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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • I think the “black box” nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn’t turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.

    She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to “fix” including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.

    This is a symptom of industry switching to cheap “disposable” electronics, rather than more expensive, robust, and repairable ones.

    From the treadmill company’s point of view, it’s cheaper to just lose one unit and pay shipping one way rather than pay to have the unit returned, spend valuable technician time diagnosing and fixing an issue and then pay to ship the repaired unit back.

    About 50 years ago, you could find appliance repair shops that would fix your broken toaster or TV, and parts for stuff like that were easily available. Now, with the advanced automation in building these, combined with the increased difficulty of repair(fine-work soldering, firmware debuging and the like) it makes way more sense to just replace the whole thing.


  • You’re not wrong. I love onions, but I will freely admit that they are a powerful flavor and they are basically in everything.

    I will note that if you’re in this camp, that if you soak your onions in water for a couple minutes after slicing they are significantly less pungent, and will allow you to taste the other stuff better without sacrificing the texture they add



  • It is very reasonable. No one forced Valve to build their business model this way, and they are one of the most profitable companies per employee, ever.

    Literally every software company built their business model this way. Go open a support case with any software vendor complaining that their product won’t run on Windows 98 and see how many help you out beyond “Buy a computer from this millennium”

    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 are failing to understand just how much has changed since Windows 98. It’s a completely different environment that requires specialized knowledge to develop for. They can’t just dust off some old source code and re-release the client. The entire back-end has changed. It would be a massive undertaking that would appease about 12 people total.

    Gabe would still be a billionaire.

    Sure, but I would argue that there are a lot of better things that Valve could be doing with those resources than supporting Windows 98


  • This issue has multiple facets and the answer changes depending on the end result you want.

    The author of the article sees the problem as “Old games you bought on steam are unplayable on modern hardware”. Kaldaien sees the problem as “Steam cannot run on older hardware anymore, even if the games I bought still work there”. Both people want the same thing (To be able to play the games they bought) but are looking at it from different angles.

    Ultimately, Steam is a DRM tool that has a very good storefront attached to it. If you want true ownership of the software, buy the game in a way that will let you run the software by itself. Valve expects that the overwhelming majority of its users will keep up with semi-modern hardware (In this case, a machine capable of running windows 10/SteamOS) which I don’t feel is is an unreasonable ask. However, expecting Valve to retain support for an OS that hit end of life 20 years ago is unreasonable.

    I agree with the opinions of the article’s author. It would be far better to ensure that support for the old titles you bought are available on modern hardware rather than making sure Steam is still accessible on a PC running windows 98. This is one of those corner-cases where piracy is acceptable. You already paid for the game, you just need to jump through some hoops to play it on your 30 year old PC.






  • Godort@lemmy.catomemes@lemmy.worldThis is a PSMA!
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    1 month ago

    The best way is to just backup to multiple locations and actively manage it. RAID at the backup destination is nice because it means that if a disk fails, you don’t immediately lose everything there. But if you have multiple places where that data lives then it’s not the end of the world to just re-create the backup.

    If you want to get into true archival solutions(way more expensive than setting up a RAID) then you’re looking at things like M-Disc and LTO tape


  • Is it possible to have kernel-level anti-cheat in Linux?

    Yes, Absolutely. But, people would throw a fit. There is probably no way to opensource it without also making it easier to bypass. There would be a concerted effort to reverse engineer it and remove it from the system while maintaining functionality

    Maintainers of anti-cheat software are not volunteers. If there was an order from management to port the system to Linux, it would happen. It’s just that with the Linux userbase as small as it is, it’s simply not profitable to cater to them.

    I think that if it ever happens, there will be a influx of people moving to linux, or abandoning their duelboots

    I fully disagree. The thing keeping regular people away from Linux as an OS is not that they can’t play some online game with Anti-cheat.

    Linux is in a weird place right now. It’s actually a perfect fit for non-technical users that use their computers for email, web browsing, and Netflix, but those users don’t know what an operating system is, let alone that there are options. More technical users tend to require more specialized applications, and if there isn’t a native linux port available, you have to do some research for alternatives, or to find a way to run it in wine.

    Windows is shitty, but it’s comfortable. And I know that it will run any software I throw at it with basically no research or troubleshooting.