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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I would lean towards no. I’m me. I don’t consider the things that people seem to associate with their “inner child” to be exclusive to children, so I don’t feel a tension between my desire to act responsibly and my sense of wonder, joy, and playfulness.

    Age isn’t a mask hiding the inner child, it’s a toolkit that helps them appreciate and engage with those things. My childish delight at birds flitting about the bird feeder is only enhanced by being able to buy my own, keep them filled, and the ability to understand more about everything that goes on with them. I have the experience and faculties to answer questions I have, which only deepens my appreciation for the “common” wonders we see everywhere. Experiencing more of life and it’s lows only makes the highs sweeter.

    A child plus age and experience is an adult. You don’t need to lose the happiness to get there.


  • You need to think about what a backdoor looks like for different devices, and different functions of that device. “Backdoor” generally means a way to bypass security measures, but that entails can vary wildly in different contexts. For some things you can know because you can check to see if the hardware is doing what’s expected because the only meaningful backdoor would be local to the hardware.
    For example, hardware based encryption systems can have their outputs compared against a trusted implementation of the same algorithm.

    For cases where there isn’t an objective source of truth for “proper functioning”, or where complex inputs are accepted and either produce a simple answer (access granted/denied), or a complex behavior (logging login attempts and network calls are always expected) it can be harder to the point of impossibility to know that what’s being done is correct.
    This is also the case for bugs, so it can actually be unclear if something is a backdoor or an error.
    “Any sufficiently hair brained programming error is indistinguishable from an attack by a nation state threat actor”. (the goto fail bug is a great example of this. extremely dumb error every programmer has made, or a very well executed and sophisticated attack.

    Ultimately, any system can be compromised by a sufficiently determined attacker. Security cannot be perfect, because at some point you need to trust someone.
    The key is to decide how much you trust each system to handle whatever you need it to handle.
    I trust my phone’s manufacturer as much or more than I trust the network provider. If I’m doing something naughty the person I’m communicating with getting snagged leads to me via the network and their device without needing to compromise my hardware. I choose to focus on the weak link: the people I talk with who might be unable to properly conduct a criminal conspiracy, and getting them up to speed.




  • Very very little. Some will have vaguely nice functional upgrades, like the spray hose being integrated into the faucet opening, a button to temporarily change the flow limiter for more power, integrated soap dispenser or things like that, but you’re almost always paying mostly for particular aesthetics.

    Oh, and some come with under sink hardware. A normal faucet that comes with a nice water filter or a near-boiling water dispenser can reasonably cost a fair bit more, assuming you want those things.


  • Eeeeh, at least then there would theoretically be public accountability. The FCC has limited censorship power that they’re generally unobjectionable with.

    I’m honestly more concerned with the censorship from private enterprises than with government consorship currently. Less accountability and less recourse.

    It also really only becomes censorship if the rating system is used to prohibit speech. If we instead made it more like the nutritional guidelines on food it could instead give more of a content breakdown than setting an arbitrary age.






  • Yeah… Of all the antigovernment people to latch onto it’s vaguely unfortunate that we landed on fawks. Like, I do get that it’s a pop culture reference more than an actual historical reference, but still.
    There was legitimate persecution of Catholics in England at the time, so it doesn’t least have a veneer of fighting tyranny, but he didn’t even actually succeed.

    Shoulda gone for Louis Lingg. A bit more modern, and had the awesome criminal defense that “it’s his right to fill his house with dynamite”.








  • You mentioned a handful of games without doing any research on them, and one of them accidentally proved my point.

    You asked for a list of games that fit my “steam hasn’t impacted pricing” statement, so I gave you games that had prices inline with what steam prices games at and industry standard. Like I explained in my previous comment. I know how much those games cost: between $50 and $70 dollars, which is what games have retailed at for decades.
    Games on steam and off steam have had roughly the same price, and games not on steam have had perfectly reasonable times making sales. Except the one on epic.

    They set the $50 price tag to maximize revenue

    My point was that even with lowering the price to the low end of standard, they have had some difficulty getting enough revenue to cover the cost of the game.
    If other retailers are able to compete just fine, and one isn’t despite lowering prices and paying for exclusives, and it’s the one that, as you mentioned, people complain about when they buy an exclusive, then maybe the issue is with that retailer.

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388073/average-price-of-video-games-by-platform/

    If you want more discussion, you can Google “video game prices over time”.

    Given that you’re starting to ignore large bits of replies and have been repeating yourself pretty consistently without expanding on the point, I’m not sure that there’s much value in continuing. You think it’s anticompetitive, I don’t think it’s so obvious. We’ll see what the courts say.
    Have a nice day, and I hope you find the same passion for your next endeavor. :)


  • So, a court document is an argument, not a smoking gun. The court didn’t dismiss the case because it has enough merit to be argued, which just means it isn’t plainly false at first glance. The court did dismiss earlier versions of their claim. Earlier versions being rejected and this one being allowed to move forward have little to do with anything.
    Repeatedly asserting that it’s “anticompetitive bullying” doesn’t actually make it anticompetitive bullying.

    This isn’t going to end well for you when Valve becomes as openly evil as Google.

    Lol, what do you think is going to happen to me? I think maybe you’re taking this conversation too seriously.

    Yes, Alan wake 2 was lower priced on epic than on consoles by about $10, after epic financed the game. it also has yet to turn a profit, with most revenue coming from titles that aren’t exclusive to epic. You also ignored the list of other games I mentioned, each of which launched for $60 to $70 and wasn’t on steam.
    Half life 1 cost $60 on launch. Same for 2. Same for the original star craft. Same for basically every full featured game for years.
    It’s not “sus” that most games sell for the typical price for a game. It’s a sign that valve isn’t driving up prices, since prices are roughly the same regardless of platform, vendor or time, including when steam didn’t exist yet.

    I know you think you’re arguing against a mindless steam fanboy, hence you’re starting to break out some insulting language and condescension. I can assure you you’re not, just like I assume I’m not dealing with a dense contrarian more interested in punishing valve for success than actual critical thinking.
    I don’t think that suing someone necessarily makes you right, and that a financially motivated lawsuit is an inherently slanted description of events, when the trial hasn’t happened and none of the claims have even been responded to.


  • And of course it’s not possible that they’re despised and not doing well because people don’t like their platform.

    You still haven’t convinced me that they are price fixing, to say nothing of it hurting consumers. Full feature games on steam are still around the same price console games are, and that games have been for many years. If they’re price fixing to artificially inflate prices, they’re doing it in a way that hasn’t really kept up with inflation and has been in line with retailers on platforms they don’t even sell on.