The reason the article compares to commercial flights is your everyday reader knows planes’ emissions are large. It’s a reference point so people can weight the ecological tradeoff.

“I can emit this much by either (1) operating the global airline network, or (2) running cloud/LLMs.” It’s a good way to visualize the cost of cloud systems without just citing tons-of-CO2/yr.

Downplaying that by insisting we look at the transportation industry as a whole doesn’t strike you as… a little silly? We know transport is expensive; It is moving tons of mass over hundreds of miles. The fact computer systems even get close is an indication of the sheer scale of energy being poured into them.

The example is pretty standard, but I feel obligated to caution people about the author (just because he’s linked to here and some unassuming people might dive in).

Scott Alexander falls loosely under the TESCREAL umbrella of ideologies. Even in this article, he ends up concluding the only way out is to build a superintelligent AI to govern us… which is like the least productive, if not counterproductive, approach to solving the problem. He’s just another technoptimist shunting problems onto future technologies that may or may not exist.

So, yeah, if anyone decides they want to read more of his stuff, make sure to go in informed / having read critiques of TESCREALism.

I’m at my wits end trying to explain this. I guess I can just recommend reading the legal briefs that summarize the matter, or articles that dig deeper than this one.

Maybe I’ll think about it later and make a more complete write up with concrete examples. I really hate to see the confusion here. Wolfire is doing us a favor, we should not be handing Valve the keys to the market just because they act like Mr. Benevolent.

What Wolfire wants to happen is for game marketplaces and game services platforms to be decoupled. Right now Valve has vertically integrated the two. You buy the game, and they offer peer multiplayer, social, workshop, etc.

If those services were charged separately, or rather the cost of those services was not forced into the pricing of other marketplaces that don’t offer those services, you open the market to more competition.

Note that the main argument Wolfire is making is that game marketplaces (buy/download the game) and game platforms (online features, mod distribution, social pages) need to be decoupled. By integrating the two, Steam is vertically integrating, amortizing the cost, and then forcing every other marketplace to bear the cost of a platform in their pricing.

If you bought a game and paid for platform services separately, then competition can better exist for both of those roles. Which is good for consumers.

Steam has a large userbase, which offers a lot of consumer inertia to prefer games on Steam. They also have a policy where game pricing on other platforms cannot undercut Steam.

The main complaint is that this pricing policy coupled with the consumer inertia makes it difficult for other gaming marketplaces to enter the market. You cannot undercut steam unless a publisher wants to not put their game on Steam at all (which would be suicide for anything but the largest titles), so you have to sell at Steam’s price point. Few platforms could match Steams’ established workshop, multiplayer, streaming, and social services; all of which benefit from costs at scale and the established user content.

Imagine trying to convince a user: “Buy your game here instead. It will cost the same as on Steam. No, you won’t have access to the existing Workshop. No, you won’t have in-platform multiplayer with your Steam friends.” Even if you had feature parity, people would prefer Steam since that’s where their existing games and friends are.

As I said, Steam would be in their rights to enforce that pricing policy for Steam keys, because they provide distribution and platform services for that product after it sells.

But as @Rose clarified, it applies to not just Steam keys, but any game copy sold and distributed by an independent platform. Steam should not have any legitimate claim to determining the pricing within another platform.

Valve offers a great service, and I enjoy it a lot. But it’s very difficult for a competitor to enter the market because they won’t be able to match Steam’s services immediately. Typically in a market the approach is then to undercut Steam, but that is exactly what this policy is designed to make impractical by forcing publishers to overprice, on penalty of losing Steams’ userbase.

I mean I don’t know what else to say. It is anti-competitive. It doesn’t take too much to see why. There are many good articles and legal briefs on the matter. It hurts you and me, the consumer, and it hurts publishers. It enriches Valve, benevolent though they may appear. You shouldn’t like this type of strong-arming the market when Amazon does it, and you shouldn’t roll over and take it from Valve either.

Doesn’t even matter, the court is going to sort it out for us. But I hate to see the reputational hit Wolfire is taking here. I like their studio, I believe their developers are operating in genuine good faith, and I think they are doing consumers a favor.

The Platform Most Favored Nation policy employed by Steam is the one at issue in this case. And yes, it is anticompetitive. It abuses userbase size to prevent alternative marketplaces from providing fewer services for smaller cuts

…unless you have a policy that requires other marketplaces to sell at the same price as on Steam, undercutting the ability for “better deals” to exist at all.

Which is what the lawsuit is actually arguing is going on.

It’s a certain policy publisher’s have to agree to in order to list on Steam, called a Platform Most Favored Nations (“PMFN”) clause.

Similar thing is used by Amazon, for equally monopolistic reasons.

I was under the impression that the policy required a game’s price to be the same on all marketplaces, even if it’s not a steam key being purchased. I.e. a $60 game on steam must sell for $60 off-platform, including on the publisher’s own launcher.

I just went to double check my interpretation, but the case brief by Mason LLP’s site doesn’t really specify.

If it only applies to steam keys, as you say, then I agree they don’t really have a case since it’s Steam that must supply distribution and other services.

But, if the policy applies to independent marketplaces, then it should be obvious that it is anticompetitive. The price on every platform is driven up to compensate for Steam’s 30% fees, even if that particular platform doesn’t attempt to provide services equivalent to Steam.

Wolfire originally operated Humble Bundle, and they have a very legitimate case. Steam uses anticompetitive pricing policies that makes it difficult for other marketplaces to compete.

Several of the [former] board members are affiliated with the movement. EA is concerned with existential risk, AI being perceived as a big one. OpenAI’s nonprofit was founded with the intent to perform research AI safely, and those members of the board still reflected that interest.

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I have enjoyed Kdenlive on the rare occasions I need to edit something. Haven’t used Blender to compare, and I’m not sure about scripting. But for casual stuff it’s solid.

Official software support for the FF5 is 8 years, I believe

If an instance is merely blocked, does that mean all content produced by that instance, or by a Lemmy.World user using that instance, is strictly not stored on Lemmy.World servers?

Otherwise there might still be liability. Also, in the US you don’t even have to do anything illegal to be the target of a lawsuit—distancing from piracy is a practical defense against the cost of legal proceedings, even if it’s technically legal.

Amdahl’s isn’t the only scaling law in the books.

Gustafson’s scaling law looks at how the hypothetical maximum work a computer could perform scales with parallelism—idea being for certain tasks like simulations (or, to your point, even consumer devices to some extent) which can scale to fully utilize, this is a real improvement.

Amdahl’s takes a fixed program, considers what portion is parallelizable, and tells you the speed up from additional parallelism in your hardware.

One tells you how much a processor might do, the only tells you how fast a program might run. Neither is wrong, but both are incomplete picture of the colloquial “performance” of a modern device.

Amdahl’s is the one you find emphasized by a Comp Arch 101 course, because it corrects the intuitive error of assuming you can double the cores and get half the runtime. I only encountered Gustafson’s law in a high performance architecture course, and it really only holds for certain types of workloads.

Sites that rely on ad revenue would have every business reason to switch to WebDRM-only.