One of the biggest bottlenecks in many workloads is latency. Cache miss and the CPU stalls waiting for main memory. Flash storage, even on an nvme bus is two orders of magnitude slower than ram.

For example L3 cache takes approximately 10-20 nano seconds, ram takes closer to 100 nano seconds, nvme flash is more than 10,000 nano seconds (>10 microseconds).

Depending on your age you may remember the transition from hard drives to ssds. They could make a machine feel much snappier. Early PC ssds weren’t significantly faster throughput than hard drives (many now are even slower writing when they run out of SLC cache), what they were is significantly lower latency.

As an aside, Intel and Microns 3d xpoint was super interesting technically. It was capable of < 5000 nano seconds in early generation parts, meaning it sat in between DDR ram and flash.

Gigabytes plural? Maybe a while. Gigabyte singular? Already a thing. AMD EPYC 9684X(https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/4th-generation-9004-and-8004-series/amd-epyc-9684x.html)

I don’t think that’s a fair categorisations. I believe that is only for selling steam keys elsewhere.

Steam allows publishers to generate steam keys for their games at no cost. The publisher can then sell those keys elsewhere. The only requirement is the keys not be sold for less than the price charged on steam. ie if the publisher can sell the key on any other platform and valve gets $0.

Expecting valve to distribute your game and provide access to their steam works features for free while allowing a publisher to undercut them would be insanity.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

Steam Keys are single-use, unique, alphanumeric codes that customers can activate on Steam to add a product license to their account. Steam Keys are a free service we provide to developers as a convenient tool to help you sell your game on other stores and at retail, or provide for free for beta testers or press/influencers. Steam keys are a free service, so we ask you to use good judgment and follow basic guidelines and rules around requesting and selling them.

Web apps.

For reference I work for a competing mail provider and the majority of our users don’t use SMTP or IMAP, instead exclusively using the web app.

I think “long covid” is something that has existed for a long time, well not long covid specifically but long term side effects of colds and flu.

A few years before covid I got a terrible cold or flu. Name a symptom of the flu and I probably had it, it was hard to even get myself to the toilet.

But what was so unique is even after the aches, the cough, and sore throat etc symptoms disappeared I didn’t recover. I was exhausted. Even weeks later I’d fluctuate between days of being fine to the next barely able to get out of bed.

It took at least 3 months after traditional flu symptoms had finished till that started to taper off. And at least another 3 before I started feeling truly myself again.

I never had one (but did want one, just financially couldn’t justify it at the time), but it would have a great fit for me. I just wanted a watch to tell the time, and display my phone notifications plus vibrate to alert me to them. That would have been legitimately useful for the job I was in at the time which was challenging to carry a phone (but it was nearby in my bag).

Now, I have no use for any of that. But I am now interested in a heart rate monitor that doesn’t hoover my data to replace my old dedicated Polar heart rate monitor (which also told the time, but I only wore it exercising), so the more expensive model is tempting!

This is one of my motivations for dumping my games and modding my consoles. Pull out Wii sports and it doesn’t work? No problems I’ll run it off usb.