Paradoxvoid

Patents are (at their core) a good thing. It protects little Jimmy Inventor from putting hours and his blood, sweat and tears into coming up with a novel invention, only for some big corpo to see it, steal the idea and bully Jimmy out of the market.

Jimmy has legal recourse to sue the big corpo if he has a patent, whereas without one he has nothing.

Just because the system’s been gamed (especially in the US) doesn’t mean it’s impossible to reform, and is currently still better than nothing.

Ok but who actually doesn’t know what a magazine is

Kbin devs, apparently.

Android Debug Bridge - it’s a tool you can use to access parts of Android you don’t normally have access to directly on the phone.

Bobby Kotick is likely on the way out at least (probably via golden parachute).

Yeah I do understand the reasoning and honestly can’t fault them for it - they are a for-profit company after all.

Doesn’t mean that it’s not a good example of them throwing their weight around (which is admittedly rare).

I had this exact fight with my team several months ago, and lost to popular opinion since the rest of my team are either zoomers or indifferent.

Ironically this is actually an example of Valve using its dominant marketshare to suppress rivals - Steam’s ToS require devs to have equivalent pricing across all storefronts if they want to sell on Steam at all, so making it harder for cheaper storefront cuts to translate to lower prices to consumers, who might otherwise move to a different storefront.

Devs aren’t going to drop Steam as a store, so they’re stuck.

That may be so, but that’s not the way that the initial tweet is using the term, and not the commonly understood definition.

I’m not denying that Valve as a whole have been a force for good in the PC gaming market, but it’s pointless to argue semantics and make up definitions to better suit personal bias instead of debating the actual point that’s being made.

People saying Steam doesn’t have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn’t have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.

While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.

Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.

Pretty sure it’s a triple whammy - Steamworks, always online, and denuvo to top it off.

If we want authors to survive, we’ve got to stop assuming that authors’ intellectual labour is a public commodity.

The irony being that this is exactly what copyright was originally intended to facilitate - authors creating works to become public domain within a relatively short period of time.

You could use Google-assistant smart speakers to add things to specific non-Keep shopping lists - e.g. Any.Do and Bring are two that spring to mind. Google killed this integration a few months back to force users into using Keep if they wanted to retain this functionality.

I really wish they didn’t have to kill third party integration with smart speakers for this. Google bait and switch at its finest.

The far cheaper Galaxy Tab A series is a near equivalent competitor for where Google is positioning its tablet (an at-home media device, rather than a highly-performant professional device), and for a lot of people, trading the considerably lower price for no docking station and some older specs is worthwhile.

Google need to either make the docking capability a lot more appealing, or reduce the price significantly because at the moment it sits squarely in the home entertainment sphere, but with a price tag creeping up to match professional-tier devices - why would someone pay the premium for what is effectively an ebook and Youtube device?

I’d also argue Firefox is hardly mainstream at ~3% usage. Edge would be a better replacement given it comes with every Windows install (and many corporate environments don’t allow using an alternative).

And that’s not even getting into how banks worldwide have been cutting down on staff numbers for years, and directing people to just their apps instead.

The major point is not so much whether your browser could block ads - your point regarding the browser ultimately having to render each element is true. The problem is that if the web server gets a request from an unattested browser (such as an old version, or one that has an ad blocker installed), it will refuse to serve any content, not just ads.

Regular people will inevitably get frustrated and we end up in scenarios like “<x browser>is bad, it doesn’t work with <y site>” because of this proposal, and more and more people end up switching until you have to use a compliant (Chromium-based) browser to do anything at all on the internet, and Google’s strangehold on web standards solidifies even further.

As much as we can (and should) lambast Facebook/Meta’s C-Suite for terrible decisions, their engineers are generally pretty legit.

Also trying to understand the code you wrote 6 months ago.