The "See Also" has "Wax thermostatic element" [0] which seems focused on automotive applications, so perhaps it was there and grew large-enough that it got split off.
> Its principal application is in automotive thermostats used in the engine cooling system.
Loss leaders only work if they can make the customer spend money to make up for that loss. Commodity hardware can't be sold as a loss leader, because companies will just buy it up at the discount, and then not use it for gaming.
An example of this was the PS3, being able to run linux. The US Air Force bought ~1700 PS3s, and built a supercomputer. At launch, the PS3 reportedly lost Sony about $300 per console sold, so that one example alone could have cost a half million dollars.
I mean, the thing is literally tied (by default but few people are changing that) to the biggest video game selling platform of the planet. Actually given how Valve prints money without doing anything, I'm impressed they don't sell it for 99.99, they would immediately kill Nintendo and Sony (Xbox doesn't need that).
The big question becomes, does a Steam Deck owner buy enough more to make up the subsidy or do they buy about the same as they would have without buying the Deck? For consoles there's little question because the console maker gets a cut of every single sale and it would be REALLY weird to only play previous generation games on a console so that math is easier but for Steam they're looking at people buying it as a secondary device (mostly) as an augment to their existing PC(s).
I also think Valve has/had enough demand at the non fully subsidized price there wasn't much point in selling it for less. They could already sell as many as they wanted to make at the $600+ price point so why subsidize if farther and leave money on the table? That has changed now that they're having to jack the prices up but I think they also just don't want to get into that model and would rather have an ecosystem of healthy competitors they sell games onto.
Similarly, when I moved from the UK to Canada, people often didn't understand what I meant when I said it was "half ten", which is the common way of saying ten thirty, at least where I grew up.
I’m a “quarter past” person but I’ve always been confused by “half ten” (which thankfully isn’t used in Australia). But in German, “half ten” means 9:30, which is make more sense to me (probably because I’m used to how German speech often drops words, which is less common in English)
>How does one get to "half ten" in German? Is it simply starting from "half to ten"?
Never thought about it much but I think you're spot on. English uses "half past" and therefore "half 10" means 10:30, whereas most other languages use "half to" which causes "half 10" to mean 9:30.
One would think this should cause confusion for international meetings often enough to be common knowledge, but I didn't know until today...
You said it wasn't from Synthet, but they did release a video ~2 weeks ago which talked about exactly that. Super interesting, whether it's the correct video or not!
> You said it wasn't from Synthet, but they did release a video ~2 weeks ago which talked about exactly that.
Good grief, I thought it might be that video but somehow completely blanked on it when I double-checked and decided it wasn't. Thanks for actually checking usefully!
(Synthet videos are almost always worth a watch even if you can't remember them a couple of weeks later. Old age, innit.)
That's an interesting one, because it's misused more often than not, to mean what you are suggesting.
It's actually meant to say if someone provides an exception, e.g. "No parking on Wednesdays", then that proves the existence of another rule, e.g. "Parking is allowed". Since an exception, without a rule, makes no sense.
But, in my experience, people do use it to mean "Oh, this one thing is wrong, but that proves everything else is right", which does not track.
No it's not. It's because the meaning of the English word "prove" has changed. It used to mean "test", which could of course have a positive or negative outcome. The modern sense of "successfully demonstrating truth" has caused this phrase to have the opposite of its original meaning.
I think it's also appropriate to use it when the rule is so strong that exceptions are famous because they are exceptions. "Birds are capable of flight" is strong enough that penguins and ostriches are famous for being counterexamples.
But that's not following the saying - it's still not proving, it's modifying the rule. It shifts the rule from "birds can fly" to "most birds can fly". Pointing out that penguins can't fly doesn't make the case that birds can fly stronger in any way.
You're right in a strict sense. But in my experience such strictness is only useful in hard sciences and (maybe) legalese. There are exceedingly few things we can claim to apply everywhere, and even fewer we can "prove" to each other.
Give it a try if you don't believe me. Even categories we take for granted, like trees and fish, are not perfectly crisp, and "obvious" facts like "humans need a heart to live" have surprising exceptions.
> Pointing out that penguins can't fly doesn't make the case that birds can fly stronger in any way.
I disagree. It's such a common rule that there's a long Wikipedia page for the exceptions[1], and the first photo is of penguins, labelled "penguins are a well-known example of flightless birds.".
If I knew nothing else about the topic, I would take it as evidence that it's common for birds to fly, otherwise that fact would have been unremarkable. Not hard proof of a universal quantifier, but a useful rule nonetheless.
> There are exceedingly few things we can claim to apply everywhere, and even fewer we can "prove" to each other.
Yes, this is why hard and fast rules don't make sense, and why they should have "generally", "normally", or "mostly" attached to them.
If you have two categories of birds, one with those that fly and one that doesn't, having that second list doesn't make the first stronger. At some point that second list dilutes that first one so much that it doesn't make sense anymore.
If my rule is that "white guys are named Dave" does my building a list of every example of a Dave and non-Dave make my rule stronger? When does the "strong" nature of the rule get watered down sufficiently? Honestly, a list of hundreds of birds tells me that it's a weak rule and that the "birds fly" rule is wrong.
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