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Would be nice, but you know they'll carve out exceptions for themselves or use "unauthorized" messaging channels regardless with no consequences. It is _always_ "rules for thee, not for me" with politicians.

Oh don't worry your pretty little head, stack-ranking and churning are still _very_ in vogue with the tech companies.

Just your average Thursday in American capitalism!

Should companies be forced to retain talent of a certain age group? Should they be forced to retain less competent people? How do you expect this to work?

In Sweden,the Employment Protection Act, (LAS ) mandates 'last in - first out', meaning if there are layoffs due to over-capacity, people with seniority (years of employment) take priority for available positions. This is kind of partioned by profession-group, so yes you can fire nurses but keep doctors, or other way around. (Its been a while since I looked into it, but thats the rough gist of it)

Yes, and that makes working for a Swedish company so much better. You know you can’t just be shown the door at any moment after years of service and you get a lot of peace of mind which is worth more than the inflated salaries in the US. There is still a way to get rid of people, of course, but that goes a little like the Japanese do: just don’t give any important work to the person, or give them a bad performance review. People quickly understand they need to move on and they can do it with dignity.

That also means that a) it's harder for younger people to get a stable job b) the bare minimum of work not to get fired decreases over time, which is bad for productivity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider%E2%80%93outsider_theor...


If a significant share of your employees optimise in the sense of doing the least of work possible, without getting fired, you have a huge problem anyways. Usually, given the right conditions, people have intrinsic interest in doing a good job. Even if their motivation is more of the extrinsic type, there is more to it than getting paid.

Not everyone has an interesting or well-paid job. Or competent manager.

I have worked a fair share of that kind of jobs in the past. The colleagues on my level who cared about more than being paid and not getting fired where the absolute majority. People want to belong. They want to work. The ones who are the exception of the rule can be seeded out pretty quickly. You do not work for an organisation for 10+ years, wake up one day and switch to pure opportunism.

As for incompetent management, that problem can not be solved by churning workers. It can only be solved by better career paths and selection processes for management roles. The most intelligent people in an organisation are often more interested in getting things done than getting more power.


Yes, it only works in a high trust society where there’s plenty of jobs and people actually care about doing a good job (any company will have incentives, people can’t just sit around and do nothing, lots of social pressure too if you’re a slacker). But hey, that’s been mostly true (until recently, I hear immigrant unemployment is really high, while “local” unemployment is close to zero, but the official statistics sit in the middle at around 7% I think, much higher for the youth).

Or if you really want to get rid of someone you can buy them out with a severance deal that is better than standard and hope they take it.

In my experience those people get juicy positions doing nothing useful as they their competence long atrophied due to zero pressure to keep their knowledge up to date. Of course now companies hire "consultants" to work around to issue, so those get fired on a week's notice when money is tight. The warm bodies remain in their chairs until retirement. Inefficiency remains a huge problem in Swedish economy, but no one dares to touch these archaic rules (BTW no minimal wage in a European country, WTF?) due to political reasons, so the immigrants get the blame instead for everything.

Its a choice - work hard with minimal securities, get better salary. Heck, one can do that in many EU places when working as self-employed on contract (if legal), and be paid by just billed days, no vacations or sick days. Its actually pretty good career path in the beginning of one's career in software development, get more money and ie invest in a property. Then get more secure permanent position, coast more and enjoy and appreciate more those stability benefits.

But high economic performance this isn't. Adaptability of market to ever-changing world that certainly isn't neither. Europe is getting hammered by this and things will get much, much worse in upcoming years. We will have to revisit our comfy lazy attitude towards work, or end up being a stagnant place with 3rd world salaries and corresponding QoL.

Switzerland is doing things much better, its sort of in between both extremes and economy is reflecting this very well. But EU leaders egos will sooner accept poverty than that somebody figured out things better than them.


The Netherlands recognized the problems with the last-in-first-out system and requires that after a reorganization, the statistical distribution remains the same. How well that works is hard to say because the level of unemployment in The Netherlands has been quite low for many yours.

What I hear is that Switzerland is a bad example. Many people there struggle to make a living.


> What I hear is that Switzerland is a bad example. Many people there struggle to make a living.

The poverty rate in Switzerland has increased (source:https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/economic-soc...) but is defined as:

The poverty line is derived from the guidelines of the Conference for Social Welfare (SKOS). In 2024, it was on average CHF 2388 per month for a single person and CHF 4159 for two adults with two children.

I live in Zurich (by far the most expensive city) and while 2388 (or 4159) would be tight (depending on housing) it would still afford you a fairly comfortable life with access to top quality healthcare and public transport. Life quality wise one could argue that poverty in CH is a better option than a middle income in a lot of European countries.


Outside of Zurich rentals are not even that bad. You can easily get a nice apartment for 1500.- or even less. If one is struggling financially, rents are lower e.g. in Aarau district, starting from around 1000 and you can commute from there. Spending 1000 when the median salary is around 7000 is really not that bad. Low inflation in Switzerland meant other European locations are now at the swiss level or sometimes even above.

Yeah Switzerland has rather few poor people and very strong middle class. And poor ain't some US version of homeless/trailer park living, just lower income, less fancy clothes, shopping in cheaper supermarkets, less/no vacations abroad.

lol does all of European tech companies combined even make more than what the EU brings in from taxing US companies yet?

Why don't you research this and report back your findings. Learning is a cool experience, compared to prejudice.

Just for others, it seems this was already an article so it came up quickly, but for fines, not taxes.

"In 2024, the total income tax paid by all publicly listed European internet companies combined was approximately €3.2 billion. This total, which includes firms like SAP, Adyen, Spotify, and Zalando, was notably lower than the €3.8 billion in fines the EU collected from US tech giants in the same year"


China is hiring engineering talent. US is firing. Nobody forces anybody to do anything. Just pointing out the current state of affairs in the long life cycle of empire. As Ray Dalio says US is very late stage declining „financial capitalism”. While China is early stage aspiring „production capitalism”. It is not like late stage declining USSR needed as many engineers as it did when it wasnt collapsing. USA is a collapsing empire. China is growing.

from what I know, Chinese engineering grads are becoming food delivery couriers because there's not enough opportunity?

TBH this is a pretty good way of looking at it. Yeah we're seeing an explosion of vulnerabilities being found right now, but that (hopefully) means those vulnerabilities are all being cleaned up and we're entering a more hardened era of software. Minus the software packages that are being intentionally put out as exploits, of course. Maybe some might say it's too optimistic and naive, but I think you have a good point.

I agree with the prediction but not the timing. We won't enter a more hardened era of software until after a long period of security vulnerabilities.

Rivers caught on fire for a hundred years before the EPA was formed.


> we're entering a more hardened era of software

This is one force that operates. Another is that, in an effort to avoid depending on such a big attack surface, people are increasingly rolling their own code (with or without AI help) where they might previously have turned to an open source library.

I think the effect will generally be an increase in vulnerabilities, since the hand-rolled code hasn't had the same amount of time soaking in the real world as the equivalent OS library; there's no reason to assume the average author would magically create fewer bugs than the original OS library authors initially did. But the vulnerabilities will have much narrower scope: If you successfully exploit an OS library, you can hack a large fraction of all the code that uses it, while if you successfully exploit FooCorp's hand-rolled implementation, you can only hack FooCorp. This changes the economic incentive of funding vulnerabilities to exploit -- though less now than in the past, when you couldn't just point an LLM at your target and tell it "plz hack".


If I hand roll my logging library, I unlikely include automatic LDAP request based on message text (infamous Log4j vulnerability).

I’m seeing a lot of similar things during code reviews of substantially LLM-produced codebases now. Half-baked bad idea that probably leaked from training sets.

It would be very helpful to see even just one example of this syndrome posted so others could become better informed.

That particular vulnerability, sure, but there's lots of ways to make mistakes.

Typically when hand-rolling code you implement only what you require for your use-case, while a library will be more general purpose. As a consequence of doing more, have more code and more bugs.

Also, even seemingly trivial libraries can have bugs. The infamous leftpad library didn't handle certain edge doses properly.

For supply chain security and bug count, I'll take a focused custom implementation of specific features over a library full of generalized functionality.


Yes, a lot hinges on how little you can get away with implementing for your use case. If you have an XML config file with 3 settings in it, you probably won't need to implement handling of external entities the way a full XML parsing library would, which will close off an entire class of attendant vulnerabilities.

> Also, even seemingly trivial libraries can have bugs. The infamous leftpad library didn't handle certain edge doses properly.

This isn't really an argument in favour of having the average programmer reimplement stuff, though. For it to be, you'd have to argue that the leftpad author was unusually sloppy. That may be true in this specific case, but in general, I'm not persuaded that the average OSS author is worse than the average programmer overall. IMHO, contributing your work to an OSS ecosystem is already a mild signal of competence.

On the wider topic of reimplementation: Recently there was an article here about how the latest Ubuntu includes a bunch of coreutils binaries that have been rewritten in Rust. It turns out that, while this presumably reduced the number of memory corruption bugs (there was still one, somehow; I didn't dig into it), it introduced a bunch of new vulnerabilities, mostly caused by creating race conditions between checking a filesystem path and using the path for something.


This argument goes even further. If you have only 3 settings, why does it need to be an xml file?

ETA: I'm not saying it has to, I'm saying it's possible to imagine reasons that would justify this decision in some cases.

Because it might grow in future and you want to allow flexibility for that, because it might be the input to or output from some external system that requires XML, because your team might have standardised on always using XML config files, because introducing yet another custom plain text file format just creates unnecessary cognitive load for everyone who has to use it are real-world reasons I can think of.

But really I was just looking for a concrete example where I know the complexity of the implementation has definitely caused vulnerabilities, whether or not the choice to use it to solve the problem at hand was sensible. I have zero love for XML.


I’m not aware of any memory corruption bugs, but some weird cases where Linux, stuck with legacy 8-bit character handling for filenames and paths, lead to unesirable behavior with Rust’s native Unicode strings.

The race conditions were indeed TOCTOU bugs. In a sense, the bugs were a result of incorrectly handling shared mutable data, though in this case the mutations were external to Rust.

https://corrode.dev/blog/bugs-rust-wont-catch/


leftpad was a focused custom implementation of a specific feature, instead of a library full of generalized functionality. At the time it was pulled, the leftpad code (JavaScript, Node, NPM) was:

    module.exports = leftpad;
    
    function leftpad (str, len, ch) {
      str = String(str);
    
      var i = -1;
    
      ch || (ch = ' ');
      len = len - str.length;
    
    
      while (++i < len) {
        str = ch + str;
      }
    
      return str;
    }
A newer version was: https://github.com/left-pad/left-pad/blob/master/index.js which cached common cases and improved on the loop performance, before String.prototype.padStart() became a thing https://www.npmjs.com/package/string.prototype.padstart

Both old and new versions return a string longer than `len` if the padding char is multiple characters, e.g. leftpad('a', 3, '&&&&') will be longer than 3. That feels like it shouldn't happen.


I realize I may have made it seem like I was saying leftpad was a general-purpose library. My aside about it was to note that even widely used libraries can still have bugs. That’s orthogonal to their scope.

That's almost the first literal exercise with strings you'll learn with "The C prog lang 2nd ed" ebook. One of the most trivial cases among writting a word/space/tabs counting program (wc under Unix).

While agreeing, it also changes the mathematics of it: if a bad actor wants to hack me specifically now they have to write custom code that targets my software after figuring out what it _is_. This swaps the asymmetry around: instead of one bad actor writing an exploit for all the world (and those exploits being even harder to find), you have to hate me specifically.

Admittedly, not hard to do, but it could save some other folks.


Depends how cheap running llms against your software becomes in the future.

>there's no reason to assume the average author would magically create fewer bugs than the original OS library authors initially did

Have you read this old code? It's terrible and written with no care at all to security often in C. AI is much much better at writing code.


Do you have a specific library in mind? I think it would have to be an ancient, unmaintained C library.

But I think most OSS code isn't like this -- even C code born long ago, if it's still in wide use, has been hardened by now. Examples: Linux kernel, GNU userland, PostgreSQL, Python.


> even C code born long ago, if it's still in wide use, has been hardened by now. Examples: Linux kernel

There have been two LPE vulnerability and exploits in the Linux kernel announced today. After the one announced just last week. I don't think as much of the C code born long ago has been as carefully hardened as you think.

(Copy Fail 2 and Dirty Frag today, and Copy Fail last week)


Sure, I didn't mean to say that these examples are guaranteed 100% safe -- just that I trust them to be enormously more safe than software that accomplishes the same task that was hand-written by either a human or an an LLM last week.

One. "Copy Fail 2" and "Dirty Frag" are the same thing.

Are you sure? I'd really like that to be true, I felt bad finishing up work on Friday evening having applied the Dirty Frag mitigation to all our instances, but knowing (thinking?) the Copy Fail 2 vulnerability was still exploitable.

Technically there are two things that need to be fixed in the kernel indeed (and one of them was fixed already), but they're both under the "Dirty Frag" umbrella and the proposed mitigation to not allow the affected modules to load applies to them both.

And consideing the size of the kenel, I call this stupendously good.

You (anyone, not you personally) write that much code yourself and let's see how well you did in comparison.


But that's the attacker advantage. You can do things right a billion times and one mistake will still take you down.

New code will also use these tools from the get go, hopefully vastly reducing the vulnerabilities that make it to prod to begin with.

The future may be distributed quite unevenly here, as they say, with a divergence between a small amount of "responsible" code in systems which leverage AI defensively, and a larger amount of vibe-coded / prompt-engineered code in systems which don't go through the extra trouble, and in fact create additional risk by cutting corners on human review. I personally know a lot of people using AI to create software faster, but none of them have created special security harnesses a la Mozilla (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/05/mozil...).

To be fair, to some extent that’s up to us. Time to get cleaning, I guess.

You are avoiding intentionally to say ‘thanks to LLMs’ or is implicit? As all these recent mega bugs surface with lots of fuzzing and agentic bashing, right ?

Thank you for reminding us all that you AI bros are still the most obnoxious people there are.

Indeed, yet another proof, there's the part of HN crowd which is passive aggressive, dismissive, and dishonest in the very scientific possible sense. Won't make my day harder than it is, but is a very weak signal.

If I'm to be offended by a single thing in your post that is calling me (names) - is AI Bro. This was undeserved, and cannot be farther from the truth. Not to miss the fact your comment is entirely off topic, and perhaps you see AI bros everywhere now.


This seems like a very emotional response, which is off-topic for HN. Consider using facts and logic to make calm, rational arguments.

I don't disagree with most of your statement, but Valve has and continues to make lots of money from loot boxes in both CS and TF2. Just want to point out that they do do stuff like that too.

They also didn't/don't put a stop to the gambling sites, scams and non-scams, done with those lootboxes.

We have an epidemic of addiction to gambling in youth, where the arrow points at lootboxes as the gateway drug..


Valve is far from the first, only, or worst actors in this field. Skin lootboxes are not much more than a flex.

If there is one to blame for the gambling epidemic, look at EA and FIFA.


Valve is not literally the first but they played a big part in normalizing both lootboxes and micro transactions. Don't rewrite history just because you are a fan.

Not to mention their role in you not owning your games.


> Not to mention their role in you not owning your games.

I do use Steam to "purchase" games, and it irks me that they're still allowed to show "Buy" when in reality you're essentially leasing/renting the game, can't believe it's legal for them (and others) to trick people like this still.


A Steam purchase I have more confidence in than a physical game copy to survive. I trust Steam to honor its agreement with me more than I trust in myself and my feline overlords to keep a game CD alive.

In a previous timeline, this has led to me going on ebay to find CDs of a long lost game (EarthSiege 2), which I promptly uploaded to the Internet Archive as the one distributed by the current license-holder at the time had an older, unstable version with bugs and, more importantly, no audio and my own original copy got damaged to hell and beyond...

[1] https://archive.org/details/sierra-earth-siege-2


Sure, I agree with all of those things, but the fact still stands, Steam is actively lying to customers as the store pages say "Buy" and "Purchase", not "Rent" or "Lease", which are more accurate. You don't actually own the product.

Don't get me wrong, as mentioned, I use Steam and like Steam/Valve, but that move is a bit shitty regardless.


I think it would be extremely confusing for customers if the steam “Buy” button was renamed to “Rent” or “Lease”.

It would only be confusing because customers are currently being misled and the new label would no longer match their faulty mental model.

How could it be confusing when that's actually what happens? Imagine HN showed "Delete comment" instead of "Reply" under the comment input, don't you agree that be misleading?

how about "Purchase License"

When I check out on Steam it displays this text to me:

> A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam.


This is what I see on the checkout page: https://i.imgur.com/diOkyCM.png

There is a product in the cart, which is a game, and the button says "Purchase", no where does it say anywhere that it's a license (although that's obvious), nor that I don't actually "own" this game after I "purchase" it.

Sure, minor detail perhaps, but I'd still argue that something Steam could do better, and since the industry is lacking self-regulation about this, I'd argue more regulations are needed for this even.


It's on the cart page, before you check out. And I do agree that it should be much more front-and-center, rather than the sort of fine-print thing they have now.

https://imgur.com/a/D1LKUUi


What? Valve basically invented making money with skins and lootboxes, it started with TF2 hats. There is an insane amount of money in the CS2 skin market.

And I forgot to mention in-game currency.

I didn't say Valve is perfect. But they're definitely worth the money I spend there. Great service, proper support, regional pricing, and the list goes on. Everything works today. The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.

Did they screw up sometimes? Sure. And I'm from the days when Steam didn't exist. I remember the NoSTEAM game versions in shady sites, including Half-Life 2. Steam was hated with a passion back then. They won by ultimately providing great value and service.


I had a rough time with Proton a few years ago and ended up setting up my most recent gaming rig as a Windows 11 machine. In retrospect it was probably unfair to judge it on dime-a-dozen Humble Bundle leftovers from a decade ago when most of the effort is spent on supporting new releases.

But yeah... just this week I was traveling for work and my kid reached out wanting to play a little Deep Rock Galactic with me. I couldn't believe how easy everything was from my Ubuntu 24.04 laptop. Steam, proton, Discord, all of it just worked and I wouldn't even have realised it wasn't running natively if I hadn't noticed the extra proton download in the Steam client.

Very nice work.


honestly, older games from humble bundle usually work really really well in my experience. i’d say give the experience a go again if you have the time

> The work they've put on Proton/Linux gaming easily wins my support.

Lets not be naive here, this is the money they are saving in Windows licenses for the Steam Deck, and having their own store instead of Windows Store/XBox PC App.

Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.


There isn't much they can do to foster native Linux support beyond trying to increase the number of people gaming on Linux. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and you need to make the platform desirable to developers before they will start developing for it.

They can do an Apple/Sony/Google/Nintendo/Xbox move, "Want your game on Steam Deck? Support Linux".

They certainly have a better card deck than Loki Entertainment used to have.


This is the chicken-and-egg problem though. If you don't get the Linux/Steam Deck audience large enough first, then that tradeoff won't be worth it to developers.

Valve have the money to pay developers to make a Linux port or ensure it works with Proton (maybe they already do in some cases?), if they really wanted to put the heat on Microsoft. Well, any not owned or being published by Microsoft i suppose.

Valve seem happy to let things happen more organically however.


> Yet they are doing zero to foster native Linux games.

"zero" might be a bit harsh, considering that they do some things at least, compared to others who literally do nothing. Steam the platform has native Linux support, what games are natively available is visible on Store listings, and a bunch of the SDKs (all of them even maybe?) are available natively on Linux too. The situation could have been a lot worse.


It will get more worse, with Proton there is no value in e.g. using Vulkan, just use DirectX, and the convinience of modern GPU programming tooling in Visual Studio, HLSL code completion with CoPilot, PIX debugger, and then let Valve have to worry about running it on Linux.

> with Proton there is no value in e.g. using Vulkan

Valve themselves seems to disagree with you here, considering they still have Linux native SDKs available for integration, and are releasing their own games with native Linux support.

I'm guessing if what you say is true, Valve would be the first to move towards that reality you paint, but we haven't seen that yet, I'm doubting we'll ever see that, but the ones who live will see I suppose :)


Valve will get their OS/2 and netbooks moment if they don't foster a proper native Linux games ecosystem, but yeah lets cheer for Windows games translation on Linux while it lasts.

Valve is actively contributing upstream changes to Wine with Proton. As long as they continue to do that the scenario you envision shouldn’t happen.

I think there's a reasonable argument that the most stable Linux gaming API surface is actually Proton.

None of this is really going to change until we end up with a situation like the EA/Apple Store conflict: a major player unable to sell a game on Windows for some reason.


Also, it's something of a pragmatic choice -- Valve did put major effort into native Linux games around 2013, but the effort fell flat for a number of reasons.

Proton is them trying a different path towards severing or lessening the Windows dependence, in my opinion.


That is like saying the most valuable gaming API is Dolphi, MAME, or LinUAE.

Almost certainly more people playing 80s and 90s games through emulation than on original hardware, so .. yes?

Except the main reason is because 80s and 90s hardware is dead, or hard to come by and repair.

Not naive at all. I'm pretty well aware of the monetary incentives and that they're focusing on their own use case.

But the improvement has been so great (and so downhill in Windows camp) that now Proton is the performance benchmark apparently...


Yes, and it has provided enough heat that Microsoft finally decided it was time for the netbook-like reaction, so lets see how long it holds.

Totally agree with you there, as much as I love to hate non-transferability, revokable licenses, permanent VAC bans on accounts that got hacked, I still find Steam the most convenient path to "owning" games in one place.

The Linux work done for Steam Deck is fantastic and I do credit their efforts with inspiring others to work on similar projects that extend and complement what Valve achieved. Much of the hard effort did go into Windows games on Linux before Valve looked at it; everything the WINE project, Codeweavers did, gaming via Lutris since 2009, however Valve have definitely been a force multiplier.

Trust is earned and I think Valve are doing pretty well on that front, especially when you look at the differences to other PC stores, Ubisoft, EA, and to some extent Epic. GOG and Itch are very different beasts.

To some extent I miss the time where Steam was totally curated, you had to make an impact to get your game on the platform, back before it was a free-for-all of shovelware and low-effort slop. Occasional controversies aside, at least on Steam the tools / marketing funnel are there to keep the popular games at the forefront of the store whilst also being fairly open to allow devs to publish without being the chosen one.

Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music? Maybe, but I reckon the super deep-discount sales have calmed somewhat and are happening later in game's long-tail part of the lifecycle or used as promo for sequels.

There are plenty of publishers that choose to mainly avoid going that route, often the traditional established publishers with console outlets they don't want to cannibalise, for example Sony and Konami.


> Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music?

I think such business model ultimately doesn't scale well for games (several million-dollars production budgets sharing minuscule pieces of a ~$20 all-you-can-eat subscription pie).

Microsoft always knew this, they didn't try to win the market, they tried to subvert the business model, probably expecting the industry as a whole moving towards it -- which didn't happen at all, at least not yet.

Simple math would prove this. There's no way acquiring half the good studios in the world and make them release flop after flop was a break-even operation. It's several orders of magnitude behind.


Most of the market talks Nintendo, Sony, XBox, Apple Arcade, Android.

Exactly because they aquired half the good studios, they happen to be one of the biggest publishers, people forget some of those studios keep using their own branding instead of anything Microsoft, and it would hurt Steam if Microsoft decides all those studios would pull out of it.


Microsoft moved to a subscription service because they botched the launch of the Xbox One, with users accumulating digital libraries on the PlayStation, and that failure is something that has continued to drag them further and further down.

Which game of theirs has paid-for currency? I don't think you get more points with Dota Plus.

I feel like a lot of things Valve does, with the exception of loot boxes, are the bare minimum of what a good (not great) companies should do.

So of course every single company look at Valve and decide they should do the complete opposite of everything Valve does except loot boxes.


I agree that turning CS into a casino wasn’t a tasteful choice on Valve’s part but as someone who has played CS at least once a week for decades I can understand that they needed to find a way to cover server costs somehow. I paid $15 dollars for CS:GO and have clocked 4,500 hours in the game. I don’t gamble but I’d rather those who choose to fund the server costs than Valve charge a monthly subscription to everyone. Skin sales alone would have accomplished this without having to have loot boxes and keys and that’s where I think Valve went overboard with it. Also, for a game that provides so much revenue I expect better anti-cheat and more VAC bans, which are rare.

They didn't need to cover server costs for CS 1.6. I wonder why that is? Hint: CS 1.6 wasn't designed from the ground up as a microtransaction vehicle so could have servers run by the community unlike CS:GO where centrally run servers are needed to make microtransactions work, not the other way around.

A company choosing to take a loss on a service is not the same as not needing to pay for it, it was getting paid for.

people are still buying tf2 loot boxes?

The lootboxes drop as a normal course of gameplay, you buy keys to open them. People still play TF2 so presumably some still open boxes. It's also the base unit of trading for high value items.

CS lootboxes are the least shitty ones in the entire industry. There is 0% pay to win, if anything the skins are a disadvantage because they usually stand out.

I didn't say that lootboxes were pay to win and most lootboxes in games are not. That doesn't mean it's not still profiting from and enabling gambling and addiction.

Maybe hot take in this age, but loot boxes for cosmetics aren't a problem when you can get cosmetics by just playing.

There's a lot of evidence showing that gambling as a child leads to gambling problems as an adult, and loot boxes are just gambling aimed to a large degree at children.

Valve games are even worse for this because Steam trading allows 3rd party sites to sell cosmetics directly for cash, and some of these cosmetics are worth tens of thousands of dollars. It's just children gambling money but with a thin veneer of video game over the top.


Almost every game that has lootboxes, even only for cosmetics, is super stingy with cosmetics you can earn in-game through normal gameplay.

And I see no problem with that. I have never bought a single skin for Counter Strike nor Team Fortress 2 and I have bunch. Well, I used to, but then CS2 came out and all of a sudden my skins and unopened boxes were valued at hundreds of euros and I sold them on steam.

If you think enabling childhood gambling addictions and unregulated gambling systems aren't a problem then I don't know what else to say to you. Lootboxes are gambling, plain and simple.

Let’s put age limit on gaming then.

Gamblers will always find a way to gamble. I like getting cosmetics for free even if they are randomized. I don’t think I have ever bought keys to loot boxes, I just don’t see the point.


That's not the problem. Valve enabling people selling them for real money is.

..and Dota2..

Ah yeah, I forgot about Dota2, sorry. It's just a genre I don't pay any attention to, but you're right.

Americans would rather mention TF2, a game with less than 10 thousand concurrent players and probably making a modicum of money, than ever pretend that game exists or has influenced other games.

Regardless of how many concurrent players it has now, TF2 was massively influential to other FPS games, and it's still held with high regard by the community. It was also one of the first major games to introduce loot boxes.

TF2 has over 30,000 active players right now though..

https://steamdb.info/app/440/charts/


25,000 are bots farming drops

What does that have to do with Americans specifically?

I love the petty little fight over the blackest black and pinkest pink or whatever that whole drama is. It's hilarious.

Both of which are rather disappointing and wouldn't really stand out more than any other nice colour

The title says "quality" but the summary seems to say it only measures the "strength" oand "darkness of roast". Certainly won't measure how good it tastes. Given these are the two properties purportedly measured, I imagine you'd get the same results regardless of tastiness and age of the coffee or beans.

> Given these are the two properties purportedly measured, I imagine you'd get the same results regardless of tastiness and age of the coffee or beans.

Right, but another way of putting it, it might provide useful signal if you hold "age of the coffee or beans" and other such factors constant :).


In this day and age where every company is playing _very_ fast and loose with their LPR/citizen employees' lives and livelihoods, yes, I think PERM should be a very strict and easily lost privilege across the board for the whole company, not a right. If we had sane employee protections in this country maybe my opinion would be different.

I have been both on visa side of things and LPR/citizen side of things. I don’t understand this mindset lpr|citizen>>perm|visa. As if the perm/visa individual has no life and can easily pack a handbag and leave tomorrow. Not defending any processes here just pointing out people (perm or not) buy homes/cars have kids in schools etc and by the time they get to perm process they are pretty much ingrained here. The viewpoint of ‘discarding’ batches of perms sounds very hypocritical.

It's not about you, you're just an unfortunate individual caught in the crossfire, and in some ways I am sorry about that. However I think it's important for countries to look after their own citizens first before foreign peoples who want/have a job here. Yes, you may have made many efforts to integrate permanently, but if you're not on a permanent status yet, then those are choices you always made knowing you're still on a temporary status. It's not hypocritical at all.

Edit: I want to say that I am not saying this from a place of no compassion, however harsh my opinions may seem. I have multiple close friends that are not LPRs/citizens yet and have been the shoulder to cry on when things go sideways. I empathise, I do, but my opinion remains the same that countries should look after their LPRs/citizens strongly first.


If you think this qualifies as insane, you really haven't met many managers, have you...

One of the problems is that it's hard to tell at first that it's AI music. Probably still hard to figure it out by ear after you've been told. But I think not nearly as many people would choose to listen to AI songs if they knew they were AI.

There's a reason it can succeed as it is now. Making music that is catchy to our ears is fairly formulaic. It's easy fot AI to do the same. But if they start labeling which music is AI and which isn't, it probably won't succeed as well.

I was pretty pissed and considered canceling my Spotify Premium after the first time I'd realized I'd been duped by AI songs. I just report them any time I see them now. If they gave me a settings option to block all AI music I'd be fine.


I'm put in mind of the Merchandise Marks Act 1887 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany#History - which ultimately did the opposite of what it was expected to do. There is a real chance here that people just want to listen to something that sounds nice and aren't that fussed about whether a human is involved.

Besides, people seem to go in pretty strongly with computers to tune the sound already. It wouldn't be that shocking if people were already listening to works that can only be made with the aid of a computer.


why does it matter to you if it's AI or not? if you enjoy a song you shouldn't resent it just because it's AI generated. Me personally there's many AI songs that I like and enjoy listening to.

Because I care about art being a human endeavor. AI doesn't create art, it regurgitates an unidentifiable goop churned together in its stomach by all the crap its eaten. There is no thought. There is no feeling. There is no meaning. If you only care about the sound, that's cool, enjoy it, but I don't.

It is debatable what thoughts and feelings went into the music of Wesley Willis, of "Whip The Llama's Ass" fame, despite him being human.

rock over london rock on chicago! pontiac we build driving excitement

When a human makes a I IV V it's art

When a machine does it, soulless


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