i am well-aware that what follows is a rant, but i really do feel boxed in from every moral angle from my upbringing. from surveilled e2e communication from the "conservatives", to surveilled 3d printers from the "liberals", and watching the political pendulum ratchet a rope around my throat with increasingly fascist tooling, i am given to wonder if I am not a side character in 1984.
so i don't mind if you downvote me. but if you care to listen to a man rant:
we have an incredibly sycophantic doj which selectively enforces the law according to socioeconomic status, so it boggles the mind that some of us in this thread maintain that this issue is partisan alone ("oh you liberals"). this line of thinking is a trap.
is it really the dems in california? is it really trump's doj? or, taking a step back and looking at fascist trends worldwide in aggregate, don't these policies benefit those groups who operate and lobby above common law? those groups of people who we magically let slide time and time again after committing gross misconduct? those companies whose monopolies fundamentally destroy free trade?
so much tribalism.
conservative or liberal, once the pendulum swings maybe consider what happens when your phantom political 'enemies' on the other side of the aisle can monitor what you create in your home, what queries you toss into your AI assistant, who you talk to on social media, what you are buying, or where your location is on the cell tower map.
then if you have a second brain cell, maybe consider whether those enemies on the other side of the aisle are struggling to feed kids and make shelter just the same as you, whether they are as much the rabble as those goliaths who dictate what the topics of division -are-
who benefits most from your fear of the other but those groups who lobby both sides??
isn't it would be better to have a world of celebrated differences and rules of decorum that instill trust and foster co-operation? isn't that the world that we want, so that we may put the monsters at epstein island, sarajevo, (and so many other places) in prison? maybe it is time to rise up and hold our leaders accountable, on the left and the right!
"oh this is just political posturing, those lawmakers are rewarded merely for doing 'something'" yes-- this is true. but from the outset, whose political posturing is it really? because the end result for every one of these laws that come to pass don't seem to prevent the folks up top from getting away scott-free.
just remember that with all illegal files (violations of copyright law, banned books, etc): it is easy to determine whether you are in possession of them. whether it is enforced against you is a matter of convenience and leverage, your personal value (and optic value as a victim in the political theatre). be value-less.
rant aside. obvious, stupid questions to the topic at hand:
- (yes, shooting people is bad).
- what is the definitive geometry of a gun?
- who arbitrates that?
- is it a crime to print a rubber band gun? a toy gun?
- what about parts for a gun? how is that known?
- who do we register our printers to?
- what mechanisms are in place to side channel whether a person purchases tools such that we can detect whether they own an unregistered 3d printer?
- how do we deal with false positives?
- if I have a novel prototype of a non-gun which I would like to patent in a highly litigious first-to-file country, how can I guarantee that the file in question is submitted only to the government entity or API endpoint in question?
- do we ban chinese printers? whose companies form the superset of allowable printers? how do smaller manufacturers join in?
- what happens when the printer EOLs and software updates for the device stop (and therefore can't update the API endpoint)?
- will open source printers be illegal?
- what else should our government forbid us for printing: cock rings and contraceptive devices? emblems associated with religious groups (modernly) associated with hate speech?
i am sorry if you read this much and are from elsewhere. watch that it does not happen to your country. my heart goes out to you.
at best we have walled garden content; and when those are scraped (either by the host or by more sophisticated bots) those walled gardens will hopefully rot under an inability to drive advertisement revenue.
I agree, I think we're at the edge of a paradigmatic shift away from humans navigating TCP-IP itself. What that looks like, I don't know, but given trends (like dynamic pricing, human-futures marketing, surveillance, and consolidation of computing under mega-companies) I can imagine: local beacons screaming AI advertisement components across a geospatial sneakernet. Auditorium-based ticketed podcasting and AR/VR/meatspace events. Thoughtful hackers reminiscing of better times simulating them in web-assembly driven first-person POV "sites" and a rolling set of encryption keys for read-access (just send them BTC)
without an ecosystem for humans to contribute meaningfully to a feedback loop that allows for free group assembly around like interests, monetary growth for hosts and other participants, and some degree of presence / searchability / permanence, the current text-only web page paradigm is doomed.
My worry: that it suddenly becomes treason to commit to or pull certain repositories, that certain repositories become nationalized, or that other nation states do the same. Heinous forks and theft of code en masse for fear of being shot by a drone streaming video over ffmpeg.
Of code becoming a regulated munition, and tools that rat you out if you are designing resistance software.
personally I was interested in the capabilities of the pci-e bus as I abuse it in every other computer I can get my hands on (the rpi4 really did not like that treatment).
to your point about 'meaningful' though, indeed the ole College Try to run Crysis on a Samsung NC-10 would be far more glorious! But I assure you this was very fun for me.
My comment about sound reproduction was more a point on Bose's longstanding philosophy in building speakers than in anything about this specific software but, to answer your question... quite possibly. Bose intentionally colour the sound and apply, at the very least, EQ and some sort of active processing to it to get what they believe is the best out of the speakers and enclosures they use.
And I'm couching this all in very neutral terms, not because I have an axe to grind with them, but because I don't want to get into a flame war with the kind of audiophiles who hate Bose.
FWIW the Bose products I've heard and used all sounded pretty good. At the end of the day they're designed for people to enjoy music within a particular target context, not necessarily to be the most accurate at reproducing the recording exactly.
(I'll say this as well: reproducing the recording exactly isn't necessarily what you want to get something to sound good. A lot of albums from the loudness war era benefit significantly from rolling off some of the higher frequencies, where clipping occurs, for example. So I have one amplifier that includes - gasp, shock, horror - tone controls that I sometimes use and, on another system where the amp doesn't have tone controls, I've hooked up a [true] stereo graphic equalizer. You also have to take the listening environment into account and when you do that some element of processing the sound before it comes out of the speakers can also prove to be beneficial. Anyway, I shall now go and brace myself for some righteous abuse from the purists.)
The title gives more credit to the argument than the article :) someone also mentioned this, and I think we are kidding?
I’ve had debate coaches in both high school and college complain about my “academic utterances” and it has taken awhile to unlearn them. I think I have won— partially because I no longer make it a habit to sound cool on the internet (or in the meatspace). Partially also because I’m older now, so I don’t care. But looking back, I think that ego is the primary motivator for the prose, if I’m being honest.
The secondary motivator being our education: the complete bag-of-words LLM approach to writing and reading we all took to get A’s on our exams… you are forced to read one metric crap ton of 1700s prose, and if you catch the damn cadence and harness it to sound good, you are rewarded by your English teacher. This conditioning sticks around for awhile.
Some of you speak to the tertiary excuse: that we’re trying to convey something deeper to our audience than words alone can convey. Like you dive deep into meter, think about enunciation and the effects of sub vocalization (where hard consonants and cadence matters), or making coherent imagery out of wall of text wordslop.
I think it’s fine, but maybe you should think about whether you are alienating your listener the deeper you go.
I was hotly jealous of Kant again, was just now reading Critique of Reason on me old jailbroken Kindle. I had grandiose ideas for inflicting that prose on people everywhere I go, so that maybe we could fix stupidity “up top”. But maybe that imagery was for his time and we are mistaken to try to emulate it.
Ironically I was re reading kant because I was afraid I am getting mentally flabby with age. This article happily reminds me that the adipose was strong when I was younger though.
It'd be a good plan. Make HL3 a VR game since you built VR experience by making Alyx, take it to the next level by launching your own VR headset, everything is perfectly made together and HL3 launch would be as big if not bigger than GTA, and you optimize it for your own hardware.
HL3 is most likely not a VR game as Valve said they aren't working on a first party VR title (plus data mining seems to confirm). Plus they already have Alyx as the masterpiece, and it was already made with their own VR headset in mind: the Valve Index.
Maybe HLX will have some kind of VR interaction possible, as they want to push technology further with each Half life game.
Valve also said something like "ARM gaming won't be a thing for us for a very long time", but seems tides can change :) I wouldn't put too much weight into any publisher/developer saying what they aren't doing, even if they were working on HL3, they'd keep that under very tight wraps.
I mean, there are plenty of info available on the status of HL3 (code named HLX) and all point to it not being a VR title.
Also I don't think ARM is really a thing for them, even now. They want to support running software on the headset, and sure why not enable compatibility layers to play some small games, but the end goal is clearly streaming from a PC.
Maybe if some good ARM cpu hit the market they will pivot, but up until recently "ARM gaming" meant mobile phones.
> there are plenty of info available on the status of HL3 (code named HLX) and all point to it not being a VR title
Anything besides rumors? AFAIK, there is absolutely zero official information beyond the rumor mill.
> Also I don't think ARM is really a thing for them, even now.
I mean, then you're just looking the other way intentionally, they're quite literally adding support for ARM now, https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/11/codeweavers-launch-a-n... That's not something you do on a whim, it's a calculated step towards something.
And they're clearly setting up the new VR head to both do standalone gameplay for people without PCs, and to do streaming from PC.
None of the Steam hardware seems to have only a single use in fact, all of them are multipurpose, not sure why the VR headset should be any different, especially when what we know points to it also being multipurpose, quite explicitly so at that.
> Anything besides rumors? AFAIK, there is absolutely zero official information beyond the rumor mill.
If you count datamining as rumors, then no, nothing else. But the data mining is real data coming from valve so it's more than just "somebody said...". You can find lists of all the references to HLX found in other games, and what that tells us about the game.
>I mean, then you're just looking the other way intentionally, they're quite literally adding support for ARM now
Yes, I'm not looking the other way. But ARM is not their bread and butter and won't be for a good while. I'm fairly certain they are pushing this because they can, not because there is a strategic importance to supporting ARM. Had they been able to use a x86 cpu in the Frame, I'm sure they would have.
Plus, ARM gaming implies games made for ARM running on steam, like on mobile phones. This is "just" an emulation layer to play x86 games on ARM. Just like Apple is doing with the Game Porting Toolkit, and just like Microsoft is doing with their Windows on ARM.
Are they really pushing ARM Gaming, or PC gaming or ARM?
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