Also, a great resource for discovering new music is the public library. They often have a curated CD section that I then rip into FLAC. I've had great chats with the people in my town's library, and I often pick a totally random CD off the shelves and discover some amazing artists.

The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh, and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.

Having a custom-made "Steam Machine" for the past 3 years thanks to ChimeraOS, it really changed the way I play for the better. I can play on my couch with my son and wife, and it made my wife (who wasn't really into gaming) buy a Steam Deck and enjoy my 500+ library instantly.

Now, I can play CS2 in my office, my son can play Astroneer in the living room and my wife The Witcher 3 next to him. The Steam ecosystem is simply amazing, it's a real shame Valve had to launch their machine during a worldwide component crisis.

It's not just the price, it's more like the hardware that is dated on arrival(weaker than a 2020 PS5) and customers are expected to use for 6+ years into the future when more and more new games are demanding RT.

Is not a problem for Nintendo to ship dated HW, sine one it's cheap, and two, since developers will walk through fire to optimize games for the Switch but that's because they're Nintendo and they ship tens of millions of Switches while Steam Boxes will not sell in such numbers to warrant this level of extra developer effort.

Good if you're only intro playing older games or are willing to stomach a lot of upscaling and low graphics setting or must have a just-works linux PC, but given the price and performance this isn't gonna be a mass appeal product.

>and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.

You know the saying "you make your own luck? Or the saying "luck is opportunity meets preparation"?

So, no, it's not bad luck, it's that the problem with Valve is they just take forever to launch a product. Which is fine for stuff like Steam or games that you can keep delaying and delaying until you get it just right exactly the way you want it, but HW has a limited shelf life where it's most valuable and once you lock in a BOM, you're on the clock to get it out the door and need to haul ass. See the titanic efforts Microsoft put into launching Xbox and Xbox 360 on schedule, it was a rootless bloodbath, as all consumer HW is, but if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

So there's no bad luck here, just bad preparation on their part. Valve could have easily launched this earlier if they just spent less time trying to engineer everything from scratch with custom parts just to fit the HW inside a cube as small as possible just to flex their HW design skills, and instead just focus on quickly getting the HW in another boring VCR box into consumers hands ASAP the way MS did it with the first Xbox.

The whole point of the Steam Box is the Steam ecosystem centered around just-works Linux emulation of windows games, not the box being an engineering and design marvel, so speeding so much time on perfecting the form for a first gen product, was pointless endeavour that cost them the product launch.

Xbox 360 was rushed with gpu problems

I would say they got it all right with the Xbox one. Then the series came out and is a good example of what valve is doing with the steam machine. AAA Games will be optimized for the steam machine (and consequently for the coming shortage in memory components) with power players in custom rigs getting the full 8k, hdr 4.0, DLSS 6.5 etc

No, it wasn't a GPU problem, it was semiconductor manufacturing and package assembly and soldering issue, that a lot of the electronics of that era suffered, from the early PS3(YLOD), to early Wii, to Macbooks and gaming laptops.

They all ran very hot back then in that 90nm era and since the industry switched to ROHS solder around 2005-2006 but the fabs hadn't yet mastered a realizable assembly process with the new solder, so early device it would lead to CPUs and GPUs desoldering off their ball grid array from the heat and the weak solder, until these kinks were ironed out over the years via 65nm die shrinks to lower power usage and better packaging and soldering techniques had evolved.

So this isn't an issue Valve could have faced as they weren't using brand new innovative HW using new manufacturing techniques, but older components that were already tried and tested. They were just too slow and lazy and prioritized form over function.

> AAA Games will be optimized for the steam machine

I fully doubt it. It's a niche product that won't sell well and game devs are stingy in the current industry market plagued with mass layoffs for cost cutting.

And the proof is in the pudding when you see how badly some AAA games run even on top end PC HW. Studios just don't put in any optimisation effort anymore and just ship Unreal Engine defaults.

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7086-acejump

- Claude writes User Stories, supervised by the PO.

- Claude is in charge of the implementation, supervised by the devs.

- Claude does the PR review.

- If a comment is made by a human, someone c/p what Claude thinks with a simple "not sure if AI is right".

We're just passing butter at this point.

I did ask the AI. I gave it several rounds. I got a summary of their diff from it. I skimmed their diff myself. I have a rough mental model of the work they did, plus what the AI did/didn't tell me. I'm asking THEM so THEY can confirm my mental model is correct to the code they supposedly authored.

I suspect the real problem is they vibed the whole thing and didn't even self-review it. So they don't know, can't answer, and the interaction is truly pointless. They are not the expert any longer. It's not worth asking them.

Honestly, the answer is so often a little toy search like Marginalia or going straight to the website in question now, its frightening.

Their business practices are just the worst. But are the first 10 blue links they show you usually bad? (Like you know that one of those 10 should be the exact thing you want, so you decide to rely on another search engine instead, & the alternative search succeeds where Google failed)

(Google could give better results to those unloyal to them, as one example, so testing needed! We could be getting wildly different results or just have starkly different usage tendencies, there’s just no way I could disagree with so many of y’all on something this basic assuming no DDG astroturfing or anything unless we’re looking at things differently one way or another)

And obviously there is no astroturfing here from DDG. That you could have seen from a tiny look at my profile. I have a pretty public persona on the internet.

But often I'm searching for a phrase inside quotation marks and DDG hasn't crawled enough sites and gives me 0 or 1 result while Google gives me 5-10 results. Sometimes Google completely disregards the quotation marks, though.

Microsoft Bing bungles quotation marks so hard (???).

DDG catches the fallout.

> Sometimes Google completely disregards the quotation marks, though

Years ago I remember Google asking the person lodging a similar complaint for an example of a query because they found there was always an explanation. Noticed this no longer holds as of perhaps a few months ago if I’m not mistaken. Even this* fails:

+”omg just tell me no results if this exact string isn’t present come on I even put the plus sign”

Infantilizing for us, maybe optimizing for the 99.5% in reality (understandable, annoying)

*edit, made up example based on what I believe I’ve seen this year

edit:

> DDG brings up relevant results

Have you noticed, not if you misspell a proper noun? Spellchecking e.g. brand names, new/fad current event topics is apparently really hard (IIRC Bing not perfect here either?)

DDG was never good at quotation marks so I forgot to mention it also sucks at these.

> Have you noticed, not if you misspell a proper noun?

I haven't but I'd really prefer 2 options:

1) I may mispel thinks quote freqwently but gimme any sorta relevent result

2) I know what I am searching for. Maybe add a "Did you mean X?" link but still show me the results containing the misspellings. If I search for "motorolla" or "mottorolla" (misspellings for "Motorola") in quotes, DDG gives me 1 incomplete page for that misspelling. Google (StartPage) gives me mostly misspellings but with "Motorola" included in some results. Without the quotes both engines treat me as a moron who can't type. If I search for

"mottorolla" phone 2026

DDG still shows me "mottorolla", not "motorola" while Google has decided I am indeed someone who can barely type even though I've put in quotes.

Edit: have to do the work, get the screenshots, & analyze my own patterns. How often do I just need the first link from any search engine (like searching $majorBrand to look for their homepage), how often do I search something esoteric where DDG falters, how often do I search something essentially unique but simply not indexed by Bing (DDG) even though it was submitted to Google just fine, etc.

Zed was super impressive when I first started it, but I don't know yet how it compares with PHP Storm.

It wont be the same experience at all, the debugging and deployment stuff will be strictly inferior and the jump to code might be less impressive.

Zed has LSP support though, so if you have a good LSP then you’ll get some nice IDE features, but they’re not really comparable.

I ended up with a T14 Gen 4 and I'm super happy with it.

Others have mentioned this but if you want to keep this workflow, the best app I've found is Obsidian + Git Plugin. It works fantastically well on desktop though it does require a little work to get it working on iOS.

Heck, maybe I should just use code for notes. One plus would be web access with code server, since Obsidians only docker image that I know of uses VNC.

Anyone compared these two tools and have a decent write up? The biggest item which comes to mind would be referencing other notes and the features built on top of that?

Yes...always visible in the status bar. Fyi: https://github.com/Vinzent03/obsidian-git

If I want to keep this workflow why shouldn't I just continue using this same workflow?

"Automatic bidirectional sync between all devices" scares me. How does it deal with merge conflicts? How am I sure I'll be able to revert to a previous version? Can I see the full history of a file? I don't know, perhaps it'd be ok. I certainly wouldn't learn git just for note taking! But, I know how to use my hammer, so everything look like a nail...

I also store in a onedrive folder for automatic sync and backup in case I have a crash before I do a git commit.

https://github.com/cybersemics/em/

"em is a beautiful, minimalistic note-taking app for personal sensemaking."

I'm not trying this app.

The readme is more about the technical details of the code than the actual features of the app. Where do I go to see what this thing can actually do?

Do people expect me to run the program just to see if I want to run the program?

[1] https://github.com/cybersemics/em/wiki/Docs

I know this is common with projects that think Github is a replacement for a website, but I genuinely wonder how does it get so bad that a 5 year project with 9000 commits and 60 contributors doesn't have a single screenshot. Nothing personal or particular about this project specifically, just... the whole open source culture of dropping something on Github and not even doing the bare minimum to have other people get to know the project.

It feels like such a waste. It could be an amazing project but who is going to bother with it if they can't see what it looks like?

I like how future proof a folder of markdown files is. But I like the design, simplicity, and deep features for capture and media support offered in Apple Notes.

The more a markdown app supports extra stuff, the more proprietary it starts to feel, as any app to read it will also need to support those things.

A while back I told myself I was going to stick to Apple Notes, as going back and forth to other things is painful, and doing it proactively means more pain, rather than maybe having some pain in 10 years of the app goes away. However, where I am again, in the middle of a largely manual migration back to Obsidian for my folder of markdown files. I used an export, but the formatting is so bad that I need to clean up every single note.

Basic formatting is a plus for me. Although now notes has really advanced formatting and even sketching.

I just tried it and it still works:

  uvx apple-notes-to-sqlite /tmp/notes.db
  # in another terminal while that's running
  uvx datasette /tmp/notes.db

But trouble free sync between machines, the ability to ‘scan’ documents, adding basic maths support, the ease… it always sucks me back in.

I wish it kept the date of creation and edits readily available, and supported markdown. But it’s damn close to what I want.

Why can’t Apple Mail do search as well as notes?

Or neovim with FzfLua (on laptop)