To add to what you’re saying: To be fair, most of the lawsuit I don’t really agree with, but maybe it’s just laying it on thick.

Part of the argument is them trying to separate the Steam “Store” from the Steam “Gaming Platform”, and in many ways that’s obviously not possible. But they say that because of Steam’s monopolistic-ish position, publishers can’t not be on the “gaming platform”, because it’s where most people want their games, or else they’ll lose out of a large chunk of money. (And without it, these games likely would not be made in the first place.) Thus Steam can force these unfair terms on developers.

There was also this portion on discounts that was quite revealing:

20. For example, Valve has set up visibility in its Steam Store to focus on games that are nominally “on sale” to gamers. Knowing that the best way to reach their audience is through discounting, game publishers must artificially inflate their list prices so they have headroom for discounting. But the “sale” price is not consistently available, and therefore some gamers pay an artificially inflated list price for the game. These supracompetitive prices increase Valve’s cut, force gamers to overpay, and prevent publishers from setting the most efficient game prices they could in the first place. Even worse, these supracompetitive prices are transmitted across the broader market by the contractual restraints discussed above.

They’re admitting to inflating games’ prices, so they can then offer a fake discount that’s closer to the actual price they actually wanted the game to be. And then they complain when Valve doesn’t let them list a game on sale for an extended period of time, just so they can essentially scam people. (Probably, once again, standard in the industry and elsewhere, but I feel like that’s gotta be banned by EU pro-consumer laws.)

The EU can and should force Steam to get rid of the MFN clause. All Valve needs to do is to let competing stores price games cheaper than on Steam. (So long as Steam services are not involved with that off-Steam purchase.)

There’s still plenty of benefits Steam provides to customers that many may choose it over a different store even if they could get the game for cheaper. And Steam also provides developers with tools that make Steam worth it, like Steam networking and cloud saves. As Gabe Newell famously said about piracy, but I believe this applies in this case too, it’s simply a service problem.

And this was only mentioned in a footnote in the complaint document, though I saw it many times when browsing through the earlier lawsuit documents. Interestingly, this sounds like it should already be illegal in the EU, as per the Wikipedia link you gave.

How clear is the wording? Is it possible to find the text of the terms / agreement / contract online? Or is it covered by an NDA?

This is true! Vintage Story does it, for example. They’re doing okay from what I can tell, but it’s more of an exception. It’s pretty clear that they are losing out on potential customers. Notably, you also lose out on regional pricing, which is pretty difficult to set up yourself. If you’re creating games for a living, you don’t have much of a choice about whether you put your game on Steam.

Once you do get everything set up and working, all you’d need to federate is to start subscribing to some communities. If you’re not “listening”, you won’t “hear” anything.

That probably counts as a privileged page, as in something uBlock Origin can’t access or modify.

Mozilla has probably been running another “experiment”, meaning not every user is affected. In the past they claimed it’s not advertisements because they are “continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox”. (Bullshit.) If you go to Settings > Home, you disable anything you don’t want to see, or just set your home page to a blank page, period.

Apologies, I don’t understand. Is any modern Linux distro lacking “general usability” or applications? Anyway, for Bazzite, there’s a bunch of ways to install software. (Though I haven’t used it myself.) I’m also not sure what you’re looking for when you’re saying “support”. Good documentation? A helpful community? Continued active development?

Just because there’s a strong focus on gaming doesn’t mean the distro would suddenly do bad at everything else, especially… general home/office use. Linux is good with that across the board. I hope I didn’t misunderstand. Please explain.

JavaScript is already sandboxed. You can only execute functions where there is an actual API defined by the browser to do so, for example Date.getTime(). There is / should be no way to get, say, your device ID. (With the exception of unpatched exploits that allow executing arbitrary code. But keep in mind browsers are likely one of the if not the most security tested software.)

What you linked to here appears to specific to Google Tag Manager in a way that I don’t fully understand, but is not related to how websites usually execute JavaScript code.

Can you link to a source that confirms this information can be collected with JavaScript (with browser comparison, ideally)? That seems outrageous if it was actually possible.

What is meant by “sensitive information” here? Browsers can’t just willy-nilly access your local files or something like that. The one thing I can think of is using JavaScript to collect information that can be used to identify you. (Is that “sensitive”? I’d put that in “identifying information”.) My honest suggestion is to keep using NoScript and just allow as few domains as possible. The next best option is to stop using websites that break without JavaScript when there’s no reason why they’d need it.

I can imagine there being a plugin that spoofs some common ways that allow sites to identify you cross-sessions / browser / websites without your consent, but blocking JavaScript (by default) is likely one of the best ways to reduce the amount of information collected about you. When you do find such a plugin, check out one of the “browser fingerprint” testing sites to see how unique your fingerprint is.

(That is, if I even understood the request properly in regards to the “sensitive information” bit.)

There is something called “local storage” that allows applications to store more information than just a cookie. Cookies are sent to the server, while local storage, as the name implies, stays local. (That doesn’t mean that this data can’t be sent to the server via JavaScript.) But local storage makes it possible to make 100% offline applications if the whole webpage is cached / downloaded (assuming no online functionality is required).

edit: As for deleting this, if I click on the lock icon in the address bar in Firefox, I have an option to clear cookies and site data for the current site. I assume the “site data” is the local storage I mentioned. If you’re using a Chrome based browser, you can probably google how to do the same thing.

Harsh, to who? It only affects me. A community for sharing art (among other things) that allows AI garbage is not something I want on my feed. I want my eyes on real art that humans have put actual effort into.

Whelp. I could’ve looked at the source instead of taking apart the image. It says so, there.

I also checked the rules, and it says nothing about AI art. (Which in my opinion, it should be disallowed. Proper artists need to get that much needed recognition and support now more than ever.) Apologies for the incorrect report. I will just block the community and move on.

Yeah no, that’s definitely AI. I spotted a couple of flaws and probably missed a bunch, too.

• Left tree: Trunk is thicker further up than further down, the trunk sorta blends into the background.
• There’s a pole that’s behind the buildings, unsure if connected, but out of place.
• The closest pole has a wire coming from the right that’s not connected to anywhere.
• Also in general the posts have no consistent structure at the top.
• The top window in the closest building doesn’t make sense. It’s connected to the edge on one side but not the other. There’s some sort of sheet (let’s presume it’s in the room) that has a clear corner and white stripe at the bottom but then blends into nothing.
• The curb on the far side of the crosswalk doesn’t line up with itself.
• In the middle of the picture, there’s a tree that grows out of a building, and one that doesn’t appear to have any leaves.

I have a bigender partner who identifies and presents more femme online and more masc in real-life.
However you feel about and choose to express yourself is valid.

Hasn’t it become standard practice for mass-reports on big social media platforms to automatically shut down accounts and content, with human moderators (sometimes) undoing such after the fact?

I happened across a podcast episode that was about AI, that I was listening to with friends. I don’t know if you want to take away anything from it but I figured I’d mention it here in case anyone wants to. Look for Serious Inquiries Only episode 477, “Debunking Bad AI Research, and Bad Coverage of AI Research”. For you it might not be super interesting, since it’s trying to explain the matter to those who might not already know much, debunking some bad studies, but towards the end they talk about the environmental impact. And this is with two experts, I believe.

One thing that pops up there is that training a “moderately large” model requires produces twice the CO₂ output of an average American over their entire lifetime. They mention water usage is really bad, too. And “moderately large” refers to what a University research team might be cooking up. Big companies have magnitudes more environmental impact from training their huge models.

(There is also a part 2, with the followup episode.)

How about dashing (and other cool Celeste features), thigh highs (with pride variants), having cute moths around, …?

Can I interest you in the Create: Estrogen mod? (some assembly required)