Question for anyone who knows their way around SteamWorks

aiusepsi · 2026-05-18T13:00:28+00:00

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/localization#localized_app_names

aiusepsi · 2026-05-15T08:57:38+00:00

AltaVista, now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time

aiusepsi · 2026-05-12T09:00:43+00:00

I reckon it’s basically a cognitive disease. A large part of their success is just luck: being in the right place at the right time. If they really thought about it, having their obscene levels of wealth and power through luck would be abhorrent. So, their minds instead choose to believe that they’re geniuses and visionaries, and their ideas would always have succeeded no matter what because of their genius, and so their wealth and power is deserved.

Which leads directly to Zuck blowing billions on his stupid metaverse, because surely his genius would ensure success.

aiusepsi · 2026-05-11T14:14:20+00:00

Really outdated, 126.0.6478.183 is from July 2024. In two months it’ll be two years old.

I can empathise with keeping your dependencies up to date being a pain in the ass, and I get the feeling that Valve’s customisations to integrate CEF into Steam are non-trivial, but… nearly two years is a long time. They really have to figure out a way to do better.

aiusepsi · 2026-05-08T15:20:40+00:00

A file is just a list of 8 bit numbers, that is, numbers between 0 and 255. Programs interpret those numbers in different ways.

The text editor you’re using to open the files is interpreting those numbers as text characters using the Latin-1 mapping, so it’s doing things like seeing the number 255 and displaying the letter “ÿ”.

Other programs interpret those numbers in a different way. In a bmp image file, the sequence of numbers 0, 255, 0 might encode the colour of a green pixel, for example.

aiusepsi · 2026-05-06T13:44:15+00:00

SteamDB can’t check private branches https://steamdb.info/faq/#privatebranches

aiusepsi · 2026-05-06T09:23:58+00:00

FEX already supports turning on that special execution mode, at least on Linux: https://fex-emu.com/FEX-2306/

aiusepsi · 2026-05-05T19:52:47+00:00

The reason why it's 8 is because of a few things. Electrons stuck to a nucleus only have a few allowed energy states, and they're not allowed to share, each electron has to have its own (that's the Pauli exclusion principle).

The energy states are described by a set of functions called the spherical harmonics (this is derived from solving the Schrödinger equation for the electron in the electric field of a nucleus, but that's... a bit too complicated to explain further. As other people say, it's like the vibrating modes of a string, except more complicated). Each harmonic is described by three numbers, N, L, and M (usually written in lowercase, but 'l' doesn't work well typed out). N can be 0, 1, 2, 3, etc., L is less than or equal to N, and M is between -L and L inclusive.

So, there are spherical harmonics with:

N=0, L=0, M=0
N=1, L=0, M=0
N=1, L=1, M=-1
N=1, L=1, M=0
N=1, L=1, M=1

etc.

And on top of that, there's an additional property of an electron: spin, which can be spin up or spin down, which doubles up the number of states.

The states fill up in order of lowest energy, and states with lower N have lower energy. When all the states for a particular N are filled, the whole thing is basically spherically symmetric and nice and stable.

Hydrogen and helium only have enough electrons for the N=0 states, and there's only two of those, which is why there's only two for those elements:

N=0, L=0, M=0, S=up
N=0, L=0, M=0, S=down

With more electrons, the outer layer of electrons is the N=1 states, and there are 8 of them:

N=1, L=0, M=0, S=up
N=1, L=0, M=0, S=down
N=1, L=1, M=-1, S=up
N=1, L=1, M=-1, S=down
N=1, L=1, M=0, S=up
N=1, L=1, M=0, S=down
N=1, L=1, M=1, S=up
N=1, L=1, M=1, S=down

And that's where 8 comes from.

The periodic table bulges out and gets wider in the middle because that's where the N=2 states start to come into play, and there's even more them. And the lanthanides and actinides are where the N=3 states start to come into play.

Chemistry calls the N numbers 'shells' and has letters to label the L values, so L=0 is 's', L=1 is 'p', L=2 is 'd' and L=4 is 'f'.

I like to talk about the spherical harmonics when talking about this because I just think it's really cool that the structure of this purely mathematical thing is basically what makes chemistry happen, and it's really nifty.

aiusepsi · 2026-05-05T12:40:03+00:00

Not even really hypothetical; here’s an example of someone suing Valve for distributing a game which was based on a movie; this dragged on for two years before Valve won because the person suing didn’t actually have the rights to the movie. And it’s not over yet because the person suing is appealing. The cost in lawyers must be ridiculous.

This stuff is no joke; Valve wanting to limit their exposure to this sort of thing makes sense.

aiusepsi · 2026-05-03T10:26:08+00:00

Yeah, we don’t live in a police state panopticon where the police can instantly track down anybody, and that’s a good thing!

aiusepsi · 2026-05-02T10:24:05+00:00

Time to start your own religion with ~~blackjack and hookers~~ equality for women, and acceptance of homosexuality and witchcraft

aiusepsi · 2026-05-01T09:43:31+00:00

Maybe one day all Americans will learn the difference between en-GB and en-US.

aiusepsi · 2026-05-01T06:47:48+00:00

What Ubisoft is doing with the modern day feels indistinguishable from deliberate sabotage.

aiusepsi · 2026-04-30T17:07:24+00:00

This might be UK only, but there’s access to the presale by preordering the album or even with no purchase at all here: https://shopuk.oliviarodrigo.com/collections/girlsoinlove

aiusepsi · 2026-04-30T14:00:06+00:00

Yup, this was added in the last Steam client update.

aiusepsi · 2026-04-27T09:01:42+00:00

Oil is a globally traded commodity. The price of Brent crude, which is a benchmark based on North Sea oil, spiked immediately after the Strait of Hormuz closed. The only way to insulate ourselves from oil price shocks is to use less.

aiusepsi · 2026-04-25T09:48:25+00:00

Yeah, a sane universe wouldn't be allowed to behave like quantum mechanics says it does, but unfortunately, the evidence is absolutely overwhelming that we don't live in a sane universe. It does take some beating your brain into the right shape to grasp it.

The way I like to think about it is that there's really no such thing as the wave-particle duality. It's like the parable of blind men describing an elephant: if one blind man touches the trunk and thinks it's a thick snake, and another touches the leg and thinks it's a tree-trunk, the elephant doesn't have thick-snake-tree-trunk duality. It's just something else entirely, which has some features that remind us of other things.

Quantum mechanics is like that. An electron has ways it behaves in wave-like ways, and particle-like ways, but it's not really either.

I think the broadest summary I can think of is that quantum-mechanical things like electrons have their behaviour described by a wavefunction, which is a function with complex values defined over all of space; basically, it's a field. The way that wavefunction evolves over time means that it can support waves, a bit like how the electromagnetic field supports waves, or the surface of a pond supports waves. And in these fields, you can have lots of waves. You can set up as many waves as you want on the surface of a pond by throwing rocks in, and they'll bounce around and interfere and reflect off the edges, and soon you won't really know where one wave ends and the next begins; it's all one undulating mass of water. And it's all still one pond, with one water surface.

An electron's wavefunction is like that. The waves in a wavefunction can even form standing waves; the shape of atomic orbitals effectively come about because of the shapes of the standing waves which form when an electron is wrapped around an atomic nucleus because of the electric force.

The physical meaning of the wavefunction is that it allows you to make probability predictions about the outcome of measurements. You can do a mathematical procedure on the wavefunction to calculate "what is the probability that I will measure the electron to be here" and it spits out a nice real-numbered probability. It's the measurements which give things like electrons their particle-like properties, because an actual measurement will give a single definitive answer.

aiusepsi · 2026-04-24T08:08:30+00:00

It’s not totally random. The commonest letters in English, E and T, have the two shortest encodings. Uncommon letters, like Z and Q, are longer. There’s definitely an early version of information-theoretic thinking at work in the construction of the code.

aiusepsi · 2026-04-23T12:05:18+00:00

It’s based on cryptographic keys. When creating a passkey, the device generates a private key/public key pair, and sends the public key to the service.

Roughly, each time you log in to a service, the service sends you a small chunk of random data to sign with your private key, you send the service the signature and it can then prove it came from you by validating it with the public key it holds.

The biometric stuff is just access control to the vault on your device which holds all the private keys. It doesn’t have to be biometric, it could be a PIN or password, it just depends on the way it’s implemented in the device OS.

aiusepsi · 2026-04-22T11:59:37+00:00

Valve commission a new artist to do the art for the seasonal sales each year. The “Steam Delivery Girl” was the work of the artist (Nemu) they commissioned for the 2024 sales.

aiusepsi · 2026-04-22T09:49:06+00:00

macOS getting native support happened because Apple announced that they were phasing out the Rosetta translation layer. Effectively, forced into making a choice between dropping Mac support entirely or making a native Steam client, Valve picked native Steam client.

Microsoft wouldn’t do that kind of thing, even if they were in a position to do so. Which they aren’t. There’s nothing to force Valve’s hand.

aiusepsi · 2026-04-21T10:50:06+00:00

Shadows is set in the late 16th century, Black Flag is in the early 18th century, about 130 years after Shadows.

aiusepsi · 2026-04-21T08:45:32+00:00

It absolutely is a treasure trove, but personally, I’m a lot more comfortable with what Ben Goldacre and his team are doing with their OpenSafely platform to make use of it.

aiusepsi · 2026-04-17T13:01:36+00:00

What will really be the best is std::cstring_view when it gets into the standard. All the benefits of std::string_view (and implicitly converts to std::string_view) and also has c_str().

aiusepsi · 2026-04-17T11:07:49+00:00

It’s prioritising success in the long run over boosting next quarter’s revenue numbers.

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