shinjiikarus

Host your own instance. When there is downtime it is your fault.

I partially agree for the GPU-side of things. But while there have been iPads without active cooling for over a decade now, there has never been a competitive, high performance laptop like the current MacBook Air build on x86. I know you are right theoretically and maybe it is a solvable challenge and the priorities were just different, but whatever ARM does, it seems to run cooler than x86. Even if it is only bigLITTLE or some other shortcut.

Technically you are right when saying:

and software can be compiled for anything.

But in practice software is compiled from source for the environment it will run on and Valve does seldomly have access to the source code of third parties. They generally have pre-compiled .exes and the accompanying files. If the developer chooses to recompile for different architectures, then valve will probably get a new compiled binary. But what about defunct developers or publishers who don’t want to invest any more development time in old software? Additionally: No, software as complex as games cannot always be compiled for anything without throwing ungodly amounts of errors. In these cases additional development would be needed, even if Valve had access to the source code and the rights to use or recompile it, which they probably don’t have for proprietary third-party software.

This is specifically a problem for valve’s immense back catalog, brand new games will probably release as a compatible binary.

And realistically Microsoft has a very good moment coming up in the next few years to effectively kill Steam: Valve only delivers pre-compiled files and does not have access to source code. Therefore Valve is not only stuck with a “Windows-like environment”, they are also shackled to x86. With Apple’s M-processors reigning supreme in the laptop space with insane values for performance-to-powerdraw (and in turn heat radiation and cooling requirements), the days of x86-by-default laptops are probably numbered and more manufacturers may want to switch to ARM, to avoid unfavorable comparisons to MacBooks. With Windows for ARM Microsoft can finally kill of all traces of Win32 in WinRT, as they tried for years and force everyone to use UWP-apps from the store exclusively on ARM. Apple does leave apps behind, when updating their operating systems on a regular basis, a similar move by Microsoft wouldn’t look totally unreasonable. The switch could even happen gradually, like Apple’s Rosetta translation layer, which runs x86 apps on arm great right now, but I don’t think it will be maintained forever and support for x86 apps on macOS will end one day. Microsoft could do the same for Windows for ARM. If this happens Valve will probably have the opportunity to install games as UWP-apps, but their back catalog of Win32 .exes becomes effectively worthless. But if Win32 .exes run great through some translation layer on linux, valve can continue to sell and support their back catalog on current hardware.

Facebook does get to decide how they store and encrypt their data. Apple and Signal have received court orders in the past, they did comply with, but there was just nothing than meta data zu turn over.

This is literally 1984’s double thinking: the people accusing other people of being woke and defining themselves as red-pilled (woken up to a reality) are in turn the most ignorant. They are accusing their enemy of having reached a state of mind they themselves claim to have reached, while they actually did not. Totally paradoxical.

Views are just a number in a database.

I hear there is another “to be maybe federated” social network currently making the rounds, we’re they could find a captive audience …

Not necessarily: Facebook has used a public-private-partnership with a German university to let them train the model on publicly available data, no matter the copyright status. The university is allowed to do this, since science enjoys a lot of defined rights, which rank higher than commercial copyright in Germany specifically (but I can imagine in other places as well). Facebook just received the model. This is obviously a ploy for plausible deniability and morally wrong, but it hasn’t been challenged in court yet and is believed to hold up currently. I can imagine OpenAI to be smart enough to have one or more layers of buffering between themselves and the dataset as well.

I hate Zucc’s guts, but he isn’t stupid. Elon on the other side I am not so sure about.

Anyone can release an app in Europe no prior approval required. I’m using over 250 apps currently on my phone and have used thousands others in the past. All of these apps either operated inside the law or at least “pending a lawsuit”, as is customary in silicon valley. The chances of this lawsuit materializing and Facebook thinking it would lose this hypothetical lawsuit must be astronomical if they chose not to launch.

Where to?