Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining it further. It does sound like a very nice system.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining it further. It does sound like a very nice system.
I don’t understand how SPAV fixes gerrymandering in this case. It seems like the re-weighting operation is meant for a pool of identical ballots. When you have district-level elections that differ between ballots, how is this meant to work?
Edit: Ooooh you meant for selecting the redistricting committee, not for running the elections. Gotcha, makes sense now.
The script doesn’t go away when you replace a helpdesk operator with ChatGPT. You just get a script-reading interface without empathy and a severally hindered ability to process novel issues outside it’s protocol.
The humans you speak to could do exactly what you’re asking for, if the business did not handcuff them to a script.
I think it’s what they’ve been calling “statistics”.
404media is doing excellent work on tracking the non-consentual porn market and technology. Unfortunately, you don’t really see the larger, more mainstream outlets giving it the same attention beyond its effect on Taylor Swift.
Huh, thanks for the heads up. Section 4 makes it look like they can close-source whenever they want.
I’m just glad FUTO is still letting Immich use the AGPL instead of this, though.
Feel the same way. My Camry is a 2013—recent enough to have a simple display and Bluetooth, but old enough to predate the ‘modern’ infotainment systems.
Believe me, I plan to drive this car until the scrapyards run out of part donors.
I’m still a big fan of D for personal projects, but I fear the widespread adoption ship has sailed at this point, and we won’t see the language grow anymore. It’s truly a beautiful, well-rounded language.
Also just recently a rather prominent contributor forked the entire compiler/language so we’re seeing more fragmentation :/
This is demonstrably wrong. The 30% cut is standard because Steam has used the same strategy as Amazon to fix prices across the market (a “Platform Most Favored Nation” clause—see the Wolfire Games v. Valve class action, specifically items 204 and 205 on pg 55). Competing storefronts cannot undercut Steam, so why would they take less than a 30% cut?
Epic Games Store—which is trying to undercut steam at a 12% fee—still list games at the same price as on Steam because of Valve has strongarmed publishers into fixing the prices. If Epic is charging 18% less but Valve is stopping publishers from reducing the game cost by that much, how is that not blatantly anti-competitive and anti-consumer?
enshitifies
Oh good, you are familiar with Cory Doctorow. He has an article on how Amazon abuses their position using the exact same playbook Valve uses.
I said no such thing. Please come back to this later with a fresh mind, and remember how wrongly you interpreted what was actually said for the sake of trying to fire off a quick response.
But if you’d rather disengage altogether then it is what it is. Cheers.
You have to have never seriously engaged with the details of the Valve monopoly if you think that’s what we are upset about.
We know Steam is an amazing storefront—I buy my games there because it’s the best experience for the cost. But Steam charges a premium. And despite taking smaller cuts, competing platforms like Epic cannot actual pass those cost savings to consumers because Valve is strongarming game publishers into fixing prices.
Yep. Because honestly, Steam is better than Epic in almost every way. When you want to buy a particular game X, you get a lot more from your purchase if it’s on Steam (workshop, friends, multiplayer, etc.). There is strong inertia and network effects that keep us all preferring Steam.
Epic can’t compete with the Steam experience. But if Epic was able to list everything 18% cheaper (the difference in fees between Epic and Steam)—then they would rightly be able to compete on price.
“Platform Most Favored Nation”. It’s a type of clause in platform/marketplace agreements that prohibit a seller from listing their product for a lower price on a different sales platform. Specifically, it prevents selling on a different marketplace with lower fees (e.g. Epic Games or a publishers own website) and passing the difference as savings to the consumer.
CSGO cases pulled $1 billion revenue in 2023. The steam store brought in $8.5 billion in that same year. That’s a 30% cut of all sales traffic on steam vs. in-game loot crates on a single title.
Loot boxes pull insane numbers. And yes they exploit children and problem gamblers. Love to see so many Valve fans downvote you :/
Sigh… I’m getting tired of the Valve apologetics in every thread. They make good products, yes. They also abuse their market share to implement anticompetitive policies. The first doesn’t absolve them of the second.
Truth is, no one has any idea what it would look like if there were actual competition among the PC games platforms. Steam may be the best possible world, or maybe we don’t know what we’re missing.
To learn more about Steam’s anticompetitive practices:
Her manner of speaking reminds me of the sermons you get at ‘modern’/nondenominational churches here in the south. Just the way phrases are timed, the intonation, the need to make every minute factual statement sound emotionally profound…
I have to wonder if she is consciously trying to speak in that way. I don’t know why they would think that was a good approach for a political speech lmao. It’s just so bizarre I can’t actually process it.
Additionally, there’s the usability hurdle of interacting with non-home instances from outside mastodon. If I pull up someone’s blog and click the little mastodon social media icon, it may very well link to mastodon.world. If my home instance is mastodon.social, now I have to launch into my own server, search up the account, and then begin interacting.
It’s trivial to do but it is an extra step, but for your less-tech-literate friends and family it can be a point of confusion. Mastodon handles federation great in-ecosystem, but the broader web is still going to treat each instance as a different site.
What even is federation in the context of a distributed vcs like Git? Does it mean federation of the typical dev ops tools (issues, PRs, etc.)?
Definitely better to charge an EV with clean energy. But it’s probably better to charge an EV with dirty electricity than it is to keep using a combustion vehicle.
IIRC a gas vehicle is something like 20% thermally efficient, whereas a coal/oil power plant can be up to 60%. So even if my EV is charging off oil or coal, I’m getting 3x the energy per unit of emissions compared to a gas vehicle (though who knows how that translates to miles of range).