There’s an argument to be made that it’s too high of a cut, especially these days. A lot of this money has funded great improvements to the gaming ecosystem and many open source projects. The major competing storefronts/launchers do not come even slightly close to the feature set that Steam provides, but they have tried attracting users through exclusivity deals. It’s very telling that some successful competitors (like itch or gog) actually offer some unique benefits and aren’t attached to some incredibly controversial corporations…

Valve isn’t free from criticism and their role as a monopolist should definitely be scrutinized, especially as companies often radically change for the worse in behaviour and culture, but a lot of this critical attention was instigated by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney who can frankly gargle my nuts.

Bait 😔

I get that part. I just don’t understand how the analogy relates to the programming languages. Maybe it really is just a shitty analogy from someone who doesn’t know much about either language.

I genuinely don’t get it.

What a shit article.

To me this looks nothing like Discord beyond having a compact sidebar… In fact, I would hope that Discord never inspires any software UI, because it really fucking sucks.

It’s probably not a good idea to infer how privacy friendly an open source software is, based on such a superficial visual similarity to a closed source proprietary product.

That title alone is giving me indigestion.

I wasn’t looking for technical support. You can do everything correctly and still get your mails randomly marked as spam or not delivered at all. This has happened to us, some of our customers, multiple smaller email providers as well as several municipalities (imagine blackholing government emails, what a grand idea). They don’t send sensible return headers, they might not even return your undelivered mail at all, they won’t react to any inquiries to their postmaster contact (or anywhere else really), they will blacklist entire IP blocks sometimes. The only way to sidestep any issues with them is to pay a few thousand bucks to enter their cool kids club certified sender alliance, which is what the big marketing firms use to deliver mass amounts of unwanted ads unhindered through their networks.

It is cheap, but the performance leaves much to be desired and their technical support is piss poor.

I’ve had the opposite experience with their cloud services in a professional context. My biggest gripe is with United Internet, the monopolistic company that owns IONOS, 1&1 (an ISP) as well as the ad-ridden, flaming pile of garbage that are GMX and WEB.DE, two of the most popular email service providers in Germany as well as a constant source of pain for anyone operating an Email server. They will ignore common industry standards and best-practices, silently block your mailserver for absolutely no reason, not respond to inquiries and just generally make the internet a slightly worse place for small to medium sized businesses and selfhosters.

It’s an alternative, but IONOS honestly fucking sucks as well, so I’m feeling pretty ambivalent about this.

I think you’re just being contrarian for no reason. The market for specialty input devices is much smaller compared to “normal” keyboards but it still exists and has become much more diverse over the past decade, with many new niche products being launched. This isn’t even the first commercially available chorded keyboard. From the video, this particular iteration seems to be marketed towards mute people and I’m sure that they or people with other kinds of disabilities are probably glad to have any products at all available to aid them in daily tasks. Not every product or company needs to participate in a high volume market. Apparently, the chorded inputs can also be reprogrammed and it can work in a normal keyboard mode, which should make it more flexible than something designed purely for stenography.

Yes, the most important concern with accessibility devices: “Does it make me look attractive?”