deliriousdreams

I don’t use my PS5 to surf the web. I know you can use it to watch movies and stuff, but I don’t use it for that either.

At best, it depends on what kind of user most of the console owners are.

Sigh. This article is all over the place.

The headline suggests that payment processors/AI companies/retailers are fighting about the collection of shopper data.

AI obviously doesn’t collect the kind of data that would be useful to the retailers or even the payment processors. So it does stand to reason that the retailers would be a little miffed about “agentic AI” insinuating itself as the middle man between them and shoppers, effectively cutting them off from that data flow.

But that’s not actually what’s happening. It seems like (potentially), the AI companies want to sell “agentic AI shopping” to the retailers and possibly payment processors? But these entities want information about the shoppers that the AI doesn’t collect and the quibble is over whether the AI can be made to collect that data?

I was able to overclock it to a crazy level. Played all kinds of games on it between me and my roommate. It was finiky using big picture mode (I ended up buying a dedicated mouse and keyboard for it to use on a lapboard at the time), but BPM gave me trouble with controllers, refusing to quit to desktop, and hanging on launching games occasionally.

A lot of Dell’s BS software went the way of the dodo bird as soon as I could get rid of it for similar reasons. The update to windows 10 I also seem to remember giving me trouble. MS didn’t consider it supported hardware. But it all worked out and now that thing is my media center PC. It’s still running after all this time, which is crazy.

As someone who owned the Alienware one with windows 8 (and upgraded it to windows 10, and a 2TB SSD), I’m glad to find anyone else who actually bought one, especially the steam OS variant, and has expertise with it, rather than regurgitating what articles say.

Here’s the thing. Since November 2022 Valve’s Steam OS has carved out almost a 5% share of the market for Linux (if we include Linux users who don’t use Steam OS). Windows has something like a 25-30 year head start on steam in this respect.

Something like 35% of PC gamers are still using Windows 10 after the EOL BS MS pulled in October. There is something to be said for those users being more willing to jump ship to steam than there is for them to buy exhorbitantly priced hardware to stay on windows when their hardware inevitably begins to show its age.

I think it’s fairly likely that Steam OS will continue to take chunks of user base out of MS for the foreseeable future.

It may not be the year of the Linux desktop, but it’s not nothing either. Valve’s devices are more hamstrung (as someone else in one of these threads said) by where you can source their hardware than they are by the MS dominated market share.

It can’t hurt to support this, despite the popular games it /may/ not be compatible with over time, because users are also becoming increasingly disillusioned with MS in general.

Lots of things remain to be seen but nobody (MS included) was expecting Steam to be successful as a platform for game sales, nor were they expecting them to be successful with physical hardware and yet here we are. Is that success limited? Sure. But it has become less limited over time.