Mozilla “sold their soul to Google”? What did I miss?

Holy shit go touch some grass. Jesus Christ

There’s no reason your clients can’t have public, world routeable IPs as well as security.

There are a lot of valid reasons, other than security, for why you wouldn’t want that though. You don’t necessarily want to allow any client’s activity to be traceable on an individual level, nor do you want to allow people to do things like count the number of clients at a particular location. Information like that is just unnecessary to expose, even if hiding it doesn’t make anything more secure per se.

Oof, that quote is the exact brand of nerd bullshit that makes my blood boil. “Sure, it may be horribly designed, complicated, hard to understand, unnecessarily dangerous and / or extremely misleading, but you have nOT rEAd ThE dOCUmeNtATiON, therefore it’s your fault and I’m immune to your criticism”. Except this instance is even worse than that, because the documentation for that command sounds just as innocent as the command itself. But I guess obviously something called “tmpfiles” is responsible for your home folder, how couldn’t you know that?

That happens literally every night though and wind also doesn’t blow 100% of the time.

Very true, but the fact that wind blows often and there’s also varying amounts of direct sunlight during the day already massively decreases the amount of storage required for a grid. You don’t need the capacity to cover 100% of energy usage, sustained, like you suggested earlier. Especially as grids become (geographically) larger and smarter — we need wind and sun somewhere to cover energy needed elsewhere — it doesn’t have to be localized. Plus solar output obviously peaks during the day, when demand is also highest.

Renewables make up a trivial* amount

The percentage is absolutely not trivial today. Especially considering there are multiple large grids today that can easily sustain 50%+ renewable energy over sustained periods. And 30% by 2030 is a lot, though of course it could be a lot better.

and as we phase out fossil fuels, the requirement for energy storage is going up drastically.

Yes, no-one is arguing otherwise.

You’re glossing over the fact that the battery is a backup to kick in only when renewable production doesn’t meet demand, and that much more space-efficient energy storage solutions exist, even if they lose more power to inefficiency.

Why do you keep asking this? How is this specific number relevant to the discussion?

If you have a dynamic pricing contract of course you get a discount… If you don’t, you chose not to in return for price stability 🤷

Though yeah, last time prices went negative in Germany I was still paying 10ct/kWh in just taxes and fees. Would be pretty cool if they’d have paid me for using electricity during that time, but of course that’s not how that works.

You’re of course right with the exclusivity argument — that’s a very real possibility, and yet Microsoft has tried it with Call of Duty, one of the most popular franchises ever, and saw very little success with it, resulting in them putting it back on Steam years later. If I were to guess why attempts like this have failed in the past, I would say that Steam is so dominant over the PC gaming market today that not even large franchises going exclusive attract enough of a user base to offset the loss of customers that aren’t buying games only because they’re not on Steam. Add to this the additional overhead of developing and maintaining a competing store front, and the cost-benefit analysis leans clearly towards just being on Steam and accepting their cut of sales. The exclusivity tactic clearly failed even for big titles like CoD, so it definitely won’t work for smaller ones. And we’re not even talking about cutting into the indie game market, which would require making very attractive exclusivity offers to many smaller studios, all for acquiring exclusivity on titles in the hope that they’ll be the next big hit — a very high risk strategy that likely results in a lot of sunken cost short-term.

Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they’ll be selling customer data at a profit

When we talk about “selling customer data”, I think we need to look in more detail into what this would actually mean in practice. It’s very unlikely that any online storefront could legally literally “sell your personal data” like address etc. that you would enter presumably as part of the payment process to third parties. That’s just illegal almost everywhere in the world, and certainly in the largest PC gaming markets. It wouldn’t lead to significant revenue either, because raw data like that just isn’t very valuable. Instead, I suppose what people mean when they say this (in the context of companies like Google or Facebook) is just the practice of selling advertising services that use the data they have on people to advertisers, who can then target their ads at highly specific segments, improving their return on ad spend. The actual private data though stays with the entity that collected it — because it’s what actually gives them the edge on the market; it allows them to offer better ad targeting than competitors.

How would this apply to Steam or a potential competing storefront? Barely. I assume no-one is arguing that a steam competitor could launch a generic advertising network that could stand against Google or Facebook, so we’re probably talking about advertising within the storefront itself. Steam today already collects information on your interests and customizes the store based on that, plus presumably your location, age group etc. — so they’re pretty much already using your “personal information” to the extent possible in this context. How else could a competitor realistically monetize personal information?

It’s a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition.

I wouldn’t say that this is the case when we’re talking about trying to eat into the market share of a dominant entity like Steam. Sure, potential competitors can make short-term plays that cut away some market share, but such strategies are expensive, risky, and alone likely don’t lead towards a significantly improved position long-term (exhibit A, again: COD being exclusive to Battle.net).

For better or worse (usually worse), toppling a near-monopoly like Steam is extremely hard for players with big cash, and practically impossible for independent competitors. This is especially true for products that are inherently sticky, like Steam, where people have curated large libraries over decades. The only reason Steam’s dominant position is not hurting the consumer is because their product works well and is in many ways very pro-consumer.

I’ve read that, IIRC. It was about getting featured organically though. Steam runs promotions for certain game series or even publisher catalogues frequently, with large custom graphics and usually a sale. Obviously I have no way to know for sure, but I can’t imagine that Valve doesn’t get itself paid for those.

This doesn’t make any sense. The reason Valve hasn’t been acquired is because it’s privately owned and not up for sale, not because it doesn’t have “enough profit”. In fact it’s extremely profitable, for all we know.

Sure, another company could come along and build a competitor. It’s happened already multiple times, and Steam is doing just fine despite some major titles these days being exclusive to other platforms. Unless Steam drops the ball on something big time, it’s unlikely that people will move to another platform en masse, especially one that is less focussed on consumer interests. No-one can just come in and “take capital away” from Steam, whatever that means, by building a competitor that sells advertising space and “monetizes user data” — they need users first.

… And then there’s the fact that Steam is already “selling advertiser space” today. Games don’t just get featured on their storefront because Gabe likes them. They make deals with publishers for this.

Apparently 50%+ of the company belongs to Gabe himself, presumably he would pass it on to some very trusted. That makes a hostile takeover pretty unlikely.

Please explain how Google would get my location if I don’t run a phone with Google location services and / or don’t allow Google services and apps to access my location. Sure, they may know where you are roughly based on your IP, but that’s just within a very broad region, and can easily be obfuscated by a VPN. Google siphons a shitton of information from everywhere they can, but it’s not like they’ve secretly implanted everyone with a tracking chip either… And neither can they get around any device’s OS-level location permission system.

Vast majority of people do, and on iOS and Android these days turning it “off” really just keeps it from connecting to peripherals. It’s still scanning even when “off”.

How is this a meme?

Some fake Telekom workers showed up at my grandma’s place in person recently, wearing uniforms and all, saying they need to “perform maintenance on the TV connection”. Luckily, grandma’s still super sharp, recognized that something was off, and just shouted “Peter, the TV people are here” into her flat, even though she was alone and Peter had died decades ago. They made some excuses and left immediately when they thought they were no longer just prying on a single brittle old lady.

Super proud of her, but also so scary to think that a bunch of asshole scammers were so close to just walking around in her flat.

You’re vastly overestimating how much the average consumer cares about these things

Fair enough — though the trauma is also just one of the named conditions, and we have no idea what that trauma was caused by.

What a strange strange comment. Why are you talking about how “Jews” were “portrayed” to be “wise” but then “the promotional image didn’t match the product”?

Among Jews, there are both good and bad people

Which should go entirely without saying, which is why your comment is so strange. You keep talking about “Jews” as an entity that has a “promotional image” and that you perceive collectively as “smart like Einstein”, or not.

I don’t really see why you say you’d make an “exception” for strong and lasting physical pain (which by the way are of course the vast majority of assisted suicide cases), but not for mental health reasons. In this case multiple doctors concluded that the patient is unlikely to improve, and no progress has been made in over 10 years of therapy.

especially if solutions aren’t limited to the individual level.

What do you mean by “not limited to the individual level”?