The steam deck runs Windows just fine. Lots of people dual boot for games that don't play under Linux because of DRM or anti-cheat.

The reason there isn't a barrier to entry is because Microsoft is still a little afraid of antitrust law enforcement. With Windows 8 they were very clearly trying to create a apple style walled garden where they could get 30% of all software sales in exchange for doing basically fuck all.

Steam at least gives you a lot of useful apis for multiplayer and streaming games and social Media stuff and a dozen other things I'm not thinking of right now plus they have a complex system for promoting your game to the sort of person that would be likely to buy it. So the 30% doesn't sting as much. There are Indies who will flat out tell you that they don't need a marketing budget because they just put their game on steam and valve puts their game in front of their players eyes. That 30% is their market budget which is not bad since most companies will spend 100% of the cost of development on marketing or more.

Microsoft wanted to build none of that they just wanted a dumb download site and to get paid 30%. Because they are Microsoft and you will damn well pay them and if you don't like it fuck you. The industry saw that coming and refused to put their software on the Microsoft app store which is why you never see it or think about it.

The ones that weren't completely esoteric we're already being found by people. All this is doing is saving them a little bit of time and companies aren't going to repurpose those programmers they're going to fire their asses and pocket the savings.

So in exchange for a ridiculous amounts of water and electricity we're getting something that has no value to speak of. Not that anyone around here wants to hear that because hey cool new tech right? The idea of an antisocial technology is something that nerds don't like to think about even though we have read plenty of science fiction with plenty of antisocial technology...

It's not just that there isn't an obvious path it's that there isn't any practical path. That's why nobody is finding these bugs. And what I'm saying is is we need to think about how much water and electricity we're pissing through and how much damage all this nonsense is going to do to our lives and our economy in exchange for finding a handful of bugs that could have sat there till the end of time without anybody giving a shit.

This is not a free endeavor. We are in the middle of a massive drought and the current political administration is preventing new wind and solar installations from coming online and suddenly we have data centers popping up with diesel generators making up for any power shortfalls they run into spraying poison into the air while drinking all of our water because it's slightly cheaper to use the water you and I need to live than to spend money desalinating.

We can't keep doing this eventually we're going to put too much pressure on the lower caste and a demagogue is going to come along and give them a bunch of weapons and point them at us and then we're going to have world War III and death camps.

This is not an exaggeration. The current president has threatened to invade Canada and Greenland and they tried to build concentration camp down in Florida and it was only their own staggering incompetence that shut it down. The next president if it's JD Vance won't have that problem and those death camps will get built.

People do not understand how close we are to disaster. Nobody wants to think about it because it's too far outside our daily lives. We have to start making trade-offs and a handful of bugs that nobody was bothering to look for is a pretty no-brainer for me

Okay Boomer

This will be moved off of Google's balance sheets onto a variety of sub companies and when they collapse you will either bail out those companies or they will crash the entire economy because they will be too big to fail.

You will very likely not have the stomach and the fortitude to simply seize control of the banking system like some of the Nordic countries did during the 2008 meltdown. That would be too socialismy for most people. The only reason why we got anything back from the 2008 collapse is Obama threatened to enforce the letter of the bailout terms and exert control over the company's involved and as soon as he did all the sudden they were flush with cash and easily paid back their obligations, without interest of course, but you won't see that happen this time we've let our government become far too corrupt for that.

Given that the current president is directly responsible for about 1/3 of the national debt and it's going to be all the next president can do to deal with the aftermath of all the nonsense and wars and tariffs and economic devastation from the current president when the crash finally does come you're going to be paying for it so you better start putting some money away for it right now.

You could get your neighbors to stop voting Republican but good luck with that. I have had zero luck. Even if they start to agree with me sooner or later they go home and they turn on Fox news or something and then they're gone again. I can't compete with hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate propaganda

He works for Microsoft and he saw firsthand just how terrible they can be and how the complete lack of antitrust law enforcement means Microsoft can get away with it.

Steamos is and always has been a hedge against Microsoft finally tightening the screws. They tried with Windows 8 but every single software publisher on the planet saw that coming and refused to publish their software on the Microsoft store. It was a wasteland and fortunately for the few games Microsoft just bought they were eventually forced to put them on steam because people just plain didn't buy them otherwise.

I still prefer GOG because I buy a game there and it's mine with the only caveat that I'm responsible for backing up the data myself and I worry what's going to happen when Gabe finally dies unless he literally has an heir. But the best chance we have to break Microsoft's Monopoly besides people actually voting to enforce antitrust law is going to be back door market share from people switching over.

Like I do wonder what's going to happen with all these old computers that are perfectly usable and can't run Windows 11. Right now Microsoft is just letting them run Windows 10 but that's not going to last forever.

It gobbles up half a gig of RAM. At a time when ram is at a premium that's a big deal. I am sure Microsoft has multiple departments fighting amongst themselves to see who is going to get access to your ever dwindling ram supply.

And say that if you've had a bug in your code for 8 years and the code is actually in production and being used then the bug wasn't all that important.

AI seems to be finding a lot of bugs that people just weren't bothering to find because why would you? I have certainly come across bugs in my own code that don't really hurt anything or that require such very specific and uncommon circumstances that I'm hardly surprised I didn't fix them sooner. Yeah a machine can and we'll find them but so what?

If it didn't cost anything to fix them that would be fine but I don't know about you but my power bill just went up 15% and despite the lies they're telling me it's painfully obvious that it's the fund data center power usage. Also Amazon is putting a data center online that is powered completely by pollution belching gas turbines that are going to crank out more greenhouse gases then literally anything in the entire country. Climate change is real and it's causing droughts. Those droughts are driving up the price of beef and chicken.

So how much is an LLM fixing esoteric bugs Worth to you? In a few years you might be eating bugs because of it...

Sales tax is a regressive tax. The reason they switched to sales tax is that the Republican party let them do it because the Republican party knew that it was a bad idea. You do it with income tax for fuck sakes. Then you have progressive income tax brackets so that it's fair. Rich people have to live in society and so they have to pay for everybody else's kids to be educated. If they don't like it then they can die with the guillotine because that's coming.

The funny thing is guys like you are going to be the first on the shopping block. A bunch of angry young men are going to show up at your nice suburban home and they're going to fuck shit up. Yeah you'll go ahead and shoot one or two of them but there's going to be like 50 or 100 of them. Then they're going to beat you to death and that'll be the end of you. Hell of a way to spend your final moment so you could ship post on a dumb dying website but hey you do you.

Remember the guillotine doesn't come down just on the ultra wealthy in fact these days it's not even going to touch them because those guys have private armies and they're on touchable. Instead there's going to be chaotic violence and it's going to hit the bourgeoisie which is you and me. Guys who aren't working 60 hours a week just to do have a little food like gen z is. We are the ones who are going to get caught up in all that violence. We aren't going to have private armies to protect us

Honestly the thing they keep leaving out is they catch every one of these guys eventually and throw them in jail for several years. With the way our prison system works they will be brutalized in prison and when they get out if they go back to fighting for freedom the next time they'll do 20 or 30 years.

Hell Donald Trump just sent a bunch of protesters to prison for the rest of their lives for being at a protest. You would think that would be bigger news that a bunch of innocent people who just happened to be activists at a protest or now rotting in prison for their entire lives but it's not. I would wager most people didn't even hear about it

They run in primary elections and they often lose. If they make it out of the primary they lose again. That's because we allow voter suppression and limitless propaganda and we've been underfunding education.

It turns out education is ludicrously expensive when you're trying to teach people who don't just learn everything on their own. In the past we would split kids into two groups the ones who would learn on their own, aka the academically inclined and then the ones who needed to actually be taught. We would take the kids who are academically inclined and make them useful to the Epstein class to build stuff for them and then we would take the rest of them and send them off to factories. Well the factories are full of robots now.

So the cost of education overall has been going up because we can't just kick those kids to the factories and we've been trying to at least get them to the point where they can be semi-functional in society. That is very very expensive. If you look at rich people their kids have the same problems as everybody else's and rich people spend a fuck ton of money educating their kids.

Us poor plebeians don't get to do that because we're not in the Epstein class. So what's been happening is we can't abandon those kids because they get dangerous when they're just wandering around hopeless with no future so we have been forced to pour a bunch of money into teaching them but we don't want to spend that much money so we keep increasing class sizes.

What it comes down to is we got used to being able to only run kids through the school system who are literally just there to be tested to make sure that they could do the jobs we were going to stick them in. We weren't actually educating anyone we were taking people who are educating themselves and then administering tests. And yeah that's going to be pretty damn cheap.

And now we actually have to teach kids or we have to deal with the fact that somebody is sooner or later going to come along and give them weapons and point them at us. But I don't think we want to pay to teach kids so I think we're heading into world War 3.

As are every single security camera in the country. John Oliver brought it up. Anywhere there is money to be made somebody is going to make it and the wealthy want to be able to monitor us 24/7 for control. The wealthy are well, wealthy so they've got money and they're going to buy that footage with the limitless amounts of cash we keep letting them have.

There is a city in California where if you want to open a business you have to put up cameras for your business and then you have to share that footage with the cops on request. Warrants are of course optional because it's all privately managed. They have command centers where they monitor you. The Simpsons did a bit on it and as usual The Simpsons later episodes it wasn't funny but it was fairly accurate.

You don't build a big brother Network in America with government because we spent the last 70 years convincing Americans government bad so that they would leave a giant power vacuum that the Epstein class could fill. Every time somebody discourages you from thinking about and talking about politics notice that it's perfectly okay for your crazy uncle to talk about how great it is to have a billionaire be president of the United States but the moment you talk about giving everyone healthcare and free school lunches suddenly that's political and you need to shut up.

Trouble is the people who want the flock cameras are winning and at this point I don't think we can stop them. They have a pretty solid tactic of using county level voter suppression to win elections and nobody seems to want to do anything about it.

And then override the locals. Every time they want to do something people don't want that's how they do it. They have a name for it they call it government small enough to drown in a bathtub.

The Epstein class wants a government that can control you and they're going to get it. It'll be just big enough that they can own it but not so big that they can't completely buy it wholesale. That's the problem with the federal government and why they want to undermine the federal government power. The federal government is just a little too big for even a trillionaire to completely buy off.

Local governments can be bought but they're too numerous so they focus on voter suppression at the local level. That can be targeted and gerrymandering can limit the expense by creating safe districts for their cronies.

State government is just the right size. Big enough to push everybody around and force them to do what they want and take all their stuff like eminent domaining away their property for AI data centers, not so small that there's just too many individuals to bribe but also not so big that the attention given by the voting public means they can't always sneak fascist candidates in.

Whenever the Epstein class wants to do something really nasty to you they will always use the state government to do it and that's why you hear so much about the importance of states rights from their mouthpieces

America can no longer be trusted and that goes for American companies. Donald Trump is openly talking about invading Greenland and I cannot believe that's a sentence I just said. And the only reason for him to take your Greenland would be to go and take the rest of Europe.

This is what failing empires do. You put incompetent thieves and rapists in charge of everything and they crashed the economy. In America We lost 123,000 jobs in the last 3 months and that's probably going to be revised to 200,000 by the time it's over.

When empires fail because of incompetent leadership inevitably the coffers get empty and they start looking to expand and loot other countries. We will take Canada and Mexico first and then the rest of South america. Using them as a manufacturing base for non-compensated labor we will build back a large military but the incompetence will continue to empty the coffers and eventually we will have to go after Europe.

And no we won't care that Europe has nuclear weapons. Incompetent people are also insane. God will protect us in our holy crusade or some nonsense.

It's frustrating because Europe is allowing this to happen because their Epstein class all wants to be trillionaires too and they're hoping that as America falls they will rise. That would work if America wasn't so fucking crazy and dangerous...

For everybody thinking this is cool because they will get Linux improvements out of it that's going to kind of dwarf all of the chaos and disasters and wars. If you can't get hardware for your cool hobby because War rationing is going on then it really doesn't matter how much cool software there is...

Politics affects your hobby. It's weird because the right wing seemed to understand that during gamergate without realizing Jeffrey Epstein was behind that and it was all bullshit and it was the finance Bros and their AI slop and the economic chaos they create coming for your hobby

America is gradually spreading its blight. The same tactics that our Epstein class uses to do all these terrible things are being adapted and used in Europe and they work. Europe is pushing back harder because it's better educated but it's having a hard time for the same reasons.