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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • You want Valve to develop a version of Steam that circumvents their own DRM to play local files? What would prevent people from using that to pirate things even more easily? I can imagine they’d have some trouble with publishers as well for doing that. There are already largely standardized cracks for steam and emulators for steam; just use that. Regardless, no solution will work for any game using DRM other than Steam, like Denuvo, so you’ll have to rely on pirates for those regardless.




  • Big thank you for writing all that out. There’s a lot of dynamics here I am not knowledgeable about, so I appreciate you providing links as well. I’ll have to read more on this before getting back to you. After your explanation, I have a much better understanding of the intended value of STAR. My gut is still saying that STAR will not allow 3rd parties into a polarized political environment, but I have no data to back that up. I just feel that people will vote 0 for the candidate they least want, 5 for the one they want, and 3 for the one they’re ambivalent about and that will devolve STAR to a two-round ranked choice that favors the two biggest political parties. Again, that’s definitely possibly me just not fully understanding the system. I’ll have to read more, crunch numbers, and see what numbers others have crunched and get back to you. Definitely very interesting and I love the concept of rating politicians independent of each other.


  • I may be off here because this is the first I’m reading about STAR, but it seems worse than instant-runoff ranked-choice voting because of the “top two candidates based on first results are the final two candidates”. It seems like ranked-choice but broken to keep the States in a two party system.

    For instance: Let’s say there are 4 parties: blue, red, green, and yellow. Let’s say the majority of people have red (27%) and blue (26%) as their top pick, so those are automatically #1 and #2. Green is a close third (25%). The remainder (21%) vote for yellow, then green, then red, then blue. STAR would say every other candidate is eliminated except Red and Blue, and then redistribute the other votes. Instant-runoff would say: eliminate yellow and redistribute based off their second choice. In this example, all those votes would switch to green and green would become first. Then blue would be eliminated, those votes redistributed, and then you’d have to see what would happen. Instant-runoff to me allows for the opportunity for a meeting in the middle - everyone potentially agreeing on their second choice; while STAR seems like it will just continue to encourage people to put their primary pick up top.


  • It was not originally for just the activation and licenses. Their plan was for it to launch as “always on”. If I recall correctly, it was going to require phoning home every 24 hours; hence the outcry at the time and the infamous Keighley interview. They rolled back a ton of the stuff with that console that they said was a “requirement” for functionality. Regardless of whether it launched, if it wasn’t for the outcry, they would have launched it. That’s an entire console. I have a hard time believing they wouldn’t roll out a “cloud only” game - you feel me?












  • On a small scale, that’s what some of these privacy-focused browsers are doing in regards to fingerprinting. Make the data that has to be provided as standardized as possible and randomize the rest that is being tested behind the scenes. That is really great, but we can’t randomize our behavior and there’s a lot of data we can’t randomize for the sake of functionality. Dunno how we handle that. Maybe we all install bots on our devices that act like users and go to random sites and click on random shit while we’re not using the device.