Yeah. When I ride my bike in the sticks and pass walkers in the dark, I try to disable my headlight a few seconds before I pass them. Otherwise all they see is a bright light approaching. Disabling the lights for a moment seems better than one party not seeing anything. (Or both parties, e.g. two bikes, or runners with forehead LED light.)
After all, even in the countryside the darkness usually is far from complete. You still see quite a few meters without any headlights. Though the tradeoff would be different for cars with their much higher speed.
If your front light is correctly aiming down, there’s no need to disable the light. Modern bicycle led front lights are most often incorrectly set up, though.
I can control the angle, but permanently aiming it down so far that it can't get in anyone's eyes is completely impractical. You would only see what's directly in front of you and you would miss a lot of stuff.
Just chuck in the old non LED lights. When I'm walking around town at night, it's only the cars with new bright white LEDs that are super bright and blind me.
It's a relief when an older car come by with orange'y lights.
Even during the day, the other week I was driving and some small mini had super bright white lights on, no need for them, it was bright day out.
Even just the normal "day" lights on new cars can be too sharp/bright. It's ok if I don't look at them directly, but if I accidently check that way it's distracting.
In an interview with Lex Fridman, John Carmack said that in retrospect, Quake was too ambitious in terms of development time, as it both introduced network play and a fully polygonal 3D engine written in assembly. So it would have been better to split the work in two and publish a "Network Doom" first and then build on that with a polygonal Quake.
Which seems to imply that the network stack was about as difficult to implement as the new 3D engine.
As open models become better (DeepSeek-v3, Kimi K2), the risk increases that someone might use them as an aid in development of biological or nuclear weapons. Current refusal training prevents this. But if models can simply be uncensored, things might get ugly as capabilities continue to increase.
I dunno? Wouldn't hard part of building a nuclear weapon be acquiring nuclear material? Same with nasty biological material? I think the danger is overblown. Besides I've always chafed at the idea of a nanny state :( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanny_state (or nanny corps for that matter)
You wouldn't like Valve so much if you explicitly saw the 30% Steam tax, I mean fee, declared every time you bought a PC game on Steam. Imagine if Microsoft did that. +30% for every Windows software. Like iOS. Then Steam games would be +60% rather than +30%.
It's not really a tax though. Other platforms offer a lower percentage (Epic: 0% up to 1000000 copies sold and 12% above) and yet the prices on Epic aren't cheaper than on steam.
If the final price doesn't change based on the storefront cut, then as a consumer, I don't care.
That's still higher than what seems reasonable for a simple store front, but they aren't as bad as Valve or Apple.
Note that Valve is a relatively small company with only a few hundred employees, but with one of the most extreme revenue-per-employee ratios in the world, estimated at $19 million per employee:
That's orders of magnitude higher than companies like Apple, Elsevier or Nintendo. Steam is basically free money for Valve. Valve is extracting huge rents (around 6.5 billion yearly revenue) for negligible expenses (only 79 people working on Steam).
Based on what? Your arbitrary standards. I still don't understand what's wrong with 30% for everything Steam provides as a platform. It's perfectly acceptable. It's not making indie developers poorer. It helping to ensure Valve can focus on the things that matter to them and do things like invest in Steam Input, Proton, SteamOS, and Steam Deck/Machine/Controller/Frame/etc. And it's still significantly better than the times when your only option was brick and mortar, where you maybe got 10-30% as the developer.
Every other digital storefront does far less and still takes 15-30%. Why is Valve the big boogey man and everybody else is free to charge whatever they want on developers while doing fuck all for anybody but themselves?
> I still don't understand what's wrong with 30% for everything Steam provides as a platform. It's perfectly acceptable. It's not making indie developers poorer.
Of course it makes them poorer if a big chunk of what you pay for their games goes to Valve.
> It helping to ensure Valve can focus on the things that matter to them and do things like invest
But they basically aren't doing that. If a company has an extreme revenue-to-expense ratio, it means they are hardly investing any of their revenue. They only have a few hundred employees while making around 6.5 billion per year.
> Every other digital storefront does far less and still takes 15-30%. Why is Valve the big boogey man
Well, Microsoft seems to do 12-15% in the Microsoft Store. And I fully agree Apple is significantly worse than Valve with iOS, because there is no way to circumvent the 30% fee in iOS; indeed, it wouldn't even be possible to offer a software like Steam on iOS. (But it should also be noted that Apple has a much lower revenue-per-employee ratio than Valve, indicating that they reinvest a lot more of their revenue.)
There's a reason everyone else who comes to take on this "market inefficiency" fails. Amazon threw billions at it. So did Google. So has Epic. And Microsoft.
None of them dethroned steam, so 30% is still the cost to access the steam user base.
If tens of billions can't overcome this "inefficiency" then it sure seems like there might be more to the story than economics 101.
The fact is that Steam has an incredibly loyal _userbase_ and you won't convince them to leave unless steam betrays their trust, which they haven't.
The trust in any competitor is nearly 0 compared with Steam which has been a platform people have loved and used for over a decade now with basically 0 issues. No corporate missteps.
Arguably the biggest controversy is the latest way they made CS2 loot boxes less valuable, popping the insane bubble in the skins market. That's still ultimately good for the average gamer and I expect they'll come out smelling like roses.
> There's a reason everyone else who comes to take on this "market inefficiency" fails.
Yes, network effects, as discussed in the Wikipedia article linked above. It's the reason why Facebook or Twitter are so hard to replace, or eBay, or Amazon. In these cases larger platforms benefit from the fact that everyone else is already there, which makes switching hard. That doesn't mean they are inherently better though. They can even be significantly worse than alternatives, apart from network effects.
Part of the reason why these companies are still around and strong is because they continue to innovate. Facebook spun up Instagram for younger folk, Amazon has some of the best shipping/warehousing/distribution in the world. eBay has slowly become less relevant for local p2p purchase because its market share got eaten up by Facebook Marketplace....
Twitter had a big chunk of its userbase eaten up by Threads, hey I'm seeing a pattern here?
Microsoft takes 30%, Sony takes 30% so that argument is out of the window.
Let's break down what you actually get for that 30% with Microsoft/Sony
- $120/yr (xbox) or $80/yr (ps) subscription fee
- Price subsidized console
- Friends system, voice chat/messages
- Online store/publishing regional pricing and associated locks
- Store for MTX
- Cloud based game saves
- Trophies/achivements and other player related goal setting
- CDN to distribute your game
- Remote play e.g. using your console to stream to your PC/Phone
- First class controller support
Steam gives you all of the above with literally 0 cost to the consumer aside from purchasing your game. The fact that anyone even pretends like this is a valid argument is a joke.
There are only a few hundred people working at Valve, with 79 working on Steam, but they are making 6.5 billion USD yearly. That's extreme. One of the highest revenue per employee ratios in the world. They are spending almost nothing. The 30% are almost pure profit.
Since PC is an open platform, the proper comparison would be other PC store fronts which are substantially cheaper than Steam. Unfortunately there is no incentive for users to switch, as Valve apparently contractually forbids games to be sold at a lower price outside Steam.
"Valve apparently contractually forbids games to be sold at a lower price outside Steam." This quote is based on one email from a valve employee circa 2017.
Furthermore, is it not Valves right to say if you wish to offer the same product at a lower price, we reserve the right not to sell your product anymore. Keep in mind in most cases when a game is not freely purchased through steam anymore you can still download the game from the CDN, you can also still use all of the online features for the game. You just cannot purchase a new copy
I really don't understand why price parity requirement is a bad thing. If you want to take a bigger slice of the pie you can eat up the infrastructure costs yourself or take your business elsewhere, EOS, Xbox, PlayStation store ect
"There are only a few hundred people working at Valve, with 79 working on Steam, but they are making 6.5 billion USD yearly. That's extreme. One of the highest revenues per employee ratios in the world. They are spending almost nothing. The 30% are almost pure profit."
You are absolutely right. that is far too much money and to which I simply ask the question why no other serious competition? Companies have poured millions into this and always miss the first stop gap of consumer rights first meaning any attempt they have to eat away at the market share fails so hard its actually embarrassing. Anyone arguing against the current system is just arguing against capitalism.
Out of all the companies in the gamer space hardware/software Valve are the only one who actually care for their customers and have regularly extended rights that go well beyond the legal minimum requirement, this is just a fraction of a reason why they have been and will continue to be first class in the gaming space
I don’t care about the Steam tax. Steam is one of the few storefronts that actually show me what I want. That give me the ability to download any game I downloaded 20 years ago when I first installed it. They went through a few dozen iterations of nonsense social stuff, but through that all the core functionality just kept working.
I hate the iOS store because it’s full of ad-riddled slop. Steam isn’t remotely close to that. If I find a game on there, even if it’s bad, someone clearly spent time and love making it.
The "buffering" message looks like they are using the wrong streaming technology though. They should use a fault tolerant real-time video codec, transmitted via UDP, which produces glitches during brief interruptions but not complete aborts with a "buffering" message.
LandSpace, the company behind Zhuque-3, might be the most advanced Chinese rocket startup.
They said they are even designing a larger rocket with 10m diameter, which is more than Starship (9m). My question is though where they are planning to get the required money from. Unlike the organization behind the Changzheng ("long march") rockets, which is already developing a 10m rocket as well, LandSpace is not state funded. And they don't have a billionaire at the top like Blue Origin and SpaceX.
On the other hand, they were only founded in 2015, and it's impressive what they have achieved since then, no doubt with quite limited funds. They also have some experience with designing methane engines.
Hold up—where do you get the assessment that LandSpace "is not state funded" and that these startups have "quite limited funds"? My understanding is the diametric opposite. Here's WSJ:
> "At least six Chinese rockets designed with reusability in mind are planned to have their maiden flights this year. In November, the country’s first commercial launch site began operating. Beijing and local governments are giving private-sector companies cash injections of billions of dollars."
> LandSpace raised 900 million yuan ($120 million) in December from a state-owned fund focussed on advanced manufacturing, while in 2020 it raised 1.2 billion yuan ($170 million), Chinese corporate databases showed.
They need to raise a lot more if they want to build a Starship-class rocket. Small government injections like the $120 million last year won't move the needle much. I somewhat doubt the "billions" of dollars WSJ is reporting, unless they include state-owned rocket companies like CASC, or non-rocket companies, like military companies.
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