And the company owners do not walk or have to deal with customers.

One notable software business professional interviewed by RBC thought that the West’s decision would “adversely affect the life of the developer community, mutual trust within it, and therefore the quality of the product.”

It was Russia and other autocracies etc. that diminished the trust by actually financing developers for multiple years to first earn trust and finally introduce backdoors into open source software, as demonstrated by the XZ utils backdoor.

In open source projects, maintainers need to have some initial trust into each contributor, and let this trust naturally grow with time and contributions. They cannot perform intensive background checks on everyone before accepting a patch.

While it is easier to uncover backdoors in open source software, there is no good way to defend and prevent against this kind of attack in this type of development process. All open source projects can do is trying to take away some trust from people within higher risk groups. This of course might lead to discrimination.

My shower thought since I watched Star Trek: In a world where universal translators are ubiquitous, do babies even need to learn any common language, or do they each develop individual languages and let the UT handle the rest?

UT translating baby noises into articulate language, should have been in an episode.

Nothing gets burned or otherwise destroyed when receiving EM radiation via a dish and converted it into electricity via a receiver.

Sure, the amplification stage of the process likely works only one way, and should be replaced in order to send something.

The one way process of burning oil to generate heat seems much more primitive than the energy conversion offered by a diode, TBH.

You can push or tow an electric car and charge their batteries. Because electric motors are also generators.

Even with your simplistic fossil fuel car in your example the alternator within can also be used as a motor.

I have nothing against any meta search engine, they are very useful, and I use them primarily as well.

However, they are not a true alternative, because they depend on third-party services. The same as Invidious is a very useful, but also not an alternative to YouTube itself, just a different user interface.

The best "server-side" anti cheat mechanisms online is streaming the game, and I am sure that eventually some talented developers are able to even write some aim bot (or more) for that.

Competitive games need a fully controlled environment. Doing it online with random unknown people should not be taken as serious as they currently do.

Alot about video games is not standardized. To be competitive all players should have the same hardware, internet connection, etc. So that it is actually individual skill that is measured, not just the size of players wallet.

But even then, developing skill takes alot of practice and time, which also, in our current system, can be converted into money. There just is no fair competition here anyway. Still many people believe in meritocracies...

In german there is only one word for it, which is a gift for german speakers.

"Copying is theft" is the argument of corporations for ages, but if they want our data and information, to integrate into their business, then, suddenly they have the rights to it.

If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software and AI models, as well, since it is available on the open web.

They got themselves into quite a contradiction.

Because this is fiction, where there is good and evil, right and wrong, the good people are rewarded and the bad people punished, successful people earned it and the poor deserve it, and complex problems have simple answers. Where every argument only has a pro and a contra.

But we are living in reality, where most things are in shades of grey, and everything is more complex than it appears. People have to make decisions based on partial knowledge, to not get stuck in indecisiveness. Where even the middle ground solution might be wrong. And with so many distractions and propaganda.

Just be kind and understanding to other people with different ideas, the real world is a complex one, and easy to get lost. Sometimes people like to flee into their simple worlds of populism, maybe through talking and listening we can help them find their way again.

No, publicly traded. One of the first steps to enshittyfication.

True, private companies are generally more focused on customer satisfaction, but that can suddenly change, for instance when the owner dies, and the new owners don't share the same ideals.

Private companies have a certain single point of failure built-in by having often just one or sometimes a small number of owners.

Nobody really knows what will happen when Gabe dies.

I just hope that valve becomes a worker cooperative... That would be the most stable form of company that probaly stays focused on customer satisfaction long term, since workers tend to favor providing long-term profits via good service instead of short term gains, for high frequency traders.

What I really like is that they double down on hackabilty by switching to metal torx screws, etc.

That, and a Linux system are IMO the main selling points of the SteamDeck, compared to any clones from Asus or Lenovo, etc.