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HaiZhung

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HaiZhung ,

What many posters in this thread fail to realize is that there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise transcends human existence in 2024.

Of course, Gaben as their CEO has the last say in it. And he’s just a good guy. But wait, aren’t there other companies that have good guys as their CEO and yet the enshittification persists?

The profound reason is that Valve is not a publicly traded company. They have no obligation to any investors to make number go up. They are a private company, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If they stay flat and keep paying their employees, that’s totally fine, and there is 0 pressure on them to change anything. THAT‘s why Valve seems like such a different company compared to everything else that’s out there.

Of course it’s still a choice to go public or not, and they have made the right call (for us consumers).

HaiZhung ,

Good man. I agree 100% - the more warming we get, the bigger of a difference each .1 degree makes. So we should only get more aggressive about climate change the worse it gets instead of giving up.

HaiZhung ,

Ain’t that the truth

HaiZhung ,

This is the correct answer, this shit is „your carbon footprint“ all over again

HaiZhung ,

AfD politics violate the constitution in numerous ways, and the German institute for human rights says the party could be banned:

euronews.com/…/should-germany-ban-afd-what-impact…

Politically, it’s of course a risky maneuver, but the correct one if you ask me.

HaiZhung ,

Of course it is complex. A few points:

If you ban a party in Germany, it’s automatically bans all „clones“ of that party, and all of its members in high functions can’t participate in these clones. Failure to comply would lead to an immediate ban of the clone. While I agree that eventually, a new far right with other people will probably form, it would take years for them to reorganize and they would have to be extremely careful. I believe that a ban would probably yield at least 10 years of far-right free politics.

Appeasement of the far right has failed every time in history, they will cannibalize every attempt to include them in any sort of „rational“ discourse. Banning parties is a lever that exists precisely because of Germany‘s history. IMHO it sends a strong message to all the non-far-right people (of which there are approx. 60-70%) that bullshit will not be tolerated.

In contrast, doing nothing signals that what the AfD is doing is fine and will move the discourse farther and farther right.

Stopping funding and preventing them from entering the Parliament is precisely what a ban would do, so I am not sure why the difference is between that and what you are suggesting.

Previously Secret Memo Laid Out Strategy for Trump to Overturn Biden’s Win (www.nytimes.com)

A lawyer allied with President Donald J. Trump first laid out a plot to use false slates of electors to subvert the 2020 election in a previously unknown internal campaign memo that prosecutors are portraying as a crucial link in how the Trump team’s efforts evolved into a criminal conspiracy....

HaiZhung ,

This is not a trial of trump.

This is a trial of the American justice system.

HaiZhung ,

France has been importing more electricity than exporting in 2022 because their nuclear reactors can’t perform in the heat resulting from climate change. And this is more likely to happen again as each year becomes hotter.

I’m not sure where this fetishism for France‘s nuclear energy is coming from.

HaiZhung ,

EG here: euractiv.com/…/electricity-exporter-for-42-years-…

HaiZhung ,

How do you even define that? Nuclear is more expensive than renewables, if you factor in construction and maintenance cost. It only works because it has been massively subdisidized.

Or do you have some source that this energy is „cheaper“? Please be aware that France caps their electricity prices internally and subsidizes them with taxes (which is fine, but makes the prices incomparable to other countries).

HaiZhung ,

Im quoting 2022 because this was last year. As in, the most recent year.

I don’t disagree that we should have phased out coal instead of nuclear first. But what has happened has happened. I do disagree that we need a „nuclear renessaince“ now, because neither the economics nor the timelines work out at this point in time. Solar and wind is cheaper, faster to build, and more flexible as you can iterate on their designs MUCH more quickly than nuclear plants. That’s the main reason why solar panel efficiency is going through the roof.

Why cannibalize the investments in what obviously works?

HaiZhung , (edited )

As far as I can tell, there is no time with no sun AND no wind: ec.europa.eu/eurostat/…/index.php?title=Energy_st…

In fact, there are multiple studies claiming that you can very well supply base load with renewables, for instance this one:

ceem.unsw.edu.au/…/MarkBaseloadFallacyANZSEE.pdf

One other problem with nuclear is that it has to run at a fixed output level, and can’t be scaled down if there is eg. lots of solar power being generated. In this case, you have to scale down renewables to make sure you can use the nuclear power, which makes it clash with the eventual goal to power everything with renewables.

HaiZhung ,

Nuclear plants are cooled with river water, and that water is getting too hot:

reuters.com/…/warming-rivers-threaten-frances-alr…

HaiZhung ,

Any sources on any of that? That’s a lot of „you just know that“ information, and I do consider myself well informed. I am not from France though.

Anyway:

  1. neither of those points addresses the costs of energy production I quoted above. Those are, to the best of my knowledge, approximately correct. It may very well have been that nuclear was competitive in the past, it isn’t anymore.
  2. getting scammed by some middle man seems to be a fate that all modern democracies share, though who the middle man is varies country by country :-)
  3. I consider the marginal cost thing to be one of the best acts from the EU. Maybe not in France, but overall it rewards the most efficient energy producer massively, which currently is solar. Those companies can use the excess money to reinvest.
HaiZhung ,

Good Post overall, no need to attack my sanity though :-)

I agree with most of this in principle. Having 100% base load with renewables is an aspirational goal - for now - but nevertheless achievable, I believe. You will find that the sun does, in fact, always shine (somewhere on the planet), and that wind almost always blows (somewhere on the planet). Admittedly, wind is more prevalent throughout the day than sun, but still.

There have been recent discoveries of superconductors that might help transport the electricity where it is needed. But again, this is all in the medium to long term future.

But of course, short to medium term, and long term too, energy storage will play a huge role. I expect massive development in this area, as this is being iterated on anyway, eg. for EVs.

HaiZhung ,

An actual fascist dictatorship IS the real threat. What do you think trump will do if he wins?

HaiZhung ,

You mean what republicans are doing extremely consistently?

Google employee responds to all the negative feedback WEI, (google drm the web) (github.com)

Hey everyone, thank you for your patience, and thank you to everyone who engaged constructively. It is clear based on the feedback we’ve received that a bigger discussion needs to take place, and I’m not sure my personal repository is the best place to do that - we are looking for a better forum and will update when we have...

HaiZhung , (edited )

Well, looking at these comments, one thing is clear: the discussion is not going to happen here. I don’t think there was even one comment of substance, which is unfortunate, since the explainer in OP reads sincere to me.

Maybe instead of jumping on the „google bad“ bandwagon, it would be helpful if people point out the specific issues that they are seeing with this.

As it stands, we might just take literally any commit to chromium and paste the same comments below it.

Edit: since posting this, the comments have considerably improved, I love some of the discussion. Thanks!

HaiZhung , (edited )

I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that. If you are outraged by something, I think it’s unrealistic to expect other people to explain to you why there is nothing to be outraged about. Otherwise you might as well just walk through life outraged by anything.

Rather, it is your responsibility to take a deep breath and ask yourself, what is it really you are concerned about? And if you deem that serious enough, convince others.

HaiZhung ,

The explainer explicitly mentions that the proposal allows browser to ignore WEI and the web is intended to work without. It even points out that there will be a continuous group of chrome users of ~5% that have the feature disabled.

If website owners rely on this feature, they are hurting chrome users just as much as other browsers.

HaiZhung ,

As a counterpoint, IMHO Google has the best track record regarding privacy of all the big tech firms. Googles data was never sold, leaked, or abused by employees as far as I can tell.

This is in stark contrast to companies like meta and twitter.

Maybe Google isn’t as good communicating that fact, but what is your reason for the distrust in this particular case?

HaiZhung ,

From what I can tell, out of all the big tech firms, Google goes to the greatest lengths preserving your privacy. You can even go to your profile settings right now and delete all your data. This was possible even before GDPR, so I am not sure how you get this picture.

HaiZhung ,

Great comment! I don’t understand the proposal well enough to answer that, but I still would like to commend you on taking the time to look into this and writing it up.

HaiZhung ,

Isn’t it already effectively very easy to force a specific browser on a website? The explainer touches on that, browser fingerprinting is so powerful to date that you can already easily tell individuals and their browsers apart. What’s changing with this proposal wrt your examples?

HaiZhung ,

As pointed out in another comment, the proposal explicitly states that web sites have to function without this feature; and chrome itself will keep it disabled for a random 5% of users.

HaiZhung ,

Makes sense to me!

HaiZhung ,

Google does not sell data to advertisers, that is incorrect.

You are correct that Google cross-correlates some data for integrating features, but as I said, you can just go and delete your data, and it will continue to work just fine.

Maybe it’s also useful to remind oneself that you do get lots of services from Google for free - and considering they are free (!), imho, Google is taking about the most ethical approach it economically can. (Ie., they will use your data to tune full integration of their products and serve ads for you, BUT you can always opt out and delete it)

I fail to see how meta and twitter are so much different in the range of products they offer. Meta e.g. operates the larges private messaging app on the planet and they DID sell (or accidentally leak, however you want to put it, see Cambridge analytica) their data.

HaiZhung ,

I do not see how my advice applies to my own comment. To me, this proposal is exactly like all other proposals, I don’t really think about it at all, and I don’t have the context or the background knowledge to judge its usefulness.

But okay, if I try to understand it: this seems to be an attempt at stopping the cat-and-mouse game between browser fingerprinting tech and browser obfuscation tech, and instead make it - optionally - possible to identify yourself as a „real“ user. You can opt out, and I sincerely doubt that Google would lock out users that will opt out or use another browser. Why? Because they would be leaving free ad money on the table, and they don’t do that.

So I don’t really see how that changes the ways of the internet, since fingerprinting is being done already, so, I guess, I don’t really care for this proposal one way or the other.

HaiZhung ,

Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone just agreed on everything? :-)

Don’t get me wrong, I am the first one to criticize Google when they mess up, but recently I have observed that piling on Google is just appears to be en vogue. I think it is important to understand what you are criticizing/outraged by, otherwise you are letting yourself be manipulated somewhat too easily.

I, for instance, don’t fully penetrate the WEI proposal, I admit. All the more I am befuddled by the overwhelming news cycle this generates, and I can’t help but wonder … why?

Anyway, when I wrote the top level comment, all other comments were just “suck it google” in various flavors, and I was disappointed by the lack of depth in the discussion.

In the meantime, this has changed, see my edit.

HaiZhung ,

You won’t be unable to go, you’ll just have a stopover after 300 miles. You know, like you normally would, anyways.

HaiZhung ,

The fact that it was challenged at all is a huge step in the right direction. Couple of years ago, the FTC wouldn’t even bat an eye with these mergers. The new chair, Lina Khan seems to be determined to reduce the power of monopolies.

Which is a good thing, if this isn’t obvious.

The problem lies with the complete out of touch judges now.

HaiZhung ,

Doesn’t seem like all is lost, since the bill will have to be renegotiated in certain details. However, as an outsider I find it really hard to judge if the bill is really “poorly drafted”. “Protecting farmers” usually sounds like a cop out for watering down stronger rules on land use to me. The farmers will be fine, our planet won’t.

HaiZhung ,

Even then it might not work. If you use this “guide” for arguing with your SO, you are in for a bad time.

People don’t want to be refuted, they want to be heard.

HaiZhung ,

This is absolutely not how it is taught in Germany. If anything, our education concerning the WW2 era is what is making germany lag so far behind the other EU states when it comes to far right votes.

We are taught at length the underlying issues that were plaguing germany after WW1; social, economical, political, and how all of them contributed together to the rise of the third reich.

That’s why Germans are also very very wary when we spot developments in our country (or other countries, for that matter) that mirror the conditions in that time.

HaiZhung ,

It’s a global issue though. Capitalism is demanding cheap labor fodder, and sooner or later societies will crack. See how in the whole western world, which has a comparatively high living standard, fascism Is on the rise?

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