I gotta say mRNA vaccines. It's not technically a 21st century invention, but much of the work to make them viable started in the early 2000s. The speed at which the COVID vaccine got developed and widely deployed was honestly incredible and a massive W for humanity. I remember thinking a vaccine would be years away.

It really feels like no matter what community you look at on Lemmy, every 3rd post is Windows bad Linux good. It's honestly a bit exhausting. And I've been running Linux for over a decade...

This doesn't make any sense. The reason Valve hasn't been acquired is because it's privately owned and not up for sale, not because it doesn't have "enough profit". In fact it's extremely profitable, for all we know.

Sure, another company could come along and build a competitor. It's happened already multiple times, and Steam is doing just fine despite some major titles these days being exclusive to other platforms. Unless Steam drops the ball on something big time, it's unlikely that people will move to another platform en masse, especially one that is less focussed on consumer interests. No-one can just come in and "take capital away" from Steam, whatever that means, by building a competitor that sells advertising space and "monetizes user data" — they need users first.

... And then there's the fact that Steam is already "selling advertiser space" today. Games don't just get featured on their storefront because Gabe likes them. They make deals with publishers for this.

Apparently 50%+ of the company belongs to Gabe himself, presumably he would pass it on to some very trusted. That makes a hostile takeover pretty unlikely.

Gen z here... Everyone around me has wallets

Tbf I am in Berlin, the cash capital of the world, but still.

Totally agree, this honestly sounds a bit like putting principles before reason. Personally, I don't at all see why paying people for their work would make projects adhere any less to the "open source ethos", even though I hear this idea a lot. I think that in an ideal world, it should be possible to contribute to OSS projects full-time and make a living, financed by donations from dependants (including corporations) that profit off of the free software and have a vested interest in continued and rapid development of the project.

If you really don't want the money to reward contributors, why not pass it on to open-source dependencies of your project that are looking for funding? FOSS projects not scrambling for funding is pretty rare today unfortunately.

I'm so fucking concerned about climate change... But I can't vote Green because of their stupid, anti-scientific stances on two issues: GMOs and nuclear power. For context, I'm in Germany, where there's very public hysteria about both. The general public still holds absurdly distorted and misinformed views, so none of the green-aligned parties are ballsy enough to hold positions on them that are in any way nuanced. It's super frustrating.

Can always trust the cops to show up and make everything infinitely worse.

As someone who "quit" nicotine and picked it up again later multiple times... The first hit after a while felt amazing every time. Unfortunately. No nausea at all.

It's been a pretty common practice for online companies for years. There are SaaS providers that offer APIs just for this purpose. At my previous job we implemented something like this too; making a rough guess at the gender of users based on just their name and some additional information. The only reason we did that is because we didn't want to ask people for their gender when they registered because that seemed arbitrary and frankly we didn't care, but at the same time we still needed a rough overall split for investor reporting and high level marketing strategy decisions.

I assume Discord would do this for similar reasons.

I guess I don’t really expect a company to resist pressure from government agencies on my behalf.

Personally, I expect them to resist to the extent possible by law. The cops need to follow a lot of rules to make legally binding requests for data. I understand that if they do, there's not much a company can do other than hand out the info, but if there's a legal way to deny such a request, I expect the company to pursue it.

The typical range of human scale temperatures is like -10 to 40 degrees on the Celsius scale? Makes no sense.

But it makes so much sense though. Because it's anchored around the freezing and boiling points of water, which is a universal experience we can all relate to. 0°C outside? It's freezing.

Fahrenheit as "the human scale" is what makes no fucking sense. You end up with the same exact problem where your specific range of "human scale temperatures" does not line up with 0-100°F at all. But it's also not anchored to water's behavior. So it just ends up being arbitrary.