gamer

There's some politics involved. Basically, everyone is rallying behind JPEGXL instead of WebP, but Google refuses to support JPEGXL in Chrome. The reasoning they gave is weak, so it's assumed that they're just trying to force the format they invented on everyone because they can.

IIRC, performance of the two formats is similar.

Unprivileged users are stuck with cancer. Life ain't fair.

logic error on line 2: Beer == Germans

Beer does not equate to Germans, rather Germans equate to Beer. If we fix that error, then it doesn't fit the original pattern:

• Germans == Beer
• Germans == Fascists

That would only work if Beer == Fascists, which of course is not true.

Also, wrong does not equal stupid, rather stupid equals wrong. Which is to say, you comment is wrong, but not necessarily stupid.

These types of projects are driven by metrics, and teams have some kind of quota/goal that they need to reach by a certain date to keep the project on schedule. Bonuses or job security may be on the line here, and so you may see some desperate employees "going the extra mile" to reach their goals.

Relatedly, Alexa's voice activation sensitivity is essentially a tunable number. It can be changed to be more sensitive, so that it will activate more easily (e.g. maybe you say "Alex" instead of "Alexa"). The people who control this are likely on the team with that deadline, so the incentives are there to lower this value in order to collect more data by recording personal conversations "accidentally". Maybe a bad update goes out that causes Alexa to activate randomly, and they quickly fix it after a few days when they collected all the non-Alexa personal conversations they need for their AI.

That's maybe a bit too deep into the paranoia/tinfoil hat spectrum for some, but history has shown that you can't give big tech the benefit of the doubt. Especially when you see some of the documents from the Google trial, where executives discuss rolling back new features to improve arbitrary metrics in the short term so that they can get their bonuses for the quarter, even if it hurts consumers.

Sure, but

• Lemmy == Lots of tankies
• Tankies == Anticapitalist

So I operate on the assumption that anticapitalist people on Lemmy are tankies. It's not true in all cases ofc, but without more info, I think that's a safe default.

That dude calling my post "bullshit romanticism of capitalism" gives a bit more confidence that they're a tankie with a strong case of grassphobia.

I meant that they're fighting Valve, which is "the good fight". They're not the only ones doing it, and they're definitely not the best ones doing it, but they're doing it. If they do manage to take a big chunk out of Valve's marketshare somehow, that will be good for everyone, even people who decide to stay on Steam.

Found the tankie lol

Unregulated capitalism doesn't work. I don't think anyone has ever seriously claimed that it does. The FTC isn't the only thing keeping the market fair, the free market does that on its own. When a company does a shitty thing, they lose customers and die. That's true in pretty much every market in the real world, except for a few problematic ones where there are bad actors trying to cheat the system.

I think he graduated from the Parker Brothers school of economics.

This is not a good way to look at it. Competition is good regardless. It doesn't matter how good Valve is today, if a viable competitor comes out, Valve will be forced to get better in order to compete.

All we need is some way to guarantee valve doesn’t become public.

This is wrong. Valve can enshittify without going public. If you think that public corporations are the only ones that are greedy/evil/anti-consumer, then you've never heard of the "private equity" industry. Look up the recent fight between the FTC and U.S. Anesthesia Partners in Texas for a clear example.

In capitalism, free market forces are what keep tug of war between produces and consumers fair, and competition is the fuel that keeps those free market forces moving. The fact that the Valve of today is both good and a monopoly is just a temporary rounding error/outlier. Over time, Valve will go to shit and consumers will suffer simply because Valve has almost no competition. This isn't a question, it's a fact of the mechanism of the economic system they exist in. It's like gravity; just because you haven't hit the floor yet doesn't mean jumping off that building was a good idea.

Epic games, whether you hate them or not, is fighting the good fight. They are doing shitty things (exclusivity, etc), so maybe they aren't the chosen one who will take challenge Valve, but they are on the right side of that fight. Hoping that Valve will stay great forever is foolish.

...but I will add that I don't think Epic alone should be trying to take down Valve. Valve is way too entrenched in this market to be taken down with any realistic competition (probably why Epic is resorting to exclusivity deals). The FTC needs to step in and regulate the market. Idk what that would look like, but it's possible to do it in a way that makes everyone happy. For example (off the top of my head, so probably flawed but whatever) the FTC could enforce interoperability between digital marketplaces so that consumers don't need to install 30 different launchers to access their purchased libraries. That relatively small change could lower the bar to entry for competitors by a lot, and not be a burden to consumers at the same time. EDIT: and it would not be anything drastic like forcing a break up of Valve.

I've seen this term thrown around on Lemmy in different contexts, so I looked it up and the wikipedia page gives a very specific definition of that term relating to a type of economic situation. I don't think that particular definition applies in this case, or does it?

but how do you rule out the possibility that Thomas paid for the flight?

Good point, and I don't have an answer. However, I think it'd be interesting to see how often he travels in a private jet. Maybe he's a high roller who jets all the time? Or maybe he decided to treat himself this one time?