Not that I necessarily support our various foreign wars, but how is that in anyway an indicator of the death of US democracy?
If a majority of people vote to violently oppress someone or declare an unjust war, then that's still democracy. After all, Democracy is "the worst form of government except for all of the others." The vote featured in Derrick Bell's "The Space Traders" is simultaneously heinous and democratic.
This isn't really true in principle. Windows probably releases new versions faster than it needs to, but there's still fundamental changes in hardware, security, and stability that continue to happen. Old hardware becomes obsolete and code built specifically for that hardware becomes needless bloat. More efficient and safe coding practices are developed over time to produce software which runs better and uses hardware more efficiently. New vulnerabilities and attacks continue to pop up which require more and more work to defend against, for an ever increasingly small user base as time continues past a point of official support. It's far easier to protect people across one or two relatively modern operating systems than it is to try and use a twenty year old codebase to protect against attacks that weren't even possible on machines of the time.
There's a reason why free operating systems like various Linux flavors also receive new versions and patches just like Windows even though those aren't selling the new version for profit.
Now does Microsoft release new versions completely because of these reasons, and do they successfully execute on promises of improvement in all of these areas? Of course not, they tend to be bumbling oafs in a lot of instances, but it's incorrect to say that there's no reason for new versions of software to replace old ones.
This is a strawman. The actual quote from the article is:
"The motivation for these behaviors is obvious: if users are repairing or recycling their iDevices, that means fewer device sales and more customers wandering outside of Apple's ecosystem."
You've conveniently dropped the second portion. Apple is happy to allow users to keep old devices so long as they are spending hundreds of dollars on overpriced official Apple repair services whenever they have an issue with their device. (Through which they push to sell more devices. If you want copious examples of official Apple stores saying something easy "can't be fixed" and that the customer should buy a new device, check out Louis Rossman.) The article is clearly ascribing Apple's resistance to right to repair to a fear of losing money from a variety of its different revenue streams, not the single metric of how many phones are sold.
Additionally, if we look at Apple as a "fashion brand," then that suggests that they release new products every year to create a haves and have-nots divide in order to sell more products out of fear of social stigma. It's hardly the peak of fashion to still be rocking an iPhone 5C or an iPhone 6. Which, they do, so I think we definitely should view them as a fashion brand! However, that just paints them and their greed in an even worse light in my opinion as a company who wants to weaponize trends and toxic human behavior to sell as many overpriced devices as possible.
The reason Apple is providing long term security updates is extremely simple: marketing. Being able to say that a phone will get 7 years of updates makes it seem like a great investment to someone looking to buy a new device, even though the percentage of customers who will actually continue to use a device for that long is vanishingly small. It doesn't cost much for them to roll out the occasional security or stability patch in the grand scheme of things, and it puts the idea in people's head that maybe, just maybe, they'll use that $1100 iPhone 13 Pro Max SuperCharged Babykisser for seven years even though almost none of them actually will.
I don't think our goal is eliminating abuse, as that seems fairly impossible. Either sellers will abuse buyers or buyers will abuse sellers, or both. But more granularity in the system might be more beneficial for more actors compared to the current system. I think there are plenty of valid arguments for why the current system is as good as we're going to get in balancing the concerns of everyone involved, but I think that's an argument that needs to be made and backed up by some numbers. I don't think we should dismiss possible solutions just because they would have problems, because the current system has problems. We should give some concrete justification about why the potential problems of an alternative solution outweigh the existing problems (or at least are so insignificant an improvement as to not merit the work of changing things.)
I don't really agree with the assertion that the game in question was priced too high. It's 9 dollars, which is pretty competitive for Indie games with comparable review scores and visual quality. It's not a genre I am familiar with enough to comment on how the intended audience feels about it, but the consistent number of positive reviews even before surge generated by the news about the game suggests it's not a particularly bad price.
Comparing it with other titles in the "More like this" page, its price seems to be lower than most and higher than a small few titles that Steam considers its competitors. There's also not a lot of room to lower the price to the point where refunding it isn't worth it: if you're willing morally to refund a game you completed and enjoyed for 9 dollars, are you going to not do so at 6? 5? 3? There's some price point where the initial gain is just not worth the (minimal) effort it takes to refund something, but we don't have a clue where it is. (And there's only a slim margin for it to be such that is a fair price for the amount of work the developer put into the game.)
Additionally, the fact that, in theory, a lower price would have avoided the issue doesn't make it okay for people to abuse the system. It's sort of like getting mugged. There might have been things you could have done to avoid getting mugged, but that doesn't mean it's your fault you got mugged and that we shouldn't do anything to address the larger mugging problem.
There're even more issues at play here than just the scale of moderation and the subjectivity of content. Mathematically, you can't ever make a perfect moderation system that's fully automated.
Content like photos and video are actually just a form of code: data stored on a computer that is executed (usually through a separate program) that creates a result.
Unfortunately, the noncomputability of the halting problem, or more precisely Rice's theorem, says that (under any model of computation that can be modeled by a Turing machine, i.e. every one we have currently) for a given property, it is impossible to determine all of the code which will exhibit that property when run. That is, if you have a computer program whose job is to look at pieces of code and determine if they have a certain piece of behavior, you will ALWAYS have false positives, false negatives, or your moderation program will crash. Another way to phrase this is that it's mathematically impossible to make perfect antivirus software.
This is independent of the amount of memory or computation time you have: if you have infinite memory and arbitrarily much finite computation time, you still can't do it. Even quantum computers are still bound by this restriction.
As a corollary of this, even if we somehow, magically, were able to completely describe all objectionable images, videos, etc. using some guidelines, we could never actually write a fully automated computer program to implement these guidelines and determine whether or not a particular piece of content was inside that list with perfect accuracy. (Unless the "guidelines" were either "everything is objectionable" or "nothing is objectionable.") We would always flag some non-objectionable content, or allow some objectionable content, or some mixture of the two. No matter how strongly worded a law or judgement ordering a company to create such a system is.
Not something I've fully thought through the pros and cons of, but what about a price-dependent refund system? I.e., the amount of money the game costs determines how much time before your refund is no longer automatic. A five dollar game gives you thirty minutes, a fifteen dollar game is an hour, 30 bucks is an hour and a half, 60 bucks is the full two hours. Or whatever specific numbers you want to pick.
This could be based off of either MSRP (i.e. non-sale price) or the price paid at time of purchase.
On the post: The Night The United States Supreme Court Cancelled Law
Re: 5-4 or 6-3, Same outcome?
Not that I necessarily support our various foreign wars, but how is that in anyway an indicator of the death of US democracy?
If a majority of people vote to violently oppress someone or declare an unjust war, then that's still democracy. After all, Democracy is "the worst form of government except for all of the others." The vote featured in Derrick Bell's "The Space Traders" is simultaneously heinous and democratic.
On the post: Apple Training Videos Highlight Company's Adversarial Stance On Affordable Repairs
Re: planned obsolescence
This isn't really true in principle. Windows probably releases new versions faster than it needs to, but there's still fundamental changes in hardware, security, and stability that continue to happen. Old hardware becomes obsolete and code built specifically for that hardware becomes needless bloat. More efficient and safe coding practices are developed over time to produce software which runs better and uses hardware more efficiently. New vulnerabilities and attacks continue to pop up which require more and more work to defend against, for an ever increasingly small user base as time continues past a point of official support. It's far easier to protect people across one or two relatively modern operating systems than it is to try and use a twenty year old codebase to protect against attacks that weren't even possible on machines of the time.
There's a reason why free operating systems like various Linux flavors also receive new versions and patches just like Windows even though those aren't selling the new version for profit.
Now does Microsoft release new versions completely because of these reasons, and do they successfully execute on promises of improvement in all of these areas? Of course not, they tend to be bumbling oafs in a lot of instances, but it's incorrect to say that there's no reason for new versions of software to replace old ones.
On the post: Apple Training Videos Highlight Company's Adversarial Stance On Affordable Repairs
Re:
This is a strawman. The actual quote from the article is:
"The motivation for these behaviors is obvious: if users are repairing or recycling their iDevices, that means fewer device sales and more customers wandering outside of Apple's ecosystem."
You've conveniently dropped the second portion. Apple is happy to allow users to keep old devices so long as they are spending hundreds of dollars on overpriced official Apple repair services whenever they have an issue with their device. (Through which they push to sell more devices. If you want copious examples of official Apple stores saying something easy "can't be fixed" and that the customer should buy a new device, check out Louis Rossman.) The article is clearly ascribing Apple's resistance to right to repair to a fear of losing money from a variety of its different revenue streams, not the single metric of how many phones are sold.
Additionally, if we look at Apple as a "fashion brand," then that suggests that they release new products every year to create a haves and have-nots divide in order to sell more products out of fear of social stigma. It's hardly the peak of fashion to still be rocking an iPhone 5C or an iPhone 6. Which, they do, so I think we definitely should view them as a fashion brand! However, that just paints them and their greed in an even worse light in my opinion as a company who wants to weaponize trends and toxic human behavior to sell as many overpriced devices as possible.
The reason Apple is providing long term security updates is extremely simple: marketing. Being able to say that a phone will get 7 years of updates makes it seem like a great investment to someone looking to buy a new device, even though the percentage of customers who will actually continue to use a device for that long is vanishingly small. It doesn't cost much for them to roll out the occasional security or stability patch in the grand scheme of things, and it puts the idea in people's head that maybe, just maybe, they'll use that $1100 iPhone 13 Pro Max SuperCharged Babykisser for seven years even though almost none of them actually will.
On the post: Indie Game Dev Decides To Leave Industry Due To Steam Returns On Short Game
Re: Re: Price-Dependent System
I don't think our goal is eliminating abuse, as that seems fairly impossible. Either sellers will abuse buyers or buyers will abuse sellers, or both. But more granularity in the system might be more beneficial for more actors compared to the current system. I think there are plenty of valid arguments for why the current system is as good as we're going to get in balancing the concerns of everyone involved, but I think that's an argument that needs to be made and backed up by some numbers. I don't think we should dismiss possible solutions just because they would have problems, because the current system has problems. We should give some concrete justification about why the potential problems of an alternative solution outweigh the existing problems (or at least are so insignificant an improvement as to not merit the work of changing things.)
I don't really agree with the assertion that the game in question was priced too high. It's 9 dollars, which is pretty competitive for Indie games with comparable review scores and visual quality. It's not a genre I am familiar with enough to comment on how the intended audience feels about it, but the consistent number of positive reviews even before surge generated by the news about the game suggests it's not a particularly bad price.
Comparing it with other titles in the "More like this" page, its price seems to be lower than most and higher than a small few titles that Steam considers its competitors. There's also not a lot of room to lower the price to the point where refunding it isn't worth it: if you're willing morally to refund a game you completed and enjoyed for 9 dollars, are you going to not do so at 6? 5? 3? There's some price point where the initial gain is just not worth the (minimal) effort it takes to refund something, but we don't have a clue where it is. (And there's only a slim margin for it to be such that is a fair price for the amount of work the developer put into the game.)
Additionally, the fact that, in theory, a lower price would have avoided the issue doesn't make it okay for people to abuse the system. It's sort of like getting mugged. There might have been things you could have done to avoid getting mugged, but that doesn't mean it's your fault you got mugged and that we shouldn't do anything to address the larger mugging problem.
On the post: Impossibility Of Content Moderation: Scientist Debunking Vaccine Myths Gets A YouTube Strike For Medical Misinfo
There're even more issues at play here than just the scale of moderation and the subjectivity of content. Mathematically, you can't ever make a perfect moderation system that's fully automated.
Content like photos and video are actually just a form of code: data stored on a computer that is executed (usually through a separate program) that creates a result.
Unfortunately, the noncomputability of the halting problem, or more precisely Rice's theorem, says that (under any model of computation that can be modeled by a Turing machine, i.e. every one we have currently) for a given property, it is impossible to determine all of the code which will exhibit that property when run. That is, if you have a computer program whose job is to look at pieces of code and determine if they have a certain piece of behavior, you will ALWAYS have false positives, false negatives, or your moderation program will crash. Another way to phrase this is that it's mathematically impossible to make perfect antivirus software.
This is independent of the amount of memory or computation time you have: if you have infinite memory and arbitrarily much finite computation time, you still can't do it. Even quantum computers are still bound by this restriction.
As a corollary of this, even if we somehow, magically, were able to completely describe all objectionable images, videos, etc. using some guidelines, we could never actually write a fully automated computer program to implement these guidelines and determine whether or not a particular piece of content was inside that list with perfect accuracy. (Unless the "guidelines" were either "everything is objectionable" or "nothing is objectionable.") We would always flag some non-objectionable content, or allow some objectionable content, or some mixture of the two. No matter how strongly worded a law or judgement ordering a company to create such a system is.
On the post: Indie Game Dev Decides To Leave Industry Due To Steam Returns On Short Game
Price-Dependent System
Not something I've fully thought through the pros and cons of, but what about a price-dependent refund system? I.e., the amount of money the game costs determines how much time before your refund is no longer automatic. A five dollar game gives you thirty minutes, a fifteen dollar game is an hour, 30 bucks is an hour and a half, 60 bucks is the full two hours. Or whatever specific numbers you want to pick.
This could be based off of either MSRP (i.e. non-sale price) or the price paid at time of purchase.
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