There are some games tbat are sold on both steam and other platforms. Many of these games have external modding communities. Steam provides slick integration for “workshop” mods, which helps drive sales.

A few years back steam used to allow fairly open API access if you acquired the game elsewhere and just wanted the mods. And then they turned it off, but still allow direct anonymous downloads. A decision that only makes sense if they wanted to lock in any steam-adopted community to make going elsewhere difficult.

Turning off something people were using to avoid potential competitors is kinda exactly what would count as “monopolistic behavior” if Steam were to be ruled a monopoly by a court

I read it as “torrent isn’t stealing, but if it was id do it even harder because those guys suck”.

Was this written by AI? Or is there some local sit-down restaurant with waitstaff that just happens to share a name with a famous fast food chain?

Calculation is a fundamental part of mathematics. You can’t get to caring about game theory or infinities without understanding calculation, and calculation itself has iterative components of counting, addition, multiplication, and formulas.

Children are trained by rote how to calculate so they can function in a society with strangers. The same skills that are of benefit to the current capitalist oligarchy would also be of benefit to a socialist republic, communist democracy, anarchist market, or technologist dictatorship.

The idea that basic skills are somehow tainted by their utility for the status quo is the dumbest idea in revolutionary thought, and is essentially the main culprit for the sort of atrocities that reinforce the anti-revolutionary impulse which props up the status quo.

That’s… Something.

Conflating mathematics with mathematic education after blaming numbers for both war and capitalism is a hell of a way to make an argument for student-led education.

LLMs are less human than monkeys, and so are not granted any copyright at all for any near-art created through them just as a human can’t claim copyright over what apes do with a camera.

The question isn’t whether or not the overgrown reddit-comment-simulator is original or not The question is if its output counts as writing and acting. And the answer to that is a strong no.

Why oh why can’t people use the right names for things?

Open Source didn’t die. NPM just proved its controls insufficiently trustworthy.

This is kin to red hat including a subscription check in their branded Linux distros and then screaming that “Linux is no longer free” just because one vendor wants to get paid.

Except, of course, that it’s even dumber that that because it’s about “enterprise IT”, where everything is either a billion dollar project or a hack put together by some salaryfolk in their spare time. (Or both, simultaneously.)

The progressive and conservative “movements” in the USA were named the same way Greenland was. By picking a word that would help appeal to low information folk.

Neither has any actual adherence to either change or tradition for the sake of such.

Wage theft as only “not paid what was owed according to current law” is already the biggest form of theft and the least prosecuted.

Please don’t help perpetuate capitalist exploitation by blurring it with the “value theft” inherent to capitalism

That’s why bsky’s pseudo-federation isn’t as big a deal as some ActivityPub boosters claim.

As I understand it, if lemmy.world shuts down or starts demanding cash my only resource would be the same as if Facebook decides I’m too critical of billionaires – start all over elsewhere with a new account. Sure, I could get close to the same experience with a different node, but I’d be a brand new account with no history. I might as well go someplace else entirely.

Bsky’s “portable user” idea fixes that. There are accounts my bsky account follows who switched to blacksky, and if they hadn’t said they’d changed I wouldn’t have noticed. The essential identity of their account shifted almost seamlessly, and they “federate” with everyone else, aside that their appview shows accounts that bsky’s ordinary moderation hides.

I don’t have any illusions about how altruistic the cryptobro VC’s are. But the entirely of their value proposition is that “leaving bsky” should be about as painless as porting your number from Verizon to AT&T.

The claimed reason for that is to highlight “referrer” links for the sites people go to from bsky.

My understanding is that if you click like https://www.themarysue.com/ the website operators would see a “feddit.org” or “lemmy.world” referer if you’re using a web browser and don’t have a defeating option enabled, but not if your browser is locked down or you use an app. The immediate redirects, however, do consistently show in the web site’s access logs.

It’s possible bsky could fuck around with this in the future, but doing so risks just sending users to a pseudo-fork like blacksky.

You’re right about the effect (lawsuits and the threat of the same are more common in America than Canada or the UK) but not at all about the cause.

The USA has had a decades-long choice to have our industry regulated primarily not through government bureaucracy but instead judicial liability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_through_litigation

“Actual coverage is less than what’s theoretically possible” is a hell of a way of saying "these things aren’t good enough (yet) to actually replace real people ".

The DSM isn’t a scientific document, but rather a medical and legal one. It is meant to help doctors correlate patients to find potential treatments, and provides language useful for billing and legal purposes.

Schizophrenia may not be an entirely accurate term, but if its use leads to patients who need medicine getting medicine and those not responsible for their actions not being held responsible then it’s hardly useless. But it does make it a good candidate for revision in the next DSM.

Which is beside the point, though. Somebody whose historical notability is half “thing contained in $BOOK is wrong” should not be presumed to be unbiased if they write a “$BOOK is bad” article.

Worth knowing:

Article’s byline is “Jim Van Os” , and the Wikipedia article for someone of the same name is a Dutch psychologist who has a ten-year history of arguing that “schizophrenia” isnt a useful label.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_van_Os

(Of course, as far as I know they may not be the same guy, and I don’t have any reason to doubt the sincerity of his argument.)

You’re the first account I’ve seen endorse OpenOffice, and I’ve been casually looking for a better alternative to word since the copilot bullshit last year.

Do you have a good example of something they added since LibreOffice forked off that’s worth considering if choosing an alternative?

A better question is what sort of legislation should apply to every website on the planet, without exception.

Off the top of my head:

• Do not store user information in an unsecure or identifiable mechanism.
• Be transparent as to what parts of the page are ads and which aren’t.
• Follow best-practices for accessibility.
• Give @DomeGuy a lollipop if he asks.

Just because they are a distasteful company, doesn’t give us free reign to spread lies about them.

To be pedantic, I’m spreading alarmist rumors at worst. In English a “lie” has to be something the speaker doesn’t actually believe. And I honestly believe that users of WhatsApp should assume that Meta can read their messages.

The signal protocol and encryption explicitly prevents the transit server decrypting messages. That a theoretical hidden third person … in the chat doesn’t change that is e2e encrypted.

You’re splitting a hair that’s not even worth curling.

If I ship you a locked box via courier, and the courier can get a copy of the key without talking to either of us, we should presume that the courier may have looked inside and take appropriate measures. Like, inventorying the contents of said box before and after, and not shipping things we don’t want the courier to know about.

It doesn’t matter if the courier keeps the box locks, doesn’t habitually carry a key, or even promises that they won’t get a key. We don’t even have to assume that they actually looked in the box, or use a slower or more-expensive courier.

If there’s a plausible way they can open the box, we should start with the presumption that they did and then go from there.

Websites that break in Firefox are websites that should not be used.

Words don’t have meanings. Meanings have words.

Amazon the internet megastore allows non-employees of Amazon to add content to their store. Both as supposed vendors offering goods for services and as customers giving reviews and ratings to such store listings. And Amazon chooses what listings to show to users through opaque algorithms.

Can you give an example of the sort of regulation a social media site should need to follow which Amazon should be exempt from? Or the sort of rule that should bind reddit and Facebook but not Amazon?