I’m not saying it was a majority issue, I’m saying the beginnings of the social turn against LGBTQ openness and inclusion has been brewing under the surface for a long time and this is potentially evidence of it.

It can be both, you’re rejecting it because you fail to understand it. Dude, in a rationally organized world we wouldn’t need fucking charities, because things would just be funded by reasonable tax structures and governments that care more about taking care of their own people instead of bombing foreign nations. Why would we need charities if things were funded well enough as it is? You’re deliberately missing the point.

That wooshing sound you hear is the point going over your head.

Why? It’s still bad. He still isn’t taking societal input on whether the projects he invests his money into are actually the most wise and sound investments to help the future of all living humans. It’s a distinction without a difference.

Then why praise one for having a pet project just because it might help the environment? If it’s not a good thing that they exist, why does there need to be a caveat of “but he’s doing good things with his money.”

Erik Wolpaw, who wrote Portal, was absolutely a Valve employee by that time already though, and very arguably the writing is what made the game so special. The team developing it wouldn’t have had Wolpaw as a pull for a writer without being acquired by Valve.

Exactly. Valve might have a “flat” management structure, but Newell hasn’t exactly re-organized Valve into a worker-owned co-op either.

If I recall correctly Newell himself has made comments on how scary brain interfaces become when the interfaces can start influencing the mind as well as reading it. Giving it positive signals in association with certain ideas or products, essentially a shortcut to what traditional advertising tried to exploit about human cognition, except now it could be forced directly, where you can essentially “force” people’s brains to be happy with a certain situation, idea, or product. He is at least cognizant of the dangers, but who knows how cognizant or how he plans to address those dangers.

It’s quite true, for example, they were one of the first companies to make successful inroads in selling video games in Russia back in the day. Other companies avoided it due to rampant piracy of games in Russia, but Valve successfully (at the time) provided a service and price point that made it more attractive to many Russians than piracy. Being decent to customers is indeed a viable business strategy, and up until the 1970’s was sort of the norm for business (not entirely, but far more than now). It wasn’t until then that businesses became far more extractive from their customer base than trying to build better products for customers.

However, they were also pioneers in certain aspects of gaming that have become detrimental to consumers, such as loot boxes and digital marketplaces. They have done their best to manage and regulate those within their own walled garden, but they have taken a hands-off approach to gambling on Steam marketplace items that takes place on websites outside of Steam (which to an extent is fair since many of them exist in countries where Valve would have very little success in taking them down in any way).

While all that is indeed good, we shouldn’t have to rely on the benevolence of the wealthy to be able to have a better world. No offense, but that kind of stuff should be paid for by taxation. He is doing some good here, but it’s also his pet project, his choice where the money goes, no one else, no input from society at large. It’s still overall not a real great thing, because it means that we have to just hope that billionaires have pet projects that help society and the earth at large. The majority of them don’t. Hell, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk think the future is for digital-post-humans and the things they are trying to do “for the future” are revolving around a plan where humans as we know them effectively become an extinct species, which is inherently elitist and definitely not beneficial to overall society since it means they effectively don’t care if any of us die to achieve it. Just because Newell has better values than the rest doesn’t mean the situation doesn’t still suck ass.

People need to remember a lot of the pro-consumer things that Valve has ever done were things they were forced to by regulation.

Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.

I like Valve more than most companies, but exactly, they are not Saints by any measure.

I never wipe because I only eat cake.

Not just that, but this is free home-made ice cream.

so I think we could say that this trend of being a disgusting bigot is one which is being ‘allowed’ more recently than it once was in social media.

I always try to bring this up because honestly, if we go pretty far back in internet terms, we can see that this has actually been brewing for over a decade.

In 2013, EA won the Consumerist poll for “Worst Company in America.” While mostly people pointed to arguably rational reasons for these votes (DRM, microtransactions, badly made and released games), the COO of EA had some other thoughts as to why they got hammered so hard as the worst company:

In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America. That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we’re not caving on that.

When this happened in 2013, most of us thought this was absolute bunkum and just EA doing damage control. Now, I’m genuinely not so sure anymore. I think perhaps some suit at EA had noticed something happening, some change in the waters that had not yet become “mainstream” but was bubbling beneath the surface, slowly growing. People made fun of this response from EA, because we thought at the time “this is the modern era, those are just backwards fools stuck in the past that are complaining about LGBT inclusion, if they even exist at all, I bet EA is making it up to cover for how shitty they are.” But… were they?? At the time it was roundly dismissed because popular culture widely accepted LGBTQ inclusion, but now we’re on a backswing and people feel emboldened to be disgusting bigots and be loud and proud about being a exclusive asshat who hates people different than themselves. Has it just been brewing under the surface for over a decade?

Peace Through Strength

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

I think both of your arguments in this thread have merit. You are correct that it is a misused tool, and you are correct that the better solution is a more compassionate society. The other person is also correct that we can and do at least make attempts to make such tools less available as paths to self harm. Since you used the analogy of people jumping off bridges, I have lived near bridges where this was common so barriers and nets were put up to make it difficult for anyone but the most determined to use it as a path to suicide. We are indeed failing people in a society that puts profit over human life first, but even in a more idealized society mental health issues and attempts at suicide would still happen and to not fail those people we would still need to do things like erect barriers and safeguards to prevent self-harm. In my eyes both of you are correct and it is not an either or issue as much as it is a “por que no los dos?” issue. Why not build a better society and still build in safeguards?

Never expect Linux users to not be completely pedantic instead of looking for an actual joke.

You’re welcome. Easy mistake to make, I make it constantly, in fact haha!

LLMs Have Lead Led to 14 Deaths

FTFY