Developers can and almost always do close to offer their games on multiple platforms and can even choose self hosted direct distribution of they do choose. Customers can choose to purchase their games on steam, itch, epic, Microsoft, or any of the many places they’re often hosted simultaneously. Steam is more often than not the choice people choose to use of their own free will because they perceive it as being the superior service.

Why do you believe excellence should be punished?

If someone says they’re not interested in dating Republicans, it doesn’t mean they are any better than the average person at picking one out from a crowd.

Valve is profitable because of the reputation they’ve built up over many years as being an incredibly consumer friendly storefront. Avoiding corporate bloat, and focusing their attention on the core aspects of their business consumers care about has allowed them to thrive where many others failed. Valve created and maintained a fantastic product. So yes.

Stream created and maintains a platform that gamers and developers want to use but more importantly, they’ve built up a reputation that people believe in and trust.

Gamers and developers are so eager to use steam because in all the years they’ve been operating, they still support and expand upon family sharing, have a fantastic refund policy (for consumers), don’t employ aggressive exclusivity deals, don’t limit download speeds behind paywalls, and provide a great review and recommendation system.

They’ve become successful due to this reputation, why should we punish them for that?

Valve created a fantastic entertainment product that people voluntarily choose to use. Why would you want to turn something people already love into something completely different? Counterproductive - especially when direct distribution is essentially free and universally accessible.

Flaked sea salt actually dissolves slower, not faster than standard table salt on account of its larger crystals!

Hi! I think your misunderstanding comes from the fact that religion, is not a mechanism for creating new knowledge, it is a collection of shared beliefs between people.

A better comparison would be faith VS science, or religion VS scientific understanding.

While most religious beliefs are faith based at their core, it’s easy to speculate that certain religious and cultural stigma arose after repeated observation of the natural world (Alice ate shrimp, Alice falls ill -> eating shrimp is against the will of God). Not as efficient as controlled scientific testing, but it ultimately lands you on the true statement “Eating shrimp is unwise and likely to get you sick”.

What about partially sighted or dyslexic individuals? Sure, a game like halo would need a lot of modification to be fully blind accessible, but a visual novel, for instance, might not. In my experience most visual novels are built as passion projects on shoestring budgets.

Lots of existing games have robotic narrators already (e.g minecraft), they just speak with a monotone voice. By incorporating more advance machine learning capabilities the same narrator could be capable of outputting a more nuanced and pleasant delivery for those that need it.

Using a robotic voice could make the game more accessible to blind, partially sighted, and dyslexic individuals. I’m not sure how an AI voice is inherently different than the voice that comes out of a screen reader, especially if it’s trained on the voice of employees or volunteers.

An employer could offer an immediate $15,000 signing bonus to anyone who already has the certification, effectively outsourcing their training costs while pocketing the extra 5k of the 20k true cost

I’ve seen stranger things.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/10/ukraine-draft-troops-reinforcements-training/

I imagine that the easiest way to acquire specific training data for a LLM is to download EBooks from amazon. If a university professor pirates a textbook and then uses extracts from various pages in their lecture slides, the cost of the crime would be the cost of a single textbook. In the case of a novel, GRRM should be entitled to the cost of a set of Ice & Fire if they could prove that the original training material was illegaly pirated instead of legally purchased.

Once a copy of a book is sold, an author typically has no say in how it gets used outside of reproduction.

If I took 100 of the world’s best-selling novels, wrote each individual word onto a flashcard, shuffled the entire deck, then created an entirely new novel out of that, (with completely original characters, plot threads, themes, and messaged) could it be said that I produced stolen work?

What if I specifically attempted to emulate the style of the number one author on that list? What if instead of 100 novels, I used 1,000 or 10,000? What if instead of words on flashcards, I wrote down sentences? What if it were letters instead?

At some point, regardless of by what means the changes were derived, a transformed work must pass a threshold whereby content alone it is sufficiently different enough that it can no longer be considered derivative.

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