The actual problem is that the language of the bill is looking to make it far easier for a president to ban any given potentially foreign influenced video platform. That’s not fantastic and it’s been masked under these compounding layers of absurdity.

Not only is the noise ratio low, this seems like a good lesson in “encyclopedias are not primary sources nor arbiters nor authorities on information.” Yes, people use Wikipedia that way anyway. No, baking in an even lower trust system does not seem like it’s actually a fix to any of Wikipedia’s problems.

The barrier to entry is an online store, something many small businesses set up. You could barely stretch it to include an application and download servers. None of those things are things steam does uniquely nor are particularly difficult. Barrier to entry is hardly the issue.

The point is, steam competitors don’t do badly because they lack the man hours of steams Dev team. They do badly because of terrible company vision and incentives. Open sourcing a tech doesn’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I don’t even think open sourcing steam really does… Anything, for developers. Philosophically cool, practically useless, everything that steam is exists in piecewise form already. Turning steam into a federated service is not meaningfully faster because you make steam open source.

Gog is the closest and does fine. The technology is about on par with steam, the philosophy of the service better, and they are doing fine. Not overwhelming steam no, but fine.

If your proposal is some sort of grant program to make that infrastructure easier to come by then that could be neat. Nothing about steams actual technology is unique though.

A federated indie store could also be neat, though like other federated systems with money involved especially you’ll need to be extra careful about how it’s all set up to make sure the result is any good.

The unusual though possibly wrong thing that differentiates steam is they don’t appear to engage in all that much anti competitive behavior. Possibly some, but not really that much. Ultimately if it’s better for the consumer but worse for ‘the economy’ who’s really losing out? By what metric?

For now, at least. But the secret to valves success here doesn’t appear to be very closed source. A fairly flat internal structure, moderately functional store and community reputation building, mostly keeping promises and having which reputation that when they don’t they can weather the storm. Nothing there seems unachievable unless your design philosophy is so cut throat and monetized that you just build a bad product.

For one misinterpretation? Are you sure about that?

Incorrect, pemdas puts multiplication before division.

Pemdas and bodmas are not bullshit, they are a standard to disambiguate expression communication. They are order of operations. Multiplication and division are not on the same level, they are distinct operations which form the identity when combined with a multiplication.

Similarly, log(x) and e^x are not the same operation, but form identity when composited.

Formulations of division in algebra allow it to be at the same priority as multiplication by restructuring it as multiplication, but that requires formulating the expression a particular way. The ÷ operator however is strictly division. That’s its purpose. It’s not a fantastic operator for common usage because of this.

There are valid orders of operations, such as depmas which I just made up which would make the above expression extremely ambiguous. Completely mathematically valid, order of ops is an established convention, not mathematical fact.

A matter of convention: true

Unless you specify you aren’t using pemdas, that’s generally the assumed order of ops.

This is not one of the ambiguous ones, but it’s certainly written to be. Multiplication does indeed have priority under pemdas.

Under pemdas divisor operators must literally be completed after multiplication. They are not of equal priority unless you restructure the problem to be of multiplication form, which requires making assumptions about the intent of the expression.

Under normal interpretations of pemdas this is simply wrong, but it’s ok. Left to right only applies very last, meaning the divisor operator must literally come after 2(4).

This isn’t really one of the ambiguous ones but it’s fair to consider it unclear.