The selling point of a Steam Deck is that it is a PC console. One of the problems with the PC gaming market is that even though in theory all PCs are "compatible", the reality for game developers is very different. Different PCs have subtly (or not so subtly) incompatible software and hardware, and it's up to OS developers to try to maintain some semblance of compatibility, and game developers to ensure that their product runs on as many configurations as possible.
The problem is that there is a large market segment that would enjoy the greater variety of games that are available on PC than on any given console, but they simply view a gaming PC as another "console". I have a friend who I would consider a "gamer" (a long history of console ownership, hundreds of hours logged on his Nintendo Switch on "hardcore" games), whose only PC is a laptop that is too weak to run any modern games, and feels that buying another appliance just to play a handful of games he can't currently access doesn't make sense.
The Steam Deck bridges the gap by providing a console experience for PC games. Developers only need target one hardware and software configuration to ensure that any Steam Deck owner can play their games. The Steam Deck operating system indicates which games run well, and provides out-of-the-box settings for controller and graphics configurations that ensure that a Steam Deck owner can buy a game and be reasonably sure that they won't have to spend any time updating graphics drivers, remapping controls, tweaking settings, or troubleshooting PC-centric issues just so they can play a PC game. It inhabits a handheld form factor because that is the best selling form factor (see Game Boy, Nintendo DS, etc.) with the added bonus that it can be docked and played like a regular console. The same combination that propelled the Nintendo Switch to massive success.
People outside the HN echo chamber don't care about the arcane hardware and software issues that cause many to turn away in disgust, they just want to buy a device that gives them access to a library of games they wouldn't otherwise be able to play. At present, the Steam Deck is the device that does that the best.
Oddly enough, Chuck E Cheese has been trying to “rebrand” itself since COVID. During the pandemic they actually operated as a shadow kitchen pizza chain and possibly as a result, the quality of their pizza (at least at our local restaurant) has substantially improved, to the point that I would rank it above a couple other nationwide chains. The atmosphere is very different from the dark, grody, funky 1980s rat pizza restaurant, and is now a loud party atmosphere with TV screens constantly blasting kiddie music videos. They’ve shifted their age demographic from “family” to “kids”, and their locations have become much cleaner.
The name of the shadow kitchen is "Pasqually's Pizza & Wings". If you read the "Our Story" page on their website, it says that they "leverage the operational infrastructure of Chuck E. Cheese kitchens across the country".
Pasqually is one of the animatronic characters, he is a chef.
As a nerd of a kid who enjoyed "Lore", it amused me when people complaining about Pasqually's Pizza at the time, because I immediately recognized it as the name of the Pizza restaurant inside Chuck E. Cheese, that's what it was always called.
Pasqually is not just the chef (and the drummer), he's the owner of the restaurant in the show. It was always his restaurant, Chuck is just the front man of the band.
Yeah I went to one last year for a friend’s kid’s birthday - the giant playground maze and ball pit is gone, the animatronic stage is gone, it’s a big dance floor and more arcade games and even a tiny carousel for toddlers
I went again recently (less than a year ago) for the first time since the 90s and the animatronics stage was still fully functional. Apparently very few locations are left with working stages, and I was impressed that my local stage had continued operating. They also serve alcohol now or something.
It felt a bit more open, one giant room, but I might just be remembering more walls because I'm taller now than I was when I was 10. Definitely no ball pit though.
Why overcomplicate a simple tool? If you're not soldering professionally and only need it a few times a month, I never see anyone recommend the Hakko FX-600. I couldn't be happier with mine. Heats up in seconds, adjustable temperature, uses standard Hakko tips, and very affordable. And takes up no bench space, you just shove it in your toolbox (with a tip cover) when you're done with it. The only downsides are that it's not as slim as a soldering station, and the temperature adjustment is in 20 degree intervals. Hakko is a reputable brand, and I have had 0 issues with mine.
I would recommend a TS100 or TS80 over the Hakko FX-600 for occasional hobbyists. Those are both closer in design to the iFixit iron. Digital display, standard (replacable) power connectors, safety features, etc. Even more compact.
Sure, but there’s also less to go wrong with an FX-600. It’s literally a wall jack and an analog switch. No pushbuttons, no displays, no power adapters. Safety features are worth considering but everything else seems unnecessary.
I'm not a fan of devices with a built in non-replaceable power cord. With the T100 I've already replaced the cord with a longer one. I can also run it on batteries, if necessary.
Much like user interfaces: by careful study of how people use them and not by aping what the most "successful" keyboards are doing.
Anyone who has used a mechanical keyboard can tell you that there is much room for improvement. Rubber dome keyboards are cheap to manufacture and adequate when new but wear out quickly, and most people don't treat them like a wear item. Meanwhile, mechanical keyboards provide a superior typing experience that decreases hand fatigue and can easily last 20+ years with no maintenance.
And don't get me started on layouts. QWERTY is ubiquitous but is a piece of tech debt that has hung around for over a century. Studies have been done and layouts have been produced that are much more efficient and produce less hand fatigue, but none have taken hold because of the sheer momentum that QWERTY has.
Want to see an easy place where there's room for improvement? Why are the rows on every keyboard you've ever used staggered so bizarrely? Because on a typewriter, mechanical limitations meant that there had to be room for the linkages. But inexplicably, we continue to manufacture keyboards that preserve this fossilized layout. Typing on an ortholinear keyboard is sheer bliss in comparison.
Modern mechanical keyboards are overpriced rgb widgets for the most part. And god forbid you’re any literate in switches, lubing, etc, it becomes impossible to just get a keyboard. I’ve returned two m. keyboards and am absolutely fine with kv-300h (cheap island scissors with no bells or whistles). I have two, one from 2017, another from 2024. No difference.
I think the market rewards cheap keyboards because most people don't use desktop computers, most people do almost all of their computing on mobile phones. Some people use laptops for work, which they swap out about every 2 years, so the longevity of the keyboard doesn't matter to them.
I've seen coworkers using 65% or less mechanical keyboards and I have no idea how they get anything done. They always seemed like a cosmetic item to me, though they seem more portable if you're connecting it to a laptop. I use a full mechanical keyboard with keypad and regularly use home, del, pg up/up keys and appreciate having the arrow keys in their own little area. I use a few of the F-keys too. To each their own, but I personally find these tiny keyboards to be far less useful than a full sized keyboard
> Typing on an ortholinear keyboard is sheer bliss in comparison.
I'm curious why. It never occurred to me that this would be a source of discomfort. If I look at how I have my hands on the keyboard, they are angled anyway - my torso is wider than the keyboard center, elbows rest on the arm rests, so the hands then kinda meet in the middle angled. It doesn't look like an orthogonal layout would be particularly advantagenous.
Otherwise, I think keyboards are a case of "good enough" and high transition costs compared to the benefits. I'm a software dev, so certainly above average in the amount of typing I do. But I can't even type with all ten fingers, yet it never seemed like a bottleneck. I can't "outtype" my thought anyway.
Looks like the bottle is pushed up from the bottom (so the water won't pool around the joint) and then caulked with some kind of sealant. Since these are basically shanties with corrugated steel roofs I would think that leaks would be the least of your concerns. And since plastic bottles come from the waste stream anyway I doubt that replacement after a few years would be an issue. Depends on what happens after a few years of UV exposure... if the main problem is just the plastic becoming hazy, well, that just gives you a free light diffuser!
There are already solutions for mounting a small led lamp with a battery and solar cell in place of the bottle cap to provide light into at least the early evening hours.
Not to defend a multi-billion corporation that’s currently being raked over the coals for anti-competitive practices, but here’s the thing about all Apple products:
Apple under and since Jobs has been all about selling appliances, not computers. A bicycle for the mind, but one that gets serviced at the bicycle dealership. And while technical users would love to use their devices as the general purpose computers that they are, that goes contrary to the device’s designated purpose. The iPad is not supposed to run desktop software because that’s not what it’s supposed to do. You don’t see a lot of complaints that you can’t play Doom on your smart fridge, but it’s the same thing, except for the fact that the iPad is such an awesome form factor and combination of hardware. But once it stops being an appliance, that opens it up to a whole class of support issues and usability problems that don’t affect it in its current state.
As soon as you put a toggle in settings that says “yes, let me break things”, then you get YouTube videos that tell kids to go in and turn on the toggle so they can mod a game, or install some spyware, and break their iPad, and the one to bear the brunt of the blame for the iPad being broken is not the random YouTuber, but Apple, for allowing their product to break. That’s how the general public sees it.
Apple is not a hardware company, or a software company, they are both. The two are tightly integrated. That is one of the best things about the entire Apple ecosystem, the amount of iron-fisted, high-walled control they exercise means that the level of integration between their devices is unmatched anywhere else in the industry. Break that bond, and a lot of the appeal in Apple products goes away because yes, the hardware is overpriced. But if you look at it from the standpoint of a product that is a tightly integrated bundle of hardware and software, and that you are paying for the software as well, when you compare it to a lot of the other commercial offerings out there it starts to look like not such a bad deal.
All this is to say: if you don’t like it, then buy something else. Requiring jailbreaks is by design, not just because Apple is greedy or lazy, but because it completely changes the purpose and usage of their product to allow the installation of general-purpose software.
>As soon as you put a toggle in settings that says “yes, let me break things”, then you get YouTube videos that tell kids to go in and turn on the toggle so they can mod a game, or install some spyware, and break their iPad
I don't buy this argument at all. If Apple is indeed a top tech company, then they can also figure out how to have advanced PRO toggles that don't easily result in breaking things. Otherwise why do they call their devices with the "PRO" suffix?
Assuming that locking everything down till you aren't even able to change a ringtone or a wallpaper, is the only way to prevent the user form braking something is just lazy: lazy engineering on behalf of Apple, and lazy form their apologists who defend such a baseless claim.
That's like saying, the only way the state can guarantee your security is to put a policeman in each of your homes following you everywhere and tap all your wires. Very lazy explanation to justify what is ultimately a nefarious policy.
To compare it to wiretapping is taking it too far. You don’t have a choice whether or not your government forces a policy on you, but you still have a choice of which ecosystem you buy into.
Complaining about the lack of freedom you have in Apple’s ecosystem is like moving to a totalitarian country where the streets are clean and the buses run on time and then complaining about the lack of freedom of speech.
The iPad can replace a computer for the average user. Hackers and developers make up a tiny, tiny percentage of people who buy iPads. There is a huge library of business-class professional software available on the App Store that fits all the needs of the average user. Graphic designers rarely lament the presence of a proper terminal.
A device that fails to offer the "average user" even the possibility of becoming power users, hackers, or developers, and stops them from even trying to explore the vast potential of the tools at their disposal, is a device that cannot conceivably function as a replacement for a general-purpose computer.
I'm sure many HN participants can recount personal stories of how childhood computers purchased by their families for "average user" purposes ended up becoming things that expanded their horizons far beyond initial expectations. It sucks that current generations are being deprived of that experience by people who can't possibly imagine that anyone would ever use a computing device for any purpose other than the narrow use cases the manufacturer conceived of in advance.
I’m very aligned. I don’t love Apple , but I buy their hardware because of their vertical integration and closed systems. I get the argument that many eyes make bugs shallow , but if you want a tightly managed supply chain as a consumer , I don’t think you can do better than Apple in today’s market.
From the foundation of the open-source movement, hackers have always had an adversarial relationship with manufacturers. It is that relationship that motivated the creation of GNU in the first place.
At least Apple allows developers to sow in their walled garden, even if they ultimately get to decide what is allowed to grow.
That basically never happens. Something about the Apple ecosystem is good enough that people who honestly should not be using Apple - because they want freedom and configurability - continue to use it anyway.
Apple is literally the only vendor selling a 13" device with 4:3 aspect ratio, high resolution and fast refresh OLED display. It's bizarre that no vendor has a competitive offering. Minisforum v3 is getting there, https://mudkip.me/2024/04/14/A-Brief-Review-of-the-Minisforu...
I mean you say all this, and then in every iPad keynote Apple hypes the performance for power users, content creators, photographers and videographers, and even gaming!
Case in point, the latest iPad Pro has an M4 chip which no other Apple device has.
The problem is Apple just don’t want to give any of those demographics the ability to run what they want - instead only what Apple thinks they should run.
Except that the iPad does run what they want. Just because the App Store doesn’t have X piece of software doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have Y suitable replacement. In fact, most of the functional equivalents in the App Store are better optimized for the iPad’s unique hardware than a piece of software developed for another platform.
As somebody who has recently (within the last year) replaced his Android devices with Apple equivalents, I initially lamented the lack of some of my favorite apps, but at this point I actually appreciate the functionality and quality of the apps I’ve replaced more than the ones that I miss.
> App Store doesn’t have X piece of software doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have Y suitable replacement.
Apple blocks JIT, causing the iSH and aShell emulators to make the iPad too hot to touch, and too hot for the battery to safely charge (you'll get a message that charging has been stopped until the iPad can cool down).
Haven't tried it yet, but personally I'm very interested in Pythonista which also exposes an impressive number of iOS APIs (bluetooth, camera, etc.) that you can use in your scripts. No idea how it functions as an IDE though.
Not to mention that washing machine PCBs have to function in an environment which is notoriously hazardous for electronics: very high humidity/moisture, and very high vibration. The last time I took a look at my washing machine's PCB while I was replacing the door seal, I noticed that it was potted in epoxy, which neatly resolves the durability issue which simultaneously making it impossible to repair. I don't blame them, diagnosing which component has failed on a circuit board which is constantly failing due to abuse and replacing it requires a much higher level of skill (and thus more expensive repairs) than just replacing the board wholesale.
I've been using it to do some basic 3D printed designs, and it has all of the features you mention. I haven't had to write any Python so far.
The main issues with FreeCAD are those common to most open-source software applications like GIMP. You can accomplish almost anything that you can with professional software, but the UI is obtuse, at times buggy, and the process is going to involve way more steps, plugins, and hidden menus.
I use it because it's one of the few CAD packages that runs on MacOS and has a viable free tier. Most other CAD free tiers are crippled or have bizarre licensing agreements.
If you decide to give it a shot, I highly recommend using realthunder's branch, which massively improves the topological naming problem issue that the main branch struggles with. It also includes the plugin that adds the "assembly with constraints" feature. https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD
As someone who develops professional software in a private company, we absolutely 1) built a lot of features fast based on user requests, which created a clunky UI. Now, we're 2) doing a redesign which, while not a total code refactor, requires discipline and cohesion to reflect deeply on what use-cases we want to support specifically, as opposed to trying to be everything to everyone. We're incentivized to do this because we can grow revenue by building well crafted software for the most popular use-cases. We just expect that this is a "circle of life" for well crafted software, of 1) building features fast, then 2) polishing the best features leveraging professional ui/ux designers and product insights: to re-simplify once you reach a certain level of complexity.
I now think of most open source projects as just as good as closed-source at 1) building the functionality and MVP UI/UX, but that there is more friction to communication overhead to do 2), as well as less incentives (smaller carrot, smaller stick). To decide on specific priorities, bring in a designer (who might be non-technical) that can fully understand the context, and then potentially change or move around a bunch of code, is not something that "just happens organically by people scratching their own itch"
I think projects that are high profile like blender have done better here over time, often when there are well resourced and governed foundations or companies backing them. Or occasionally an OSS author will do this. Though I think that's the exception rather than the rule, and certainly requires a larger breadth of skills that extend beyond pure technical ability.
The problem is that there is a large market segment that would enjoy the greater variety of games that are available on PC than on any given console, but they simply view a gaming PC as another "console". I have a friend who I would consider a "gamer" (a long history of console ownership, hundreds of hours logged on his Nintendo Switch on "hardcore" games), whose only PC is a laptop that is too weak to run any modern games, and feels that buying another appliance just to play a handful of games he can't currently access doesn't make sense.
The Steam Deck bridges the gap by providing a console experience for PC games. Developers only need target one hardware and software configuration to ensure that any Steam Deck owner can play their games. The Steam Deck operating system indicates which games run well, and provides out-of-the-box settings for controller and graphics configurations that ensure that a Steam Deck owner can buy a game and be reasonably sure that they won't have to spend any time updating graphics drivers, remapping controls, tweaking settings, or troubleshooting PC-centric issues just so they can play a PC game. It inhabits a handheld form factor because that is the best selling form factor (see Game Boy, Nintendo DS, etc.) with the added bonus that it can be docked and played like a regular console. The same combination that propelled the Nintendo Switch to massive success.
People outside the HN echo chamber don't care about the arcane hardware and software issues that cause many to turn away in disgust, they just want to buy a device that gives them access to a library of games they wouldn't otherwise be able to play. At present, the Steam Deck is the device that does that the best.