Are you trolling or do you genuinely believe that? I remember the original too. YouTube is applying AI filters on many old videos and reuploads, and the end result is distrust of many videos we used to trust.

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.

Thanks for the new fear.

Everyone loves Technology Connections. Also, watching Alec rant about Christmas lights every year is tradition now.

In case you're not being hyperbolic (or for anyone else legitimately thinking this because I've heard it multiple times), I think Valve really did the best thing they could. I know Valve feels huge, but MasterCard and Visa together are over a hundred times bigger, and any payment processing system Valve could make would definitely be a pushover.

Also, never underestimate the casual normie population. If Valve lost Visa and MasterCard support, I'm pretty sure that would mean losing two-thirds of their playerbase if not more. Those people would either prop up alternative stores like Epic or Microslop's or just pull away from PC gaming altogether.

Anyway, it's a bit like the people saying Valve should make their own DRAM to combat the shortage. It doesn't acknowledge how entrenched the existing manufacturers are and how far away Valve actually is from that level of manufacturing.