Wandering Adventure Party

@nev @loops Are you actually working on something else or is that just a suggestion?

I have no problem using AI to tighten my writing.

I use it for spelling, grammar, word choice, tone, the whole toolkit. If I need a version of a sentence that feels sympathetic, or lighter, or more grounded, I can just ask for it.

Why bother? Because it lowers my stress. People—especially neurotypical people—are hyper-sensitive to tone and often completely miss when I’m being funny.

Case in point: yesterday I made a joke about using Slackware with IceWM and goofing around with Xeyes. Some rando decided this meant I was an “egotistical gatekeeper.”

No, my friend. That’s just what happens when you stare at Xeyes for hours in a dark room. The giant floating eyeballs colonize your mind.

But here’s the real point: using AI hasn’t eliminated conflict, but it has absolutely dialed it down. It lets me say things like “Make this conciliatory and keep the levity” without burning emotional bandwidth.

Does this make me less authentic? I don’t think so. It makes me less stressed.

Authenticity isn’t an objective metric anyway. What I am doing is presenting myself without unnecessary friction. And tone-checking helps me get there.

@TheIdOfAlan I’ve long thought there should be a decentralized social network that provides much of Steam’s social features—so that devs don’t have to depend on Steam.

Valve is becoming the Apple of Linux—and I’m not the only one who’s noticing.

IGN just laid it out beautifully in this video, and the takeaway is dead simple: the real revolution isn’t the hardware parade. It’s the software ecosystem quietly knitting everything together.

And here’s the part that still blows people’s minds: Valve is doing this with open-source infrastructure. Not a walled garden. Not a locked-down ecosystem. Real Linux, real desktops, real flexibility. That gives enormous confidence to anyone who hates vendor lock-in but still wants a cohesive, unified experience.

It’s the same four-product strategy Apple used decades ago—but rebuilt for a world where openness isn’t a liability, it’s a feature.

My dream is to grow the Fediverse by seeding multiple ways to host it.

This is why I’m building the Federated Video Co-op Initiative.

This is why I’m building @gofedi, a fully-managed hosting service.

Make it easier for people to not just join a community, but build it too.

Oh God. Jack Dorsey just cannot help himself.

First he bankrolls Bluesky. Then he sprints into Nostr. Now he’s resurrecting Divine, the spiritual successor to Vine.

Maybe—just maybe—we stop orbiting another billionaire’s hobby app and support loops instead.

Apparently, it’s very easy to become an industry influencer with no experience in that industry. Here are the steps:

1. Identify where an industry’s insiders all sound the same. That sameness is your opening.
2. Frame your thesis as the thing everyone should have noticed but didn’t because they’re too deep in their own bubble.
3. Show just enough data to make your stance feel inevitable.
4. Turn every pushback into proof that the insiders are protecting comfort over clarity.

The only real prerequisite is the confidence to stroll into a room full of experts, flip their table, and say, “Relax, boys—I’ll explain your own industry to you.”

Adam Dalliance It is a standalone device, but it’s going to run SteamOS. And most importantly, run your entire Steam library through Proton. Yes, on an ARM chip.

VR industry people really don’t like it when I tell them that Meta failed with the Quest.

But it’s true. It’s not that the Quest didn’t sell well. It’s that it failed to be what Meta needed it to be.

Meta didn’t buy Oculus to make a fun gaming peripheral. They bet tens of billions on Oculus becoming “the next iPhone”—the next universal computing platform after smartphones. They needed VR to replace your monitor, your TV, your phone, your laptop, your workplace, and your social life. They needed a new operating system they controlled from top to bottom, a new app store they took a cut from, a new identity layer they could own, and a new digital world they could monetize forever.

That was the business case. Not Beat Saber. Not fitness apps. Not a fun toy for teens.

The problem is that VR was never in a position to become that universal platform. Smartphones solved immediate, essential problems and sat in your pocket, always on, always available. VR solves one thing—immersion—and requires you to strap a device to your face.

That’s great for games, but it’s never going to be the foundation of daily life. Meta knew this, but they couldn’t admit it. They had already sunk so much capital, talent, and corporate identity into “the metaverse” that they had to hype it as inevitable. Virtual offices. Virtual cities. Virtual meetings. Virtual everything. They sold inevitability because reality wasn’t compelling enough.

The result was a hype cycle that spiraled out of control. Meta spent over $36 billion building a future no one asked for. The hardware remained heavy, isolating, battery-starved, and full of friction.

Horizon Worlds wasn’t a digital civilization—it was a ghost town. And once Meta framed VR as “the next internet,” they trapped themselves. You can’t quietly walk back a moonshot after declaring it the future of the human race. So they doubled down, again and again, until expectations collapsed under the weight of their own ambition.

But this isn’t a failure of VR. It’s a failure of Meta’s narrative. VR didn’t need to be the next iPhone. It just needed to be good at what it’s good at. Meta tried to universalize a niche technology and punished it for refusing to become something it was never meant to be.

Meanwhile, Valve is playing an entirely different game. People keep saying they “have money to burn,” but that undersells what’s actually happening. Steam is a revenue supernova with a tiny headcount. Their hardware isn’t a rich guy’s hobby—it’s strategic infrastructure that strengthens the ecosystem. SteamOS, Proton, the Deck, the Index, and now the Frame aren’t attempts to dominate all human computing. They’re ways of making it easier for people like me to play the games we already own, on more screens, with less friction.

Meta needed VR to become the world’s operating system. Valve just needs it to be a great way to play games.

Which of those goals sounds more achievable?

That’s why I think Valve will win more than people expect. Meta bet on a civilization-shifting platform revolution that never came. Valve is building something smaller, smarter, and more grounded—and in the process, they’re giving VR the one thing it always needed but never got: a reason for actual players to care.

Valve isn’t just the biggest force in PC gaming, and they’re not just the newest console manufacturer swaggering into the arena.

They’re morphing into something far bolder: the Apple of Linux.

If you’re not a gamer, that might sound unhinged. Maybe even a little deranged. But if you’re already deep in the Steam ecosystem—if your library scrolls so far it needs its own municipal transit system—you know this isn’t wild at all. It’s practically destiny.

Let’s rewind. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he didn’t reinvent the wheel. He just drew a big cross on a whiteboard and said: four products. iMac, Power Mac, iBook, PowerBook. Four neat squares. Four clean market segments. And everything Apple built slotted neatly into that grid.

Apple didn’t suddenly leap to 30% marketshare. They barely scraped 3%. Didn’t matter. Because the money wasn’t really in the hardware. It was in the ecosystem.

Buy a Mac and suddenly you’re buying OS upgrades, iLife apps, office software, music tools, the whole glittering Cupertino starter kit. That stack of software made the hardware profitable, and that hardware made the software inevitable. The loop fed itself.

Now fast-forward to Valve. Look at what they’ve assembled.

Four core hardware pillars:

• Steam Controller
• Steam Deck
• Steam Machine
• Steam Frame

Four segments. Four use cases. Four doors into the same house.

Already have a PC? You grab the Steam Controller.

Want your library in your backpack? Steam Deck.

Want it in the living room? Steam Machine.

Want it strapped to your face? Steam Frame.

And the moment you buy any one of these, something interesting happens: the rest of the ecosystem starts making sense. Buy a game on Steam and it works everywhere. Your save files carry across devices. You can stream titles between them. The more hardware you add, the smoother it all feels, and the more the ecosystem pulls you deeper in.

But here’s the part I really want you to notice: I didn’t say Valve wants to be the Apple of gaming. No. They want to be the Apple of Linux.

And that’s where this gets concrete. Their hardware ships with Linux that isn’t locked down or lobotomized. It has a real desktop environment hiding under a slick UI.

Which means Valve can evolve SteamOS in ways Apple never aimed to with macOS. Apple built a general-purpose OS that occasionally supported games. However, Valve built a gaming OS that can naturally branch outward into media, creative tools, and productivity. “Gaming-adjacent” doesn’t require a conceptual pivot. It’s the next logical step.

What might that look like?

• A native media center built directly into SteamOS—think Plex or Jellyfin, but officially blessed and seamlessly integrated.
• First-party creative tools that take advantage of Proton and GPU acceleration—video editors, music tools, asset creators.
• A productivity layer—file syncing, cloud storage, collaborative apps—that piggybacks on your Steam identity.
• A SteamOS app store that isn’t just for games. Apps, utilities, editors, streaming clients, the works.

They’ve already dipped into this with Big Picture Mode’s media features, Steam Link, Steam Input configurators, desktop mode on Steam Deck, and Proton opening the gates for thousands of non-gaming applications. Nothing stops them from extending that further.

That’s why Valve—private, secretive, and small enough to fit inside an Amazon lunchroom—is still one of the most valuable forces in the entire industry. Not because they sell hardware like Apple, but because they’re building an ecosystem like Apple. Except this one runs on Linux.

If you’re a PC gamer, none of this is news. But if you’re outside the gaming bubble and this future arrives exactly how I’ve described, just know: it didn’t come out of nowhere. You just weren’t looking in Valve’s direction.

@jrcruciani Yeah, so much stuff that are great leaps forward got buried in that announcement because there’s so many great leaps forward.

Americans are finally waking up to the fact that Canadian tourists aren’t coming back.

The result? A $5.7B hit to the US economy.

As a Canadian, here’s why I’m not visiting anytime soon. I don’t want to deal with the hostility, the rhetoric, or the risk of being harassed while I’m just trying to travel.

That isn’t anti-American. It’s simply why I’m not spending money there right now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/us/canada-us-travel-decline-flights.html

I’m fully aware the Metaverse isn’t happening.

No one is strapping on a headset to telecommute, and the Quest was never destined to be the next iPhone. It was a fascinating experiment that revealed something fundamental: most people don’t want to live or work in a digital diorama.

A few years ago, VR had all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Money poured in, breathless think pieces declared the dawn of a new digital civilization, and a small army of “visionaries” appeared overnight. They weren’t building a future—they were chasing funding rounds.

The idea that we’d all be buying land in virtual suburbs and decorating our walls with NFTs felt absurd then, and looks even more ridiculous now.

The truth is, that hype suffocated VR. It buried the medium under expectations it was never built to fulfill. But now that the hype has evaporated and the opportunists have migrated to AI, VR can finally breathe again. It can go back to what it was always meant to be: a creative frontier for gaming, exploration, and presence.

VR was never supposed to replace reality—it was supposed to expand imagination. And with the noise gone, it finally has the space to do exactly that.

@dave0 I mean, BBC says Hitler had one.

Just watched the BBC seriously discuss Hitler’s micropenis.

Yes, really—they went into detail.

Some might say that explains a lot. But let’s be real: most people with micropenises don’t commit genocide.

@domi @xyhhx I think there’s a small misunderstanding here.

There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia or mentioning how long you’ve been using Linux. That part is totally fine—we all have our own history with the platform.

My point was simply that longevity doesn’t automatically translate into authority. My own experience tinkering with Xeyes in 1998 doesn’t give me any special insight today. It just means I was a kid having fun with a goofy little program.

The post was meant to poke fun at that idea, not at anyone’s personal history.

And honestly, I appreciate that you caught the humour in it—Xeyes is inherently funny.

@xyhhx @domi I promise the beginning of the post was a joke—I know humour can be tricky to parse online. Some folks have a sixth sense for it, and others… well, let’s just say their internal laugh-track hasn’t been patched since kernel 2.4.

All good though. If you ever want a reboot into “things that are actually funny,” I’m happy to help.

@michael @blotosmetek Oh man, my daughter’s PC was just upgraded to Windows 11 without my consent. As a result, WiFi no longer works so I’m going to have to install Linux.

@xyhhx @domi If you saw ego instead of humour, that’s on you.

Xeyes isn’t a flex. It’s two creepy cartoon eyeballs wobbling around your screen. If you think that signals elite tech status, I genuinely hope you’re never stuck in a dark room with those things staring you down.

int*domi;*domi=0; You didn’t actually read what I wrote.

I wasn’t gatekeeping. I was making fun of the idea that old Linux war stories matter. The entire point is right here:

But none of that vintage cred actually matters, because Linux never wins people over with nostalgia. It wins people over when it finally does the thing they care about.

I was saying the opposite of what you think. My post was critiquing the idea that longevity equals authority, not endorsing it.