“The people” are too stupid to blame unfortunately, they have no idea what’s going on.
Average IQ Americans freebase propaganda and Joe Rogan for thoughts. The Kremlin and the Republican propaganda empire have been paving the way for a Project 2025 Neo Nazi hostile takeover for decades.
John Doe from Florida doesn’t stand much of a chance when every TV, cell phone, and Facebook bot in his state is beaming the world’s largest psy-ops laser-beam at his head for half of his life.
I tend to blame the Fascists. But yea, the future is bleak. We’re cooked in America, at least.
lazygit ! Just needed to throw out a mention because it’s an amazing tui for visual orientation, is super fast, and can be used with a mouse and keyboard (or just keyboard) from the terminal. I saw it mentioned on a thread here last year and have preferred it as a fast “oh crap I think I made a mess lets back up” tool over the more complex gui apps I’ve tried (almost all of them).
The games are crippled by how archaic and underpowered the hardware is. TOTK is beautiful _despite_ the hardware limiting its true potential, robbing world class studios, and forcing them to cut corners.
It’s indefensible considering how much legendary IP that potato is holding hostage.
The good news is that the best Nintendo platform is also the best mobile platform: The Steam Deck. It plays Nintendo games better than Nintendo consoles do, and as a bonus, it plays everything else.
Have you ever tried to use physical media with a Steam deck?
Have you ever tried to get 5 hours of battery life with a Steam deck?
Have you ever put a Steam deck in your pocket? (I do have big pockets, but at least with the Switch Lite, it's possible.)
Nintendo will be just fine. I personally will never use a platform that can kick me out on a whim, or could screw me the moment Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus.
I have docked my Steam Deck to a TV. I have also used physical media with a Steam Deck. The USB port lets you do both of these things. I also just plug it into my laptop dock to play more desktop-oriented games.
The Deck works for me since I rarely play for more than a couple of hours in a stretch (so I don't need 5 hours of battery life), and I don't need to stick it in a pocket. It's "just a PC", so you can still play non-Steam games on it if you need to avoid the Steam ecosystem for some reason. Its direct competitors (Asus/ROG Ally and the Lenovo Legion and others) show there's a market for this type of device.
The Switch satisfies the needs for a lot of people people; great! Good ideas will cross-feed with those in the handheld PC gaming device realm.
> Have you ever tried to dock a Steam deck to a TV?
Yep, works great with non-proprietary docks vs even using a 3rd party dock on Switch has led to bricked units.
> Have you ever tried to use physical media with a Steam deck?
I haven't tried, but I'd be surprised if plugging in a USB optical drive wouldn't work. That'd be pretty silly though, but so are some of the Switch physical releases when the bulk of some games isn't actually on the cartridge.
I think the better thing to look at is DRM instead of specific transmission format. Steam itself is a grey area for DRM (some games are DRM-free IIRC), but you can also use things like Lutris... or generally whatever you'd like. Takes a bit of tinkering, sure, but a whole lot less tinkering than getting anything unofficial to run on a Switch.
> Have you ever tried to get 5 hours of battery life with a Steam deck?
Yep, works great. I'll still give the point to Nintendo because they prioritize battery life so much more, but if you aren't running the SD at full tilt with a large 3D game, it can get decent battery life.
> Have you ever put a Steam deck in your pocket? (I do have big pockets, but at least with the Switch Lite, it's possible.)
I would love a Steam Deck Lite or something. That's probably the biggest reason I keep my Switch Lite: it's easy to just toss in a bag on a whim while the SD (and other Switches) require planning to actually use them.
> Nintendo will be just fine.
Yup. They're probably still sitting on piles of cash from the DS and now Switch. People were saying Nintendo was doomed when the Wii U did poorly, but others at the time rightly pointed out that they've probably got enough runway to have a few more total flops of consoles.
> I personally will never use a platform that can kick me out on a whim, or could screw me the moment Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus.
Losing Newell is a valid concern (again, for Steam as a platform), but Nintendo is certainly an interesting choice to say they won't kick you out on a whim, given their track record of bans, lawsuits, and just being particularly litigious.
I didn't mean that Nintendo was in trouble, I just meant what I said: the best way to play Nintendo's games isn't on Nintendo platforms. For me, I'm not going to be playing games away from the ability to plug in or dock for 5 hours. I don't put expensive electronics in my pocket, and yeah I've docked my Deck to a TV... it's great. As for physical media, why would I want to use that?
But sure, if you hate Steam on principle then obviously it isn't for you. In my 19 years of using steam I've never had any problems though, and I suspect that's true for most people.
I haven't tried in the last couple of months, but last time I tried connecting Deck to a TV it was _painfully_ obvious it was Linux with a thin veneer of Steam over the top.
Some of that is Valves' to fix, but some other things are just "that's how PC games are" — I genuinely can't believe "render the UI at native screen resolution, but the game at arbitrary different one" is not a standard feature in 2024.
I don't mind my game running at 720p, if I still can view the text and UI at native 4K; but apparently this is just not possible to get on PC.
What you are looking for is a render scale option. It is usually specified as a percentage of your display resolution but could also be combined with upscaling (DLSS, FSR, XeSS, etc.) options.
It's something that is up to the game developer to implement but it is becoming more and more common to see in games now.
I don't know, it doesn't make much sense to call the Steam Deck the best mobile platform by dismissing things that a mobile platform should be good at just because you personally don't care about them.
The Steam Deck is just a PC - nothing is locked down. You could install whatever OS you'd want to replace SteamOS, or you could buy your games somewhere other than Steam and just use SteamOS as a launcher.
> I personally will never use a platform that can kick me out on a whim, or could screw me the moment Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus.
This is a very strange take for someone arguing for locking into Nintendo's most-recent ecosystem (where you're generously allowed to re-buy some of the games you already own from previous generations) over an open, linux-based hardware platform that connects to steam.
>I personally will never use a platform that can kick me out on a whim, or could screw me the moment Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus.
Dude, you have to rebuy all the games you've already bought and already own every odd generation. Imagine paying for NES and SNES games, Wii and Wii U games and other old garbage you already own? That's Nintendo.
On steam you have absolutely massive library dating back almost 20 years by this point, and it comes with you every time you buy a new device, whatever it might be a PC, laptop or SteamDeck.
Yes, steamdeck is pretty large and bulky, but you can get 5 hours battery life on non-demanding indie titles (ie. Hades on the updated deck OLED models)
Yes, you can dock a Steamdeck to a TV easily.
It's all around better, completely open device, minus the size (and battery life in demanding AAA titles switch can't dream of running anyway)
I mean, there's no fucking way you could fit a regular Switch into your pocket. I don't care how big your pockets are. So that doesn't really seem like a fair criticism.
One of the things I find sad about the Switch is in fact that Nintendo seems to think it fulfills the same niche that their portable systems did, but it doesn't even come close. I can fit my 3DS (XL or not) into a pocket very comfortably, not so with my Switch.
This is a statement that could only be made by an HN commenter. My wife has to drop into Arch to recover her audio every time she connects her Steam Deck to the TV. This is not a product ready for mass consumption.
Honestly, it's a milquetoast take. The only advantages of the Switch at this point are Nintendo exclusives and better support.
There are some rough edges with the Steam Deck, but it's a bit odd to frame the Switch as "ready for mass consumption" when it lacks access to Steam, something every other handheld has, and consumers expect in 2025.
I think the point is that with the Switch you get Nintendo only, and in the past at least that meant anemic hardware and paying for old games you already bought. With the Steam Deck you get a portable PC with all that implies, meaning PC games, but also emulation.
So on one hand you have a walled garden, of the type that HN tends to hate (when it's Apple), but on the other hand you have an open platform that's significantly more powerful.
Exactly this. Because capitalism tells us to pay people the minimum (which isn’t enough) and charge them the maximum (which is too much) and suddenly living is unaffordable for the majority.
Airlines should be a federal service like the post office, not for profit companies cramming the poor like sardines and scamming them over baggage space.
When the “tools” are built from countless lifetimes of blood sweat and tears dedicated to mastery and bottled by mega corps to siphon all of the value and sell it back to the people by laundering their intellectual property, your angle falls flat. The “poor” can’t eat art. They used to be able to sell their art to buy food. Now 5 tech bros are seizing all of that food money, artists are starving, humanity is being regurgitated into slop, and you’re cheerleading for molloch.
It's not even that. A lot of papers are trained from copyrighted works without permission by less than five people groups in academia or startups. The systems to make the models can be done extremely cheap.
People are downvoting wrongthink again. This is a valid rebuttal to a pretty poor and not very historical comment. The new narrative must be perpetuated at all costs.
This isn’t true, is it? I’ve only ever heard that TypeScript has one of the most advanced type systems of any mainstream language.. but I don’t have enough experience with other languages to know how true that is.
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