Agreed :)

And no matter how they do it, it’s clear they need to make changes; “everything is an Xbox controller and now just works” actually was pretty nice solution 20 years ago to fix the complicated mess that was PC gamepads with DirectInput, but it is very much outdated idea today.

Thankfully it appears changes are happening that might solve the issue in the near future, and all we can really do is wait and see.

They could expand the Xbox controller API feature set tomorrow

No, they couldn’t. There’s over 20 years of legacy hardware and software that expects Xinput data to be returned exactly in this format:

typedef struct _XINPUT_GAMEPAD {
  WORD  wButtons;
  BYTE  bLeftTrigger;
  BYTE  bRightTrigger;
  SHORT sThumbLX;
  SHORT sThumbLY;
  SHORT sThumbRX;
  SHORT sThumbRY;
} XINPUT_GAMEPAD, *PXINPUT_GAMEPAD;

Changing any of that would break every single xinput controller and game made in the last 20 years. Modifications require a new API, which is exactly what GameInput is.

Researching this a bit more, there is an answer in the making already - GameInput. How long that will take to take over from every game using xinput is left to be seen.

It’s not possible as xinput doesn’t support gyroscopes, the controller simply doesn’t report that data. The “Switch” mode is setting it to be a mostly standard HID/DirectInput device so that all of those inputs can be accessed, but that requires something (Steam Input) to sit between the controller and the game to map the inputs together, and the game has to also support non-xinput controllers - otherwise you are just mapping them back to xbox inputs. The exception is a game that support directinput… well, directly. Like sim racers etc.

There is now the option of going “hardware” Steam Input as well, as is done by the HORIPAD for Steam, but it is something the controller has to do.

I’m willing to bet that without the Deck, most AAA games would have already jumped to requiring roughly PS5-level PC hardware now that last gen consoles are effectively dead.
UE5 on the Deck might not be pretty, but making it run at all on it lowers the minimum requirements of a game tremendously.

It should be an IRC clone. Having the voice and screen sharing is also kinda nice.

Instead it’s IRC + MSN messenger + Ventrilo + Skype + TeamViewer + MegaShare + Wiki + Game server hosting + Forum and probably a few more I’m forgetting, and adding more half-working bloat all the time.

IIRC here in Finland they keep failing yearly inspections constantly because the balljoints and bushings etc are always completely shot as they can’t handle the extra weight of the batteries and massive torque from the motors.

[EDIT] Here’s the (in Finnish) news article about it. The list of most failed electric cars for their first inspection (4 years old) in 2024 were:

• Tesla Model 3, 49% fail, most common issue: rear axle.
• Renault Zoe, 19% fail, front axle.
• Tesla Model S, 16% fail, front axle.
• Tesla Model X, 14%, N/A
• Porsche Taycan, 12%, manufacturer’s compliance plate (it’s placed so that it gets damaged really easily :p)

It’s all about the battery temperature.
Even if you are running the deck with the APU cooking at 80C and fans blasting at full tilt, the battery stays relatively cool. But stuff it in an insulated box and start charging it at 45 watts, and the battery will quickly start heating from the inside over the recommended 30-45C maximum.

3070 Ti is still a surprisingly capable card. If you compare 3060 Ti, 4060 Ti and the 5060 ti to it, they are all really close with the 3070 Ti actually being the fastest. Gone are the days where an xx60 of a new generation was vastly faster than a 70 or even 80 of the previous one.

The major difference is VRAM, 8GB is to little little for 4k gaming, but it’s still perfectly fine at 1080 or 1440p, especially with some FSR/DLSS thrown in.

Sleep mode means ram is being powered, as otherwise it will clear out, and it keeps Bluetooth and WiFi on as well for the wakeup stuff.

There’s a rather complicated tweak for allowing hibernation, that saves stuff to disk and actually shuts the deck off properly.

All hail the Gabecube.

It doesn’t. The website would ask for an id check, you would generate it on the processor side and give the randomized ID to the site so it could go check it’s valid and let you through. It can be used to verify an account permanently but without one, it would kinda act like a temporary 2FA code.

How would you propose I prove to you at a reasonable certainty that I am an adult, without showing you my ID, or showing it to someone else you trust to tell the truth?
And also somehow prove that the ID I gave was not fake without the government that issued it telling you that it’s genuine?

Well, I actually could do it because I’m old enough that most of my accounts are already over 18 years old, but I don’t think requiring every new Pornhub user to wait 18 years is a reasonable solution.

If there is exactly one global service that does all the checks for every single internet user, which every single website uses, and the information going through them is always known, then sure, they could certainly block stuff.
But it’s quite clear by now “we aren’t going to implement age verification on the internet” isn’t going to happen, that verification is going to be implemented eventually, and in the rather near future. And places like the UK and many US states are extremely unlike to roll back the already implemented solutions.
So the question now is how it can be done with the least amount of invasion to privacy, and crucially, without the website needing your actual ID.

The way EU is planning on implementing it is seemingly rather okay on the privacy side.
Basic idea is that instead of sending your actual ID to every random shady website, which is fucking stupid and you should never ever do, you verify your ID once to a trusted processor, and the websites only receive a simple “Is adult: yes/no” answer connected to a randomised ID from them.

Combine that with one additional hop between the website and processor and you eliminate the processor even knowing what websites you requested the check for, and therefore the risk of a data leak is minimal.

There actually is one under development.

And also one already on steam but it’s from a russian dev team, so…

Yup. Exactly what happened with @x and @music.

Give the EU some time.

And if they don’t remove it, oooh I wanna see the GDPR report microsoft sends me after three years when I ask for it. Before I demand they delete my data :)

Huh, seems that quite a few LShift + LCtrl + LAlt + LWin + <key> have hardcoded links: Y opens Yammer, L for Linkedin, T for teams, O for outlook and so on. TIL.

Possibly, kinda depends how it’s implemented, does it need the software to trigger some AI software or not.

Back when Microsoft got some copilot hotkeys put on laptops, they send the perfectly reasonable “LShift+Win+F23” key combination :)