Hmmmm. Have you tried contacting microsoft support?

All the smarter ones don’t because an email can change, your google account unique id will not, that’s the purpose of account IDs.

I won’t deny that many people/websites probably do use email though. Which is bad. But I can’t deny that that probably is what is happening.

Unfortunately that was just an example.

That’s… mostly because of popularity and it depends on whether some service is offering OAuth and if the website in question is using THAT identity provider.

For example, mastodon is technically offering it.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16221

but this is the docs page:

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/optional/sso/

So the answer in this case is to just grow, promote and support what we’re already doing: fediverse stuff.

How hard is it to implement email verification?

Harder, actually.

That’s the point of OAuth, which is what you’re seeing there.

The idea is that you’re you and you have a… google account. This shitty little website doesn’t want to be responsible for you login details, because those can get stolen. Maybe they contain an email address, which is a problem. Software needs to be updated, it’s all a big. They don’t want to touch anything in terms of security that identifies you as you.

Maybe all the website does is save your favorite pepe memes. They don’t need anything else from you, but they still need to have something to get a user id and make sure nobody messes with your pepe meme collection. That’s where this system comes in, because the rest of website becomes significantly easier. They don’t need to store anything personally identifying, all they get is an ID and they can connect it with your pepes.

The only downside to OAuth is, as you can also see, that it’s corpos you don’t want to trust that are offering it.

Maybe you didn’t find the genre that clicks with you.

1984 is an objectively depressing story and not really interesting for the love story or other things. It’s political.

Reading is great when you have hours to kill and want just more dense information or description. You also sort of need to enjoy using your imagination I guess.

Maybe you’re interested in a biography of a musician or movie director, maybe you’re into history, maybe you like crime and horror stuff.

But also, there are SO MANY bad books out there. Don’t worry about it. I haven’t read a book in years, because I am not really interesting in topics at that level at the moment and I don’t think many authors really capture things well. You need a real good book recommendation.

And also, maybe you just don’t like reading books.

Also, translated books can be a lot worse, read in native language if possible. Authors can put a lot of… style and taste into their language and that’s lost in translation sometimes.

Not really.

For practical purposes, all files “binary”, ones and zeros. And with those ones and zeros, you can encode stuff for example text and for example with ascii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII But you can also encode programs that can be executed, or what you named, visual, audio, or whatever you want. The differences are the “encodings”.

Sometimes, things work a bit like one of those Russian Matryoshka dolls, for example a PDF can contain a JPG or a PNG but also TXT.

It’s really not that simple as there being “4” types.

I’m not sure that answers your question though.

Psychological tricks with external help.

Specifically reserve time for them, plan them out in advance, do something every day if you can and set reminders. There are even apps that try to support you with habit forming.

So if for example 6pm to 7:30pm is hobby time, every day, and you treat it like an appointment you have to go to (with yourself).

Plan your projects in advance. This can be done during that hobby time, but be sure to write down which tools and material you need, so you can just pick it up. Also, it helps if things are organized, if you just need to grab a box and it has everything in it, that’s easier to pick up and put down than searching and collecting all your tools every time you need them.

Imagine there’s a huge fuel station that’s so big they essentially set rules towards suppliers that they can’t offer their gas to other stations at a cheaper price otherwise they can’t sell it in their station with 95% market share.

That is specifically not what is happening.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

“Steam Key Rules and Guidelines”

“You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.”

Valve does not “dictate” prices in any way.

Ubi and WB are free to sell their games for as cheap as they want. But if and ONLY IF they offer a steam key with the purchase, they can’t undercut steam.

Edit: the original comment left it unclear if the price rule only applies to copies sold that include a steam key, or if copies that work completely without steam can be arbitrarily priced. If the latter is the case, it’s obviously fine. If it includes any game version, it isn’t OK.

Ok. The rule is, actually let me link it…

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

“Steam Key Rules and Guidelines”

“You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam.** It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.”**

Just read that paragraph. It should be pretty clear what the whole thing is about.

True, but this deal is that companies stick to the terms and in turn they get access to steams shop, implicitly the community.

They don’t have some unalienable right to access another company’s customers.

You don’t have a “right” to go into a BurgerKing and advertise and sell your burgers there.

That is true, definitely a “lesser evil” situation.

Bloomberg cites two high-profile cases referenced in the ongoing lawsuit, one involving Ubisoft, and another Warner Bros.

First of all, I trust Ubi and WB way less than valve.

Valve allegedly threatened to delist all editions of Rainbow Six Siege after Ubisoft offered a cheaper option on its Uplay store.

Yeah.

Because it violates their policy. That’s not a “threat”, those are the terms of the contract Ubi and WB agreed to. Terms that everyone has to follow.

Heck, Ubi and WB should be hit with a counter suit for trying to leverage their market position to exert control over valve and getting unusually favorable terms.

Clown suit. Ubi and WB are mad they can’t break their contract with valve in a one sided way.

edit: I forgot some context:

The deal between valve and a publisher or dev is: they can sell on steam and elsewhere if steam is at least tied in price, or cheaper, but when they sell somewhere else, that includes the steam key and access to steam and steam’s distribution at no cost.

What the devs and publishers wanted to do was leverage other features of steam and the steam ecosystem, while undercutting steam’s price.

They are always free to just not sell on steam for a cheaper price. That’s not what this is about.

edit2:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

“Steam Key Rules and Guidelines”

Duh. I wouldn’t have called it “addiction”, but dependency was clearly the goal, otherwise they wouldn’t take away classical search.

I thought that was obvious from the start.

It is also dead due to how repulsive the place was. Literally.

Contrary to the memes and the “elite pvp” reputation of eve online, the people in the communities are very welcoming and you can make some long term friends there.

You still need to sort of enjoy the game itself I suppose. That is relatively easy with friends though.

Depends.

If they are the “Ratatouille” kind of critic, knowing what they like, or what is good and serving as a “bar”, that can be a good reference if you are informed about their tastes.

But there is also a bunch of “high art film” that’s just boring, so if they insist that that is art or film or cinema and something more mundane but fun isn’t, because it doesn’t fulfill some arbitrary condition, that’s bad.

A horror movie critic after watching thousands of horror movies saying “The overall movie was meh, but that one thing about the monster or the way they did their camera work was cool and that’s why the movie was worth watching and if you are just watching for entertainment, not so much”. And the same person can judge a different horror movie to be “completely unoriginal and derivative”.

But if it’s a movie about someone watching paint dry and it’s “super interesting because it reveals something deep about our human nature and our relationship with the passage of time” then that’s… that’s not my thing.

Also I pay zero attention to movie critics. I don’t care about movies. That’s just what I think about them.

Arguing against violence and war when that is possible is fine.

Arguing fanatically to lay down weapons when one side is very clearly not going to do that, is very stupid.

In the sense that there will always be people who are going to be tricked into a fascist, violent, superiority cult, because there are just that many people, and in the sense that sometimes and regularly moderate or intense violence will be necessary to stop them, because some people are closed off to arguments and peaceful discussion, opposing that violence is taking their side, yes.

And it’s fine if you disagree, I simply think you have really finished thinking about it. The reply is always going to be a “… but what if they just stopped being fanatic fascists” and I think that is not how that works.

So ultimately I agree with Orwell.

Basically, the good parts of free speech arguments.

I do think there are things that can just be banned from existence, and be made illegal, but it’s significantly more tolerant than the current vibe.

Reality doesn’t give a shit about our systems of morals. There is a certain “mainstream, harmony and political correctness” creep that sometimes happens. And what’s bad about that, is that bubbles brain wash themselves into believing that the way they think the world works is really how the world works. And what they hold isn’t just a perspective and an opinion, but a fundamental truth about the world and deviation needs to be purged. And that eventually collides with reality. This is both true for racists and for people who think racism can be “cured” or “educated away” or “people can just consider the facts and change their mind”.

The fediverse allows a more gradual interaction than centralized social media sites. Because centralized social media must decide how to deal with… depiction of politics, religious subjects, NSFW topics, which btw, covers everything from violence over nudity to medical conditions.

If there was a medical community sharing discussions about medical topics, I can block that and be unburdened by it, but there is no central fediverse authority that needs to decide if that medical picture is not allowed because there is a boob in it.

In short, banning a social group on social media, like racists, doesn’t convince anyone or remove that group of people from factually existing and factually organizing.

Open Source Software works the same way, you can’t be sure that math library isn’t being used to control a remove controlled ballistic missile, but pretending that you can “ban math” depending on the purpose is stupid, so there is no point in worrying about it.

You can just form a regular institutionalized user group / hobby association and run that this way if you want.

That’s the end point I see for the fediverse too, localized specialized interest groups that run themselves, know each other IRL and both finance the space because they see the value it brings them and democratically decide how to run it.

… but it doesn’t work perfectly with sign ups being unlimited, anonymized and open to the general internet.