They’re not that different any longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883

I have no idea how accurate this info on FindLaw.com is, but according to it, you don’t need a lawyer in small claims court (in the US). And according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_claims_court there are many other countries with similar small claim courts: “Australia, Brazil, Canada, England and Wales, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Greece, New Zealand, Philippines, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Nigeria and the United States”. I know the list of countries is not even close to covering a large amount of Steam users, but I suspect that us Europeans are covered in other ways, so there’s that.

The Wikipedia page also mentions the lawyer thing, by the way:

A usual guiding principle in these courts is that individuals ought to be able to conduct their own cases and represent themselves without a lawyer. Rules are relaxed but still apply to some degree. In some jurisdictions, corporations must still be represented by a lawyer in small-claims court.

And I don’t think you need to sue Valve in the US. I think they’re required to have legal representation in the countries in which they operate, which should enable you to sue them “locally” in many cases. Again, not an expert, so I’m making quite a few assumptions here.

Yeah, you’re right. Sorry. I’ve edited my comment to reflect that. I didn’t read OP’s image but rather the news post by Valve on Steam, but missed the part that said: “the updated SSA now provides that any disputes are to go forward in court instead of arbitration”.

it’s certainly not GOOD for Steam users to not be able to complain without lawyering up.

But doesn’t the change open up for litigation in small claims court? (Again, I’m in no way knowledgeable in US law, so I’m just asking.)

If, for example, I want to return a game in accordance with the rules and they won’t let me, I’m not gonna lawyer up and sue them from the other side of the Atlantic.

While supposedly being a lot cheaper than litigation, arbitration isn’t free either. Besides, arbitration makes it near-impossible to appeal a decision, and the outcome won’t set binding legal precedent. Furthermore, arbitration often comes with a class action waiver. Valve also removed that from the SSA.

I’m far from an expert in law, especially US law, but as I understand it, arbitration is still available (if both parties agree, I assume), it’s just not a requirement anymore [edit: nevermind, I didn’t understand it]. I’m sure they’re making this move because it somehow benefits them, but it still seems to me that consumers are getting more options [edit: they’re not] which is usually a good thing.

but chose bash because it made the most sense, that bash is shipped with most linux distros out of the box and one does not have to install another interpreter/compiler for another language.

Last time I checked (because I was writing Bash scripts based on the same assumption), Python was actually present on more Linux systems out of the box than Bash.

Enterprise licensing for self-hosted setups is priced per chunk of 64 GB of RAM in your cluster. I.e. if you run Elastic on 2 machines of 32 GB RAM each, you pay for 1 node. It sounds like there may have been some poor communication going on, because they definitely don’t base the pricing for self-hosted setups on the number of employees or anything like that.

They’re also not super uptight about you going over the licensing limit for a while. We’ve been running a couple of licenses short since we scaled our cluster up a while back. Our account manager knows and doesn’t care.

I can dig both, but I much prefer precision platformers.

I think they vastly underestimate how many things Meta tracks besides ad tracking. They’re likely tracking how long you look at a given post in your feed and will use that to rank similar posts higher. They know your location, what wifi network you’re on and will use that to make assumptions based on others on the same network and/or in the same location. They know what times you’re browsing at and can correlate that with what’s trending in the area at those times, etc.

I have no doubt that their algorithm is biased towards all that crap, but these kinds of investigations need to be more informed in order for them to be useful.

Yup. I remember it from when Atlanta hosted the Olympic games some time in the '90s. Despicable.

Didn’t something similar happen in Turkey with Erdogan a few years back? Pretty sure he was accused of being behind it himself too; don’t know what the final verdict was though.

I think it’s a pretty common accusation, just like when a politician is attacked, someone will invariably suggest that they staged it in order to get more support.

I read every single word of it, twice, and I was laughing all the way through. I’m sorry you don’t like it, but it seems strange that you immediately assume that I haven’t read it just because I don’t agree with you.

This is such a fun and insightful piece. Unfortunately, the people who really need to read it never will.

Cloud Saves may be difficult to deal with, depending on what games you play.

Fair enough, and thanks for the offer. I found a demo on YouTube. It does indeed look a lot more reasonable than having an LLM actually write the code.

I’m one of the people that don’t use IntelliSense, so it’s probably not for me, but I can definitely see why people find that particular implementation useful. Thanks for catching and correcting my misunderstanding. :)

I’m closing in on 30 years too, started just around '95, and I have yet to see an LLM spit out anything useful that I would actually feel comfortable committing to a project. Usually you end up having to spend as much time—if not more—double-checking and correcting the LLM’s output as you would writing the code yourself. (Full disclosure: I haven’t tried Copilot, so it’s possible that it’s different from Bard/Gemini, ChatGPT and what-have-you, but I’d be surprised if it was that different.)

Here’s a good example of how an LLM doesn’t really understand code in context and thus finds a “bug” that’s literally mitigated in the line before the one where it spots the potential bug: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/ (see “Exhibit B”, which links to: https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307, which is the actual HackerOne report).

LLMs don’t understand code. It’s literally your “helpful”, non-programmer friend—on stereoids—cobbling together bits and pieces from searches on SO, Reddit, DevShed, etc. and hoping the answer will make you impressed with him. Reading the study from TFA (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3613904.3642596, §§5.1-5.2 in particular) only cements this position further for me.

And that’s not even touching upon the other issues (like copyright, licensing, etc.) with LLM-generated code that led to NetBSD simply forbidding it in their commit guidelines: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/112446618914747900

Edit: Spelling

I wouldn’t trust an LLM to produce any kind of programming answer. If you’re skilled enough to know it’s wrong, then you should do it yourself, if you’re not, then you shouldn’t be using it.

I’ve seen plenty of examples of specific, clear, simple prompts that an LLM absolutely butchered by using libraries, functions, classes, and APIs that don’t exist. Likewise with code analysis where it invented bugs that literally did not exist in the actual code.

LLMs don’t have a holistic understanding of anything—they’re your non-programming, but over-confident, friend that’s trying to convey the results of a Google search on low-level memory management in C++.

Nowhere does he say that he doesn’t believe in Wunterslash, so I’m cool with him.

I don’t think anyone should fear for their lives because of their opinions regardless of how stupid they are.

Edit: It’s pretty fucked up that this is somehow controversial…

That’s great. Don’t get why they’re not announcing it, but whatever, I’m glad it’s gone.

It’s not Mozilla’s CEO that’s doing anything shady here, it’s a partner company, OneRep.

Edit: And Mozilla is breaking up with OneRep because of it. (Just in case someone had missed that part.)