This is true, but it’s not the only factor. Staying private allows a company to not be predatory, but it definitely does not guarantee it - it simply allows the executives to choose. It’s the combination of Valve being private and Gaben always staying true to his values despite his incredible wealth that gave us Steam in its current form.

I’ve known plenty of private companies that were as shitty as a public one, or more. Quality executives are vanishingly rare, particularly at this level of company value.

I will be disappointed if it’s not this guy

My office used to do this, until upper management caught wind and threw an absolute fit over it. Then they paid the building manager to come in and remove the lightswitches so we couldn’t turn the lights off ever again, there’s literally an alarm that goes off if the circuit is broken.

Yay for having a mild headache every single day!

Say what you will, I had more fun with the item servers being down than I have in many years. It felt like an unplanned community event or something to me, shit was awesome.

(Point taken that it literally only happened due to Valve being negligent though)

I use Kagi too - they have a feature I haven’t seen before where you can basically optimize your own SEO. You can uprank or downrank any given website to varying degrees based on how much of that site you want to see in your future search results (I use this a lot for game wikis that have since migrated off of Fandom etc, but the stale Fandom page always shows up first in google search).

They’re also working on a feature to warn you which articles are paywalled directly from the search result, which I will use the hell out of.

They also have something they call Lenses, which are essentially search profiles that emphasize certain types of results (programming lens upranks stackoverflow, github, and API docs for instance).

All in all I’ve been extremely pleased with the quality of the product and the directions they’re exploring in. And being able to easily chat up the devs in discord doesn’t hurt either.

Since becoming an adult it has become increasingly obvious to me that early high-school level stuff is impossibly complex for a significant chunk of the population.

Congrats bro

The slippery slope argument is not always a fallacy. The strength of a slippery slope argument relies on the ability to show that the initial action will actually lead to the predicted outcome. The fallacy comes in when connections are drawn between unrelated concepts - an easy example of this is the argument that legalizing abortion will lead to the legalization of murder. In this case, I think it's pretty likely that making a certain item legal to steal will pave the way for more items to be legal to steal in the future. After all, who decides which items should fall under that law? I'm sure there will be plenty of people with very strong, differing opinions on the topic.

Good n’ you?