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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • It makes perfect sense if you’re a systems engineer.

    Downloading games costs bandwidth.

    Steam services millions of customers daily.

    Valve, correctly, decided to do a bit of load-balancing by prioritizing updates by how recently and frequently you play them, and spreads them out.

    This is nicer to their systems, and its nicer to most people who don’t live alone and have to share internet with other human beings in their home (or at work).

    You’d think it would be no big deal, bandwidth is “infinite” and “free” in most peoples minds. But there is a maximum throughput, and there is a cost in energy, time, performance, and money.

    Load-balancing, people. It saves lives.











  • You missed 3 times in a row.

    1. The 30% cut thing has been industry standard since the dawn of time. Valve goes out of its way to make exceptions to this rule down to 10% in cases of very high volume but everyone only talks about the 30 since thats all they hear about. Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point. Plus, developers are not getting nothing for that 30%, especially games that use Valve’s Steam networking services. Unlike Microsoft and Sony who also take 30% cuts, Valve doesn’t charge $10,000 per game patch to have someone review and approve it to be published.

    2. The regional pricing goes both ways. There was literally a game recently users were complaining about NOT getting it because the publisher opted out or something, where the regional pricing would have made the game affordable but in USD (Valves country of origin and therefore default), it was exhorbitantly priced. And this one wasn’t even Valve’s fault.

    3. Valve did not censor games directly on behest of the Australian nutjobs, they fought back against them pretty hard, but Valve is ultimately beholden to the payment processors (who they also pushed back on). Once Visa and MasterCard started threatening to pull services, Valve was put in a “comply or die” situation. If they didn’t do as they were told they wouldn’t be able to accept money with anything but Stripe or Bitcoin. They literally lost Paypal as a payment option over this fight.

    I think its very dishonest of you to frame these points as enshittification. This term means the intentional degradation of a product or service for the sole motive of increasing profits. For point 1, the whole industry literally started off like that. For point 2, it was literally an attempt at equity (valve may not get the deltas correct but in some countries they’re losing money on games). And for point 3, you might be able to argue it but ultimately it wasn’t for profits so much as it was survival.

    If you wanted to shitsling at Valve, you should have mentioned how Valve invented lootboxes in TF2 and then exacerbated the issue in CS:GO/CS2, releasing that awful plague onto the industry.








  • So the radio mesh range depends on a couple factors but the short answer is “yes, easily.”

    The long answer is that the world record for longest direct meshtastic/LoRa message is 90km, but you can easily get 1/10th that with some buildings and whatnot blocking the way. Getting really good antennas and sticking a node way up high like in your attic, on your roof, or in a tree and using a personal device closer to the ground that bounces off of it is the most “ideal” scenario for a home setup. I currently talk with people three cities over regularly, and there are about 110 nodes in my area and constantly growing.

    Because there are no cellphone towers, you’re kind of responsible for getting your node high up if nobody else has set up a ROUTER node on a nearby mountain (by the way the router role is not the same as your home router, its supposed to be like a cellphone tower but way up on a mountain, not a rooftop of a tall building).

    And if you’re the first person in your area, Heltec often sells their chipsets in 2 pack bundles with cases and batteries. Give one to a friend and ask them to pay it forward if they like it!

    If you want to get started, you have two basic starter choices: the cheaper Heltec V3 (or now V4) based on ESP32, or the more expensive Heltec T114 based on RAK. The former is more powerful but drains battery like crazy, and the latter is more power efficient but lacks features like Store & Forward. There are other brands of board makers, but Heltec is the entry tier (and both are pretty solid from what I can tell of the two units I have). There is lots of room for DIY builds too if you are looking to do custom shells for on-person devices or enclosures+beefy antennas for outdoor units.