People saying Steam doesn't have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.

While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.

Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.

Here's another example where trying to chase the live-service money train has just ended up with a subpar product that people abandon or avoid almost instantly.

Unfortunately I suspect the wrong lessons will be taken away from this as well - e.g. the console/PC gaming market is too fickle, etc.

I think it'll actually be Xarmageddon, which is like Armageddon, but much more woke.

I'm surprised he hasn't changed his name to Elon Mux by now.

It's the lemmy hug of death now

The amount of people bootlicking a corporation's decision to cut costs rather than just moderate effectively is pretty astonishing for Lemmy,

Plenty of people got value out of the comment section - if nothing else, they were invaluable in knowing when to skip past the recap/opening theme/filler content in long-running shows like One Piece.

Most of it is pretty inane, but there was some useful stuff in there, and I always found it fun to see what other people thought of particularly crazy episodes.

Ok but who actually doesn’t know what a magazine is

Kbin devs, apparently.

Patents are (at their core) a good thing. It protects little Jimmy Inventor from putting hours and his blood, sweat and tears into coming up with a novel invention, only for some big corpo to see it, steal the idea and bully Jimmy out of the market.

Jimmy has legal recourse to sue the big corpo if he has a patent, whereas without one he has nothing.

Just because the system's been gamed (especially in the US) doesn't mean it's impossible to reform, and is currently still better than nothing.

You've got to give Microsoft credit for their dedication to backwards compatibility.

Exactly! This is the playbook for how Linux has gained such a mainstay - while GNU/Linux on the desktop may still be pretty small, the extensibility and open-source nature of the platform has meant it's been able to take over on all sort of alternative platforms - Android and Steam Deck being the big ones in the consumer space, but also larger distros being used regularly in enterprise/web hosting.

If everyone had refused to embrace Android or Steam Deck or any of the other distros run and maintained by for-profit corporations due to some preconceived idea of what the 'correct' way to use Linux is, it would still be doomed to irrelevance outside of tech circles.

People these days really are sheltered if they can't detect sarcasm without it being specifically called out...

I heard someone approached Christian with that idea already, but he is wasn't really interested.

Setting up the whole ecosystem is hard - most of the app developers are very good with front-end and user experience, but setting up a robust, scalable backed is a completely different skill set.

I haven't been following it super-closely, but this reads like the SMH is trying to drum up homophobic controversy where there wasn't any.

My understanding was that the murders were commited by a spurned lover (who happened to be a Police Officer) as opposed to some systemic homophobia within the NSW Police that led to the murders.

No doubt the NSW Police could be more receptive in general, but I don't know if they'd have treated the case any differently if it was a heterosexual officer who was spurned and committed murder - probably more of an indictment on the awfulness of the force than any particularly political or social bent.

Yeah I don't understand the premise of the headline either - unless it's supposed to be some slight on 'inner-city lefties', being the only ones who could possibly want an EV...

This may be the doomer in me, but I fear this will spell the end of Aussie.zone - Lemmy fits the definition of social media, but I don't know how it's feasible for @lodion to verify every user's age...

Honestly, it's so strange this never comes up - yes there are ads but a man's gotta eat. The ads aren't particularly intrusive so the free version is a fine sacrifice for those of us who are happy enough with the base functionality of sync and can deal with the minor annoyance of an occasional ad.

I'd prefer to purchase the ad-free version, but the pricing is a bit excessive for me right now - I can wait it out until there's a sale or other discount in the meantime.

If that's a dealbreaker, all the other Lemmy clients are available to use instead - I've used them all and they're all excellent.

I really wish they didn't have to kill third party integration with smart speakers for this. Google bait and switch at its finest.

I'm in a similar vein, and as of yet I've still yet to hear a convincing argument as to why this body is different from the multitude of other advisory bodies the government has, and will continue to soundly ignore, or why a well-funded statutory body can't achieve the same role.

Racists will claim anything other than a 100% yes vote as a 'win' so don't let their backwardsness stake a claim in your mind.

Yeah I hopped back over from Edge when the manifest v3 stuff came out, and the two main things I miss are proper profile management and vertical tabs - I've been using https://codeberg.org/... to get around it currently, but having a native implementation to both issues will be a massive (and recently rare) Firefox W.

Yeah I'm not a constitutional expert but I'm 90% sure this won't work. Like professor Twomey said, we elect individuals, not parties (which is what this basically is) - and what happens if they have a falling out, or disagree on a policy position?

Definitely wouldn't be surprised - MS have been making noises about reducing the level of access non-core Windows services get after the cloudstrike fiasco, and given MS's patch stability lately, I would also not be surprised if something leaked out early.