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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • This is a tricky one, honestly, because the steam deck straddles the line between PC and console.

    If you were a Sony fan, you’d be rightfully upset if Sony released a new PlayStstion every year, and made new games only for the new hardware. It’s just not long enough to feel the hardware has ran its lifespan, and you feel cheated.

    Conversely in PCs, the expectation is that the hardware slowly improves constantly, and new hardware doesn’t stop you playing all the latest games on your old hardware; the only limiting factor is how far your old hardware can be pushed before the performance is too poor. And that is YOUR choice as a user, not an artificial choice imposed on you.

    I’d expect that any Steam Deck 2 is going to be more like the PC model - it won’t create exclusives or stop people playing the new games on their old deck, it will simply be better and faster.

    So on that basis I wouldn’t personally have a problem if Valve put out a deck every year.

    All that said however, I think waiting several years is the smart business move. People have longer to enjoy their hardware while still feeling like they have the “latest model” - it’s psychologically better from the consumer perspective.

    There may also be an argument that longer release cycles makes things less complicated for devs (less devices to test on) and also keeps the hardware going for longer, because devs will be incentivised to optimise performance for the current deck (which they might not be as much after a new one comes along)


  • I appreciate your point, but I still believe spelled-out numbers work better.

    In prose, especially fiction writing, the ideal case is that the words themselves slide neatly out of the way and become invisible, leaving only a picture in the reader’s mind. Generally speaking, anything distracting is therefore counter-productive for fiction. Strange fonts and strange typesetting, while interesting, take the reader out of the prose. There’s a reason almost every fiction book you pick up from the shelf uses Garamond.

    In an engineering context, remembering exactly “12 eggs, 6 toast” is probably the most important thing, and numeric digits assist in that. In fiction however it doesn’t matter if, by the next page, the reader has forgotten exactly how many eggs there were; the important aspect is to convey the sense of a large and chaotic family, and the overall impression is more important than the detail.

    Thats why although the numbers are important for setting the scene, we really don’t want them to jump out and steal attention. We don’t want anything at all to have undue prominence, because the reader needs to process the paragraph as a cohesive whole, and see the scene, not the specific numbers.




  • tiramichu@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzLiterally Nineteen Eighty-Four
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    16 days ago

    Context is everything, IMO.

    In engineering work, numbers should always be digits. In prose, numbers should be spelled out.

    Breakfast at the Thompson’s was a busy affair; 12 eggs and 6 rounds of toast for their 3 sets of boistrous twins.

    Compared to

    Breakfast at the Thompson’s was a busy affair; twelve eggs and six rounds of toast for their three sets of boistrous twins.

    To me it’s pretty clear which of those reads better and more naturally as prose; digits really ‘jump out’ on the page, and while that is great for engineering texts, it is incongruent and distracting for prose.




  • One thing that works is finding ways to make achieving small tasks part of your routine. I have a to-do list and in my lunch break at work I often pick off one or two things and decide okay, that’s what I’ll do when I get home. And so that way the selecting of the tasks and the doing of the tasks are things that have their own specific times and the decision is already made.

    What also works is to create some external motivation.

    I might not feel like cleaning the house, for example, but if I have friends coming over then I’ll enthusiastically clean everything because I want it to be nice for them.

    And so sometimes I intentionally weaponise that by inviting a friend over just to give myself that extrinsic motivation.



  • This is it for me too. I’m not going to allow companies to monetise me or my data any more than the absolute minimum I have to.

    One thing I try hard at is making sure that I never have to see a single advert in my own home. I don’t have TV, I don’t watch any streaming services if they have ads, and I adblock everything. I don’t care how good a product is, how cheap or free, if it has advertisements I’m out.

    To me it’s about having sufficient self-respect to not let companies live in my head rent-free.