I was going to just downvote and move on, but you seem unable to properly understand that a lack of a reply can mean different things, and you just assume that the person not replying to you agrees with you and is just too afraid to say so. Let me be clear… you are moving the goalposts and I see no point in having a discussion with someone who is not just dishonest in the conversation, but insists that it’s others who are acting dishonestly.

Steam does not have a monopoly on gaming. If you want to narrow that down to PC gaming then you’re changing the subject, but even then, they do not have a monopoly on PC gaming because they are not the only sellers. They don’t even have a monopoly on Linux gaming because they have put their resources there into open source projects which others have also benefited from, which is how I’m able to play Rocket League (yet another wildly successful game not available on Steam) on my Linux computer. Bringing other ‘classic monopolies’ into the conversation makes no difference on the discussion we’re having. And those other monopolies were not taken down because they were monopolies, they were taken down due to their anti-competitive practices - something that Valve has actively and successfully tried to avoid.

And no, I don’t think that because you feel that one number is ‘quite close’ to another number that they should be equal. I think that’s just another sign of you being dishonest and moving the goalposts and then assuming that you’ve made a valid point.

And finally, respond to this or not, I don’t care, but I said, multiple times, all that I need to say on this subject and to you.

The gaming market is much larger than PC gaming.

And Steam does not have an 80% market share on PC gaming, so who’s lying?

And finally, who the fuck do you think you are that I owe you a response?

You are equating “monopoly” with “abusive monopoly.”

No, I’m not. I’m saying they aren’t a monopoly by the simple fact that they aren’t the only providers of the service they sell. And while they are currently in a position to use their power to make themselves a monopoly, they are not doing that and instead are playing fair with their competition.

I know! There’s this great game called Fortnite that no one has ever heard of because you can’t get it on Steam. /s

Treat customers right and you get rewarded. They are the majority market shareholder because they have earned it, not through deceptive business practices but through being a great company.

If they were a monopoly they wouldn’t allow other game catalogs on their systems, yet I have GOG and Epic on my Steam Deck. In fact, there isn’t even a requirement for me to have Steam on my Steam Deck. Just because a company is the market leader doesn’t mean they got there through unethical means.

And Steam controls 80%-90% of the video game market?

Mono=one poly=seller… and last I checked Steam is not the only seller of video games. They aren’t even the only seller of digital video games. They aren’t even the only seller of digital video games for SteamOS.

They are the largest because they do what’s right by their customers and employees. As a ‘for instance’, I bought Portal 2 for the PS3 many years ago. I no longer have my PS3 but I can still play Portal 2 (as well as Portal which was just thrown in for me) on any PC.

I’m loving these comments, so many great albums! And a ton I’ve never hear of and will need to check out.

I have a few of these, but two that really jump out at me are

• The Inevitable Rise And Liberation Of Niggy Tardust - Saul Williams
• Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By - Lovage
• Common People - William Shatner

These are albums that you’ve just gotta let play.

e: can’t believe I forgot Shatner!

Reblog?

I went all in on it… I fully drank that Koolaid and was an early backer, got an extra controller and really thought it was going to be amazing. But their whole launch was so bungled that by the time I actually got it I was so disillusioned with the whole company that I couldn’t enjoy it. It sucked to have bought into the kickstarter and financed the project, and then see the product on the shelves at Target while I was still waiting on mine to be delivered. I had mine for a couple of months before reselling it at a loss.

Several years later when Stadia was announced I felt that little familiar glimmer of hope pop up, but I didn’t let myself get too excited for it. I did eventually get a couple of Stadia controllers and really enjoyed that service (and I still use those controllers today).

Oh, I agree and that’s one reason why I think putting it into Windows is a huge mistake!

I am having fun with it because I find the tech interesting and I love seeing what I can get it to do… but it is so dumb and frustrating. But so was 3D printing 12 years ago, you’d have to fiddle with the settings, do some test prints to make sure everything was setup right, deal with a warped bed, and every print was an experiment. It was shitty, but when you got a good print, that was the best feeling. That’s how I feel about LLMs, it mostly sucks but when it works, it’s great.

I also support several open source LLM projects because that is where I think the real innovation will come from, and the technology is only going to get better like 3D printers now.

Who said that this world isn’t also an existential threat to me? I’ve never implied that things shouldn’t change, in fact I said that they should. My statement about having to live in the world we have is merely a statement of fact, but I was hoping to imply that for many this still means investing for your future. Just because it isn’t useful advice for some, doesn’t mean it isn’t still helpful for others.

Great points, but not the world we currently live in, nor on any track towards. I’ll just let my mom know she can stop working because society should be taking care of her and I’ll go ahead and liquidate my 401k and IRAs since they won’t be needed.

It’s great to work towards those goals of having better social programs, but you still have to exist in the world that you actually live in.

Personally I don’t see the top post as being ‘an attack on another user’ and the post is actually of something that’s mildly infuriating because reading posts where ‘th’ has been replaced with a symbol is mildly infuriating. I do agree that common etiquette would have been to remove the user’s name from the post, however it isn’t a requirement for something like this.

Also, yeah, your post was baiting the mods… shouldn’t be surprised by the result.

Agreed, the bailout should be targeted and very selective. If OpenAI can’t survive, then fine, let it ‘die’. It won’t actually die, it’ll get scooped up by someone else and their assets will be picked up by one of the surviving companies. It’s an interesting way to innovate… burn money to push the industry further along, knowing full well that you’ll never turn a profit, but that a future company will end up with your tech and they might eventually make a profit.

The problem is most Americans with retirement savings are shareholders of these tech companies whether they know it or not. My mom lost a HUGE part of her retirement savings when WorldCom went under and was never able to recover from it and is now in her mid 70s and still has to work full time. She’s almost blind and can hardly walk and she’s worked her whole life and tried to do everything right but her financial advisor was giving her what was thought to be good, safe advice in the early 2000s and completely changed how her twilight years are playing out.

I added Opencode to my Linux terminal and have it powered by Ollama and it has made my Linux computer even more amazing. I just tell it what I want it to do and it does it. It knows all of my servers, services, applications and scripts, has access to all of my config and data files. So when I tell it that I have some files stuck in the ‘download’ directory inside my ‘movies’ directory, I don’t have to tell it which computer that directory is located on or how to access it. I also don’t have to tell it that the files get into that directory using Radarr. So when I was having issues of my files not properly being moved from ‘download’ to ‘organized’ it could have just moved the files, which is what I was expecting… instead it looked at the config file for Radarr and suggested how I can fix it. That was pretty incredible.

Now, if Windows had done that using Copilot I wouldn’t be thrilled because that means that Microsoft has way too much knowledge about my personal network structure.

Adding agentic AI to the OS can be amazingly powerful, but it really should only be done with an LLM that you control.

Also, agentic AI is going to cause a LOT of problems because as great as my above example is, I later had an instance where I added several .docx files to my Opencode directory and asked it to convert the files to a format it can read (plain text) and then ingest the information from them. It did that, and then it wanted to delete the .docx files. I told it to leave the files alone and I’d delete them later. A couple of minutes later it again tried to delete those .docx files (it was literally trying to run the command ‘rm **/*.docx’, which I really don’t like it using wildcards with the rm command). So again, I told it not to, then I told it that I do not want it to ever remove any .docx files without my explicit permission. It apologized profusely… and then immediately tried to run the rm command again.

It’s a handy tool, but if you get lazy and let your guard down it’s going to bite you.

I keep seeing this assertion that Yahoo linkjacks stories, but that isn’t true. Yahoo is a news aggregator and pays to syndicate stories from a large number of sources.

In fact, Yahoo not only paid for the story, but at the very top of the page, and in the article itself, they attribute it to NBC News.

You can stand down from this mission of protecting online news sources from Yahoo and redirect your efforts to some other worthy cause.

The catch is it’ll be enshittified as soon as it can.

My point is that just because you are living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t mean you can’t still save. It’s a decision that you have to make but it is doable because no matter how bad you’re situation is, there are other people getting by on 5%-10% less than you. By insisting that someone living paycheck to paycheck can’t also have savings is what’s doing a disservice to them.