Oh my god, this addresses probably my biggest complaint with code editing in Godot. Thanks for posting this!
I never saw any other solid evidence.
It's all hearsay; anyone with a search engine can find articles making claims but what's accurate or not is anyone's guess. It's all we've got to go on until the trial, most likely.
My understanding (again only based on articles from the past 2+ years that this lawsuit has been in the works) is that it isn't codified in their agreements at all, but that they can / have either removed games from the store, or removed them from promotion (meaning you could find the game if you searched for it, but it would never show up on the storefront, for instance) in response to games being listed elsewhere cheaper. That's kind of part of the basis for this lawsuit, by my understanding - I've read that they're using those examples as evidence against Steam that they're acting anti-competitively.
There's been a lot of articles and discussion about it since this lawsuit first showed up, and the general gist that I've seen is that:
- It's not codified in their agreements, but
- They can / have in the past either removed products from the Steam store entirely or removed them from curated marketing and promotion in response to the game being listed elsewhere at a lower price.
They seem to handle it on a case by case basis, but in those cases it's definitely not been restricted only to the sale of Steam keys. They just don't have any firm legalese to refer to here that I'm aware of.
I haven't seen the agreement itself, but I've never seen anything to lead me to believe it didn't apply to non-steam key sales. EGS doesn't sell Steam keys but games still can't be listed for cheaper on EGS than Steam without violating Steam's terms, for example.
I really don't think there's any way to reasonably argue that Steam should have to give out Steam keys for cheaper sale elsewhere. They're paying for the servers, they're paying for the Steam features, they're paying for the advertising; it stands to reason that people shouldn't be able to take advantage of that. Even if it was ruled this way, all Steam would have to do is discontinue the free Steam key distribution and instead charge 30% of the game's price to generate keys, then remove the MFN clause. They'd still get their cut.
Anyone posting something on Mastodon can tag a lemmy community to mirror the post there as a new post. It ends up looking a bit strange (it's obvious it was a Mastodon post), as hashtags end up in the title.
I feel like Steam could remove their most favored nation clause (which is what this lawsuit is about) for any storefront that isn't selling Steam keys specifically, and the amount of sales they'd lose would be effectively a rounding error. I don't care if a game is 10% cheaper on EGS or itch.io or wherever else; I'm still buying it on Steam because I want to use the services Steam provides. The sole exception is GoG - but even with GoG, I still find it much less reliable than Steam for just being able to get the game working without problems (on linux specifically).
If the product being sold is a Steam key, I don't think there's any argument that could stand up against the MFN clause... the fact that Steam allows developers to generate Steam keys for their games for free and sell them elsewhere is pretty generous as it is now.
it’s that you are attacking very specific peripheral claims
I'm countering the claims you're making. I'm not going to intuit your arguments. If you want to clearly state your argument in its totality, I'll address it in its totality.
Your original claim was:
The real issue is not that current landlords are exceptionally greedy (the rules of capitalism assume and encourage everyone to be as greedy as possible), it’s that there isn’t enough housing stock to give everyone who wants one a unit.
The article you linked above did not support this argument, as it said the majority of people in that age range living with their parents are doing so because they don't make enough money or don't want to give money to a landlord, not that there isn't housing available to rent.
The fact that you're trying to exclude houses that are available for rent (presumably for prices that people can't afford) from the above stated numbers is yet another example of moving the goalposts because, based on your original stated argument, those should be included in the discussion.
If you narrow your argument enough times, you'll find something that's not easily countered - obviously. "There's 20 million people who want to live in Manhattan, but there's not enough units for them!" would technically be correct, but it's a worthless argument to make. Yes, some people will end up living outside of their ideal best case scenario, but you know what? I think getting everyone into houses is the first step, and we can work on improving the location of those houses second. Someone who's unemployed and unhoused in LA could be unemployed and housed in San Diego and their situation would be immensely improved.
You are moving the goalposts every time you post. First there's not enough housing to give everyone a unit. Provided a link that counters that claim. Then the vacant housing is derelict / decrepit. Provided link that counters that claim. Then the housing isn't in the city. Provided link that counters that claim. Then there's not enough housing in LA specifically to cover the homeless population (which I will note includes a lot of folks who were sent to LA from elsewhere in the country after becoming homeless).
You can keep making excuses and changing your argument all you want, but the fact of the matter is, there's a lot of housing that isn't being used, or that's being priced too high to accommodate the people who need it. In fact, if you include that latter statistic, there's plenty of vacant housing in LA, even - 171,353 homes vs. your stated 75,518 homeless. You're going to an awful lot of trouble to attempt to find an argument supporting your view, and you haven't linked a single source for any of it.
Maybe consider that perfect doesn't need to be the enemy of good?
There are no such things as habitable off-market ready-to-move-in vacant homes in the city.
Just look at the link, man. Everything under 'Seasonal' is habitable and off-market.
but it still represents tens of millions of Americans.
From the linked article:
According to the U.S. Census, there are approximately 17 million vacant houses across the nation.
If a house is vacant, it’s probably because it’s subject to a legal dispute, derelict and uninhabitable, slated for demolition, for sale, or being used for short-term rentals (which should also be banned but that’s only tangentially related).
What're you basing that on? Because the US census bureau disagrees:
But the largest category of vacant housing in the United States is classified as “seasonal, recreational or occasional use,” commonly referred to as seasonal units. These vacant structures cover a wide range of housing units, from part-time residences and hunting cabins to beach houses and timeshares.
Point is, there's plenty of housing, but greed - either people who own multiple houses and do not rent them out, or people who have them up for rent or sale but have priced out a large part of the nation, is creating an artificial scarcity.
If it's the video I'm thinking of, it was a really in-depth deep dive into the history of the game and the player-driven politics, drama and events. I don't play the game, but I found it very interesting to watch.
I think I know the exact video you're referencing, because I recently watched it, ending at maybe 4AM. So, I can relate.
it’s that there isn’t enough housing stock to give everyone who wants one a unit
There are >27 empty homes in the US for every homeless person.
Depends largely on how good you are at it, whether you're willing to draw NSFW stuff, and if so, how extreme you're willing to get with that NSFW stuff. Sad but true.
Personally I find CTRL+SHIFT+V rather uncomfortable to press, not to mention it requires moving your whole hand down the keyboard, whereas CTRL+V doesn't. A quick rightclick -> Paste Without Formatting is quick enough to do.
Paste Without Formatting exists on the right-click context menu almost everywhere. I don't consider context menu usage to be annoying (to observe someone using) at all, personally.
Now I can't stop picturing a nightmare scenario of having to watch someone do their copy/paste purely from the keyboard, but using the menus via that trick, rather than using the hotkeys. Thanks for that.
I don't want to potentially be judged by people who can't even be fucked to vote, thank you very much.
Hot Take: Lemmy communities should function similar to hashtags on Mastodon.
Rather than communities being hosted by an instance, they should function like hashtags, where each instance hosts posts to that community that originate from their instance, and users viewing the community see the aggregate of all of these. Let me explain.
Currently, communities are created and hosted on a single instance, and are moderated by moderators on that instance. This is generally fine, but it has some undesirable effects:
- Multiple communities exist for the same topics on different instances, which results in fractured discussions and duplicated posts (as people cross-post the same content to each of them).
- One moderation team is responsible for all content on that community, meaning that if the moderation team is biased, they can effectively stifle discussion about certain topics.
- If an instance goes down, even temporarily, all of its communities go down with it.
- Larger instances tend to edge out similar communities on other instances, which just results in slow consolidation into e.g. lemmy.ml and lemmy.world. This, in turn, puts more strain on their servers and can have performance impact.
I'm proposing a new way of handling this:
- Rather than visiting a specific community, e.g. worldnews@lemmy.world, you could simply visit the community name, like a hashtag. This is, functionally, the same as visiting that community on your own local instance: [yourinstance]/c/worldnews
- You'd see posts from all instances (that your instance is aware of), from their individual /worldnews communities, in a single feed.
- If you create a new post, it would originate from your instance (which effectively would create that community on your instance, if it didn't previously exist).
- Other users on other instances would, similarly, see your post in their feed for that "meta community".
- Moderation is handled by each instance's version of that community separately.
- An instance's moderators have full moderation rights over all posts, but those moderator actions only apply to that instance's view of the community.
- If a post that was posted on lemmy.ml is deleted by a moderator on e.g. lemmy.world, a user viewing the community from lemmy.ml could still see it (unless their moderators had also deleted the post).
- If a post is deleted by moderators on the instance it was created on, it is effectively deleted for everyone, regardless of instance.
- This applies to all moderator actions. Banning a user from a community stops them from posting to that instance's version of the community, and stops their posts from showing up to users viewing the community through that instance.
- Instances with different worldviews and posting guidelines can co-exist; moderators can curate the view that appears to users on their instance. A user who disagreed with moderator actions could view the community via a different instance instead.
- An instance's moderators have full moderation rights over all posts, but those moderator actions only apply to that instance's view of the community.
- Users could still visit the community through another instance, as we do now - in this case, [yourinstance]/c/worldnews@lemmy.world, for example.
- In this case, you'd see lemmy.world's "view" of the community, including all of their moderator actions.
The benefit is that communities become decentralized, which is more in line with (my understanding of) the purpose of the fediverse. It stops an instance from becoming large enough to direct discussion on a topic, stops community fragmentation due to multiple versions of the community existing across multiple instances, and makes it easier for smaller communities to pop up (since discoverability is easier - you don't have to know where a community is hosted, you just need to know the community name, or be able to reasonably guess it. You don't need to know that a community for e.g. linux exists or where it is, you just need to visit [yourinstance]/c/linux and you'll see posts.
If an instance wanted to have their own personal version of a community, they could either use a different tag (e.g. world_news instead of worldnews), or, one could choose to view only local posts.
Go ahead, tear me apart and tell me why this is a terrible idea.
Do we know why lemmy.world doesn't federate with us?
Kind of falls under the 'Too Afraid to Ask' category, I guess, but I've been curious about this for a while. Did something actually happen at some point, or was this just a procedural thing that wasn't ever followed up on?
It's mildly annoying given how large they are.
Edit: It's possible that this isn't a federation problem at all (as discussion is bringing to light) but something else entirely. Regardless, though, something is going on.
It's also possible that the site I link below is out of date, so maybe don't take that as gospel. I bookmarked it a year ago and just hit it up to check on this a few minutes before posting, so I haven't been keeping up with it.
Doing a little more digging in light of the above, it's possible this is related to this issue, and there's just an extremely long delay before we get content from lemmy.world. Weirdly, though, it doesn't seem to be the case with other instances - maybe because of their size? Either way, looking at the same posts on our instance and 3 or 4 others, we seem to be the only ones not getting the replies. So something's fucked, maybe.
If you're on lemmy.world and happen to see this, drop a reply in here, maybe - I'd be curious to see how long it takes for us to see it (or if we can at all).
Performance has gotten quite bad over the past few days.
Page load times have been very slow for some communities, especially those hosted on other instances, and especially over the past few days. Not sure if this was related to the maintenance over the weekend. Here's some quick examples from a sample of 3 communities. I'm listing them in the order that I visited them (I'm not sure if images et. al. are cached across instances, but just in case):
- https://pawb.social/c/196@lemmy.blahaj.zone - Load: 6.8s
- https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/196 - Load: 655ms
- https://lemmy.world/c/196@lemmy.blahaj.zone - Load: 705ms ---
- https://lemmy.world/c/technology - Load: 705ms
- https://pawb.social/c/technology@lemmy.world - Load: 17.58ms
- https://yiffit.net/c/technology@lemmy.world - Load: 557ms ---
- https://yiffit.net/c/memes - Load: 557ms
- https://lemmy.world/c/memes@yiffit.net - Load: 699ms
- https://pawb.social/c/memes@yiffit.net - Load: 587ms
Of these three tests, we performed fine on one, but the other two were markedly slower. Refreshing the home feed (settings: Subscribed, New) has also been very slow (with load times in excess of 5 seconds being very common).
Is anyone else seeing this, or is this a 'Me' problem?
(I swear I don't only complain.) :D
Problem displaying 'ff' in RichTextBox?
I'm sure there's a really simple answer to this, but it's a surprisingly difficult problem to search for.
I've got a RichTextBox control and I'm trying to write text that includes the letters "ff", but they don't show up. This is the specific code in question:
for entry in suffix: desc += "[color=darkgray]Suffix (Tier: %s, Quality: %s%%) 'of %s'\n[color=royalblue]" % [entry.tier, entry.quality, entry.mod.name]
This is what it ends up printing:
If I change one or both of the Fs to capitals, they both display fine; it's specifically two lowercase Fs that're problematic. They also display fine elsewhere in the same textbox; it's just this line specifically that's problematic. Even tried escaping it but it didn't like that, either.
Most of the settings on the RichTextBox are default; the font has a lowercase 'f' character; I haven't done anything weird with the font size, or style, or anything else.
I'm tearing my hair out here. Please tell me this is just some stupid bbcode tag or some such.
Edit: For anyone finding this later:
It's a ligature (ffi) that the font is missing a glyph for. To solve the problem: On the Import tab, choose the font you're using, click Advanced, and under Metadata Overrides, expand OpenType Features, click Add Feature -> Ligatures, add whichever option is appropriate (discretionary or standard ligatures), then disable the option. Reimport the font, and the issue is fixed!
Canvas (Lemmy version of Reddit's r/place) event begins in about 8 hours
Let's get some furry shit up in there. We can create / share a template so we're all working on something cohesive. Any interest / anyone have any suggestions for something to draw?
'No impact on missions,' military powerhouse insists
> The hacktivists, which describe themselves as made up of "gay furry hackers," usually target government orgs whose policies they disagrees with, and have a flare for political publicity stunts, also posted a link to the purported stolen files on their Telegram channel.
>"The astonishing siegedsec hackers have struck NATO once more!!1!!!," the crew wrote, bragging: "NATO: 0. Siegedsec: 2."
> The team is referring to its earlier NATO intrusion in July, during which it claimed it swiped information belonging to 31 nations and leaked 845MB of data from the alliance's the Communities of Interest (COI) Cooperation Portal.
Google's Generative AI Tools Now Turn Text Into Online Worlds
Hiber3D has integrated Google's AI tools to give creators the ability to type what they want to see—and generate an immersive world.
> "Some game developers are turning to artificial intelligence to make the creative process faster and easier—and cheaper, too. At Google Cloud Next in San Francisco, startup Hiber announced the integration of Google’s generative AI technology in its Hiber3D development platform, which aims to simplify the process of creating in-game content.
> Hiber said the goal of adding AI is to help creators build more expansive online worlds, which are often referred to as metaverse platforms. Hiber3D is the tech that powers the company's own HiberWorld virtual platform, which it claims already contains over 5 million user-created worlds using its no-code-needed platform.
> By typing in prompts via its new generative AI tool, Hiber CEO Michael Yngfors says creators can employ natural language to tell the Hiber3D generator what kind of worlds they want to create, and can even generate worlds based on their mood or to match the vibe of a film. [...]"
Once this is refined, this could be very neat! It's only environments right now, not characters and whatnot, too, but maybe eventually we'd be able to dynamically generate some anthro-populated worlds to explore.
Degrading performance, especially over the last few days
Performance on Pawb.Social specifically has been degrading significantly; it often times takes a very long time (10+ seconds) to load a post, for example, with a noticeable number of time-outs occurring. Opening the same post via its home instance in these cases typically works much faster, leading me to believe the problem is here, not with the host instance.
This is the case even with local communities.
Hoping to hear from other folks - are you also experiencing this? Is it a temporary issue, or indicative of a growing server-side problem?
Server donation link?
There was discussion on the lemmy fork thread about replacing the default 'Donate' link with a server-specific one, but given that's not available yet, is there somewhere we can contribute funds towards hosting costs?
Really, maybe such a link should be on the sidebar, at least - if there is one somewhere already, I wasn't able to find it, and as such I suspect other folks who would potentially be looking for one wouldn't find it, either.
ELI5: How are unexploded cluster munitions not a solved problem?
I really don't have a lot of background on cluster munitions; it only really came into my perception in response to the controversy over the US providing them to Ukraine. As I understand it, the controversy is because they often don't all explode reliably, and unexploded munitions can then explode months or years later when civilians are occupying the territory, making it similar to the problems caused by landmines.
In an age where things like location trackers, radio transmitters, and other such local and long-range technology to locate objects are common place, what's stopping the manufacturers of these munitions from simply putting some kind of device to facilitate tracking inside each individual explosive, to assist with detection and safe retrieval after a conflict? I get that nothing is a 100% effective solution, but it seems like it'd solve most of it.
Can someone with actual knowledge explain why this is still a problem we're having?
Kobold Hucksters (by Commissar-K)
He's an alchemist, okay? It's definitely a Strength potion, not grape Kool-Aid, okay? It's only $5, just try it!
Need some kobold representation up in here. (by jareddrawsjared)
That poor elf has seen better days; it takes a special kind of talent to be overpowered by kobolds.
Tell me about your favorite furry media.
Books, games, movies, youtube channels, podcasts, whatever you've got - I'd love some recommendations for anything tangentially furry-related. There's plenty of cartoons (and I'd be happy to hear about those, too), but in particular, any more adult-focused media would be very welcomed!
Argonian representing for the Nightingales
Is it a testament to the power of the organization, or the lawlessness of the city that one can wear their regalia in broad daylight unaccosted? It's anyone's guess.
Per-User Community Groups?
We can currently filter communities in our feed by 'Subscribed', 'Local' and 'All', but I'd really love a way to add communities to custom groupings, and have additional filter options based on those groupings. For example, a 'News' group that I could add all of the News-related communities to, and be able to click a filter button and see only those... or maybe the use case most people would likely use: creating groups to isolate SFW and NSFW content.
If there's a way to do this that I'm unaware of, I'd love to hear about it.