I'm not used to hearing good things about EA, but good for them.

It's an absolutely massive game, and has been in development for 17 years. They also were pretty upfront with the fact that there would be a price increase at launch. I'll also mention it's one of the rarer games where the devs opted out of any Steam DRM, so you can copy the game files and run them on any machine without needing Steam installed. I keep the game on a thumbdrive for playing on my work PC when I have downtime.

All in all I think the price is well deserved, and I hope they do really well.

AAA games are clearly too expensive to be sustainable. Every new big games has so much money behind it that it can't afford to fail, leading to a bunch of highly risk-adverse design decisions. With a few exceptions, players are increasingly having to turn to indie games and AA games for unique experiences because AAA games are getting bland.

I'm not convinced that game length is the main issue though. There's a ton of game mechanic bloat, and far too many games are open world when they would probably be better as a more focused experience. Graphical improvements are also getting increasingly less important, with it getting harder and harder to see new improvements. Switch/indies/AA/etc clearly show that you can have great looking games without spending a huge amount of money on chasing realism in graphics.

Yeah, I've long thought that weather forecasts are a perfect use case for AI. AI is great with complicated systems that are hard to model accurately but have lots of available data.

Current weather forecasts kinda suck. I try to schedule jobs around when it's going to rain, and have to frequently reschedule because rain forecasts aren't very accurate. I really hope we can see improvements.

They want access, they just don't want china to have access. Of course, when you add a backdoor it's best to assume everyone will use it sooner or later.

Nearly done with Metaphor ReFantizio, and also playing some Astalibra and FEAR.

I recently found out that FEAR won't run well on modern windows PCs, and installed it on my Deck to see if it ran better on linux. Turns out it runs fantastically, with the Deck able to outperform any windows machine. I intended to only test performance, but FEAR is one of my favorite shooters of all time and I quickly got suckered back in. So I guess I'm going to do a full playthrough now.

There's definitely plans to bring SteamOS to more handhelds, we've seen partial support for the ROG Ally being added over some recent patch notes for example. This may just be for other handhelds for right now.

On the other hand, we just recently started getting links on the new Steam Controller. That could just be a Steam Deck accessory, but maybe Valve is planning on trying Steam Machines again.

As someone else mentioned, that one was based on a different distribution of Linux, and had a lot of differences in function/setup to the current version of SteamOS on the steam deck. The steam deck's version is steam deck exclusive right now, and people have to use other options like Bazzite and HoloOS if they want a Steam Deck-like experience on another device.

This implies that Valve is finally ready to let other vendors use SteamOS, which is great news.

Right, I'm fully licensed as an electrician but I also have to repair/maintain natural gas/propane/diesel engines. There's also increasing amounts of computer/network knowledge needed for new controllers and setting up network monitoring. Overall it's a job that really benefits from a lot of different skill sets, and has a lot of day to day variety in the work I'm doing.

These cards sound good, but I'm generally soured on Intel as a company. It'll be years before I feel comfortable buying hardware from them.

Yeah, there's a lot of questionable work out there. Many homeowners underestimate the difficulty involved in some repairs too, so there's definitely a need to justify why it took as long as it did.

One of my biggest pet peeves with corporate websites. It's like they're afraid that clearly stating what they do will prevent them from growing and doing other things as well. So instead they refuse to say anything coherent.