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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • Unpopular opinion incoming:

    I don’t think we should ignore AI diagnosis just because they are wrong sometimes. The whole point of AI diagnosis is to catch things physicians don’t. No AI diagnosis comes without a physician double checking anyway.

    For that reason, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that an AI got it wrong. Suspicion was still there and physicians double checked. To me, that means this tool is working as intended.

    If the patient was insistent enough that something was wrong, they would have had them double check or would have gotten a second opinion anyway.

    Flaming the AI for not being correct is missing the point of using it in the first place.




  • I don’t think that taking a cut for the sheer exposure of the platform is the same as exploitation. Even small devs make more money by an order of magnitude through steam than they would if they did not.

    Steam costs money to operate. I really don’t understand why people think steam should just be valorous and noble and not make any money. Labeling them the middleman implies they don’t do anything. They provide a service in the same way a grocery store is there to make sure you don’t have to drive to a different farm every time you want a different kind of vegetable.

    That’s really the only problem I have with what you said. Of course people shouldn’t be loyal to companies, I’m just pointing out the flaw in your logic that people should be loyal to people instead. Any type of figure that you don’t personally know is primarily a concept.

    But also, “Behaving like a responsible consumer” is an idealistic fantasy that mostly fails because of the prisoner dilemma. If not enough people do it, the only people who suffer are the ones doing it. That base mindset might be overcame on an individual basis, but it’s rarely popular enough to gain the traction required for actual change, and it becomes more and more difficult the more people are content with the service.

    It doesn’t help that steam is essentially the only game launcher that isn’t tiny or garbage.




  • Here’s the difference. When we talk about companies dominating an industry, we’re usually talking about practices that keep competition from even forming. Monopolies are formed as a result of big companies buying out or making it impossible for their competition.

    Steam doesn’t do that, which is a big reason they won their monopoly suit. They just provide a better model than anyone else is willing to, and they rake in the cash because of it.

    Compare this situation to books-a-million in the states. Books-a-million doesn’t have a monopoly on books, they just have created a better environment for selling them. They aren’t stopping other book stores from opening or buying chains to shut them down, they just sell you a cup of coffee and give you a place to sit while you browse their massive selection.

    That’s not a monopoly, that’s just better business.





  • Guarantee that the line of reasoning here is

    We can stop the inevitable fact that people aren’t going to buy our shares by pushing them on the most chronically addicted users of our platform and disguising it as a premium exclusive offer

    I mean, who else is susceptible enough to the sunken cost fallacy that they would pour actual money into reddit? The answer is the demographic that’s already put in a substantial amount of investment in the form of time spent on content creation.

    To those people, they might very well bite because it means their useless, time consuming hobby finally might become a source of income.

    It’s honestly an intelligent business move by reddit, even if it’s scummy as fuck and ultimately setting up their own best content creators to spectacularly fail and lose a ton of money when the shares tank.

    Reddit still goes public. Reddit still pays their CEOs obscenely before they jump ship. Only the creators lose.