He / They

  • 7 Posts
  • 574 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Been playing Avowed, and enjoying it a lot. It’s a really good AA rpg in the POE universe, and the worldspace is probably the prettiest I’ve seen in the past couple years. I think the last time a game really 'wow’ed me with visuals, to the point that sometimes I just stopped to appreciate the view, was TW3.

    Also played some Avorion, which scraches my Eve Online itch without having to actually play that, and Mabinogi (Frieren crossover event), which was the first game my partner and I played together 15 years ago. It’s gotten so many QoL updates in that time that there’s almost no ‘grind’ anymore, and it’s so much more laid back than other MMOs, and has so much content.





  • I get called a Luddite (which honestly makes me preen) at work because I am very skeptical of new technology ever being fundamentally different than some already-extant tool. Almost everything billed as new is just an iteration on something you already have, or if you don’t have, don’t need.

    SaaS and I/PaaS has been a horrible shift in the industry, because it takes a truth (that most orgs don’t have the people or expertise needed to run large-scale environments and the tools needed to support and secure them), and entrenches that in policy by handing the money you could be spending training people to do it, to another org, further shrinking that knowledgebase in the industry. It was bad enough when that signing-over of core responsibilities was happening with small IT companies via MSPs (who were only ever supposed to be “IT for non-IT companies”), but *aaS has pushed that to mid and even large companies.

    It was supposed to help IT professionals do their jobs, but the reality is that it’s just another money extraction tool, and job-destroyer.



  • There’s a difference between having a monopoly and abusing it

    Sure, but whether Valve fits the definition is debatable. Being highly dominant does not automatically make something a monopoly. At best you could call it an imperfect monopoly/ imperfect competition, because substitutes absolutely do exist, but they’re not mostly close enough to be truly competitive. It’s also important to factor in that 4/5 of the largest games on PC are not even on Steam at all: Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, and League of Legends. PUBG is the only one of the top-5 that’s on Steam.


  • Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically

    I’m interested in which of their games that have loot crates you think are targeted specifically at children? Basically all of their games, but especially their games with loot crates, tend to be targeted towards adults. Hell, TF2 came out in 2007, which is 18 years ago, so no one who is a child today was even alive when it came out. It’s mostly elder to mid-Millennials. You can dislike loot boxes (I do), but don’t try to paint Valve like they’re Roblox or Epic Games.

    everyone else missed the moment to start competing and Valve gained monopoly unopposed.

    Other platforms were around before Steam was fully dominant, but they tended to be focused on the creators’ first-party games, and excluded other publishers and titles from using their platform. Desura and Central/Impulse both had decently large user bases. Stardock Central actually preceded Steam’s release, but was overtaken because Stardock was mostly just using it for its own games, but also billing the service more as a way to unify your physical and digital libraries, and to provide patches and whatnot, whereas Steam went all-in on digital-only.

    because it’s impossible to move people who amassed content libraries over the years

    Yes, but this is sadly just the natural reality of digital sales. Because you are buying a license, it’s not trivial from a company’s perspective to make those portable, and the company you’re moving the license to is then having to host your content without ever actually receiving the money for it, which isn’t super appealing. GOG actually tried this for a while(GOG Connect), where you could essentially redeem your Steam games to your GOG account, but they realized it wasn’t worth it (especially since there isn’t game parity on the 2, so most people have to keep Steam anyways).

    You’re ignoring all of the warning signs because they didn’t screw you over yet.

    I must have missed where I said Valve would never do something bad? But yes, I don’t believe in condemning someone for what they might do in the future, preemptively. If and when Valve goes darkside (probably when Gabe dies, and it ends up under new management), they should be condemned. Acting as though they’re bad just because they’re dominant in the market is silly, though; they didn’t get there through anti-competitive business practices, they got there through others failing to do better.


  • M$ did hella shady, monopolistic stuff (patent theft, market manipulation, very likely corporate espionage, and certainly most visibly prefferential treatment of their own software ecosystem and sabotage of third party software on their platforms) to create and enforce market dominance. Unless Valve has been doing something I’m unaware of to kill other platforms, they’re not really similar situations.


  • It might be. It hasn’t been tested in court.

    I lean towards ‘no’ because I do not see moves on their part to actively attack other distributors, but I admit I have not done research on this subject.

    Based purely on having used many other distribution platforms, I think they (Valve) just legitimately have the best service currently. Everyone else either kinda sucking (GOG, as much as I love them), or really sucking (EGS, Origin, UPlay, etc), and losing to you in the market, doesn’t make you a monopoly.




  • Man pages, help files, and commented configuration files galore

    Technical documentation != Tutorials. Not even remotely.

    Linux support forums might be hostile to entitled noobs looking for a handout and a quick fix

    “Oh so you use Linux? Name every distro (to prove you ‘put in the effort’ to my standards)”

    Sarcasm aside, Lime Buzz is completely correct; FOSS as an ecosystem has cultivated an air of ahem techno-elitism, and that severely undermines its actual usefulness as a tool of individual freedom or certainly resistance. If a tool requires a bunch of X (time, money, base knowledge, etc) in order to utilize, it’s not going to be useful to people who do not have that resource to spend on it. Which is going to be the majority of any given group. And that has really made it as an ecosystem much less important than many other concerns. Individual projects can still be important, but Linux is certainly not going to save us from Authoritarianism.

    Corporations pay for support services. The code is free (as in speech). No one ever claimed that the support was also (or even should be) free.

    Corporations may unfortunately be people, but people are certainly not corporations, and shouldn’t be expected to pay for everything corporations do.

    If you believe that Linux actually helps people- that it materially improves their lives over being trapped in a predatory tech world built by for-profit entities who are happy to sell their customers out to a fascist government- then you are conceptualizing the relationship between Linux evangelists and new users incorrectly. We’re not providing sales and tech support in that case, we’re providing them aid. And aid workers don’t ask people to show how much they’ve tried to help themselves before offering them help.

    And if you don’t think Linux actually aids peoples’ lives, then you just agree with Lime Buzz that

    There are far more important things to worry about and to do.




  • So what are you referring to, then? Inflation-adjusted wage growth?

    Purchasing power, which was not shit in the 90s compared to today. That’s what really matters; what can you get with the money you have.

    You’re ascribing way too much rationality to the average voter here.

    I think you’re ascribing too little. The average voter is not a political philosopher, but they’re also not comatose. They understand simple economic principles like tax cuts being given to others and not to them, or subsidies for certain industries and not others, or the lack of government action to curb rising prices, etc. They may not have all the proper labels to describe what they’re seeing vs what they want to see (and indeed, the US has spent so long demonizing Socialism and propagandizing Capitalism that most can’t describe either properly), but polling proves that most Americans (hilariously, even most Republicans) don’t want cutthroat neoliberal everyone-for-themselves economic policies.

    Bold of you to assume there’s more to come, in light of recent events.

    I think that Trump would love to install himself as a dictator, and maybe he will, but even dictators keep controlled elections going for the appearance of legitimacy. He’s already 78, and no other Republicans have managed to replicate his popularity among GOP voters. One way or another (unless the US government literally dissolves, which is my preference tbh) we’ll be dealing with a post-Trump US government sooner or later.



  • bull market

    The stock market is not the economy. The economy on the ground has not been bullish. The US stock market doing well benefits the wealth-holders, not workers.

    people primarily care about their own life, and just aren’t motivated by big abstract concepts

    I agree, which is why the DNC’s attempt to allow a leftward shift only in its social policies has fallen largely flat with connecting with voters. It’s a sort of Rainbow-Politics, if you will. Voters see that they’re not actually moving Leftwards on economic policies that would help their own lives.

    Sadly, it seems the DNC is taking this as a message that the Leftward shift on social issues was the problem, rather than the lack of economic change. Sanders has been talking about exactly this ever since election day, but the DNC leadership is already signaling they don’t believe that or care. I am worried we’re in for several Presidential election losses before they all die out or get the message.