The US FTC just posted a big article about their recent unscrupulous activity, actually!
I’m a huge fucking nerd.
The US FTC just posted a big article about their recent unscrupulous activity, actually!
The feature is called Obstacle Aware Acceleration.
The 30% cut was industry standard for digital distribution for years. Google, Apple, and numerous other players all took 30% as standard.
That being said, Steam hasn’t taken a flat 30% for years now - their standard agreement starts at 30%, decreases to 25% after the first $10m in sales, then decreases further to 20% after $50m.
Furthermore, Valve has done more in terms of providing services, APIs/libraries, and end-user features (all with no additional fee to the developers or consumers) than any other game storefront has. I’d say they more than justify their cut.
WebP is not proprietary. It’s an open format, is not patent-encumbered, and its reference implementation/libraries are open-source. It is driven mostly by Google, similar to Chromium.
It’s a better format than JPEG, GIF, or PNG, while doing the jobs of all of those, but better (in most cases), and is an open format. It also has wide compatibility nowadays. The only major downside is a lot of social media services don’t even think about it being a potential format due to a lack of awareness/wide usage, leading to a degraded experience when someone shares a WebP somewhere (lack of auto-embedding as an example). I suspect this is why it gets a lot of hate here, which is unfortunate because it’s not at all the fault of the format.
AVIF (based on AV1) is the up-and-coming format that beats WebP in most cases now, but support isn’t quite there yet (mostly due to Apple), and it has the same problems for social media as WebP. However, it doesn’t have any true lossless mode AFAIK. HEIF (based on HEVC) is also good, but is heavily patent-encumbered and not as open. JPEG-XL is dope and potentially even better in some aspects, but has very poor support across the board.
Another Tesla owner here (2020 Model 3) who thinks Musk is an absolute tool bag, but the misinformation out there about the cars is just plain silly.
Every Tesla has always had prominent manual door release mechanisms on the front doors. So prominent, in fact, that most people who try to get out of the car for the first time instinctually go for it (on the Model 3 and Y, at least). The rear doors depend on model/year, but are mostly much less prominent/accessible since it would defeat the purpose of the child lock.
There are far, far fewer EV battery fires per year than there are ICE fires, even adjusting per capita. Furthermore, Teslas have historically had the lowest rate of battery fires of any EV.
Software updates never install automatically and you literally never have to sit and wait in the car for them. When a software update is available, you get a notification to schedule it both on the car’s screen itself and on your phone via the Tesla app. You don’t even have to touch the car to schedule or install the update from your phone. Additionally, if the concern is regarding getting in/out while an update is installing, the standard door handles work just fine throughout 95% of the update process, and the manual releases always work.
What, to get in the car? That’s a valid criticism I suppose, but not at all unique to Teslas, and getting in won’t do you a lot of good with an “empty tank” anyway, especially if it’s dead to the point that even the 12V battery (which is responsible for the doors and most of the electronics other than the motors and HVAC) is fully drained. Either your 12V battery has to straight-up fail entirely or you have to leave the car sitting on 0% for weeks to months for this to happen. There are terminals to “jump” the car and access the frunk (and thus the 12V battery) without access to the inside of the car.
Build quality issues are not at all unique to Tesla, and occur with every manufacturer all the time. Except for the Cybertruck, nearly all of Tesla’s build quality issues were largely worked out years ago and are on the same level as other manufacturers.
My car literally drives me to and from work every day (40min one way) with very infrequent interventions or disengagements from me. Pretty convincing lie, if you ask me. While we’re not at level 3 autonomy yet, and Elon has hugely over promised and under delivered over the years, the tech is extremely impressive (especially given it’s 100% camera-based) and already pretty damn good (not always perfect) in most scenarios. It’s constantly being improved, too. I’ve gotten to personally experience the progress over the past 5ish years, and it feels like we’re getting pretty close. Whether it’s actually level 3+ soon, who knows. The future is hard to predict, especially with very new, experimental tech like this.
100% valid, no argument from me.