Thanks for the basic lesson in media literacy. I was replying to your comment which implies that this comic is somehow a media critique.

This comic is very explicitly bashing fans not the media.

Yes because they were licensed resellers.

Under many licenses no, you did not. Resale was certainly in the realm of things that license agreements could and often did prohibit. I was probably too blanket in my statement earlier, it was certainly not ubiquitous, but in many cases physically selling the CD did not transfer the license and the purchaser would have been in violation of the terms by using it.

You’re conflating DRM with software licensing. DRM is digital enforcement of license terms. Steam was by no means the first form of DRM, but it is a DRM platform (though there are some DRM-free titles).

I am not too young to remember Steam being a highly controversial topic because it was basically launched as the DRM for Half-Life 2. The backlash against the normalization of DRM led to the creation of Good Old Games, still the premiere DRM-free vendor on the market.

However, software licenses have been in use since the 70s. The practice of selling actual copies of code as opposed to licenses to use the code was already rare by the 90s. If you bought a CD or floppy disks in a store, you were buying a license to use the code on the disks, but you were explicitly denied the rights to resell or copy it, at least for most commercial products. Most people just never read the very long terms of usage.

Again that is a separate issue from the no undercutting clause. Prohibition of resale is ubiquitous in the software world because for decades the ploy has been to sell you a license, not an actual product.

Of course I’d love that to change but it’s a core precept of how digital ownership works and has worked for most of it’s existence. Steam is not the main force behind that.

Yeah that’s not what they’re preventing. It’s to stop someone with rights to generate keys, i.e. the developer, from generating a lot of Steam keys and then selling them on their own site at a discount, which is basically leeching off of the Steam infrastructure & ecosystem while sidestepping the storefront. Which is fine as long as they don’t undercut.

The EULA for any software you’ve ever paid for is what forbids resale.

2 is false. It only applies to steam keys.

For personal projects you can either just use git locally or make them source-available with a restrictive license. If you don’t even want the source to be available then why use a public repo?

No one should be using a corporate chat bot to “figure out who they are”.

Chatbots? Basically nothing. Any interaction I have with one leads to spending more time verifying its output, inevitably finding many mistakes, and eventually finding a primary source for what I’m actually looking for. The best actual impact it has is forcing me to narrow down my nebulous question into what I actually specifically want, but the bot itself is contributing very little to that.

Neutral nets in general have limited real usefulness in analyzing large batches of data when other purpose-built analysis software doesn’t exist.

“AI” is a misnomer and there is absolutely zero evidence to suggest that we’re even on a path toward actual AI, sometimes called AGI, though they’re also changing that to just mean a profitable LLM which is fucking hilarious.

Any task you use a bot to do, you will become worse at that task. For mass data analysis, that’s fine, poring over reams of data is already a skill that other technology has largely obsoleted. But using it to do research, to read or write for you, or god forbid to make actual decisions and think for you, are very slippery slopes that are already causing a lot of the general public to seriously erode their basic mental capabilities.

This post is clearly horny but I don’t know why everyone is saying there’s no punchline. The punchline is that pissing in her mouth in the store is exposure therapy.

This is honestly funnier and more well-paced than like half the comics that get posted here.

Any games that you can just run on Steam without issue will work fine, it’s when you have to start passing launch commands etc that things become more complicated. Most things are still possible but harder because you have to deal with the very unusual way Nixos stores its files. The specific thing that made me give up and go to CachyOS was trying to get gamescope working under wayland for Steam games – every way I tried, I was having to compromise on what I actually wanted. Also VR has been easier to play with, though it’s still far from Windows parity.

I mix, my server and laptop are nixos but I use an arch variant on my desktop. Mostly I do this because of various pain points with nixos and gaming.

Yeah I fuckin love eating a whole stick of butter straight

Yeah this is just accurate IMO. It can be nice to add richness but the people that eat half an avocado with a spoon are crazy.

I quite enjoyed the show but season 4 was a massive turd that should be skipped.

Because the entire US political spectrum fits nearly inside of “neoliberalism”. Liberalism in general is just capitalism+.