Ah, never read the books. Just figured I needed to expand my reasoning.

It’s also worth checking out their Augmented Steam extension to get a lot of that directly on Steam Store pages.

I don’t think the positioning will feel too different from the Deck honestly. Your hands are going to be closer together holding the controller and thus rotated more inward. It looks like Valve rotated the grips and stick/button/trackpad triangles to match this angle, hence the lower sticks and tilted trackpads. The ergonomics on the Deck, original Steam Controller, Index controllers, and Index headset have all been great, so I trust them here.

Thanks for the reminder. I don’t think I encountered payment issues with the Deck (I used a credit card and was early enough to be in one of the April 2022 waves), but better safe than sorry.

Yeah, it is comforting. I still often spend more time optimizing my plan for a project than on actual progression. I also need reminders for very basic stuff. Some of my task lines are for stuff like feeding the cat, brushing my teeth, or charging my phone. My daily routine list is 200+ lines and would be unwieldy in anything other than a spreadsheet. Granted, many of those aren’t actually daily tasks.

Counter-counterarguments.

That assumes the 999 are in a position to stop the 1. Assuming FTL travel/communication/detection is never possible, reaction ability is always going to be limited. A relativistic projectile aimed at a planet can be a silent civilization killer.

This is more about cautiously reacting to the possibility of hostility in the very high stakes scenario of first contact, not the confirmation of hostility. In the room analogy, we don’t know who has the gun, whether it’s truly 1 person or 0 or 100 or 500, if most or all of the 999 are blindfolded or willing to defend newcomers, whether overpowering the violent one(s) is actually possible due to everyone being spread out and any guns having functionally unlimited ammo, whether other people have already been taken out for just showing up or resisting, and whether all of the above even matters if the aggressor gets a kill shot off before any of the above takes effect.

Evolution is inherently a competition for limited resources with winners and losers, so violence innately comes with the territory. Even grass and trees are in a war for sunlight. The concept of peaceful cooperation may be common due to the individual specialization likely needed for a species to become space-fairing, but it’ll be a higher level, more abstract idea, and the universality of other species applying it more broadly cannot be assumed.

Regarding the first point, I think it just assumes the possibility for hostility, not the universality of it. If there’s a room with a thousand people and I know one person in the room has a gun and wants to kill me, I’m still going to hesitate to enter regardless of the 999.

Also, any intelligence that arises out of evolution is going to have at least the rough concept of violence.

Sorry. I may be reading more into the chain than what’s actually here. I’m just saying “aliens can’t be expected to behave like humans” isn’t really a viable explanation to the Fermi Paradox without some big caveats, because given a large enough sample of intelligent alien species, (1) they won’t be monolithic, (2) some will exhibit human-like behavior on the premise that humans aren’t special, (3) some will have arrived on the scene millions or billions of years before us, and (4) the “somes” from the last two points is enough that galaxy spanning civilizations should already be everywhere even if FTL is forever impossible.

If intelligent life is rare enough to preclude the “given a large enough sample” (I’m thinking one species per galaxy level rarity), then the solution to the Fermi Paradox is elsewhere.

This argument has never really made sense to me. If you picked a random individual lifeform from anywhere in the universe, then yes, there’s a good chance it won’t have much in common with humans. If you take the totality of all life in the universe however, we should see a smoother distribution of behaviors. Human-like behaviors would be within that spectrum by definition and should not be entirely unique.

Let’s say of all the intelligent species in the universe, an average of 1% exhibit whatever motivations are needed to go interstellar, and that 1% of those species got a billion year headstart. Well, due to sampling bias, we should still see that 0.01% represented everywhere.

This sounds like me. I’ve got a spreadsheet I go through daily with sections like “morning routine,” “returning routine,” “essential chores,” “dinner routine,” etc. It’s set up to turn tasks green when I complete them so I get just enough of a dopamine hit to continue. There’s also a dedicated column that’s basically for “you’ve determined this is the optimal way to do this task after countless iterations; stop trying to rethink it and just do it.”

I’ve got similar requirements, and I’m still at least partially on Keep due to them. So far, the closest thing I’ve seen is Quillpad, and being able to stack it with Obsidian is an attractive feature, but the lack of nested checklists is a deal breaker for a few of my use cases.

And yes, I hate apps wanting to auto-categorize things for me, groceries, banking transactions, etc. I do 99% of my grocery shopping at one store, so I have a dedicated shopping list for it with categories set up to match the easiest path through the store that hits everything.

It’s crazy to me that there aren’t enough people living like that to make solutions for it ubiquitous…

I’m not OP, but thanks for spelling that out. I guess I must have seen a bunch of tech stuff from that instance starting out. I was under the impression it was started by Machine Learning enthusiasts. Lol.

Yeah, the price parity thing seems to be a big misconception here especially. The price parity guideline comes from Valve’s page for Steam keys. Valve gets a 0% cut when keys are sold on third-party sites, yet they still use Valve’s infrastructure, so it makes sense for Valve to not want you to price them to have all your key sales go third-party.

As far as I can tell, Valve has zero interest in how you sell copies of a game that don’t use Steam keys.

Also something I noticed per their guidelines:

It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

As a frequent user of IsThereAnyDeal, I can tell you it’s more common than not for a game’s historical low price to not be on Steam, so Valve is definitely not strictly enforcing this. With this and the lack of legalese on the page and letting developers/publishers determine what “similar” and “comparable” are on their own terms, I’m not seeing anything Valve should be doing differently here.

I never called it reasonable. I just don’t think it’s especially egregious. Honestly, I would price the value of Valve’s contribution (which is definitely not zero) at maybe 15% to 20%, but that’s just a gut feeling.

I’m not saying the standard doesn’t suck, just taking issue with the implication that anyone using it is uniquely bad to do so.

But yeah, you’re right that getting me to admit Steam (overall) sucks would be nigh impossible. I genuinely don’t believe it does, so there’s nothing to admit. Maybe you could convince me to lie about it though? Lol.

I do admit there’s a few places it sucks, the gambling stuff being the biggest, but their positives eclipse those for me. I also acknowledge I’m in a privileged position being able to enjoy Valve’s efforts in VR, Linux compatibility, etc. directly and that I might have different opinions if I was on the outside looking in. I imagine that’s not quite the admission you want though.

Similarly, I have a spreadsheet I’ve been refining for years synced across all my devices for task management. No premade solution satisfied me. The columns I use:

• Task: short description of task
• Details: any helpful details to remember
• Did: date last done
• ↻: repetition interval in days currently going all the way from daily (1) to every other year (728)
• Do: next do/due date
• Meta Notes: usually hidden notes for future me about why a task is set up the way it is or placed where it is to avoid relearning certain lessons

I keep everything brief enough for the main 5 columns to comfortably fit both the width of my phone and a space I keep available on my left desktop monitor.

The Do column is calculated for me and is color coded from red (very late) through orange (missed a day), yellow (do today), green (near future), blue, purple, and black (far future).

Completing a task is usually as simple as Ctrl+; or F4 (or a calendar tap) in the Did column, and the immediate feedback of the color change keeps me invested in continuing.

I use this same layout for routines, projects, leisure, etc. which all have their own sheets. To give you an idea of how thorough these are, my routines one has about 200 lines.

30% is the industry standard though, and Valve’s contributions of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you’re not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn’t make that viable, that’s really on you.

The Ventoy thing reminds me of my minimalist setup:

• My car keyfob.
• My apartment key (on an extra keyring so it dangles lower to use immediately when I grab the whole set by the keyfob).
• My mailbox key.
• My work key.
• Minimal 256 GB flash drive partitioned into 100 GB for Ventoy and 150 GB for random personal files. This is my favorite minimalist shape for flash drives by far.

I have done geocaching and I’ve got a Steam Deck, so I may be borrowing the pen and adapter ideas, though I’ll probably keep the adapter with the Deck.

I’d add that “requirement” is relative. My city’s bus system has stops near enough to cover my home and work, so you could say a car is not required for the route. However, using the bus system would turn my 20 minute (10 minutes one way) daily commute into 3 hours. That’s just too impractical to consider.

Yeah, it’s actually been kind of a relief to have fewer new games to look forward to every year. I have a backlog of something like 700 unplayed games already in my library. I know I’m not going to play them all as much as they deserve before I die, but being able to make a much bigger dent in them is nice.