Having express self-checkoit is great. The Kroger near me went full-self-checkout. They have large kiosks that mimmic the traditional checkout belt kiosks, except the customer scans at the head of the belt and the items move into the bagging area.
If you have a full cart, you scan all the items, checkout, walk to the end of the belt, and bag all of your items. Takes twice as long as bagging while a cashier scans (for solo shoppers), and because of the automatic belt the next customer cannot start scanning until you finish bagging, or their items will join the pile of your items.
It effectively destroys all parallelism is the process (bagging while scanning, customers pre-loading their items with a divider while the prior customer is still being serviced), and with zero human operated checkouts running you get no choice
Sorry for the long reply, I got carried away. See the section below for my good-faith reply, and the bottom section for "what are you implying by asking me this?" response.
From the case studies in my scientific ethics course, I think she probably would have lost her job regardless, or at least been "asked to resign".
The fact it was in national news, and circulated for as long as it did, certainly had to do with her identity. I was visiting my family when the story was big, and the (old, conservative, racist) members of the family definitely formed the opinion that she was a 'token hire' and that her race helped her con her way to the top despite a lack of merit.
So there is definitely a race-related effect to the story (and probably some of the "anti- liberal university" mentality). I don't know enough about how the decision was made to say whether she would have been fired those effects were not present.
Just some meta discussion: I'm 100% reading into your line of questioning, for better or worse. But it seems you have pinned me as the particular type of bigot that likes to deny systemic biases exist. I want to just head that off at the pass and say I didn't mean to entirely deny your explanation as plausible, but that given a deeper view of the cultural ecosystem of OpenAI it ceases to be likely.
I don't know your background on the topic, but I enjoy following voices critical of effective altruism, long-termism, and effective accelerationism. A good gateway into this circle of critics is the podcast Tech Won't Save Us (the 23/11/23 episode actually discusses the OpenAI incident). Having that background, it is easy to paint some fairly convincing pictures for what went on at OpenAI, before Altman's sexuality enters the equation.
I mean, their press release said "not consistently candid", which is about as close to calling someone a liar as corporate speak will get. Altman ended up back in the captain's chair, and we haven't heard anything further.
If the original reason for firing made Altman look bad, we would expect this silence.
If the original reason was a homophobic response from the board, we might expect OpenAI to come out and spin a vague statement on how the former board had a personal gripe with Altman unrelated to his performance as CEO, and that after replacing the board everything is back to the business of delivering value etc. etc.
I'm not saying it isn't possible, but given all we know, I don't think the fact that Altman is gay (now a fairly general digestible fact for public figures) is the reason he was ousted. Especially if you follow journalism about TESCREAL/Silicon Valley philosophies it is clear to see: this was the board trying to preserve the original altruistic mission of OpenAI, and the commercial branch finally shedding the dead weight.
I seriously doubt it had anything to do with his wedding. I don't think the sexuality of a CEO is that big an issue in this day (see: Tim Cook).
Especially considering how Atman's has steered OpenAI vs. the boards' stated mission, it seems much more likely that his temporary ousting had to do with company direction rather than his sexuality.
I'll just add that "designed to be burned up" is the correct approach to these types of satellite constellations. SpaceX has that aspect correct, at least.
Agree with everything else. Musk is a batshit egomaniac, and letting him dictate use of large infrastructure is careless. Government subsidies should entail a certain public influence over the operation of the system.
I'm at my wits end trying to explain this. I guess I can just recommend reading the legal briefs that summarize the matter, or articles that dig deeper than this one.
Maybe I'll think about it later and make a more complete write up with concrete examples. I really hate to see the confusion here. Wolfire is doing us a favor, we should not be handing Valve the keys to the market just because they act like Mr. Benevolent.
As I said, no need for us to argue further. The lawsuit has grounds, even if you don't understand why. Read articles and legal briefs on the matter if you would like to learn more.
What Wolfire wants to happen is for game marketplaces and game services platforms to be decoupled. Right now Valve has vertically integrated the two. You buy the game, and they offer peer multiplayer, social, workshop, etc.
If those services were charged separately, so that the costs of those services was not forced into the pricing of other marketplaces that don't offer those services, you open the market to more competition.
Note that the main argument Wolfire is making is that game marketplaces (buy/download the game) and game platforms (online features, mod distribution, social pages) need to be decoupled. By integrating the two, Steam is vertically integrating, amortizing the cost, and then forcing every other marketplace to bear the cost of a platform in their pricing.
If you bought a game and paid for platform services separately, then competition can better exist for both of those roles. Which is good for consumers.
Steam has a large userbase, which offers a lot of consumer inertia to prefer games on Steam. They also have a policy where game pricing on other platforms cannot undercut Steam.
The main complaint is that this pricing policy coupled with the consumer inertia makes it difficult for other gaming marketplaces to enter the market. You cannot undercut steam unless a publisher wants to not put their game on Steam at all (which would be suicide for anything but the largest titles), so you have to sell at Steam's price point. Few platforms could match Steams' established workshop, multiplayer, streaming, and social services; all of which benefit from costs at scale and the established user content.
Imagine trying to convince a user: "Buy your game here instead. It will cost the same as on Steam. No, you won't have access to the existing Workshop. No, you won't have in-platform multiplayer with your Steam friends." Even if you had feature parity, people would prefer Steam since that's where their existing games and friends are.
As I said, Steam would be in their rights to enforce that pricing policy for Steam keys, because they provide distribution and platform services for that product after it sells.
But as @Rose clarified, it applies to not just Steam keys, but any game copy sold and distributed by an independent platform. Steam should not have any legitimate claim to determining the pricing within another platform.
This... misses the point? Of course the can not sell on Steam. That's always an option.
The antitrust aspect of all of this is that Steam is the de-facto marketplace, consumers are stubborn and habitual and aren't as likely purchase games less-known platforms, and that a publisher opting not to sell on Steam might have a negative influence on the games success.
If that consumer inertia gives Steam an undue advantage that wouldn't be present in a properly competitive market, then it there is an antitrust case to be made, full stop. At this point, the court will decide if the advantage is significant enough to warrant any action, so there's really no need for us to argue further.
But I really don't like seeing Wolfire—which is a great pro-consumer and pro-open-source studio—having their reputation tarnished just because Lemmyites have a knee-jerk reaction to bend over and take it from Valve just because Steam is a good platform.
Valve offers a great service, and I enjoy it a lot. But it's very difficult for a competitor to enter the market because they won't be able to match Steam's services immediately. Typically in a market the approach is then to undercut Steam, but that is exactly what this policy is designed to make impractical by forcing publishers to overprice, on penalty of losing Steams' userbase.
I mean I don't know what else to say. It is anti-competitive. It doesn't take too much to see why. There are many good articles and legal briefs on the matter. It hurts you and me, the consumer, and it hurts publishers. It enriches Valve, benevolent though they may appear. You shouldn't like this type of strong-arming the market when Amazon does it, and you shouldn't roll over and take it from Valve either.
Doesn't even matter, the court is going to sort it out for us. But I hate to see the reputational hit Wolfire is taking here. I like their studio, I believe their developers are operating in genuine good faith, and I think they are doing consumers a favor.
What even is federation in the context of a distributed vcs like Git? Does it mean federation of the typical dev ops tools (issues, PRs, etc.)?