MudMan

“Force exclusivity is bad” is an angle that has always baffled me a little, because some of its proponents seem to also be going “what exclusives does the Xbox have” like two posts down the road.

Or maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember where the “I will never buy anything on Epic because they pay for exclusives” was instead “Square has betrayed its customers by moving to the PlayStation” (or, you know, Konami for having Xbox ports).

Gaming opinions are weird, and get weirder if you track them over time.

It says (pretty explicitly, if you go back and read interviews), that Gabe Newell really doesn’t like Microsoft in general, that the feeling is mutual and that the fact that his multibillion dollar empire is stuck as a Windows application MS may try to muscle out at any point has motivated him to bring PC gaming out of Windows from very early on.

Granted, MS has been sucking at attempting exactly that for a long time, but that’s the ultimate motivation here. That’s not a particularly disputed fact.

Well, that and the several billion dollars in Gaben’s bank account.

Private companies are still corporations, guys.

I don’t think this tracks. Steam’s model is developing software to automate or crowdsource expensive effort. Now, anyways. It originally was to fix PC piracy, but they achieved that ages ago.

And hell yeah they have a natural self-reinforcing monopoly. Even ignoring the mass of captive users with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars committed to the platform, Valve has been doing feature work on that storefront for decades. When others try to compete people immediately bring up the expansive value added features. They make their own controller drivers. They make their own compatibility layers. They make their own OS, FFS. In what world bringing a PC storefront to that level would “not take much”? It’s an Apple-style ecosystem model, and much as it terrifies me that it’s an ever growing monopoly, it’s still impresive that they managed to build it within Microsoft’s own.

Yeah, if it isn’t it will be. If you extrapolate their current moves to a world where PC gaming is entirely controlled by them, maybe even from the OS level downwards, and there is also a set of console-like standalone platforms on handheld, set-top and VR segments… well, that’s a level of control over a massive media segment that I don’t think anybody has had before. Especially not a private company whose ownership is two cheeseburgers and/or an unfortunate knife sharpening accident away from changing overnight.

I’ll be honest, I don’t think that’s the reason. I also think those numbers may be different but they may both be indistinguishable from zero when plotted against natural languages. You’re right about it being hard to define what counts as a “Esperanto speaker”. I can’t decide if that makes the Python comparison better or worse, though.

Man, I don’t like the Steam monopoly on principle, but I have to admit I do struggle to pay attention to Epic exclusives. It’s simply the launcher I open the least after GOG and Steam. I’ve though “hey, wasn’t that Ubi Star Wars thing out” like two or three times and forgot about it between remembering that’s an Epic thing and deciding whether I wanted to buy it.

But hey, since we’re going multiplat again, I could use some newer Ubi games on GOG, too.

Oh, sorry, you misunderstood, I didn’t mean you specifically, I mean you as in “why would you ever do this”, as in “why would anybody ever do this”.

Languages, as we’ve established, are complicated.

Yeah, but that’s my point. The author clearly isn’t thinking about the hundreds of millions of native French speakers around the world, they’re an American thinking the word “mutton” sounds fancier than “sheep”… in English.

Which yeah, okay, that’s their cultural upbringing causing that, but then maybe don’t make a joke entirely predicated on making sharp observations about how languages work and aimed specifically at nerds. I can only ever go “it’s funny because it’s true” or be extremely judgmental of your incorrect assumptions about how languages work here.

There is literally no other thing that needs regulation more. It’s the entire reason contracts are a thing that exists. If anybody comes to you claiming they’ll set your working conditions based on empathy, that’s your cue to find a different job and a good union.

“The root of all modern languages” is a heck of a thing to say about Latin, and I’m pretty sure several billion people haven’t quite gotten that memo. Calling a chunk of Europe and a thin slice of Africa “the entire Universe” is also a spicy take. Come for the programmer humor, recoil in disgust for the rampant ethnocentrism, I guess.

I mean, French is vulgar Latin at best. And even if it wasn’t obviously spoken by all sorts of French people, elites or not, it’s also the official language of a bunch of other countries, from Monaco to Niger. “Elites and certain circles” is a very weird read, which I’m guessing is based on US stereotypes on the French? I don’t even think the British would commit to associating the French with elitism.

Russian speakers being “mostly autoritarian left” is also… kind of a lot to assume? I’m not even getting into that one further. I don’t know if the Esperanto one checks out, either. “Esperanto speaker” is the type of group, and this is true, whose wikipedia page doesn’t include statistics but instead just a list of names. Which is hilarious, but maybe not a great Python analogue. It may still be the best pairing there, because to my knowledge English speakers aren’t any worse at speaking English than the speakers of any other language. They are more monolingual, though.

It just all sounds extremely anglocentric to me, which is what it is, I suppose, but it really messes with the joke if you’re joking about languages specifically. One could do better with this concept, I think.

I think this thread is meant to flatter programmers and make linguists and sociologists extremely angry.

You can, in fact, ask that. It’s just that you shouldn’t have to because labor conditions should be regulated by law.

I need to spend more time with it, but there is an unexpected level of nuance to that, isn’t there? You can drag your feet a LOT, and you can promise a choice on the next law to be enacted or to research a technology without comitting to it actually being deployed. Accurately conveying democracy in a game is pretty much impossible, but I do like how well they let you play the policy delay game.

Isn’t this pretty much the same system Google was intending to implement on Chrome before backtracking? That’s my understanding anyway.

Ultimately the issue is that we’ve gone to extremes. The response to the data market that runs the Internet is now that many people are against ANY amount of information being dislodged from users to anybody else. That is obviously way more strict than pre-internet standards, when people’s location data was widely available and TV advertising ran a whole lot of live reporting and segmentation data, but it has become the goal.

Mozilla (and Apple, and for a bit Google), are suggesting to go back to a world where someone quietly aggregates some info without tracking individuals in excruciating detail and now advertisers don’t want to lose the granularity and resell ability of the spy-level data gathering… and users don’t want to give up even aggregated info.

We’ve scorched the earth so badly there is no path forward, so we stay where we are. I have no moral stance on this, but it seems to be what’s happening.

I don’t know, I think maybe it depends on age? Most people exposed to US media will recognize at least the landmarks, but that’s probably true of other cities as well.

But NYC has been in so many videogames I feel younger people with a passing interest in gaming will at least have a weird set of expectations. Of Manhattan, if nothing else. The twenty years of open world Spider-Man games alone are more exposure to an overhead map of a city than most people get of the place where they live in that amount of time.

Anecdotal, but relevant: I had forgotten what the “smears” were supposed to be until I saw this and went “oh, right, they did that”.

Oh, cool. My current device uses Logitech Options+, which is not the same as the old G Hub and is not the same as what you’re describing.

Which honestly, before we get into the mandatory login and everything else, begs the question… why does Logitech need three different multi-device software hubs? What the hell?

It’s not (just) that manufacturers are trying to mine all this bloatware for data, it’s that most of them are absolutely terrible at making software in the first place.

Yeah, I’d like to know the specifics, too. My Logi mouse still uses the same application (although they did update terms recently) and while they’ve added some AI shovelware to it the mouse stil remembers its shortcuts with that thing off and I haven’t noticed any changes to how the application is put together.

It’s entirely possible the application is a Chromium-based browser thing, but in any case it still doesn’t require a login (although it does support one) and it will run offline.

Don’t get me wrong, Logi’s approach to this, along with a lot of other hardware manufacturers, sucks really bad. I do appreciate Microsoft, of all people, recently starting to standardize RGB controls, at least. It’s still wonky and interacts weirdly with some third party software, but it’s a start. I don’t need twenty different apps to keep glowy lights and saved shortcuts going.