There’s some company that has done some CGI videos making fun of the Boston Dynamics use of a hockey stick for separation, do videos that have humans pretending to be Boston Dynamics people abusing a CGI robot.

kagis

Corridor Digital, as “Bosstown Dynamics”:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query="bosstown+dynamics"

e.g.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKjCWfuvYxQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3RIHnK0_NE

Context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H5uWRjFsGc

tries running yt-dlp on the page URL to grab the URL of the actual video file involved

Try:

https://video.euronews.com/mp4/SHD/29/22/96/00/SHD_PYR_2922960_20251113112832.mp4

I mean, yeah, but that’s wartime policy. Like, most countries are willing to take more risks and accept more costs if they consider is necessary to fight a war.

But as far as I know, doing this demo successfully isn’t something that Russia needs for any kind of war purposes.

Frankly, if the thing is that untested, I’m not sure that I’d want to have the developers or the audience that close to it without shielding. And it should have a remote E-stop switch (though maybe it did here, and that’s why it froze up).

You know those Boston Dynamics videos? Unless the stuff is pretty mature, they’ve got those protective walls or are interacting with the robots with hockey sticks.

Ex:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYwekersccY

EDIT: Actually, looking at the Russian video again, I think that the AIdol people don’t have a remote E-stop button and were instead fumbling around with one built onto its back there, since that’s when it stopped moving.

Not to mention that Steam does have competition as an app store, stuff like GOG. I mean, it’s a little bit obnoxious to use both at once, but really not that much of a hassle.

It’s built like an extra beefy gaming laptop.

Much better cooling, which is a limiting factor for the laptop form factor.

I mean, you can run a Linux phone now:

[email protected]

Downside is that aren’t going to have a large software library optimized for touchscreen use. The hardware options are pretty disappointing compared to Android. Not all hardware functionality may be supported, if it’s on a repurposed Android phone. Android or iOS software is mostly designed to expect that it’s on a fast/WiFi connection some of the time and on a slow/limited mobile data link some of the time and be able to act accordingly; most GNU/Linux software is not. Battery life is often not fantastic.

I still haven’t been pushed over the edge, but I’m definitely keeping my eye on it. I’m just not willing to develop software for Android. I know that GNU/Linux phones will stay open. I am not at all sure that Android won’t wind up locked down by Google at some point, and over the years, it’s definitely shifted in the locked-down direction.

My current approach is to carry around a Linux laptop and try to shift my usage more towards using the Android phone as a tethering device for the laptop, to get Internet access everywhere. That’s not always reasonable — you need to sit down to use the laptop — but the only thing that the phone really has to be used for is dealing with text messages and calls. If you really wanted to do so, as long as the laptop was on, you could run SIP to get VoIP service off the Internet from a provider of that from the laptop over the phone’s data service, not even rely on the phone’s calling functionality. The laptop isn’t really set up to be able to idle at very low power the way a phone is, be able to wake up when a call comes in, though, so it’s not really appropriate for incoming calls.

If I need to access something one-handed without sitting down, I can fall back to using the phone.

And it does have some nice benefits, like having a real keyboard, a considerably more-powerful system, a much larger library of software, a better screen and speakers, a 3.5mm headphones jack (all those phone space constraints go away on a laptop!) and so forth. You can move the phone to somewhere where its radio has good reception and just have it relay to the laptop, which isn’t an option if you’re using the phone itself as the computing device.

You can, though I don’t, even run Android software on the laptop via Waydroid.

I don’t presently use it in this role, but there’s a software package, KDE Connect, that lets one interface a phone and a Linux desktop (well, laptop in this case), and do things like happily type away in text message conversations on the laptop, if one has the laptop up and running.

I’m thinking that that approach also makes it easier to shift my use to a GNU/Linux phone down the line, since mostly, all I absolutely need from a GNU/Linux phone then is to act as a tethering device, handle phone calls and texts. It’s sorta the baby-steps way to move off Android, get my dependence down to the point where moving is no big deal.

I’d think that you could set them to whatever in Steam Input, if you’re playing a Steam game.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675200/discussions/0/597397396010388899/

You can set the touchpads to nothing in their menu. Just delete the command in settings and that will solve it for you…

I believe that you can have per-game settings, so just enable them for that one game you want.

You could probably put a 400 Wh powerbank in a backpack (search for “power station” on Amazon).

What controller from the 1980s looked anything like the Steam Controller?

I mean, the Sega Genesis controller was mostly black and had face buttons and a D-pad and was around in the late 1980s, but that’s about as close as I can think of, and that’a not much by way of similarity.

depending on their sales expectations they could legit make this a loss leader.

I don’t think they will. The problem is that the hardware is open.

Closed-system console vendors can sell at a loss because if you’ve bought the console and don’t buy games from them for it, you’re going to have limited use of it. It’s maybe an expensive Blu-Ray player or something. Not a sensible purchase. You’re gonna buy games for it.

So they can just crank up the price of games and make their return over time from games.

But if the Steam Machine is sold at a loss, then people will also buy it to use it as a regular mini-PC, and Valve doesn’t make a return from them.

Ah, gotcha, so it’s middleman overhead. Thanks.

https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

Thanks, but I don’t think that it’ll do it for me. I’ve tried similar packages before, and the problem is that I also want the ability to input a bunch of Unicode characters and use keys in terminal emulators and so forth. Even Anysoft Keyboard, which I’m presently using, is occasionally lacking, and it’s pretty comprehensive. I’ve considered doing a soft keyboard myself, even, but I just can’t work up the will to go develop for Android with Google slowly closing some stuff. I think that my long-run trajectory is to move what I can to a Linux laptop and hope that GNU/Linux phones eventually become a practical alternative to Android.

That’s the normal mode of operation, but it can apparently also run games locally on the Frame itself, which I guess gives people a portable — if less powerful — gaming option that they can haul around easily if they want.

I think that for running games locally on the Frame, for anything other than games designed specifically to be gentle on a battery — and many games are not, unfortunately — you’re also really going to need to leave it plugged into a powerbank. The internal battery just isn’t that large relative to what the device can draw.

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/steam-frame-specs-availability/

The battery included on the Steam Frame is a 21 Wh model. The Snapdragon system-on-chip gobbles up around 20 W at full power—that’s how much it’ll likely use while playing a game locally in standalone mode. From this, we can expect around an hour of playtime without additional charge.

Someone else in here commented on how it took a while for the Deck to come to his country.

I almost asked him, but since you’re the second one…I mean…wouldn’t you be able to just get a Deck or a Steam Machine or whatever from anywhere and use it?

I’ve seen other people request SteamOS-as-a-general-OS on here too, which also surprised me.

I’m thinking that it’s one of two things:

• People just want something that they’re sure is easy to use.

• People want an HTPC-oriented configuration.

I have it off on my phone at the moment because my soft keyboard is enaging in shennanigans, and I will say that I didn’t appreciate how many errors that I make on tiny phone keyboards that it fixes until now. I mean, damned if you do, damned if don’t.

The steam machine sounds intriguing but there is already a big market for mini PCs and I don’t know if consumers would go out of their way to buy a steam PC box. I’m most skeptical about this one

You might not be the target audience. I’m comfortable building an HTPC and putting an OS and all on it and configuring it, but the benefit of a console is that someone just gets an all-in-one setup that works out-of-box. Well, and that game developers are specifically testing against.

Like, if it weren’t a barrier, you’d probably just have everyone using PCs instead of consoles in their living room. Might open the gates to let console-only folks do Steam.