Definitely better to charge an EV with clean energy. But it’s probably better to charge an EV with dirty electricity than it is to keep using a combustion vehicle.

IIRC a gas vehicle is something like 20% thermally efficient, whereas a coal/oil power plant can be up to 60%. So even if my EV is charging off oil or coal, I’m getting 3x the energy per unit of emissions compared to a gas vehicle (though who knows how that translates to miles of range).

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining it further. It does sound like a very nice system.

I don’t understand how SPAV fixes gerrymandering in this case. It seems like the re-weighting operation is meant for a pool of identical ballots. When you have district-level elections that differ between ballots, how is this meant to work?

Edit: Ooooh you meant for selecting the redistricting committee, not for running the elections. Gotcha, makes sense now.

I think it’s what they’ve been calling “statistics”.

Again, I am really wanting to see this EU case you reference, because this is an issue I have been reading up on. Do you have a reference for me?

The points linked above allege Valve will delist a game from their platform if the price is lower off-platform (even for non-key sales), correct?

This is called a “Platform Most Favored Nation” clause, and it has anti-competitive effects. It is controlling the price off-platform using the leverage of market share to coerce behaviors out of publishers.

Please also link me this European court case, I have been unable to locate it myself.

It’s an ongoing case, so I don’t know what you expect of me here. My reply was to correct your misunderstanding about the focus of the case, which is not limited to the use of steam keys as you originally claimed.

I am not aware of the european case you reference, would you mind pointing me to where I can learn more?

If that is demonstrably true, I’d like to see the demonstration. In fact, the case alleges the policy extends to non-key sales (see pts 204, 205, 207, 208).

I haven’t read it either. There is however a If Books Could Kill episode about it that is very worth listening to.

I like Wolfire. Their head (David Rosen) had a really good procedural animation talk at GDC about a decade ago, their games are pretty good, and they started up Humble before it spun off on its own.

Before tarnishing their reputation, I’d suggest reading up on the actual complaints put forth in the lawsuit. I’ve done so extensively, I think they have very solid grounds to go after Valve (Valve’s behaviour is comparable to Amazon’s in terms of anticompetitive practices).

It’s only double counted in a situation where you’re actually counting both sides. This is a Canadian study published by a Canadian outlet about the impacts of Canadian policy.

They’re not trying to balance the books, so to speak, they’re evaluating transactions on a single account.

404media is doing excellent work on tracking the non-consentual porn market and technology. Unfortunately, you don’t really see the larger, more mainstream outlets giving it the same attention beyond its effect on Taylor Swift.

The current assumption made by these companies is that AI training is fair use, and is therefore legal regardless of license. There are still many ongoing court cases over this, but one case was already resolved in favor or the fair use position.

Ah, yes. The famously singular “westerners” who all 100% agreed with every foreign affairs policy of their government over the past century.

Huh, thanks for the heads up. Section 4 makes it look like they can close-source whenever they want.

I’m just glad FUTO is still letting Immich use the AGPL instead of this, though.

Feel the same way. My Camry is a 2013—recent enough to have a simple display and Bluetooth, but old enough to predate the ‘modern’ infotainment systems.

Believe me, I plan to drive this car until the scrapyards run out of part donors.

330 micrograms per gram

That seems like… a lot. Way more than I expected or am comfortable thinking about.

I’m still a big fan of D for personal projects, but I fear the widespread adoption ship has sailed at this point, and we won’t see the language grow anymore. It’s truly a beautiful, well-rounded language.

Also just recently a rather prominent contributor forked the entire compiler/language so we’re seeing more fragmentation :/

I can only assume at this point you are intentionally not engaging with the actual issue. Cheers.

Fanatical and humble bundle (the good old days) are good examples.

Incidentally Wolfire Games—the studio that founded Humble (but no longer operates it)—is currently in class-action litigation against Valve for this very issue.

I don’t know what you say “non-discounted”, cheaper is cheaper no matter what.

The Steam Distribution Agreement AFAIK allows temporary sales on other platforms to undercut Steam, but requires the “resting” price matches that on Steam. By specifying “non-discounted” I meant to indicate that although sales do exist on other platforms, the normal price of an item always matches on Steam. A quick few spot checks show the non-sale price of games on Humble, Steam, and Fanatical are equal.

“Cheaper is cheaper” kind of overlooks the core issue. Ultimately a publisher on Epic Games Store—which has a fee of 12% instead of Steam’s 30%—can have a lower price for a game as part of a promotion, but can’t just sell every game 18% cheaper always without violating Steam’s terms and being risk being de-listed.

Steam doesn’t get a cut from keys sold in perfectly legal thirth party stores like fanatical, humble or gmg. Epic does not sell steam keys so obviously no.

Okay, gotcha. Yeah, I misunderstood. For Steam Keys it’s pretty clear that Valve should be able to control the price since they provide the services after that key is purchased.

But the PMFN applies to all copies, even those distributed outside of Steam (e.g. the direct-from-publisher option I mentioned). Last time I was in a thread on this, another user found the following in the complaint (page 55) from the Wolfire v. Valve case mentioned above:

204. TomG also explained to another game publisher that the publisher should “[t]hink critically about how your decisions might affect Steam customers, and Valve. If the offer you’re making fundamentally disadvantages someone who bought your game on Steam, it’s probably not a great thing for us or our customers (even if you don’t find a specific rule describing precisely that scenario).” In that same thread, TomG responded to a question by stating: “we usually choose not to sell games if they’re being sold on our store at a price notably higher than other stores. That is, we’d want to get that lower base price as well, or not sell the game at all."
205. In response to one inquiry from a game publisher, in another example, Valve explained: “We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market- so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours. . . .”