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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It doesn’t have anything to do with Epic, it’s because Steam provides a great service with a ton of features nobody else offers, and Valve has demonstrated time and time again that they make policies that benefit consumers.

    It would be great if Steam had some competition, but Epic ain’t it. What people want is another service of equal quality to Steam. Instead the best we have is GOG and that still falls well short of feature parity nevermind the anti-consumer cesspool of Epic.

    Suing Valve isn’t going to do anything to improve the situation. Realistically what could Valve do to be “less of a monopoly”? Lower the percentage they take of sales? Consumers wouldn’t see any benefit from that only developers. Ironically it would also increase Valves monopoly because if they took a smaller cut there would be even less reason for companies to sell on Epic as Epics lower cut is literally the only reason developers (outside of Epic literally paying some of them mounds of cash by way of exclusivity contracts) pick Epic over Steam.

    If Epic really wants to do something about Valves monopoly it’s simple, they just need to offer all the same features that Steam does. Things like family sharing, streaming support, a cross platform store and launcher, and an excellent review system so people can better understand the games they’re thinking about buying. Until that happens yes people will stick with Steam because it’s the objectively superior experience.



  • I still don’t get this. As far as I can find, Steam doesn’t allow steam keys to be sold cheaper elsewhere, but they don’t bother with prices of games in other stores.

    This is tricky. Officially Valve doesn’t have any rules about non-Steam game prices on other stores. Unofficially evidence has been put forward by way of emails between developers and Valve that seem to show that Valve unofficially requires price parity with other stores and will punish games that offer lower prices elsewhere.

    The charitable interpretation is that their policies are worded confusingly and some of their agents are misinterpreting the rule requiring Steam key prices to be uniform as applying to non-Steam keys. The uncharitable interpretation is that Valve knows such a policy would get them in hot water with anti-monopoly laws and so they’re careful to make sure it stays an unofficial policy.






  • The point is we don’t need more MBAs, we need people educated in useful skills. Should every MBA program be closed? No probably not, but we definitely have way more than we need. Cutting funding for things like MBA scholarships and closing down the majority of those programs will go a long way towards moving the majority of potential future MBA students into useful programs. We need less managers and more engineers, fewer CEOs and more chemists, hell fewer analysts and more plumbers.

    There are many problems with modern capitalism and even if we never handed out another MBA degree again that would not even remotely solve everything, but the MBAs are making the problem worse. It’s a minor thing but it’s an easy thing to do and it would make a difference small as it is.


  • China is pushing hard to make their domestic brands the new standard world wide so they’re not worried about whether the bubble pops or not. They want to drive prices down even if that means selling at a loss because they know that’s what it’s going to take to dislodge the entrenched players. For better or worse it’s likely a winning strategy because the existing players are more concerned with maximizing their quarterly profits rather than meeting any kind of consumer demand or indeed even selling to consumers at all.


  • I doubt it will take a couple years. They’re burning through so much cash right now that they’ll be bankrupt in a couple years and despite sunk cost fallacy they won’t let it get that bad. At some point they’ll cut their losses and pivot to some other new fad. The small handful of uses that make sense will stick around and a few companies will be in just the right place to make it turn a profit but the vast majority won’t. Some will go bankrupt (if we’re lucky Meta and/or X will be one of them) and some will just write it off as a failed experiment. Either way just as hard as prices spiked we’ll see them cratering before they rebound back to normal. Six months would be highly optimistic, but a year probably isn’t out of the question.

    Of course all of this might be moot if Shitler manages to start WW3 by attacking Greenland. If that happens RAM prices will be the least of everyone’s worries.




  • In the late 90s I saw a piece demonstrating an optical 3d storage system that had a capacity about an order of magnitude greater than the at the time brand new HD DVD and Bluray discs. I assumed this clearly superior format that already had a working demo would obviously kill other optical media. Turns out nobody could figure out how to manufacture one at a price anybody was willing to spend.


  • I guess the flip side of that though is that you could feasibly have one hell of a guerilla war since a decent chunk of the population would help you. It would really come down to how willing the US military would be to bomb their own citizens. This would be one of the few situations where the lack of clear sides in the US would actually be somewhat beneficial (unlike the previous civil war where there was a fairly stark North/South divide, the split this time tends to fall along rural/urban with suburbs being fairly evenly mixed).





  • Sounds like it’s about equivalent to Intel’s latest GPU. Both are running about a little over a generation behind AMD and Nvidia. Meanwhile Nvidia is busy trying to kill their consumer GPU division to free up more fab space for data center GPUs chasing that AI bubble. AMD meanwhile has indicated they’re not bothering to even try to compete with Nvidia on the high end but rather are trying to land solidly in the middle of Nvidia’s lineup. More competition is good but it seems like the two big players currently are busy trying to not compete as best they can, with everyone else fighting for their scraps. The next year or two in the PC market are shaping up to be a real shit show.