YHK - yet another hacker news clone

borderline murderous eyetwitch

This feels like a strange argument given site we are on. "Why are applications so slow and bloated these days" has been a pretty constant complaint around here for many, many years.

How are you twisting more efficient software into a bad thing?

Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.

I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?

But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.

The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.

I wouldn't call it terrible.

It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.

Imo it's just the only way to write software now. Opus 5.5 is better at coding than humans. Human code is slop.

Perhaps it will bring back native apps because supporting other platforms is less laborious.

I've had reasonably good luck having Claude generate Rust code that performs well.

You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.

Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:

- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)

- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't

- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5

- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers

- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, are incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.

There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.

Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.

I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.

People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.

Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.

Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.

The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.

Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.

Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.

Like when they made two generations of XBox consoles boot 5 seconds faster by making the unskippable boot animation 5 seconds shorter. Many years after the exact same issue bottlenecked Windows 7 boot times on SSDs.

Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.

The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.

But what does it mean in this context?

I don't see why not. They clearly know what they are doing at Valve, and for an engineer who knows what he's doing, LLMs are of very limited use.

Or you can download 66MB of data on a 100mbit/s internet connection in 5 seconds.

Say you need to load 1gb from disk and need to download 1MB of data from internet. It should take ~75 milliseconds to do that.

It is incredibly slow, considering Valve is a billion dollar company. This level of optimization is closer to what you would expect from a person who is programming as a hobby.