There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

ashok36

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ashok36 ,

Yes. You understand how pricing works. The stores charge what the market will bear. That’s why games had been stuck at $60 since the 360/PS3 era.

With the recent issues of transgender people in sports, why don’t we move some sports over to a weight-class system?

Obviously this won’t work for all sports, but things like football, track, soccer, it would allow for de-gendered team, even allowing athletes with the skills but not the genetically-endowed physical attributes to have a place to play....

ashok36 ,

American ninja warrior has had more and more women making it farther and farther in the competition every year. There are still handicaps in place to make sure at least some women make it to the finals but after that there are no handicaps. At this point, even if they removed all the handicaps there would still be women that reach the finals, just not as many. It’s been very interesting to watch.

The announcers still try to hype up the women’s achievements but at this point most of the big barriers have been broken. They’ve had to resort to stuff like, “if she gets a buzzer here she’ll be only the second mom to get a buzzer in qualifying!”. It’s kind of silly at this point.

ashok36 ,

Valve doesn’t set the prices for any of the products you buy through their store. The game developers and publishers do.

The exception is valve developed games which are mostly free to play and make money on useless cosmetics. Most of their successful games are built on mods that are only possible because valve takes the very consumer friendly position of supporting and encouraging modding of their games.

Hell, they even allow and promote fan made remakes like Black Mesa and unofficial sequels.

If valve is a monopoly, it’s only because they’re the only corporation in the pc gaming space (OK maybe include gog too) that respects their customers. They’re not perfect but they’re orders of magnitude better than the competition.

ashok36 ,

Literally all pricing is set by the devs and publishers. The guy you’re responding to has no idea what he’s talking about. The Steam store terms of service are public and easily available to read through. I know, I’ve done it. The only pricing requirement they have is keys sold off store can’t be significantly discounted under the store price. That’s it.

ashok36 ,

Bullshit. Games on steam that hit sales thresholds pay less to steam and the prices remain the same. Games on EGS only pay 12% and prices haven’t dropped.

Reality does not comport with your argument at all.

I’ve been in product development and management for 10+ years. I know how pricing decisions are made. You’re very naive.

ashok36 ,

Again, you are very naive. What you’re describe is cost-up pricing which hasn’t been a generally used method of pricing goods and services for decades at this point. The reason is that doing cost-up pricing is a really good way to go out of business.

The way pricing works today is that sellers set pricing based on what they believe the customer is willing to pay. From there you work backwards accounting for retailer margin, cost of goods, transport, discounts, etc… To find your maximum cost per unit. If you can’t produce the product for less than the maximum cost, you either need to scale back your features, add a feature that would justify a higher sell price, or abandon the project.

Your notion that companies would lower prices if they had to give retailers a small cut is not borne out by theory or by observed real world outcomes.

You’re wrong. Doubling down won’t make you less wrong.

ashok36 ,

No, the problem steam was originally created to solve was distributing updates for pc games. Before steam getting updates meant visiting shitty dev websites or ad farms that also hosted update files and manually patching your game.

It was awful.

ashok36 , (edited )

That’s a valid opinion. It’s not one I share but if you preferred that situation then that’s fine. I feel pretty confident saying you are in a pretty small minority though.

-edit I just realized what you said and if it’s true that you did most of your pc gaming before steam got popular, you may be out of your depth in this conversation. It’s been like 20 years. If you did most of your pc gaming more than 20 years ago, I don’t see how your opinion is informed at all.

ashok36 ,

I think I just have responded to the wrong comment. My bad.

ashok36 ,

We can argue all day over when steam “got popular”. For me, I’d consider the launch of HL2 to be the most reasonable point in time to choose.

ashok36 ,

I think we’re talking past each other. By ‘popular’ I do not mean ‘well liked’. Just that it was used by a lot of people. 2004, in my opinion, was when steam took off and the downloading updates from random websites phase of pc gaming died. There was a transition, to be sure, but the writing was on the wall. We just didn’t know it at the time.

ashok36 ,

Maybe they just really like Boogey2988. In which case, yeah, report them.

ashok36 , (edited )

I wouldn’t read too much into his YouTube handle. He’s a chode but I don’t think he’s a nazi simp. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was auto-generated.

ashok36 ,

There are two separate entities: the raspberry pi foundation which is the charity and unchanged, and the raspberries pi holdings company which has always been the business side of the project. The corporation contributes to the foundation a significant amount of money which is not changing. The charity is the majority stakeholder in the company.

Here’s the founder explaining it

youtu.be/EoSPR_dZnYg?feature=shared

The Curious Case Of The Underselling Arena Tours (www.stereogum.com)

“Who can afford to go to multiple shows?” says the anonymous tour manager. “Two tickets to a show, you’re talking probably about $200 with fees and everything. You go to a meal around the show, you’re talking at least $100 or $200 for a nice dinner. Then you got parking and babysitters, then you add the VIP stuff to...

ashok36 ,

I think they’re exaggerating. My friends went to sleep token in Tampa and floor seats were $250.

ashok36 ,

I would tend to agree but this was a mid size arena and it was sold out. Sleep token fans are a bit fanatical, even if they’re not a mainstream act per se.

ashok36 ,

I’m sorry but all of these doom and gloom comments are insufferable.

A. The raspberry pis that you have known and loved are all still around and, considering inflation, cheaper than ever. If you’re complaining about prices, stop buying from scalpers!

B. All this talk of enshittification and decline is purely and 100% speculative. You are acting like your catastrophic fears are a forgone conclusion when they’re, at best, a guess.

ashok36 ,

Maybe. I’ll be the first one to call out bad behavior but at this point it’s just knee jerk anticorporate fervor.

The worst thing raspberry pi ever did is dare to be an electronic company during the worst electronics part shortage in our lifetime. People complaining they couldn’t get a pi to do their dinky personal project are the epitome of having first world problems. Prices and availability have been back to normal for over a year now and people still gripe about it. I’m just over it.

ashok36 ,

Pi5 doesn’t have h264 hardware. Pi4 is probably better for media centers right now.

ashok36 ,

That assumes your media collection is all hevc. That’s not the case for most people.

ashok36 ,

For a standard media center, kodi is pretty great.

ashok36 ,

Yes, that’s my point. If you have a library full of 1080 h264 then the pi 4 is a better choice. The Pi5 will struggle with software decoding compared to the 4.

At the end of the day, they’re different boards with different use cases. I think a lot of people don’t appreciate that enough.

ashok36 ,

Looks like Prey 2016 with a bit of Mirrors Edge. I’m definitely more interested now than I was before. I never played the original Perfect Dark games so I don’t really have any expectations.

PowerColor uses NPUs to lower GPU power consumption and improve frame rates in games (www.neowin.net)

PowerColor has come up with an interesting use for neural processing units (NPUs) in modern CPUs. At Computex 2024, it displayed so-called “Edge AI” technology that pairs a graphics card with an NPU to lower power consumption in games....

ashok36 ,

Yeah, I’ve been using a Google coral to identify people, cars, animals, etc in my security camera feeds for years now.

ashok36 ,

I think the rebound would wait until a new leader was named and would depend on who that is.

ashok36 ,

Denying historical events and refusing to come to terms with their causes and repercussions is not a left or right problem.

You can be as communist as you want but pretending that events with photographic evidence didn’t actually happen put you in the same category as moon landing deniers in my book.

ashok36 ,

The US has so much red on its ledger it will never be balanced. And there are plenty of apologists for atrocities in our history. They’re just as bad as the Chinese or Russian (or pick whatever country you want because they’re all guilty to some extent) when they do it.

ashok36 ,

Which removing the appointed prosecutor would render moot, which they’ve already done.

Their argument is that the case was only brought so that the prosecutor would be hired and then kick back money to the DA. It’s laughable on its face.

ashok36 ,

If all you’re doing is plex and a minecraft server, look into proxmox or unraid.

Unraid is paid but very noob friendly compared to most others. It’s also very flexible hardware wise.

ashok36 ,

They share similarities for sure. I’ve not used it though. I know unraid offers a 30 day testing license. Not sure about the others.

ashok36 ,

I worry about Republicans taking power and using the trump trials as an excuse to put together kangaroo courts in places like Texas and Florida to actually do the sorts of politically based prosecutions that they’re whining about now. That should never be a reason to not uphold the law though. We cannot let ourselves be held hostage by what bad actors might do in the future.

ashok36 ,

And they’re all riding through my godamn yard.

I’m on the border of two neighborhoods and my house is the most convenient cut through point that shaves about two miles off a typical ride to school.

Sucks for them though. I’m putting in a fence next month.

(honestly, I could live with the bikes but now they’re riding electric scooters, dirt bikes, and one asshole keeps riding his golf cart through my lawn)

ashok36 ,

One strap on in his butt, one in his mouth, maybe one sucking his dick if he’s into that.

ashok36 ,

My town is building a shit load of apartments and townhomes. Everyone on nextdoor hates it. I can’t entirely disagree either since infrastructure is lagging far behind for all the new residents.

ashok36 ,

Bad for Trump, yes.

ashok36 ,

The guy behind me that watches fox news all day because “he needs something to help him focus” immediately started spouting fox talking points as soon as the verdict was read. My younger coworkers were like, “no way, that’s crazy” to all his bs. I just had to say, “no that’s not true. I read the jury instructions and they don’t say that.” He moved onto insisting there was no evidence and Cohen perjured himself and at that point I was already on my way out the door.

He’s Gen x, a landlord, new York exile, classic gabagool. Ugh.

ashok36 ,

He’s a job hopper and I don’t expect him to be there more than a year or so longer. He mostly keeps his dumb shit to himself but I guess if you’re gonna spout off then the day your orange turd gets convicted of felonies is a logical one.

ashok36 ,

Not until you fix the hot water!

ashok36 ,

The hilarious thing is that Sony could open their own pc storefront selling steam keys, keep their 30%, and the only restriction would be maintaining price parity with the same game on the Steam storefront.

For a. Company like Sony that already has all the payment processing and customer service knowhow, this would be far easier for them than most.

Yet they can’t or won’t bother because suits are fucking stupid.

ashok36 ,

Nope. There’s rules about pricing parity but you can generate and sell as many of your own keys as you want.

ashok36 ,

Here’s the relevant part of their website for reference:

If you request an extreme number of keys and you are not offering Steam customers a comparable deal, or if your sole business is selling Steam Keys and not offering value to Steam customers, your request may be denied and you may lose the privilege to request keys.

I find it hard to believe Sony would run afoul of these guidelines. I’m not sure what they mean by “if your sole business is selling steam keys”. Maybe referring to shovelware ‘developers’ that use steam for laundering money, if I had to guess.

ashok36 ,

How so?

ashok36 ,

When? Who did they stop?

ashok36 ,

That’s… Not an answer at all.

ashok36 ,

The biggest reason trump won in 2016 was, apart from Clinton’s unfavorables, his sense of humor. He could throw out zingers and also be surprisingly self deprecating.

His problem is that no one was in the mood for any humor in 2020 as he had royally fucked up covid and now in 2024 he’s obviously in mental decline. He’s still good for a quip once in a while but he’s not nearly as funny now as he used to be and way less funny than he thinks he is.

Biden, meanwhile, for better or worse is exactly the same now as he was four years ago. A little more soft spoken maybe but he hasn’t changed nearly as much as Trump has.

ashok36 ,

If you don’t see progress, it’s because you’re not paying attention. Each test flight of starship has performed better than the last.

ashok36 ,

They caused him to try to kill himself. $1m is low in my opinion. I just wish it came out of the cops retirement fund.

ashok36 ,

Not settled in court. An independent law firm investigates the allegations. No court has touched this and likely never will.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •