Many of the games that actual kids spend time on are the purest expression of gaming slop (half-broken microtransaction gambling hell with schizophrenic flashing colors). Roblox and Fortnite's Islands system are both guilty of this. The problem is kids don't know any better and don't yet understand the value of money. The obvious response is "parents should handle this" and while I agree, there is no system to let them say "here are Robux/V-Bucks you can spend on quality content (e.g., Fortnite's Battle Pass is very well designed, quality content), but gambling slop is disabled".

In my experience, the Epic Games Store downloads faster, installs more efficiently, and launches games faster than Steam. The social features I actually use (i.e., add a friend, join them in a game) work fine. I'm not aware of any features Steam has that EGS lacks that I actually use frequently (Valve's VR, streaming tech, and Proton are great, but I don't use those frequently). It's not just me, many indie game developers are also big fans of EGS (most recent example that comes to mind are Jeff Kaplan's remarks during his 10 hour stream a week or two ago). Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.

Nearly every time I add the free EGS games to my cart the checkout fails. I frequently have to restart the EGS client for checkout to work (and even then it fails often).

I launched EGS just now to time some comparisons and it's a black rectangle on my screen with no GUI (probably self-updating). I had to kill the process and restart it.

The Look and Feel for the EGS client just feels slow. Not that Steam is always amazing in this regard either but it's way better than EGS. Go to your EGS library and click between "favorites" and "all games". Switching from favorites to all games takes me ~4 seconds, every time (if you have any meaningful number of games).

The search/sort is slow. Steam's feels instant.

The library list has a ton of wasted space. In terms of vertical space, the Steam library lists three games for every game EGS lists.

The EGS social features compared to Steam are downright anemic (and Steam is pretty bad compared to something like Discord). You can't even set an avatar in EGS. Even EA's Store app (whatever they call Origin now) lets you do that.

I'll stop there. I could rant for much longer.

One thing that steam does better than any other place is create an incredible store experience to sell games on. I don't think any other game distributor has an algorithm as good as theirs, and all the integrations and hookups that come with it. For example, Nintendo's shop page for each game is sparse in detail and lacks so much information buyers have access to in that game's Steam page counterpart. The store search and other store views display games far more efficiently than nintendo's search and store views, making it much easier to find what you're looking for in fewer clicks and fewer minutes.

if you have the time, try to find a game on nintendo vs on steam. Don't google for the pages, go to their base shop page and start from there. Try to avoid directly searching the title, instead search for keywords as if you're a gamer trying to recall a game suggestion you heard from a friend like 2 weeks ago. You'll notice the plethora of differences that combined puts steam on a whole other level of sales and content distribution if you go about it like that

EGS doesn't even have a Linux version.

Steam is always going to be my first choice because Linux support is better. If I buy on Steam I know it's going to work.

In my experience, the Epic downloader would frequently lead to degraded performance and/or system instability when I'd leave it running; I've never noticed such problems at all with the Steam client.

I try out the Launcher every couple years to see if it's improved. I just installed and logged in for the first time since 2023.

Looks like they have finally fixed lag and freeze jank that occured on every action, blocked scrolling, and etc.

Unfortunately just clicking on the "Featured Discounts" items on the store home page.. 3-4+(more like 4-5+ on further testing) FULL seconds of blank until the game details load. An ecommerce site where the items take 3-4 seconds to display!? I flipped over to Steam and everything in the store loads "instantly".

Sigh, I'll check back in 2028.

Edit: It boggles the mind and defies reason that they can't get a handle on table-stakes UX after all this time, energy, and hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into it. Nepotism; gotta be, yeah?

If this were true than Epic would have eaten Steam's lunch.

or network effects are keeping people on a worse platform?

> Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.

It is a monopoly but that can be a good thing sometimes. Steam is really good! Is it 30% cut good? Maybe not but I do think Valve has managed to keep Steam good for a very long time and if they lose their monopoly they're going to have a strong incentive to fuck things up.

Another example is WhatsApp. Sure, sucks for Google and Apple that WhatsApp have a watertight monopoly in most of Europe (and probably much of the rest of the world; I haven't checked). But it's pretty great for actually users. We've had at least a decade of totally free messaging that everyone has with no ads and e2e encryption.

Meta are just about starting to fuck it up but it's been a pretty great run.

Why would Apple care if WhatsApp has a monopoly? They don’t make money from iMessage

Gamers complain about layoffs, but the largest invisible cause behind them is Steam’s 30% cut, which nobody acknowledges.

I have Max 20x and they're still separate on 2.1.75.

Mine took restarting. Is it still separate for you? Also might not work yet if you have CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1 on

Data centers don't do anything other than sit there and turn electricity into heat. They only emit nothing but heat (which could be useful to others in the building).

In America they have "temporary" jet turbines parked next to them burning gas inefficiently with limited oversight on pollution and noise because they are "temporary".

False, come up with new talking points please:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJT2JeDCyw

If these things were so safe the rich should build them next to their homes.

Heat and noise. The noise and the increased electrical bills are the main things people living near data centers complain about.

What did Epic do?

paying for store exclusives mostly. it was a big deal when borderlands 3 dropped in 2019 and again with alan wake 2 in 2023. its kinda hypocritical when you keep talking about competition and how its important to fight monopolies then come up with a $150M exclusivity deal instead of actually competing with steam.

Setting aside whether paying for store exclusives is right or wrong (personally I don't see anything wrong with it), what does that have to do with the Apple discussion? The problem with Apple is specifically that they use their dominant market position to force anti-competitive terms on other companies. Has Epic been bullying companies into accepting their deals? You can sell a game anywhere, Epic has no leverage in this respect.

"Previous data from the trial reported that 107 participants received the mRNA vaccine and Keytruda treatment, while the remaining 50 only received Keytruda. At the two-year follow-up, 24 of the 107 (22 percent) who got the experimental vaccine and Keytruda had recurrence or death, while 20 of 50 (40 percent) treated with just Keytruda had recurrence or death, indicating a 44 percent risk reduction"

Statistically, if those in the control group had gotten the treatment, then in expectation 9 of those people wouldn't have had their cancer return or died. It must be exciting to run these sorts of trials with super promising drugs, but also a little bittersweet/dark.

You make a very good point. But the other side of it is that sometimes it goes poorly. The vaccine could have some previously unknown bad reaction with the Keytruda and the numbers get 44% worse instead. In this case it would be better to be in the vaccine group, but that's not guaranteed.

40% recurrence seems insanely high after just 2 years.

It makes me wonder what the selection criteria for candidates were

from clinicaltrials.gov:

Eligibility Criteria

Key Inclusion Criteria:

Resectable cutaneous melanoma metastatic to a lymph node and at high risk of recurrence

Complete resection within 13 weeks prior to the first dose of pembrolizumab

Disease free at study entry (after surgery) with no loco-regional relapse or distant metastasis and no clinical evidence of brain metastases

Has an formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tumor sample available suitable for sequencing

Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) Performance Status 0 or 1

Normal organ and marrow function reported at screening

Key Exclusion Criteria:

Prior malignancy, unless no evidence of that disease for at least 5 years prior to study entry

Prior systemic anti-cancer treatment (except surgery and interferon for thick primary melanomas. Radiotherapy after lymph node dissection is permitted)

Live vaccine within 30 days prior to the first dose of pembrolizumab

Transfusion of blood or administration of colony stimulating factors within 2 weeks of the screening blood sample

Active autoimmune disease

Immunodeficiency, systemic steroid therapy, or any other immunosuppressive therapy within 7 days prior to the first dose of pembrolizumab

Solid organ or allogeneic bone marrow transplant

Pneumonitis or a history of (noninfectious) pneumonitis that required steroids

Prior interstitial lung disease

Clinically significant heart failure

Known history of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)

Known active hepatitis B or C

Active infection requiring treatment

Ages Eligible for Study 18 Years and older (Adult, Older Adult )

Sexes Eligible for Study All

Accepts Healthy Volunteers No

There are affordances for "this works so well and has so few side effects that we are ethically bound to give the control group the drug too." This happened with AZT for HIV.

I'll blame Spotify, and your company.

See here for a truly random sample of human music: https://0xbeef.co.uk/random/soundcloud

Thankfully, most of it doesn't reach your Spotify feed. I think most of it is garbage, but I'd fight for the right of people to continue posting it. All things algorithmic have this exploration/exploitation, diversity/fidelity tradeoff and Spotify has theirs tuned very heavily toward exploitation/fidelity. I think there is a cool opportunity for someone to put the tradeoff dial into users hands.

Ah, when I said "find out what the difference is", I meant more of a cultural understanding than technical.

Not sure it’s a cultural thing since most of the copy coming out of DeepSeek has been pretty straightforward.

This sounds like the same basic voice systems we’ve had for 15 years. Idk if that counts as modern “AI”

The modern AI phone support systems I’ve encountered aren’t able to do anything or go off script, so it sounds better but it’s still a lousy experience.

I've fed thousands of dollars to Anthropic/OAI/etc for their coding models over the past year despite never having paid for dev tools before in my life. Seems commercially viable to me.

> I've fed thousands of dollars to Anthropic/OAI/etc for their coding models over the past year despite never having paid for dev tools before in my life. Seems commercially viable to me.

For OpenAI to produce a 10% return, every iPhone user on earth needs to pay $30/month to OpenAI.

That ain’t happening.

They don't sell their models to individuals only but also to companies with most likely different business and pricing models so that's an overly simplistic view of their business. YoY their spending increases, we can safely assume that one of the reasons is the growing user base.

Time will probably come when we won't be allowed to consume frontier models without paying anything, as we can today, and time will come when this $30 will most likely become double or triple the price.

Though the truth is that R&D around AI models, and especially their hosting (inference), is expensive and won't get any cheaper without significant algorithmic improvements. According to the history, my opinion is that we may very well be ~10 years from that moment.

EDIT: HSBC has just published some projections. From https://archive.ph/9b8Ae#selection-4079.38-4079.42

> Total consumer AI revenue will be $129bn by 2030

> Enterprise AI will be generating $386bn in annual revenue by 2030

> OpenAI’s rental costs will be a cumulative $792bn between the current year and 2030, rising to $1.4tn by 2033

> OpenAI’s cumulative free cash flow to 2030 may be about $282bn

> Squaring the first total off against the second leaves a $207bn funding hole

So, yes, expensive (mind the rental costs only) ... but forseen to be penetrating into everything imagineable.

>> OpenAI’s cumulative free cash flow to 2030 may be about $282bn

According to who, OpenAI? It is almost certain they flat out lie about their numbers as suggested by their 20% revenue shares with MS.

A bank - HSBC. Read the article.

Also interesting; https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/26/openai_funding_gap_hs...

Not sure where that math is coming from. Assuming it's true, you're ignoring that some users (me) already pay 10X that. Btw according Meta's SEC filings: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2023/q4... they made around $22/month/american user (not even heavy user or affluent iPhone owner) in q3 2023. I assume Google would be higher due to larger marketshare.

A banks sell side analyst team, which is quite different.

If you fed thousands of dollars to them, but it cost them tens of thousands of dollars in compute, it’s not commercially viable.

None of these companies have proven the unit economics on their services