I also don’t remember Han wearing a scoop neck, skin tight crop top.

This is kind of necessary. You could open a store just selling Steam keys. You get Steam’s software distribution, installed user base, networking for free and pay nothing to them. Steam is selling all of those services for a 30% cut. Since your overhead is $0, you can take just a 1% fee and still turn a profit because Valve is covering 99% of your costs.

Steam could disable keys or start charging fees for them. As long as they’re being this ridiculously generous and permitting publishers to have them for free, some limitation makes sense.

I’m dubious, though. There must be a provision for promotional pricing. I’ve definitely bought keys for less than Steam prices.

I can’t believe that a company that puts out a device running Linux that gives you access to the OS in a few clicks and provides guides for how to install competing distribution platforms is more anticompetitive than Sony, Apple, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google. Valve and Steam aren’t perfect. It’s difficult to accept that having a store and charging for it is worse than, for example, Sony buying studios and paying millions of dollars for some games to be exclusive on their platform.

As someone who maintained an API, 80% to 90% of my time was discovering that hackers were attempting an exploit, blocking it, adding monitoring, building abuse prevention. After we shut our API off, we could turn services back on, especially free services that we only took away because hackers.

Not to mention the support volume. More than half of our support calls were, “Why did you suspend my account? I’m a poor old grandpa. I want to appeal.” Okay, yep we looked into activity and you sent 50000 requests in less than a minute and that’s all you ever did with this account. Did you know hackers lie and will spend hours getting tech support? You go to school to be an engineer to build cool stuff and instead field bullshit support requests all day from people trying to destroy the thing you want to build so they can maybe make thirty bucks and cost you tens of thousands. It sucked the life out of me and turned me eternally cynical.

I want to make the, “free”, moniker illegal. Advertisers have to pay money for ads and they get that money from us when we buy their products. In addition to having to look at ads, we also have to pay money for the privilege of looking at them. Any ad supported service is objectively not free. No thanks.

There are degrees. If someone’s sharing about their recent stillborn child, it’s probably best not to bring up that one time I was 6 and my cat died and I can really, really sympathize. Anyone who worries about this is probably that person and could spend more time asking questions and less time, “relating”.

The, “Everyone assumed roles were 100% different, but they were 100% the same, which really says something about you western people.” is distasteful to me and factually incorrect. We can see what people who live and lived without technology and access to shared culture do. Generally, men hunted more and women cared for children more. The observation has been that women spend a portion of their lives pregnant and nursing, so men go out and do things that require them to be away. We haven’t documented gender roles because preconceptions or because we’re western, but through direct observation. Those observations of how people lived could be combined with our knowledge of wear patterns on bones to construct a better understanding of how roles may have been less distinct and how bones wear. The assertion that we have 100% confidence in perceiving people’s entire lives by looking at bones and we can’t trust anything anyone said before because they were all sexist… excuse me… had preconceptions is unhelpful.

I haven't used Twitter or X, but based on the image, that's the keyboard. See the blue GIF icon? Likely X's picker. The dark gray one below it is probably the keyboard. Could be Samsung because I see the same thing in Samsung Keyboard, SwiftKey, and Gboard.

I’d rather tax the rich and let the people decide what to do with their money than trust all billionaires to do the right things.

This particular person is on a mission to do to malaria what science and governments did to smallpox, eliminate it from existence forever. You don’t spend 80 billion dollars to save on your taxes. He’s no perfect saint, but there are rich people who are more selfish.

The part of the poster that says, “Time to install your update”, as in, “inject you with microchips from Microsoft and here’s a picture of Bill Gates in case what I’m saying isn’t clear”? Is that the believable one?

I wonder what the motivation would be to inject people with salt water. We’ll go to the expense of getting needles, people trained on how to use them, rent sites, sanitation, and I guess all of that so people can feel like their governments are doing good jobs and hope nobody involved tells anyone.