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. . . .”

Ya know, all perfectly fair.

Good choice on reddit. As much as I love a good 'ol sneer, there’s a lot of jargon and clowning to wade through. There are a lot of genuinely solid critiques of his views there, though.

I appreciate you doing your due diligence on this, but I’m not really sure where to keep this discussion going. I still stand by my original comment’s warning. Reading Siskind is probably not going to corrupt an unassuming reader to immediately think XYZ bad thing. His writings tend to be very data heavy and nuanced, to his credit.

Is he Hitler 2.0? No, far from it.

But he shares a set of core assumptions with the other ideologies, and the circles between his community and the other communities have large overlap. If you start with one, it’s likely you encounter the other. If you start to think like one, it’s a small jump to start thinking like the other. (From experience).

In my opinion, anyone encountering Siskind for the first time is well-served by an understanding of TESCREAL—which they are likely to encounter in either his posts, its comments, or linked material—, and its critiques—which should help them assess what they encounter through a critical lense.

That’s more or less what I wanted to give caution about, which may or may not have come across correctly.

(Not that his stuff is entirely innocent either, but beside the point)

I understand, a good instinct to have. Unfortunately I have read so much in such a piecemeal way I cannot really compile a specific list. But I can point you to where “evidence” can be found. I don’t expect you to read any of this, but if you want to evaluate Alexander’s views further it will help:

• The New York Times did a piece on him that does a good job outlining Alexander’s ties to and influence on Silicone Valley. Probably the best actual piece of journalism on him.
• There used to be a reddit community (/r/SneerClub) that would read his (mountainous, as you point out) posts and pull out errors and misteps to “sneer” at, but that’s been dead since the API revolts. The old posts are still up. Basically you had a club of people that spent years finding (cherry-picking, mind) the juicy bits for you.
• You may find some passing reference to Alexander is one of Émile Torres’s articles or interviews on the subject of TESCREAL, but probably nothing substantial.
• If you spend time on communites like LessWrong and the EA Forum, you will see heavy reference to and influence from Alexander’s writing among members.

A lot of what I say comes from my experiencd spending way too much time following these socisl circles and their critics online. Unfortunately, the best way I know to see for yourself is to dive in yourself. Godspeed, if you choose to go that way.

Edit: of course, reading his work itself is a great way , too, if you have time for that.

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.