> "Chess players who don't use engines will be left behind"

Unfortunately this is absolutely true for classical chess at the professional level, w.r.t. preparation.

Not detracting from your point though, for the other 99.9% of chess players.

Being able to freely threaten reprisal against people exercising their rights circumvents those rights.

Freedom of association applies to individuals; it's a non-sequiter here.

I think there's a line between retaliating against someone, and refusing to help them in the future.

I do not believe that refusing to do business with an individual, where your business provides a non-life-critical service, is retaliation. A water company refusing to provide water to your home would be problematic. A luxury handbag store refusing to allow you to purchase more luxury handbags would not.

Image as a hypothetical that a customer goes into your store for the sole purpose of wasting your support staff's time. They are not going to make a purchase. They are also not directly committing a crime. They are just hurting your business for no particular reason.

Should you, as a business owner, be forced to allow them to continue to be on your property?

I think the ideal answer is yes for critical public spaces, and no for ordinary retail.

Steam clearly falls into the latter category and should be free to ban customers for any reason save discrimination against protected classes.

> I do not believe that refusing to do business with an individual, where your business provides a non-life-critical service, is retaliation.

This isn't accurate. It might not threaten your life or pose any great hurdle to overcome but retaliation has nothing to do with that. If they did it in response to an action you took not to solve a problem but instead out of spite or to otherwise get back at you then it is retaliation.

That isn't the same as refusing to do business with someone who isn't productive to associate with. The two are entirely separate categories.

Of course any business (including Steam) will attempt to argue that an instance of the former is actually the latter, and a difficult customer will attempt to argue that an instance of the latter is actually the former. Regardless, Steam (and most other businesses) behave in a clearly retaliatory manner regarding chargebacks. In cases where the company failing to respect the individual's legal rights is what led to the chargeback that shouldn't be permissible.

To frame it in the terms you used, any otherwise legal activity stemming directly from the company having violated an individual's legal rights should be treated in the same way that a protected class is.

I think someone exercising their legal rights, such as their right to enter a business open to the public and their right to free speech inside that establishment, in a way that harms the business should be something a business can "punish" by refusing to do business with that individual.

I do not think it would be good public policy to prohibit this. I also don't believe, in the United States at least, this conduct is currently legally prohibited.

I previously gave an example of a situation in which I think the correct resolution is for the business to, as you put it, retaliate against someone exercising their legal rights.

A second example of the same type of retaliation is a business denying future sales to an individual who repeatedly purchases and then returns physical merchandise. I think blacklisting that individual is both morally and legally sound.

For the record, I think the definition of "retaliation" needs to include a desire to harm the other party. If your only desire is self-protection, I do not believe it qualifies as retaliation.

It's certainly retaliation if you can't use something you already paid for.

A limited account is allowed access to all prior purchases. It can even download those purchases again (incurring costs on Valve's part without paying anything).

I don't believe anything was rescinded in the situation being discussed; Valve just prevented the user from continuing to use their community/marketplace services. This makes sense because they were put into the bucket containing fraudulent or abusive user accounts.

Are you saying it's fine, iyo, for companies to use market position to work around consumer protection laws? I don't feel like Valve/Steam should be allowed to sell games they know are broken and then refuse refunds (they could also fix them!).

>can even download those

So what you're saying is I should find a fat juicy data pipe somewhere and download stuff from Steam until I fill /dev/null... ;oP

Seriously the. 15 minutes or so of support time will have cost more than the game did in this case, but it really is the principle. Stealing lots of small amounts from lots of people is still criminally dishonest.

It's relevant in that businesses generally also enjoy freedom of (non)association but obviously that's not an absolute.

Idealism ≠ Reality

Fuck I hate being old and having to be on this side now.

If that's good enough to be human readable than patch is even better.

People do write patch files be hand.

If the only thing we're concerned about is human readability, we can do better than patch files with their pesky @@ lines and plusses and minuses. But we're talking about a compromise between readability and parseability/schemas.

Yep and the XML goes too far into unreadability. Also parsing XML is heavier weight.

More commonly, edit them.

I suspect that the noteworthy composers wrote for the medium, and those "10 more" aren't the games we mention when we talk about SNES OSTs.

Fun fact: Modding an NA SNES to play Japanese games is one step: use some needle-nose pliers to break off a small plastic tab in the cartridge slot.

They usually tell people when they're going climbing.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

That structure is common. "Not X, but Y" plus "Rule of three." It's not that humans don't ever use that structure, but it's rare outside of LLM output.

Any single data point doesn't mean it was LLM generated, but they add up.

I've experienced a similar adaptation when experimenting with cold showers. In that sense it was somewhat of a detriment; the cold became less invigorating but just as unpleasant.

It contributes to sodium intake, if you're watching out for that. Probably at about a third of table salt's sodium by mass, though.

Might cause overeating too, because it's tasty.

That's it.

Tasty food will be my downfall.

The Hollywood depiction doesn't matter if you're in a position to go to college and you're picking your major for what pays best. The only other safe bets are law and medicine, and even a freshman will realize those are much more work.