For better or worse, the vast majority of people think in terms of local communities, not a global one, so this is still a massive ask. UTC already exists for the industries that need it (and people chronically online enough to have more global than local social connections).

I don’t want to sound like too much of a fanboy, but I’ve owned every first-party device of theirs so far, even the old physical Steam Link, the OG Controller, and the Vive which I count as theirs, and they’ve consistently hit the sweet spot of what I want out of hardware:

No hostility to the user; very tinkerer friendly; a good balance of build quality, ergonomics, and features without going into diminishing returns; long-lasting software support (even the market failure of the Steam Link has recent firmware updates); forwarding wider Linux and gaming software ecosystems; etc.

At this point, I’m just grabbing them if I have even an occasional use case for them, and I don’t regret it one bit. My Frame comes in tomorrow, and I’m very excited.

Yep. Just stay away from the Meta headsets. They are cheaper than the competition for a reason.

Those links aren’t smoking guns.

The first details troubled rollout of software upgrades, “upgrades” being the key word. That’s really just the nature of complicated software development in general. The previous complete package of software is already up-to-task and running it longer than desired isn’t a huge issue.

The second says they can’t fix multiple problems simultaneously, which is again another common software development reality and a very different statement than not being able to fix things.

The third flat out says the opposite in that many fixes actually have been completed, just not all of them yet. It’s an adjacent issue, but the headline also frames the secret keeping as a bad thing when that’s just a sensible thing to do.

Technically, they’re both supersonic, not hypersonic, but yeah, that’s just semantics. The actual important detail is that the SR-71 is twice as fast (or more) as the F-35. There’s a lot of testing you can do with the former that’s just not possible with the latter.

The F-35 has nothing to do with this, but just to correct anyone’s misconceptions, F-35 loss and readiness rates only sound bad because that kind of coverage gets clicks/views. When you add back in the context of comparison to other aircraft and the total number of airframes produced and hours flown, the F-35 is actually performing great.

If you want a less dark explanation, I think the toys are powered by both individual and collective imagination. Really popular toys like Buzz gain sentience immediately, because there are masses of children already thinking of them that way so much so that proximity isn’t needed. Non-toy items like Forky can gain toyhood and sentience from a concentrated dose of imagination. Most toys would be somewhere between those two extremes.

You could also go a step further and say collective imagination results in a lower quality sentience, explaining all the Buzzes, green aliens, etc. starting out less self-aware.

Not even that. “Abuse of genAI” is what ruined it. The tech itself is great.

I said it somewhere else, but I think Valve actually did factor in wishlist counts. The problem is in the percentage of those that convert to sales. For games, the median conversion rate is 10% to 20% of wishlists converting to sales within the first week. I expect the Steam Controller’s conversion rate was much higher.

Valve may have even tried anticipating this from Deck sales and still failed to account for the Deck conversion rate still being lower due to the greater price.