He founded Valve primarily with his own money and has ran it for most of it’s existence, allowing them to release games that were regularly groundbreaking.

Half Life brought us advances in AI, in simulating complex details like animal food chains, in making story part of the gameplay through seamless in engine cutscenes, in “seamless” level transistions. It nearly single handedly killed tje genre of arcadey “doom/quake likes” for literal decades.

Half Life 2 further heightened the bar of story in games, graphical effects, reconstruction of real faces in games, facial animations, mocap for games, and was one of the first well done use of a “modern” physics engine in games. There were news articles about the great leap forward it represented in tackling the “uncanny valley”.

Portal’s, well… Portals were groundbreaking. Left 4 Dead created the co-op horde shooter genre, further advanced AI with the “horde director” concept of an AI orchestrating the placement/amount of enemies, and was one of the first large scale examples of well done contextual dialog. Team Fortress 2 revolutionized the class based team shooter genre, and unfortunately popularized microtransactions for skins/unlocks forever. Half Life Alyx is the first “VR first/only” full length triple-A game.

There’s the Valve Index, pushing forward VR tech. The Steam Deck, pushing forward handheld computing (at least in terms of build quality/price/ease of use).

They bought the rights to Dota, the original Warcraft 3 mod that was the very first Moba game, and made a sequel to it. CounterStrike was one of the vanguards of the original rise of eSports and it’s latest sequel is still a major player in that scene.

Without all of their Source Engine games we wouldn’t have Garrys Mod and the huge cultural impact that it’s still having on the internet. Source Filmmaker brought 3D animation with effectively anything you could import into Garrys Mod into the hands of the masses, which has also had a massive impact on internet culture.

There’s a hell of a lot of reasons to love/respect Valve, and by extension it’s founder, besides just Steam.

He’s Gabe Newell, the founder (and I think still CEO) of Valve Software.

Former Microsoft employee that started up a small game studio in the 90s. They took the Quake engine, modified the balls off of it, and used it to make Half Life, an FPS game that revolutionized the landscape forever with things like real time in-engine cutscenes that wove the story in through the gameplay, and through how advanced the enemy AI seemed. It also featured a ton of miniscule details requiring some clever coding to pull off, which really added to the atmosphere.

They also made the Steam gaming client, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, Counter Strike, Dota 2.

He’s not involved with the day to day much anymore. Pretty much retired in (I think) New Zealand now.

Very nice guy by most accounts. Was still responding to fan emails semi-regularly around 2010, and was one of the main voices in the dev commentary features in their games up through the Orange Box (Half Life 2 Ep 2, L4D, Portal, TF2).

Musicbee is a pretty good Foobar alternative.

If by “only so much” you mean every BS thing in OP’s image, sure.

To be clear, you can turn off all web content in the search menu/start menu search.

Sounds like your IT team messed up the setup. In their defense, Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to set it up well.

A “good” setup hides all this shit from the end user. All your “library” folders (Documents, Desktop, Pictures, etc) can be invisibly made into OneDrive folders. Still save your shit where you normally do, navigate in the file manager like you normally do, no lag for changes you do locally to show locally, minor lag (like 1-2 minutes) for changes to propagate to OneDrive itself (and other machines you are currently logged into). Just now everything is backed up to the cloud.

Solo IT/Dev? I’m so sorry.

If I remember right, Noice started offering paid subscriptions to stream higher quality sound files from a central server. I just rolled back my install to the last version before that change (looks like 2.5.6) and disabled updating.

I’ll have to check out soothing noise player!

what people mean by feminism

I plan on reading through the PDF someone mentioned and buying the book at some point, and I’m truly not trying to start shit.

I think the best route towards good results is to assume good faith for as long as possible, and to try to meet people where they are rather than attack them for believing the wrong things.

All those caveats said, it’s important to acknowledge that just as the broad category of “men” includes some amount of dangerous men, the broad category of “feminists” includes some amount of people who are to some degree misandrists. People who are not seeking solutions for the good of women or everyone but are instead seeking some form of emotional relief through a form of revenge on members of the general group that has (or they feel has) wronged them.

Sorry, I just feel like most groups tend to ignore bad elements within them. It’s dangerous to assume that absolutely every single person who shares a belief label with you is good. I don’t think anyone on any side talks about it enough.

There’s also the PC port, or QoL romhacks that map boots to the Dpad.

That fucking sucks, but don’t apply your anecdotes as general truths. I have the opposite experience.

Wife and I built a new home with family help on the downpayment. Doubled sq ft, 1.5x previous rent, house increased value significantly between contract and move in. Farther from work but closer to highway so commute times unaffected. Saved up enough to pay back the downpayment help over the course of a year.

I’m a massive outlier, and most people have experiences closer to yours, but it’s not an across the board thing. So fucking much of the housing market depends on location.

You’re better off rotating usernames on a semi-randomized schedule if it really matters to you that much. Is your personal threat model such that you actually need to be concerned about this?

Anyway, OpSec rather than asking others to fix your privacy concerns would be the way to go.

Create separate accounts by topic, with different fake identity details beyond what you made them for. Keep track of each identity’s fake time zone when planning when you post so that no one can figure out what time zone you really are posting from.

Beyond that decide on a lifetime (and “cooloff period” before you make a replacement) for each account using a random number generator.

Most importantly, use various AI tools to obsfucate your typing style and word choice.

This all seems like a shit ton of work to just talk about your hobbies. I sincerely hope you don’t have stalkers this dedicated.

Unless I’m missing something big here, saying they “kinda mean the same thing” is a hell of an understatement.

Lol. Minecraft alone proves you wrong. 4chan is where Notch first posted early builds and got feedback.

No argument on it being a cesspool. It is, and has been, for a long long time. But plenty of good stuff happens there too.

/vr/ has unearthed a large amount of formerly lost media (guides, promotional material, entire games! Most of Osamu Sato’s work outside of LSD Dream Emulator had effectively been lost before they got onto it) and is often the spot that leaked stuff drops, like the huge Nintendo leaks a few years ago. The Doom threads there have had a hand in some big, well known mods. It’s arguable that Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart grew out of those threads’ failed Doom Kart project.

/g/s “friendly windows thread” is decidedly unfriendly, but the guides and links in the OP are wonderful resources on how to set up and configure new Windows installs. I haven’t seen the info there laid out as well and as easily digestible anywhere else.

/vg/ has a large number of threads that are really the only source for certain info about certain game series. The emulation general threads are great resources, and the wiki built from them is the best go to one stop shop for info on emulators. The amateur game dev general threads have been the building grounds for a decent amount of games you’ve heard of before. Risk of Rain is a good example. Hopoo started his game dev journey in those threads. Any game that references “AGDG” is shouting those threads out.

Point is, there’s diamonds in the shit pile.

It’s not required for hardly any functionality beyond navigating the start up menu. Most games that support it don’t require it.

They basically did similar stuff with some of the stuff in the sm3d collection thingy.

They did not.

For Super Mario 64, they emulated it. They increased the resolution the game renders at (trivial with emulation of 3D systems) and they used basic LUA patches in the emulator to override HUD textures with higher resolution ones adjusted for the Switch controller.

They did not add any further enhancements in any way. Compared to even 64 DS, it was extremely sophomoric. Compared to the Super Mario 64 decomp project, and what its native switch port is capable of (more on that later), it’s an incredibly lazy port. They didn’t even fix the slowdown with Bowser’s Sub that is as simple as adjusting a single compiler flag when you build the ROM from the N64 game source code.

For Sunshine, it’s an admittedly impressive solution of mostly emulation with some sections of the game engine ported (I think it’s the audio processing?). Once again, the game is rendered at a higher resolution, but they did not redo ot improve further any textures (besides some of the HUD again), graphical effects, or game content. Wind Waker HD this ain’t.

For Galaxy they cannibalized the existing port of it to Android on the NVidia Shield. The Switch shares most of the important internals with it (CPU, GPU). It’s a combo of emulation with certain key code ported, like Sunshine. Again, besides resolution and HUD, no improvements.

Beyond that, Nintendo has been content to sell straight up emulation through the Virtual Console service since the Wii. They’ve had multiple instances of straight ports over the years, and some of the most popular Switch games are straight ports with DLC bundled in.

There are numerous impressive remakes they have done over the years, but that is absolutely not the norm.

The Super Mario 64 decomp on the Switch supports (not available in Nintendo’s official port in 3D All Stars):

• Effectively infinite render distance for objects (coins, enemies, stars, etc)
• 60 fps (compared to the original/all stars 30fps at best)
• True analog camera control using the right stick (All Stars is just the original’s clunky button based control mapped to the stick)
• All sorts of QoL options like collecting stars not kicking you out of a level, options for streamlined/faster message boxes
• Optional bugfixes
• Optional cheats
• Variety of HD texture packs to choose from
• Variety of higher quality 3D model packs to choose from
• Support for an astounding variety of mods. Levels, entire new games, new characters, new movement and control options (Odyssey Mario in 64 with full cappy and enemy capture mechanics anyone?)
• Support for many more languages
• Nearly all of the above is toggleable mid-game from the pause menu.

I don’t think anyone was expecting something amazing out of 3D All Stars, but they absolutely fucking phoned it in.

PowerShell Microsoft Graph Module. Most of the official doc pages have at least one section of “TODO” in them.

After they officially deprecated the previous modules with similar functionality.

When I do find relevant answers, lately they’re all so old that they no longer work, or rely on now deprecated functionality of a library or system.

Finding code snippets for interfacing with Azure through PowerShell is a crapshoot because Microsoft keeps deprecating different PowerShell modules for it.

Come be non-conformist like all the rest of us!

Yep, take some ideas from single player colony management games.

It’s astounding how much you can “automate” when fully using the filters and rules options in vanilla Rimworld. Mods increase that exponentially. Granted, different genre, singleplayer, and pausable while you configure things.

I think the challenge is balancing that with the real time events you have to react to, so it doesn’t further compress the meta to an even smaller set of “optimal” options.

If you really need, you could farm like how bot accounts build up karma. Just use a private subreddit so your system gaming is out of the public eye.