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Comment Re: What exactly is "Steam" anyway? (Score 1) 159

I think one valid complaint is the use of DRMs.

I am in every way anti-DRM, but it's ubiquitous. A lot of publishers won't publish on GOG for this reason. I agree that Epic is arguing in bad faith. The enemy of my enemy is convenient, nothing more, so I am not delusional about Epic but I still enjoy their actions.

They are basically throwing money to become relevant enough that they can be profitable without having to throw money. If that ever happens, you can be sure that there will be no more free games.

TBH I usually forget to go look at the free games they are typically so underwhelming, though there have been some legitimate greats too.

Meanwhile Steam is sustainable and superior on features.

There are only two features of Steam beyond buying installing games which I care about, and one of them sucks. I like that it handles updates for me, but that is also the bad one, because practically none of the updates are differential. I want them to make that easier so that publishers actually do it. I know that it requires significant support from publishers when they use packed data files, but even that is something that could be addressed. (If the files are compressed individually instead of using compressed archives, then binary patches are feasible.) The other feature is Proton. Anything else including friends, achievements, and even reviews is all optional to me. I enjoy some of those features, but I would still use Steam without them.

Comment Re: So this is actual profit (Score 1) 90

And ammo. Yeah some people have thousands of rounds of ammo. The military has millions of rounds, and enough men to go with them to effectively utilize suppressive fire. If you do get in an old-fashioned firefight with soldiers they can simply outbullet you if for some reason they don't have an armed backpack drone. Which by the way they totally do.

Comment Re: 4.3% (Score 1) 90

You get that the unemployment rate is literally designed to be a falsehood because it stops counting people when they have been unemployed for a while, right? The methodology used for it has no concept of who is looking for work at all, it's based on a fundamentally bogus assumption that people who haven't found any for long enough aren't looking.

Comment Re: I think it's more than slavery (Score 1) 90

If people don't buy stuff eventually the corporation collapses. The principals can make a profit before then, but repeat this enough times and the whole boat sinks as it happens to too many major employers at once. Hence too big to fail, which is of course the result of failure to enforce antitrust law.

Submission + - Bombshell report exposes how Meta relied on scam ad profits to fund AI (arstechnica.com)

schwit1 writes: Documents showed that internally, Meta was hesitant to abruptly remove accounts, even those considered some of the “scammiest scammers,” out of concern that a drop in revenue could diminish resources needed for artificial intelligence growth.

Instead of promptly removing bad actors, Meta allowed “high value accounts” to “accrue more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down,” Reuters reported. The more strikes a bad actor accrued, the more Meta could charge to run ads, as Meta’s documents showed the company “penalized” scammers by charging higher ad rates. Meanwhile, Meta acknowledged in documents that its systems helped scammers target users most likely to click on their ads.

“Users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests,” Reuters reported.

Internally, Meta estimates that users across its apps in total encounter 15 billion “high risk” scam ads a day. That’s on top of 22 billion organic scam attempts that Meta users are exposed to daily, a 2024 document showed. Last year, the company projected that about $16 billion, which represents about 10 percent of its revenue, would come from scam ads.

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