They have a responsibility to ensure that games they sell continue to work.

How do you figure that? Valve sells you a game, and they publish the system requirements for that game. If a game doesn’t work on your system then they’ll give you a refund as long as it’s within the refund window. Beyond that, they owe you nothing. For 32-bit titles, one of the technical requirements is 32-bit OS libraries. Let’s say Windows 12 removes support for 32-bit software. What do you think Valve will do? I say they’ll mass-update the system requirements of 32-bit titles to indicate that they’re not compatible with Windows 12 and higher. Historical precedent is on my side here, because this is effectively what Valve did when Apple dropped 32-bit support from OSX.

They ship libraries on Linux so there’s a common base, and they should also do so for 32-bit games. GOG does this for older games using things like dosbox or whatever, and Steam should follow suit.

The libraries that Valve ships for Linux support are essentially Proton. They’ve invested a lot of effort into Proton because there’s a strong business case for doing so. 95% of Valve’s customers game on a Windows OS (source: Steam hardware survey), which means that Microsoft could present an existential threat to Valve if Microsoft attempts to lock down their platform. Having a functional alternative OS could dissuade Microsoft from making any anti-competitive moves. Plus, of course, without Proton there’s no Steam Deck. I think making money from Steam Deck is only Valve’s short term goal though, which is why they’re opening up Steam OS to other handheld makers. The long-term aim is to shift gaming away from closed-source to open-source platforms so that Valve’s business isn’t reliant on any one OS vendor.

There’s no business case for doing the same with legacy 32-bit titles. There will be no new 32-bit titles going forward, and there’s hardly any market for existing legacy 32-bit titles. Valve would need to compete with GOG, who’s already doing much the same thing, and GOG is barely profitable as it stands. GOG’s 2024 profits were a paltry 1.1M profit on 199M revenue (source). That’s a profit margin of about 0.5%, which is not a healthy indicator in a for-profit business. 5% is generally considered low, 10% or better is a healthy margin. GOG is essentially being propped up by CD Projekt Red’s Witcher/Cyberpunk money (CDPR has 468M profit on 801M revenue in 2024; a profit margin of 58%, which is wildly high-margin). Valve could prop up a money-losing 32-bit compatibility project with all their income from 64-bit software sales, but I doubt they would.

The Steam client is just a launcher. Why is it Valve’s job to make sure that legacy 32-bit games continue to run? They’re not the vendor of the game, and they’re not the vendor of the OS. They’re just a middleman. If the game vendor doesn’t want to patch it to 64-bit, and the OS vendor doesn’t want to maintain 32-bit compatibility, then there’s simply no more support for that combination of OS and game. Valve isn’t required to step in there.

It may surprise you to learn that Valve already switched the client to 64-bit… for Mac. OSX hasn’t had 32-bit support since 2019, but it still has a Steam client! Valve didn’t do anything for 32-bit-only Mac titles, except drop the “Mac OS compatible” tag once Apple had dropped 32-bit support. That’s all they’re ever going to do for 32-bit-only PC titles, when/if OS vendors completely drop 32-bit support.

32-bit is dead and it’s somewhat absurd that Steam is still 32-bit.

Tell that to anyone who bought a legacy title on Steam and now wants to run it on modern hardware. Leaving the Steam client at 32-bit is simply a low-effort way to ensure that the OS has the 32-bit libraries that will be required by any 32-bit title the user happens to launch.

I must have missed that negative sentiment entirely. I played all three and had no complaints. Did some searching, and apparently a lot of the gripes were related to levels being cut down in size / broken down into pieces to allow for a console release (strict memory requirements). Also I think they changed engines for the 3rd game, or at least a lot of people complain that movement and controls were worse in DS. I guess ignorance is bliss, cause I enjoyed them all.

Do you mean Thief: Deadly Shadows? That was the 3rd game in the series, and from what I understand it was pretty well received. The orphanage level alone is so highly regarded that it has its own Wikipedia page.

Now the 2014 reboot, just titled Thief, that was so poorly received the it basically killed the series. It might have been a decent game, but it was not a good Thief game.

I switched to AirVPN about 6 months ago and I’ve been really happy with the service. Was previously using NordVPN, which was fine, but I was looking for a VPN provider that offered port forwarding and AirVPN does that. I don’t have hard stats on this, but I do feel that having access to port forwarding has improved my overall torrent speeds since switching.

Here’s the exact post that got the Proton CEO in trouble:

Maybe Gail Slater really is a great pick for Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division. Frankly, I have no idea. But I won’t do business with any company that carries any water whatsoever for Trump.

I’d recommend AirVPN. Here’s why I’d recommend them, in their own words:

No traffic limit. No time limit.

No maximum speed limit, it depends only on the server load

Every protocol is welcome, including p2p. Forwarded ports and DDNS to optimize your software.

Be lucky if we get out of this with only a recession. The slogan might as well have been Make America Great Depression Again.

Canadians have two moods. The first is “I’m sorry”, the second is “You’ll be sorry.”

Second mood activated.

Not the person you replied to, but I’m in agreement with them. I did tech hiring for some years for junior roles, and it was quite common to see applicants with a complete alphabet soup of certifications. More often than not, these cert-heavy applicants would show a complete lack of ability to apply that knowledge. For example they might have a network cert of some kind, yet were unable to competently answer a basic hypothetical like “what steps would you take to diagnose a network connection issue?” I suspect a lot of these applicants crammed for their many certifications, memorized known answers to typical questions, but never actually made any effort to put the knowledge to work. There’s nothing inherently wrong with certifications, but from past experience I’m always wary when I see a CV that’s heavy on certs but light on experience (which could be work experience or school or personal projects).

However, it’s worth mentioning that WireGuard is UDP only.

That’s a very good point, which I completely overlooked.

If you want something that “just works” under all conditions, then you’re looking at OpenVPN. Bonus, if you want to marginally improve the chance that everything just works, even in the most restrictive places (like hotel wifi), have your VPN used port 443 for TCP and 53 for UDP. These are the most heavily used ports for web and DNS. Meaning you VPN traffic will just “blend in” with normal internet noise (disclaimer: yes, deep packet inspection exists, but rustic hotel wifi’s aren’t going to be using it ;)

Also good advice. In my case the VPN runs on my home server, there are no UDP restrictions of any kind on my home network and WireGuard is great in that scenario. For a mobile VPN solution where the network is not under your control and could be locked down in any number of ways, you’re definitely right that OpenVPN will be much more reliable when configured as you suggest.

I use WireGuard personally. OpenVPN has been around a long time, and is very configurable. That can be a benefit if you need some specific configuration, but it can also mean more opportunities to configure your connection in a less-secure way (e.g. selecting on older, less strong encryption algorithm). WireGuard is much newer and supports fewer options. For example it only does one encryption algorithm, but it’s one of the latest and most secure. WireGuard also tends to have faster transfer speeds, I believe because many of OpenVPN’s design choices were made long ago. Those design choices made sense for the processors available at the time, but simply aren’t as performant on modern multi core CPUs. WireGuard’s more recent design does a better job of taking advantage of modern processors so it tends to win speed benchmarks by a significant margin. That’s the primary reason I went with WireGuard.

In terms of vulnerabilities, it’s tough to say which is better. OpenVPN has the longer track record of course, but its code base is an order of magnitude larger than WireGuard’s. More eyes have been looking at OpenVPN’s code for more time, but there’s more than 10x more OpenVPN code to look at. My personal feeling is that a leaner codebase is generally better for security, simply because there’s fewer lines of code in which vulnerabilities can lurk.

If you do opt for OpenVPN, I believe UDP is generally better for performance. TCP support is mainly there for scenarios where UDP is blocked, or on dodgy connections where TCP’s more proactive handling of dropped packets can reduce the time before a lost packet gets retransmitted.

The next tech bubble, IMO.

Market capitalization is just simple math, multiplying a company’s stock price by the number of shares that have been issued. Tesla has issued roughly 3.2 billion shares and is currently trading at around $550, which makes their current market cap about $1.75 trillion dollars.

I don’t understand how the value can be that high compared to all of the other companies, especially China.

On its face it seems utterly nonsensical that Tesla is worth as much as all other auto makers combined, when Tesla only accounts for something like 5% of total US car sales. There are two reasons I can think of why this is currently so:

• Tesla accounts for roughly half of all US electric vehicle sales, and electric vehicle sales are roughly 10% of all US vehicle sales. If electric vehicles largely replace ICE vehicles and if Tesla maintains that share of EV sales, then Tesla will be an extremely valuable company. Investors might be betting on a) electric vehicles and b) Tesla continuing to the win the lion’s share of electric vehicle sales.
• Tesla investors are irrational. Personally, my money is on this one. I think long-term Tesla is going to get crushed by cheaper and better-built EVs, probably from China but also possibly from other existing car manufacturers. Sometimes I’m tempted to short Tesla’s stock based on this belief, but to quote John Maynard Keynes: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

are there games that try to portray life and folklore of people I may not know about?

Kingdom Come: Deliverance might fit this. It’s set in 15th century Bohemia (modern day Czechia), and was designed with input from archaeologists and historians. That may present too much overlap with 15th century Bavaria, though. It’s an immersive sim with at least some jankiness, though I believe many bugs have been squashed since release. It can also be a bit tough in the early going as your character starts out pretty weak by design. Your character gets better at skills as you use them and the game starts to shine more once you’ve established some basic competency.

Are there games that play with this kind of meta mystery (I don’t know what word best describes it) where you have a glimpse that there’s something bigger behind the scenes?

I’d recommend There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension. Chock full of 4th wall breaks and meta commentary on games, game design and game development, plus lots of humour and a ton of heart. There is a bit of a mystery component as well. I’d recommend avoiding spoilers if at all possible, I went in blind and I think it made for a much better overall experience.

I’d wait for independent reviews. The first wave of Intel GPUs had a lot of issues, mostly related to drivers. From what I understand Intel has come a long way on the driver front in the past year, but we don’t have a clear picture on their overall state with the new parts. Reviewers like GamersNexus will call out whether the current state of the drivers are good enough for a recommendation, or if Intel still has more ground to cover.

Yeah, I don’t get it either. What I’ve seen doesn’t look anywhere close to an 8+ out of ten rating. Will be interesting to see the player ratings on this one…

I don’t dislike that art style in general, but to my mind it seems like a poor fit for a Dragon Age game. I guess they’re pivotinf strongly away from the series dark and gritty roots, which is unfortunate because I think that was one of its strong points.

Watching Skill Up’s review now, and oof. That art style… that writing. Don’t know who they made this game for, but it’s definitely not me.