot of identical things, but a listenable varied set is more than that.

A worry might be SteamOS as a requirement, rather than as simple support. You could imagine kernel modules being developed for 'anti-cheat' and them running under SteamOS but not some other distro that may (justifiably) block them.

This is the most (in fact only) interesting thing about the announcements to me. Must say I'm not sure about it - can't see how mouse+keyboard style games, which the original Stream Controller was explicitly designed to work well with, would pan out.

I have hugely customised layouts for several games to the point where I can't imagine playing them without it - they tend to be RPG games like Skyrim and Elder Scrolls Online. It's that style of game I'm trying to imagine mapping to the new layout, and to be honest gen1 looks more amenable to me at first glance. Hope to be proven wrong though.

Yeah we do the same in australia. Its fine. It was the 1980s when we did it, and I remember being a bit bummed out the 2c lollies wouldnt be a thing no more, but I figured I'm a teenager now and probably should be eating something more substantial than 2c lollies from the delicatesan. (although Im sure my mother was relieved, sweet things where banned in the house except for special occasions, but she couldnt control what me and my brother did outside the house)

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.

Yes, and pros too. But those people can do the computation in reverse.

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.

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.

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.

(Yeah, it's the John Birch Society; I failed to completely correct from "Birchers" as they were informally known.)

For those who don't remember, the plan to stop minting pennies in the 1960s got canned when the John Bircher Society came out claiming it was Communist influence, somehow.

I can't blame him. If I had the talent I'd run one of those get-rich-quick scams too.

Just inflate the value of your company with VC money for a few "rounds" until a big player buys you, then take the money and run.

It's the standard business model in Silicon Valley really.

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.