Imagine there’s a huge fuel station that’s so big they essentially set rules towards suppliers that they can’t offer their gas to other stations at a cheaper price otherwise they can’t sell it in their station with 95% market share.

That is specifically not what is happening.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

“Steam Key Rules and Guidelines”

“You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.”

Valve does not “dictate” prices in any way.

Ubi and WB are free to sell their games for as cheap as they want. But if and ONLY IF they offer a steam key with the purchase, they can’t undercut steam.

Edit: the original comment left it unclear if the price rule only applies to copies sold that include a steam key, or if copies that work completely without steam can be arbitrarily priced. If the latter is the case, it’s obviously fine. If it includes any game version, it isn’t OK.

Ok. The rule is, actually let me link it…

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

“Steam Key Rules and Guidelines”

“You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam.** It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.”**

Just read that paragraph. It should be pretty clear what the whole thing is about.

True, but this deal is that companies stick to the terms and in turn they get access to steams shop, implicitly the community.

They don’t have some unalienable right to access another company’s customers.

You don’t have a “right” to go into a BurgerKing and advertise and sell your burgers there.

That is true, definitely a “lesser evil” situation.

Bloomberg cites two high-profile cases referenced in the ongoing lawsuit, one involving Ubisoft, and another Warner Bros.

First of all, I trust Ubi and WB way less than valve.

Valve allegedly threatened to delist all editions of Rainbow Six Siege after Ubisoft offered a cheaper option on its Uplay store.

Yeah.

Because it violates their policy. That’s not a “threat”, those are the terms of the contract Ubi and WB agreed to. Terms that everyone has to follow.

Heck, Ubi and WB should be hit with a counter suit for trying to leverage their market position to exert control over valve and getting unusually favorable terms.

Clown suit. Ubi and WB are mad they can’t break their contract with valve in a one sided way.

edit: I forgot some context:

The deal between valve and a publisher or dev is: they can sell on steam and elsewhere if steam is at least tied in price, or cheaper, but when they sell somewhere else, that includes the steam key and access to steam and steam’s distribution at no cost.

What the devs and publishers wanted to do was leverage other features of steam and the steam ecosystem, while undercutting steam’s price.

They are always free to just not sell on steam for a cheaper price. That’s not what this is about.

edit2:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

“Steam Key Rules and Guidelines”

Duh. I wouldn’t have called it “addiction”, but dependency was clearly the goal, otherwise they wouldn’t take away classical search.

I thought that was obvious from the start.

butterflies

I also don’t have a good solution and I’m extremely slowly writing my own stuff starting from svg and drawings and some programming to do geometry. But I mostly haven’t touched 3d yet.

I would use blender which you have already excluded so no idea.

A new report

BY THE AI COMPANY “WRITER”

and research firm Workplace Intelligent found a massive portion of workers across the US, UK, and Europe are intentionally trying to sabotage their bosses’ AI initiatives.

Please don’t spread obviously doctored “reports”.

The thing I’m concerned about is not the absolute number when news like this are published, but the magnitude of the error. Not in a “haha, they’re so wrong, lol” way, but in a “if they get it this wrong over x years, I wonder what the error will be in 2x years”.

“Combining observations and climate models suggests a 60% stronger weakening of the Atlantic circulation than using models alone.”

Being off by 60% is massive and then new estimate will have some margin of error as well. Which could go back to the original value, but it could also be worse. We just don’t know.

Government is excluded from meeting GDPR requirements. ☺️

This is not the answer to your question, but a comment. Sorry, I am aware that it may not be helpful to you.

I don’t think TOS are very hard to read once you’ve read one or two, if you care, you should just read the TOS.

For example, if you’re concerned about EU-US datatransfer, the privacy policy has to outline who data is shared with, so you can skim it and see if they mention sharing data at all, or if they are doing it with specific companies, or just “partners”.

On the internet and social media, you have to transfer the rights to your content to the social media content, because it’s the only way they’re allowed to store, replicate and distribute your comments or post.

That kind of stuff. And those paragraphs mostly look the same.

THAT is what happened?! Wow, that is hilarious!

The legal battle is ongoing, but Kim looks set to lose.

I am SO curious what will happen here and what the final verdict will be. Trying to cheat someone out of 250 million has to result in some enormous fine at least right?

Really interesting because I could easily see this go both ways.

Scientists from a psychology releated field doing dodgy stuff is pretty much expected. “Researching comments” from a subreddit is weird, especially if it’s done without asking for consent first. That was a thing that bit someone else the other time. Also, a specific researcher being stuck on this support group in particular? For 6 six years or more? Why? If it’s not specifically targeting that group, why is that worthy of study in particular? Aren’t there other self help groups online that could be researched?

But also, it’s not just a subreddit, it’s an LLC and if there is money involved the pendulum of truth could easily swing the other way instead.

tldr: Da fuq they doin’ ova there?!

I don’t think that’s the problem.

By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.

The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 also didn’t help.

Like, wtf is that sentence even supposed to mean.

Pretty much every single time someone does a study on “technological* impact on learning” for example handwriting and typing, they mess with the methodology or they don’t have a good control group or system. And then the result is always that their traditional system is better.

They never genuinely switch methods and put effort into TEACHING the new tech and with the new tech. Obviously you can’t just hand out laptop and the competence just… diffuses into the kids, because internet. That’s nonsense.

Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores.

one guy noticing a correlation better not be “good science” at this point.

openDemocracy’s website has been repeatedly brought down by an army of bots.

This website uses cookies to give you the best experience.

See, from my point of view, the problem is that the website is up, not that it was brought down?

It was literally started less than 2 months ago, it’s going pretty well for a national movement. I don’t think it’s explicitly limited to German only, if you want to do an event, you can sign up on the website and do it.

If I search “Iron” on wikipedia I’m looking for facts

Not what I meant.

The point is: there is an established group of editors, with established rules and preconceptions, an established interpretation on what good sources are and what a neutral perspective is and isn’t, and there is no chance of changing those and that is why I have no interest in interacting with wikipedia in any constructive way.

I could talk about politics too, I picked video games because I know those articles are also bad.

deleted by creator

Yes.

Yet behind the celebrations, a troubling pattern has developed: The volunteer community that built this encyclopedia has lately rejected a key innovation designed to serve readers.

But not that one, because rejecting AI 1) is not a generational rejection and 2) it is correct to reject it.

What I think is or will be the generational problem: the community that maintains it and decides what is being accepted or rejected is an “in group” that it is impossible to break into with conflicting ideas. For example, I do think the gaming, game mechanics and game development related pages can be vastly improved. But I don’t think the people responsible for those pages are interested in the changes I would suggest.

All the wikis for different games could just be on wikipedia. But they’re not, probably because they were rejected, because it’s “not relevant”. Well, some people decided they were relevant after all and they made their own wikis for those. The outcome is tribalism based fragmentation, because of differences in opinion of who values what and what should be preserved and what shouldn’t.

Thanks!