In case you’re out of the loop, the old Steam Deck had Philips screws that screwed into self-tapping plastic holes. This lead to occasional stripped threads and often stripped screwheads....
To be clear, that gives them the opportunity to avoid enshittification. There’s plenty of private companies that are dogshit. Valve happens to be one of them that took the opportunity and ran with it.
When Gaben retires or dies, things could very easily change. But I don’t think it’ll happen before then.
It points to something hinky, but it’s not complete proof. If it’s correct, then the money is just sitting in an account. It’s not going into anybody’s pockets (although the interest might?). The open question is if the IRS form is accurate to the amount of money just sitting there. If not, then this starts to look like criminal tax fraud.
This could still come down to incompetence rather than malice. That said, the quote from the UCSF guy who was fired years before the charity existed does lean more towards malice.
One other thing to note is that while Karl Jobst does have a legal background, it’s in Australia. The US is also a common law system, but there are enough differences that Karl might not realize what is and isn’t illegal.
The one thing that does lean more towards malice is the quote from the UCSF guy who was fired long before the charity existed.
That said, I otherwise agree. If the IRS forms are right, the money is just sitting there. That’s not illegal in itself. It just looks bad.
Jobst also doesn’t always know US law, since he has a legal background in Australia (and I’m not sure what his specialty was, either).
He particularly mentioned in the video that the IRS isn’t an all-knowing monster ready to pounce on unsuspecting taxpayers, which is true. I’ve seen the bullshit US tax protesters sometimes get away with. Irwin Schiff, for example, once signed a blank 1040 form and sent it into the IRS. He almost made it to the statue of limitations until he went on The Tomorrow Show (a nationwide NBC talk show) and bragged about it. That said, people in the US do tend to think of the IRS as an all-knowing monster ready to pounce on unsuspecting taxpayers, and that’s why the response with the guy came back that way. Jobst doesn’t seem to be fully cognizant of how people in the US view the IRS.
There wouldn’t necessarily be legal responsibility. Things have been reported to the IRS with the money sitting there. If they’re paying themselves “expenses”, that would need to be reported on their personal income taxes. If that’s all there is to it, nothing illegal is happening. As of now, that’s all the evidence tells us.
Bad way to run a charity, but not illegal. That may change with more evidence, like if the money was paid out more than is actually reported.
I’ve been going through the Turbografx/PC Engine library, particularly shumps. Lots of stuff that gets overlooked from when Nintendo and Sega were dominating.
AMD is getting there by optimizing the shit out of memory access and cache. RISC designs by nature have far simpler memory models. AMD has to throw tons of resources into making the x86 pig stay in the air, and they’re already flirting with a move towards ARM.
Most of the people who know how to keep that pig flying already work at AMD or Intel. They certainly don’t work at VIA Technologies (the third x86 company that nobody talks about, for a good reason). In contrast, any given Fortune 500 could probably hire an ARM team to make a custom chip for their needs provided they had a good enough reason.
One thing you can do is translate 3d APIs. This sometimes makes 3d consoles easier to emulate than 2d consoles. PS1 emulation was basically solved when SNES emulation was playable but still had noticeable bugs.
You don’t really “tailor” hardware to Linux. You release a driver without a dumb binary blob requirement, or at least document your hardware enough for a kernel hacker to pick it up.
If the Deck can gain critical mass, they’ll be able force the issue. They’re already doing it with targeting Linux. The Switch is ARM, and the Switch2 leaks suggest it’ll be a better ARM chip, so devs are already targeting it.
Unreal/Unity already go to ARM pretty easily, so it’s not a huge deal.
What I’m getting at is there are factors that affect the broader market. Having more people and companies able to work on processors means greater possibility of variation, and therefore has an evolutionary advantage.
There are three x86 companies, and there’s not likely to be any others. VIA is barely worth talking about. AMD is currently killing it, but it wasn’t always that way. Over a decade ago, a combination of bad decisions at AMD, good decisions at Intel, and underhanded tactics at Intel made AMD nearly collapse. Intel looked smug on its throne, and sat on the same fundamental architecture and manufacturing node for a long time.
This was a bad situation for the entire computer industry. We were very close to Intel being all that mattered, and that would have meant severe stagnation. ARM (and RISC-V) being more viable helps keep that from happening again.
Much of what people do on computers these days is through a web browser. An even bigger market is servers, which often run Linux and can port things into ARM with less hassle.
I asked because what you’re describing doesn’t do much if you understand how common web frameworks and runtime environments work.
The framework needs to parse the HTTP request. That means holding the parameters in a variable somewhere just to arrange them in a datastructure for processing.
But let’s ignore that and say we have some kind of system that stream parses the request right out of the buffer (which itself still needs to be held in memory for a bit, but let’s ignore that), and when it matches a preconfigured password parameter, passes it directly to the hashing system and nowhere else. I don’t think any framework in existence actually does this, but let’s run with it.
We’ll still need to pass that value by whatever the language uses for function passing. It will be in a variable at some point. Since we rarely write in C these days unless we have to, the variable doesn’t go away in the system until the garbage collection runs. Most systems don’t use ref counting (and I think it’s a mistake to disregard the simplicity of ref counting so universally, but that’s another discussion), so that could happen whenever the thread gets around to it.
But even if it runs in a timely fashion, the memory page now has to be released to the OS. Except most runtimes don’t. First, the variable in question almost certainly was not the only thing on that page. Second, runtimes rarely, if ever, release pages back to the OS. They figure if you’re using that much memory once, you’ll probably do it again. Why waste time releasing a page just to make you spend more time getting it again?
And we’re still not done. Let’s say we do release the page. The OS doesn’t zero it out. That old variable is still there, and it could be handed over to a completely different process. Due to Copy on Write, it won’t be cleared until that other process tries to write it. In other words, it could still be read by some random process on the system.
And we haven’t even mentioned what happens if we start swapping. IIRC, some Linux kernel versions in the 2.4 series decided to swap out to disk ahead of time, always having a copy of memory on disk. Even if you’re not running such an ancient version, you have to consider that the kernel could do as it pleases. Yeah, now that var potentially has a long lifespan.
To do what you want, we would need to coordinate clearing the var from the code down through the framework, runtime, and kernel. All to protect against a hypothetical memory attack. Which are actually quite difficult to pull off in practice. It’d be easier to attack the client’s machine in some way.
And on top of it, you’re running around with an undeserved sense of superiority while it’s clear you haven’t actually thought this through.
Would it be so bad if games didn’t have insane budgets? Most of my favorite games from the past decade are from small studios operating on pizza and hope.
Rant: Valve's new Steam Deck screws speak volumes about their ethos.
In case you’re out of the loop, the old Steam Deck had Philips screws that screwed into self-tapping plastic holes. This lead to occasional stripped threads and often stripped screwheads....
YouTuber Jirard (a.k.a. The Completionist) has been accused of keeping and hoarding charity donations (www.youtube.com) angielski
Karl Jobst and SomeOrdinaryGamers (separate video linked here) have accused Jirard Khalil of lying to viewers about his charity....
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Valve says "technology doesn't exist" yet for full Steam Deck 2.0 (www.eurogamer.net)
Larion Studios forum stores your passwords in unhashed plaintext. (lemmy.world) angielski
Larion Studios forum stores your passwords in unhashed plaintext. Don’t use a password there that you’ve used anywhere else.
Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com) angielski
Noooooo you can't make a microtransactions free game and finished too 😭😭😭 (lemmy.world) angielski