Stupid hot take is stupid (plus, Steam Deck hype)

So, I was watching the Broken Silcon podcast the other day, when Tom and Dan's conversation made its way around to the Steam Deck, and I have to say... I had to stop watching.

For the record, here's the video in question:

Here's the product that they spend ten full minutes trashing as being a waste of time, when a laptop can be had for "the same price":

Here are the actual prices of the really-real-world gaming laptops:

And this is what you'll pay for a gaming laptop that can seriously outclass the Steam Deck:

 

We're still waiting for full benchmarks and reviews, but so far, it looks like the $499 CAD Steam Deck can easily keep pace with $1100 CAD Lenovo (only 220% of its price), and is only clearly beaten by $2100-plus CAD of Alienware (only 420% of its price). 

Tom and Dan acknowledge that they may be coming across as too negative about the Steam Deck, but only after spending ten full minutes delivering the stupidest stupidest of stupid takes that I've heard in a long time about any tech product. 

Yes, you can buy a laptop for a similar price... maybe. But you won't be gaming on it:

Best Buy has one $550 CAD laptop, and one $650 CAD model, neither of which looks like a gaming machine of any description, and both are still more money than a Steam Deck. After that, prices double to $1120 CAD (only 224% of a Steam Deck).

Liars...

All of these topics were ones I'd previously asked Twitter not to show anymore, including "Based on your likes." All of them are back again, regardless, as was their "turn on push notifications" plea... which they'd also previously, repeatedly, promised they wouldn't suggest anymore.

This is why you should still be ad-blocking online

Having just pointed out how different Google's advertising-fuelled business is from Facebook's surveillance-fuelled shop, I suppose it's only fair to point out that being distinctly different from, and less evil than, Facebook, doesn't automatically make the crew at Google into paragons of virtue.

Por ejemplo, take this report from Huffpost:

The ad caught Gordon Turner’s eye immediately. It was an official-looking online video encouraging viewers to apply for the “Senior Booster Program,” which entitled those 65 and older to government-issued payments of $1,728. For Turner, a 77-year-old Texan on disability benefits who lives alone and financially supports his elderly mother, that kind of cash could go a long way. So he clicked the ad’s link right away to input his personal information, and he waited.

Unfortunately for Turner — and the more than 10 million others who’ve viewed this video — no such program exists, and no check will be coming in the mail. Behind the Google ad, and hundreds of others like it, is 1111 LLC, a little-known affiliate marketing company run by a former pro MMA fighter from the Canadian prairies. The firm, which also operates a network of pro-Trump news sites and MAGA merch e-shops, has quietly erupted into one of Google’s top-performing and highest-spending political advertisers

1111 LLC has pumped out a deluge of slickly produced videos via Google ads in recent months that promote entirely fabricated government handouts [...] Many of these ads are designed to look like news segments, with miscontextualized footage of President Joe Biden at his desk appearing to sign documents related to the bogus payouts. [...] They have collectively been viewed well over 100 million times in a matter of months, according to public Google data, sparking false hope in an untold number of households nationwide as the coronavirus pandemic drags into its third calendar year.

Shady companies fleecing people online is a story as old as the internet, but what’s noteworthy in this ruse is Google’s complicity. The tech behemoth has pocketed more than $2.2 million from 1111 LLC since September to run ads that cruelly con its own users while flagrantly violating its own policies — and, experts say, federal law.

Dammit, Google, must you?

A while back, I was watching The WAN Show, a weekly tech-focused podcast on Linus Tech Tips, when Linus, a YouTuber who makes a significant chunk of his company's revenue from Google Adsense, opined that ad-blocking was tantamount to theft; if not outright piracy, it was at the very least privateering.

Linus was wrong. There's a false equivalency at work in his argument, in which ads served up by Google are essentially the same thing as the ads that you'd see on network television: a minor nuisance which is borne by the audience in exchange for otherwise-free programming. The problem is that online ads aren't at all the same as the TV ads of the long ago time; online ads are lousy with scams and grift, when they aren't actually installing malware on your system when they're auto-executed by your browser. 

Do you remember cryptojacking? Because I do.

And then there's the creepy surveillance aspect of things; even Google, whose business model is still viable if the link between advertising and surveillance is broken, isn't yet a surveillance-free zone. There's a reason why the U.S. Congress is marking up legislation right now which will mandate a stop to the process; a looming legal problem that Google is trying to get ahead of by making cross-app tracking more difficult, much like Apple has already done.

And even if online ads weren't dangerous to your security, invasive to your privacy, and occasionally outright-illegal scams which Google not only fails to detect, but profits from, online ads are intrusive to the online experience, to a truly obnoxious degree.

Do you remember when a U.S. Congress, who couldn't agree at the time to keep their own fucking lights on, came together to mandate a decibel cap for television ads? Because I do.

Do I like LTT's content? Yes, I do. It their content so good that I'd be willing to give up my privacy, my security, my emotional well-being, and subject any number of desperate people to an endless (and apparently unstoppable) fire-hose of lies, scams, phishing attacks, misinformation, radicalization, and addiction? Yes, addiction; our current epidemic of opiate addicts is a direct consequence of Oxycontin advertisements which were pumped into people's homes, depicting an opiate painkiller as addiction-free, side-effect-free, and totally safe.

BTW, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, who were responsible for that ad campaign? They're desperately trying top settle the resulting class-action wrongful-death lawsuit... so far, without success.

Online ads aren't a relatively-innocuous thing which we endure to get access to free content. They're often dangerous, frequently outright evil, and demand far too much in exchange for showing us a few minutes of a movie trailer on YouTube... which, I'll remind you, is already a fucking advertisement, and shouldn't need to also be supported by selling additional pre- and end-roll ads... or mid-roll ads, for that matter.

So, no, Linus, ad-blocking isn't piracy, or privateering, or theft of any description. It's self-defence. If Google want me to stop blocking the ads they're hosting and serving, then that ad stream needs to be independently certified as 100% clean, by people whose word we can trust on the subject. In other words, not by Google themselves, who have a vested material interest in shading the truth on this subject.

A false equivalence debunked, again: Google and Facebook do not share a business model

Lazy pundits are fond of equating the evils of Facebook Meta with the "don't be evil" ethos of Google Alphabet, with the sole reason being that both are in the advertising business, but this past week has laid bare the differences between the two, and NYMag.com's Pivot podcast lays out the differences very, very simply:

Kara Swisher: There are Big Tech winners and losers in this week’s earnings, and Alphabet is making it look as easy as ABC. [...] On Tuesday, Alphabet announced a 20-for-one stock split. But they weren’t popping corks all over the Valley. Shares of Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, fell more than 20 percent, in part due to the impact of Apple’s privacy changes. [Emphasis added.] Also, issues around growth; also, the money they’ve been spending on the Metaverse.

Yes, I know that Zuckerberg blamed recent iOS changes which block apps from sharing data with each other, and the effect that those changes are having on the business of surveillance advertising, but Google Alphabet are also in the advertising business, and their business is booming. Surely something else has to be at work, right? Maybe one of these two companies is in the advertising business, while the other is just in the surveillance business full stop, with advertising as a sideline?

[Swisher:] And again, the spending on Meta is insane — they lost $10 billion on that division, the Reality Labs division [...] 2022 could bring challenges for both Alphabet and Meta [...] but the big thing was this $10 billion cost for the Metaverse investment. So what do you think about the situation?

Scott Galloway: This is the quarter that Google disarticulates from Facebook, much less Pinterest and Snap. Search is its own form of communications and advertising that continues to just grow. [...] Facebook, for the first time in 18 years, had a decline in daily active users. It’s never registered that.

Yes, it's definitely sounding to me like Google Alphabet is in an entirely different business than Facebook Meta... and Facebook Meta's bid to rebrand itself as a real-world Ready Player One product isn't going at all well.

Galloway: He’s doing exactly the right thing strategically. The problem is the tactics make no sense. The people in this universe are not impressed with the universe he envisions, and specifically the portal. [...] The Reality Labs group grew from $1 billion to $2 billion, but to spend $10 billion to get to $2 billion … If he pulls it off, it’ll be one of the most impressive feats in — not even corporate renewal — but vision around maintaining growth. I don’t think they’re going to. I think this thing is already a giant flaming bag of shit.

I think that last line illustrates just how quickly Facebook Meta has fallen from grace, here. As recently as a month ago, it was looking like Zuck had successfully flipped the script, changing his company's narrative from Frances Haugen's whistle-blowing and under-oath testimony to Facebook's plan to shove us all kicking and screaming into a Facebook Meta-dominated VR future.

Now, pundits are openly talking about Meta's VR initiative in the past tense, having noticed that nobody under the age of 25 would be caught dead using this thing, and describing the entire division of the company as a "giant flaming bag of shit." Although, to be fair, that same description would apply equally well to Facebook Meta as a whole.

So, no, Google Alphabet and Facebook Meta are not in the same business. They are not equivalent, or interchangeable. Google Alphabet provides services that people like, and which they use in increasing numbers, while Facebook Meta is a giant flaming bag of shit" which shed a record-sized chunk of their valuation in a matter of days, and whose leader has continued to refuse to change the ethical direction of the company, even as he bets the entire enterprise on a dystopian VR future which nobody wants.

These companies are not related, and they are demonstrably not the same. Clearly, changes to the business environment which chopped the legs out from under Facebook Meta have had no impact on Google Alphabet at all, except to increase the size of their business... at Facebook Meta's expense. There is no equivalence here. So can we please stop lazily equating them? Just... stop.

This has been one of two aspects of the Facebook Meta for the past few years which I've found really, really frustrating. The first was that Facebook Meta, regardless of how evil the actions, or how feculent their headlines, seemed to be immune to consequences: no matter how bad the news, their earnings, profits, and share price just kept going up. That's now changed; Facebook Meta has now shown themselves to be vulnerable to consequence in a way which is going to haunt them for a long time to come.

The other aspect, though, was this false equivalence angle, one which Facebook Meta has been perfectly happy to encourage. Because if Google Alphabet and Facebook Meta are impossible to distinguish from each other, if both of them are equally targets of antitrust actions, and draconian regulations, then Google Alphabet could be forced into the role of reluctant ally with Facebook Meta, in spite of the simple fact that they really have very little in common.

Well, no more; we now have a clear demonstration of just how different these two companies are. We can rein in the evils and excesses of Facebook Meta without having to deliberately kill Google Alphabet in the process. Reasonable rules which pose an existential threat to Facebook Meta, don't present any serious difficulty to Google Alphabet at all. So can we please do that now? Pretty please?