shinjiikarus

I created a bot account for this, so all green on that front, will experiment with it, thanks!

I wouldn’t get my hopes up, after his stint at McLaren

Yeah, I let it run by night and saw what I did today. You are totally right, I will probably need to clean up a few things.

Not OP, but I’m using this one: lemmony on GitHub

EDIT: deleted link, I feel like I made a mistake, see below.

If you know the basics of AWS/Azure/Cloudhosting (spin up VM, create users, login via ssh, register URL, etc.): really low (1-3) with the ansible recipe. With docker not much higher if you know the basics about docker that is.

If cloudhosting is not your forte, but are reasonably skilled in basic linux navigation, configuration, and upkeep use a Hoster that is doing a lot for you like DigitalOcean and read their tutorials. Since you still don’t need to configure a lot the challenge rises to a 4-5 maybe.

If you have never heard of hosting nor Linux it still isn’t the most difficult project to start learning to do these things. Setting up rises to a 6 or something. But keeping a Linux server running over an extended period of time is much harder than setting one up. Maintenance is difficult compared to a MacBook or something, so be prepared to read up on backup and restore docker containers and volumes and how to keep your instance reasonably updated without breaking your server. This would still not rise the difficulty above a 7.

Small disclaimer: In the past I have used alts and burners on Reddit all the time. I have the best intentions to keep my instance up to date and running smoothly, but if something catastrophic would happen, due to me meddling with stuff, I’d shut it down and start from scratch. I’m not clinging for my comments I wrote drunk at 03:00 AM.

Yeah, about that …

With the recent bribery scandal, EU officials seem to come really cheap.

Host your own instance. When there is downtime it is your fault.

I partially agree for the GPU-side of things. But while there have been iPads without active cooling for over a decade now, there has never been a competitive, high performance laptop like the current MacBook Air build on x86. I know you are right theoretically and maybe it is a solvable challenge and the priorities were just different, but whatever ARM does, it seems to run cooler than x86. Even if it is only bigLITTLE or some other shortcut.

Technically you are right when saying:

and software can be compiled for anything.

But in practice software is compiled from source for the environment it will run on and Valve does seldomly have access to the source code of third parties. They generally have pre-compiled .exes and the accompanying files. If the developer chooses to recompile for different architectures, then valve will probably get a new compiled binary. But what about defunct developers or publishers who don’t want to invest any more development time in old software? Additionally: No, software as complex as games cannot always be compiled for anything without throwing ungodly amounts of errors. In these cases additional development would be needed, even if Valve had access to the source code and the rights to use or recompile it, which they probably don’t have for proprietary third-party software.

This is specifically a problem for valve’s immense back catalog, brand new games will probably release as a compatible binary.

And realistically Microsoft has a very good moment coming up in the next few years to effectively kill Steam: Valve only delivers pre-compiled files and does not have access to source code. Therefore Valve is not only stuck with a “Windows-like environment”, they are also shackled to x86. With Apple’s M-processors reigning supreme in the laptop space with insane values for performance-to-powerdraw (and in turn heat radiation and cooling requirements), the days of x86-by-default laptops are probably numbered and more manufacturers may want to switch to ARM, to avoid unfavorable comparisons to MacBooks. With Windows for ARM Microsoft can finally kill of all traces of Win32 in WinRT, as they tried for years and force everyone to use UWP-apps from the store exclusively on ARM. Apple does leave apps behind, when updating their operating systems on a regular basis, a similar move by Microsoft wouldn’t look totally unreasonable. The switch could even happen gradually, like Apple’s Rosetta translation layer, which runs x86 apps on arm great right now, but I don’t think it will be maintained forever and support for x86 apps on macOS will end one day. Microsoft could do the same for Windows for ARM. If this happens Valve will probably have the opportunity to install games as UWP-apps, but their back catalog of Win32 .exes becomes effectively worthless. But if Win32 .exes run great through some translation layer on linux, valve can continue to sell and support their back catalog on current hardware.

Facebook does get to decide how they store and encrypt their data. Apple and Signal have received court orders in the past, they did comply with, but there was just nothing than meta data zu turn over.