V A L V E T I M E

Let it happen when it happens. If you hype it, you’ll just be disappointed when it doesn’t come out when you expect it to.

800?

Eight. Fucking. Hundred?

Ban me. I don’t give a fuck. If someone abused anywhere near 800 children then they just need to die. We are infinitely better off without.

I hope it does. I’m trying to marry into royalty so I can have carte blanche to do whatever I want. Like eat pancakes for dinner. Or eat pancakes for lunch. Or have a second helping of pancakes for breakfast. Really, just more pancakes.

They pay the cat deposit on my new place, where ever that may be. I’ll take a cat as well, though.

I’ll do mine for 2.7 and a cat deposit.

Brass knuckles are ribbed for your pleasure.

deleted by creator

I literally just blocked an NSFW lemmit of misogynygonewild and it blew my mind it was even a thing. Fucking trash.

I’m sorry. Weren’t the winter Olympics just in China? Yeah, the same China with an active genocide? And the world cup is still run by… Checks notes… FIFA. So, umm, yeah…

Is that any different than a human moral code? We like to think we have some higher sense of “truth” but in reality we are only parroting that “facts” we hold as true. Through our history we have professed many things as truth. My favorite fact that I just learned yesterday is that we didn’t discover oxygen until after the founding of the United States. Are the humans before 1776 any less human than us? Or are they trained on a limited data set, telling people that the “miasma” is the cause of all their woes?

But, like a human, it mostly tries to stick to the truth. It does get things wrong, and in that way is more like a 5 year old, because it won’t understand that it is fabricating things, but there is a moral code that they are programmed with, and they do mostly stick to it.

To write off an LLM as a glorified chatbot is disingenuous. They are capable of produce everything that a human is capable of, but in a different ratio. Instead of learning everything slowly over time and forming opinions based on experience, they are given all of the knowledge of humankind and told to sort it out themselves. Like a 5 year old with an encyclopedia set, they are gonna make some mistakes.

Our problem is that we haven’t found the right ratios for them. We aren’t specializing the LLMs enough to make sure they have a limited enough library to pull from. If we made the datasets smaller and didn’t force them into “chatbot” roles where they are given carte Blanche to say whatever they say, LLMs would be in a much better state than they currently are.

I miss the duke

I’d like it kinda like the PlayStation controller with the pad in the center.

Sidetalkin’™ 2

You could very well be right, I haven’t read the full suit or done a lot of research on it, so I’m just going off the scraps I’ve read. I did check out isthereanydeal to look at price differences between Steam and Epic on some major titles, and all of them had even pricing. I don’t have a huge sample size, so if you want to look for some that have different prices, I’d be interested to see how much difference there is, and if, say, the lowest price on Epic has had a Steam sale after it where the game was priced higher on Steam.

I think that’s part of the argument. It isn’t just for Steam keys, it’s for alternate storefronts like GOG, Ubi, EA, Epic, etc. If you want to sell on Steam, you have to keep it the same price as anywhere else. It seems a bit harsh, but I am tentatively siding with Steam on this one. I’ve never had a company be as consumer friendly as Valve has been over their lifetime, and they’ve earned some brand loyalty. It’ll quickly dissolve if they start fucking people over, but for now, as far as I’m concerned, they get the benefit of the doubt.

Yeah, on the other hand, I’m also an idiot, and I could be completely off with what I’m talking about. IANAL, so we’ll have to wait and see.

It wouldn’t make them available to more people, it would make deeper sales available to certain storefronts. Right now, Valve says that if you want to do business with them, and you offer a discount on another storefront, that same discount must be reflected in the Steam price when it sold for a discount on Steam. What the lawsuit says is that Publishers should be allowed to publish whatever discount they want on whatever site they want. That sounds like a better deal to consumers, but what it does is open the door for anti-competitive loss-leaders.

It’s the same strategy that companies like Wal-Mart have employed to gain marketshare. They come in, sell everything at a loss to drive out competition, and then raise the prices to the same price the competition was charging. They haven’t given the consumers a better option, they’ve only ensured that they don’t have another choice. If you look at Valve and you look at Epic, you can easily see who has the deeper pockets: Valve is worth a little over $3 Billion from what I can tell, while Epic is worth over $40 Billion. If Epic wants to sell at a loss to drive Steam out of business, they can, easily. As a matter of fact, they’ve already tried this by offering the free weekly games that they do.

I’d wager that if this goes through and Steam loses, we’ll see that free weekly game go away, and then large doorbuster sales of everything on the site just to undercut every steam sale as it happens. Where are you gonna buy that new game at? Steam where it’s full price, or Epic where it’s half price? What about the Steam Winter Sale? Will you buy the game for 80% off, or go over to Epic offering it at 90% off with a $10 coupon for another game on the site? Pretty soon you’ll only be shopping on Epic, and once Steam is gone, Epic can charge whatever they want. It’s the long game. They don’t need to be profitable today. They just need to show their shareholders the path.

It’s actually kinda the opposite. It’s claiming that Valve makes deals with publishers that use Steam forcing them to maintain price parity with other storefronts. So, if you want to discount a game on something like Fanatical, you’d have to run the same discount on Steam, you can’t just have one or the other. I don’t want to put on the ol’ tin foil hat, but it reeks of Epic. Epic wants to run cheap sales through their storefront that Steam won’t get, so they can pull users away from Steam. If they both have the same discounts, then Epic can’t get the upper hand. That is complete conjecture on my part, but it fits with Epic’s shit strategies. Instead of making something that brings people to them, they want to kill off the competition through anti-competitive practices. It’s the same thing they are doing by signing exclusivity contracts with third-party developers.

I read Lost City of Z recently, and this is a wonderful visual aid for that. If you haven’t read the book, you definitely should. The movies was OK, but the book was amazing.