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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • The thing is, steam’s market dominance is one of user choice rather than anticompetitive strategies or lack of alternatives. Steam doesn’t do exclusives, they don’t charge you for external sales, they don’t even prevent you from selling steam keys outside the platform, or users from launching non steam games in the client. The only real restriction is that access to steam services requires a license in the active steam account. Even valve-produced devices like the steam deck can install from other stores.

    Sure, dominance is bad in an abstract theoretical way and it’d be nice if Gog, itch.io, etc were more competitive, but Steam is dominant because consumers actively choose it.





  • You have to search using language that papers might actually use though. “Parachute effectiveness” means what the satirical paper is exploring, whether it prevents death or not. The only serious studies that might have used that language would be old WW2 studies that threw people out of planes with different parachutes to see how many survived.

    If you want to know how to design an effective parachute, you should be looking at reference books like Parachute Recovery Systems instead.


  • Billion dollar costs aren’t rounding errors even at YouTube/Google’s scale. They’re a measurable percentage of total revenue. I agree that it slightly improves the user experience, it’s hard to imagine a worse cost/benefit tradeoff from an engineering perspective even at more realistic costs. It’s especially hard to justify when there’s an easy alternative for users in the form of downloading videos.










  • You can sometimes deal with performance issues by caching, if you want to trade one hard problem for another (cache invalidation). There’s plenty of cases where that’s not a solution though. I recently had a 1ns time budget on a change. That kind of optimization is fun/impossible to do in Python and straightforward to accomplish Rust or C/C++ once you’ve set up your measurements.






  • The security level should be the user’s choice. Maybe I don’t care if my neopets account is hacked. Maybe the 2fa offered actually decreases security, like the SMS 2FA required by my 401k account that can be used as the sole recovery factor, bypassing the password. Maybe I’m accessing from a system configuration that makes 2fa really annoying, like a build system running inside a fresh VM on every run.

    The service doesn’t have the context necessary to know when 2FA is warranted.