Spyke

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steam

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What do you think of this prediction?

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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.

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Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain

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I guess I don’t really expect a company to resist pressure from government agencies on my behalf.

Personally, I expect them to resist to the extent possible by law. The cops need to follow a lot of rules to make legally binding requests for data. I understand that if they do, there's not much a company can do other than hand out the info, but if there's a legal way to deny such a request, I expect the company to pursue it.

world

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‘A catastrophe’: Greenpeace blocks planting of ‘lifesaving’ Golden Rice

I'm so fucking concerned about climate change... But I can't vote Green because of their stupid, anti-scientific stances on two issues: GMOs and nuclear power. For context, I'm in Germany, where there's very public hysteria about both. The general public still holds absurdly distorted and misinformed views, so none of the green-aligned parties are ballsy enough to hold positions on them that are in any way nuanced. It's super frustrating.

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temperature

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The typical range of human scale temperatures is like -10 to 40 degrees on the Celsius scale? Makes no sense.

But it makes so much sense though. Because it's anchored around the freezing and boiling points of water, which is a universal experience we can all relate to. 0°C outside? It's freezing.

Fahrenheit as "the human scale" is what makes no fucking sense. You end up with the same exact problem where your specific range of "human scale temperatures" does not line up with 0-100°F at all. But it's also not anchored to water's behavior. So it just ends up being arbitrary.

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*Permanently Deleted*

It's been a pretty common practice for online companies for years. There are SaaS providers that offer APIs just for this purpose. At my previous job we implemented something like this too; making a rough guess at the gender of users based on just their name and some additional information. The only reason we did that is because we didn't want to ask people for their gender when they registered because that seemed arbitrary and frankly we didn't care, but at the same time we still needed a rough overall split for investor reporting and high level marketing strategy decisions.

I assume Discord would do this for similar reasons.

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We're good, seriously! - Jellyfin

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Totally agree, this honestly sounds a bit like putting principles before reason. Personally, I don't at all see why paying people for their work would make projects adhere any less to the "open source ethos", even though I hear this idea a lot. I think that in an ideal world, it should be possible to contribute to OSS projects full-time and make a living, financed by donations from dependants (including corporations) that profit off of the free software and have a vested interest in continued and rapid development of the project.

If you really don't want the money to reward contributors, why not pass it on to open-source dependencies of your project that are looking for funding? FOSS projects not scrambling for funding is pretty rare today unfortunately.

ich_iel

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ich_iel

Und dabei hat die CDU doch extra nett gefragt, dass jeder bitte nur einmal abstimmt. Hätte echt niemand mit rechnen können, dass sich da keiner dran hält.

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Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid

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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.

memes

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Don't be a dick leave old people alone.

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.