“Xbox” will just be Windows going forward, at least on handhelds.

We’ve come full circle, almost like a red ring of death.

I wish, but it feels like Valve is still mostly trying to support x86/x64 type devices and ARM/RISC-V doesn’t seem on the roadmap as much.

Dude off the top of my head Balatro (won many Game of the Year awards), Vampire Survivors, Terraria, and Minecraft all have Android ports.

I wonder if Valve plans to release an Arm version of SteamOS

The problem here is you’d be relying on a translation layer similar to Proton, but would probably have to be built off of something like Box64 for it to work. There just may not be enough horsepower on these small devices for that to do well.

I’ma be real: It fucking kills me that Steam on Android has been mostly used for 2FA and the idea of it being an alternate game store for Android somehow just… doesn’t exist?

Especially, out of all companies to take the fight about that kind of stuff to Apple and Google, Valve has the punching power, and they’ve literally already had Epic forge a path for them in this regard.

Why is my Android copy of Balatro unable to use the same cloud save system as Steam? Why am I stuck in Google’s fucking lame gaming ecosystem? It just makes me heave and sigh because I’d way rather be purchasing games for Android via Steam on the Steam Android app. It just feels like such a missed opportunity.

The fact that it is a paid product should have been their first clue it was a honeypot.

I can’t, for the life of me, shake the feeling that the person writing this is Captain Beatty.

Lately, our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine.

The current internet—a mature ecosystem with widespread access and ease of self-publishing—undoes that.

I’m not trying to be dismissive of the important things the article is talking about… but this is almost exactly the kind of justifications Captain Beatty uses in Farenheit 451 for the of burning of books. Boiled down to the basics, what Beatty preached was that all books disagreed with each other, and it made things confusing, and people didn’t know what to believe, and people were in constant argument and disagreement, so the best way to solve it all was to burn all the books so people couldn’t find differing ideas and disagree anymore.

This article makes no such prognosis, in fact, it’s not making a prognosis at all other than “this is happening and you should know” (making it good journalism), but I do worry about the way it’s framed and how that could lead people down the path Captain Beatty traveled. Especially when it seems like it’s on the verge of understanding but falling short.

The commission’s work was the sort of precise and methodical case-building that is the opposite of the frenetic and immediate justification engine. In an anti-institutional moment, the congressional truth-gathering process read to some as academic, slow, even elitist.

On some level here they understand it, but they’re failing to admit to themselves truly how many it read to as academic, slow, and elitist. It read that way to so many people that literally millions of Democrats chose to stay home in 2024 because they felt like their party was failing miserably in fighting against real, actual fascism on our doorstep. Instead of trying anything daring and new the Democrats were going to trod the same broken path that had failed them time and time again.

They weren’t shy about it being fascism, too. You can’t scream from the rooftops how dangerous the fascists are and how we need to stop them and then roll over to shake their hands and hand them power and act like anyone is going to take you fucking seriously. Because at no point did the people in positions to change anything take big risks themselves. They’re all going to be comfortable and pampered because they’re part of the elite, while the rest of us are going to be literally crushed to death in the Orphan Crushing Machine that Trump is going to build into an All-Humanity Crushing Machine.

So yeah, when they are literally just going to hand Trump power after Trump clearly broke every rule in the book to make this happen, the people who supported you up to that point now view you as not being serious. You won’t put your money where your mouth is. You’re not stopping certification using legal trickery like the Republicans, you’re just saying “Well I guess fascism won and we’re good people, so we always let winners win.” Even when those winners plan to basically start a genocide, that’s fine to them, I guess.

The fact that 8 relatively short sentences are considered a “huge rant” speaks ill to your level of literacy. But you do you.

This is also probably the reason why you lost your DARPA funding, they more than likely caught wind of the fact that those backdoors were present and didn’t want to create any derivative products based upon the same.

Though this implies that the Department of Defense doesn’t want to use compromised tools, since DARPA is DoD. NSA is also DoD.

I mean, it’s still Open Source, right? So it would be pretty hard for them to hide a backdoor or something??

I guess I don’t know what’s so sus when it’s easily auditable by the community and has been for two decades now.

If it’s just because it’s memes and you’re not being that serious, then disregard please.

Once again, this means literally every government on the planet has lost the plot.

Just quoting myself here because yeah dude, all countries are guilty of this and it makes me ill. Just because I was born into a specific country doesn’t mean I have some fucking grand allegiance to it. The US is categorically the worst and most despotic country on the planet and it’s where I’m from, no argument. I’m from the tippy top of the worst of the worst. Sorry, not sorry, I don’t really have a voice in any of it.

You only seem to accept perfection as valid.

Am I, or am I the only one here dreaming of anything outside of what already exists? Like I said, we have a different opinion on centralization versus decentralization and I don’t think that’s going to change, and that deeply impacts how we both view these issues. You’ll just have to accept that when you say “centralize with democatic controls so no one can take advantage” to me that’s Utopian thinking. (Because once it’s centralized and a bad actor somehow does take over, then you can’t decentralize it quickly.) That’s acting like you already have the perfect solution. That’s not critiquing the status quo. Sure China is better than the West, but that doesn’t mean China can’t be better than it is now. And dear God, I hope that for China, because the West sure ain’t up to the charge of leading the world through climate change and mass extinction.

which when combined with democratic structures leads to no abilities for individual actors to take advantage of the system itself.

You know people keep saying that, and each time, surprise, there’s a despot at the end. Sorry man, we’re just on different pages here.

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I have known Marxists, and they didn’t self-ascribe the term “tankie” to mean “Marxist.” In fact the ones I’ve known would bristle at the suggestion.

I literally expressed that Western tech companies can and will hold a proverbial gun to the worlds head to get what they want and you attack me for “singling out China.” Okay.

My point was that communications are fucked when they’re controlled by centralized powers instead of decentralized and citizen-controlled. Like I said, there isn’t a modern country that does this right. They’re all draconian fuckheads who want to spy on their populace but have privacy for those in positions of power. It’s not the system, it’s humans, and it’s that kind of shit that you have to face when designing societies (remember the Utopian thinking you brought up?) that when you’re centralizing power of any kind, you’re creating more opportunities for despotism. Currently, everywhere, all communications are pretty centralized. We don’t have lots of rogue communications in most countries, partially because even things like encrypted communications still have to use hardware owned by communications operators to be able to get from Point A to Point B. I’m just interacting with Lemmy, but on the way back and forth, my data passes through all kinds of privately-owned infrastructure that I have no control over.

Once again, this is why I think communications are currently neck and neck with commodities in terms of importance of understanding how their function changes society and alienates us from each other.

I don’t know how to more emphatically tell you that Debord was such a Marxist his many of his theses from Society of the Spectacle literally were copying/detourning Marx lines. His “plagiarism is necessary” thing is something he lived up to when writing the book. Like three quarters of things in the book are other writers words twisted into what Debord wants to talk about. The Lettrists/Situationists were literally building on what came before.

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

Do you have specific issues with the real democratic structures of AES states that you can point to further decentralization helping with?

I understand how all this works, and I think those are systems built on human communications systems of the 18th century, not the 21st. I think communications have come so far that we need to consider that more decentralization and distribution than we already have isn’t going to somehow make things worse.

Current iterations are Napster, and I want us to be be Bittorrent.

Like I said elsewhere, I think communications and how they alienate us from each other has potentially become the bigger issue than commodities separating us, which is why I’m less interested in Marx and more interested in Debord/McLuhan.

Like how McLuhan talked about the history of ancient Egypt and how, after the invention of papyrus and use by the military, the power in society went from the Priest caste, who previously were the only people who could write, to the military caste, because their writing was current, prudent, and useful in everyday life. It changed power relations in society based on a different type of communications system. Modern communications, especially software are literally language made manifest and so much of our world runs on it all now that the private corporations that own it all can effectively put a gun to the world’s head and say “do what we say or we make it all stop working.” We can also look at the flip side, the Great Firewall of China, which endlessly spies on all its citizens and even gives them cute popups to remind them that cops are actively watching their online activity, and why friends of mine used to risk running Tor exit nodes because they wanted to support dissidents in countries who were blocking their communications.

Does that make sense?

Bud, I’m reading theory, and you’re literally telling me I’m not reading the right theory.

AES is democratic, so there must be something you don’t like but haven’t defined yet.

Well to be fair, I’m probably closer to anarchist than strict socialist because to me decentralization of power and communications is how you solve a lot of this and no societies that exist or have existed have really tried it in the sort of capacities we could try it at this point in history, I believe. There’s just no society who has even come close yet. I do think we were held back slightly technologically and communications have progressed to the level that things can be more decentralized, a la citizen communications like the barbed wire telephone network. I think current iterations of democracy are all really outdated and that there’s been plenty of new options to try but there is no political willpower in any society to pursue those things.

I wouldn’t say I ascribe to Critical Theory, but the general idea of “there is no perfect anything, we must always be critiquing and trying new ways” speaks to me. So hanging our future on 200 year old ideas without any progression or growth of those ideas feels foolhardy to me.

With all due respect to theory, I’ve seen too much of it shit all over people who lack education, context, or ability to understand, and basically leaves those people out of the conversation and acts like their opinions don’t matter because they haven’t read the right books or have the right education.

The differences between academic unions and blue-collar unions were always stark to me, and when there was ever any connection between the two, the academics would roll their eyes and be dismissive of the blue-collar people, who may have not always been theory conscious but were good people, a la Samwise Gamgee (in terms of Tolkiens ideas of the kind of good, kind, but simple people he met in WWI). Constantly telling those people that they don’t know enough to be involved isn’t ever really a positive way forward, in my opinion, and anything where it’s forced from the top-down on those people instead of having their input is something I’m against, sorry. You can’t explain away taking away people’s right to input in their own governance with theory, to me.

I’ve read some Marx, but never got my hands on an unabridged copy of Capital, nor did I finish it because it was pretty tedious. I personally think Debord had way more profound things to say, and Society of the Spectacle is the most dog-eared book I own. Mixed with McLuhan’s Understanding Media, I’m actually partial to think communications might actually be neck-and-neck with commodities in terms of importance of understanding them. I mean, Debord thought that too, which is why he thought he would be remembered for his board game Kriegspiel, (a war game focusing on lines of communication) not for SotS.

So you’re saying you only believe hierarchical societies with monopolies on violence are viable societies? Where a strong-man makes the decisions from the top-down for everyone else?

There is no room for decentralization of control or a non-authoritarian dominance? There is no room for socialism grown from the bottom up organically instead of forced from the top down?

Why must the idea of “state” equal “authoritarian state with monopoly on violence?” There is no other such type of state we can imagine? Do we really lack such imagination?

Markets aren’t evil, workers who own the mean of production will still be trading with other groups of workers who own their own means of production. A t-shirt factory will still be trading with a textiles factory. Capitalism just raises the importance of markets to the detriment of pretty much everything else in life.