I am a little worried that this is still a problem after 20 years. Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? And flooded roads aren't exactly an unusual event to begin with.
In ATL this happens often enough that it's not a shock when it happens, we have lots of drainage problems here. I agree that I would have assumed Waymo had tested in events like this, but clearly not. So what I can say is running in ATL is a great test case for these events, and also the people who live here don't do a better job than Waymo did. There were dozens of people who ruined their cars yesterday trying to drive through deep water.
We had a story in the news this week about a Cybertruck driver who thought his Elonmobile was a boat because it has "wade mode" and deliberately drove into a lake! Humans are very stupid when it comes to driving through standing water!
To be fair if you take Elon Musk at his word the Cybertruck is supposed to have hermetically sealed powertrain components and be capable of exactly this.
The powertrain is one thing, the more critical issue is the car's structure, including the ventilation system, all sorts of gaps - and also, all hollow spaces, in which you need to balance weep holes (to prevent water condensation and subsequent rusting or weird issues regarding temperature changes) against the ability for external water to end up there at all.
Getting that right is a very expensive job and that's why you usually only see true (i.e. no visit to a shop needed afterwards) wade ability on large military vehicles and custom RV builds.
Functioning cities often shutdown for a day here or there for weather. I live in a northern city where we laugh at southern cities for shutting down for 1 inch of snow - but it is the right thing for them because it doesn't happen enough to be worth dealing with. If my city shutdown for 6 inches of snow we would be shutdown unacceptably often so we instead have higher taxes to pay for all the infrastructure needed to deal with snow (though honestly this isn't much $ in the total budget).
Which is to say cities need to figure out what is the best use of their efforts/money. It is wrong to fault Atlanta for not dealing with this. If you live there you as a voter should learn all the pros and cons (I suspect there are some unexpected environmental ones) and consider if you should vote for a change or just deal with it. The rest of us won't don't live there though should keep our fingers out of their local issues.
I’ve lived in Atlanta for many years, grew up with family in northeast, so I know how to drive in snow and have seen how Boston, New York and Atlanta all deal with it. Atlanta has a very very small fleet to clear snow and ice because the cost of maintaining a large fleet just isn’t worth the low frequency they’re needed. So it’s common for bad ice to shutdown the city for 1-2 days. That’s a valid trade off.
Every once in a while Atlanta would get a bad one and people would start complaining about needing a bigger fleet, then a couple weeks after it’s over just forget about it.
And, in the north, you have snowstorms. I'm glad to not be in a situation where you were pretty much expected to drive into office jobs every day whatever the conditions any longer. But that used to be the case barring the rare state of emergency.
Yes, there were certainly plows. But driving was still somewhat dangerous and you saw cars off roads on a regular basis. Driving into work on one of those daysz, I picked a pregnant woman off the median of a road whose car had gotten stuck.
And when it does happen: A Waymo should not fucking drive through it.
I remember once when the mall in my hometown flooded. It was at the top of a hill.
IIRC: The top of that hill received something like 6" of rain in less than 15 minutes, in a very "Fuck you in particular" sort of way.
The vaguely-greater surrounding area was fine. It was a very localized event.
They were not prepared for this. It was a mess.
And gosh: The streets near there flooded, too. The drainage systems were simply not up to the task.
It had never happened before, and it has never happened since, but: Quite clearly, it happens.
(I don't understand your deflection here, at all. If your main point is that "If cities were designed better, then the deficiencies of autonomous cars wouldn't be a big deal for those autonomous cars at all" then I might reasonably conclude that you're just not particularly observant of the world.)
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edit: People also screw things up. We (people) drive through flooded roads sometimes -- we even do it on purpose from time to time, even though the guidance is to avoid it.
Some other times, we get surprised by flooded roads. Especially at night, they can be hard to detect. We screw things up. We take risks. Sometimes, those risks even work out OK.
But back in context: Waymo. Waymo is an autonomous taxi cab. It works on regular public streets, and on a long-enough timeline: Some of those streets will be flooded.
I probably never want my taxi driver to try to ferry me through a flooded roadway, whether it has a human brain or a computer brain calling the shots.
(I did get to spend a week getting ferried ~daily through flooded roads in a Jeep once in an unrelated flood, but by a high-ranking deputy Sheriff was (who would not become confused by a power outage[1]), and this Jeep was a proper cop car with the lights and the logos. We had some mutual problems that needed solved that involved public safety, and both of us were being paid to solve those problems. That worked fine, I knew what I was getting into before we set forth, and we'd have had extraordinary support if anything went very wrong.)
Yeah you can start by not building _more_ in the flood plain.
And if you do, then don't build architecture that is incapable of just accepting the temporarily higher ground water. We know how to basement just make the basement high enough to tower over the flood.
Oh, no cheap ground-level storefront windows? Welp, guess those have to be elevated above sufficiently voluminous drainage channels (the former streets).
> Or in Florida's case, mandate hurricane ties on timber homes so they can't lift off their slabs.
That doesn't mitigate much. The mass of a paper and matchsticks "house" just isn't enough to resist it getting torn apart - if not by the wind, then by debris.
The only kind of structure able to survive a dead-on hit is steel bar reinforced concrete or very, very solidly built brick-and-mortar. But that is expensive to build.
> It's uneconomical to hurricane-proof all housing in Florida.
Given the yearly news about record breaking destruction... I'd say it is uneconomical to build in Florida at all. The only thing keeping some regions (in addition to FL and other hurricane hotspots, add California for fires and potentially earthquakes) afloat is politicians bribing populations by promising government bailouts or by forcing insurance companies to offer coverage by law even if it is extremely expensive.
The amount of waste and human suffering generated because of these perverse incentives is staggering.
The news tends to exaggerate a bit (quite a bit) for effect. Where the storm hits is devastating, but a mile away can be basically fine. So percentage wise very little of Florida gets destroyed, but of the part that gets flattened, it may be entirely destroyed. Same thing can happen periodically near virtually any body of water or stream. But hurricanes are something that can be observed and predicted in advance instead of being out of nowhere like flooding
> But hurricanes are something that can be observed and predicted in advance instead of being out of nowhere like flooding
Yeah in advance enough to prevent loss of human life, but still, if you're hit, everything you own is gone. There just is not enough time to pack up more than maybe your laptops, phones, a bag of clothes and your most important paperwork.
Explain to the class where the water is gonna get all that momentum from. Florida is flat.
The storm surge goes up (and a whole bunch of water falls on top of it). The storm surge goes down. This isn't some river bursting it's banks.
Between the requirements imposed by needing to resist hurricane winds and the slab ties it's "good enough" that there's a 99.9999% chance the building will stay on it's foundation long enough for something else to be the problem.
> The storm surge goes up (and a whole bunch of water falls on top of it). The storm surge goes down. This isn't some river bursting it's banks.
FEMA has a flood rating specifically for exactly this situation: V. They have this because it carries additional hazards beyond normal flooding seen with storms.
> Coastal areas with a 1% or greater chance of flooding and an additional hazard associated with storm waves. These areas have a 26% chance of flooding over the life of a 30‐year mortgage.
And here's a video about researchers at the Oregon State University's Wave Lab studying this exact thing:
Once again, this sort of reddit-esque penchant for projecting general guidance and engineering standards into specific situations misses the mark.
Someone in a subdivision that's a few miles inland with a mangrove swamp between it and the ocean anyway has to care about New Orleans style flooding, not "what sea state is my picture window rated for" flooding.
Like there's a reason that Florida building code just says tie it down and call it good. It's just not necessary nor economically worthwhile to try and make structures shrug off the surf. Sure, literally on the coast type stuff will get rekt (most of that stuff is concrete now though) but the average modular home subdivision doesn't need special requirements above and beyond what it takes to shrug off the wind.
When it comes to wind loading the code is basically a fight between evil civil engineers who want the state jackboot to force you to buy their service and the hardware makers (Simpson and the like) who'd prefer you reference a conservatively pre-computed table and install that much of their hardware.
There are many reasons to shit on Florida but their building code is pretty top notch (and this makes it expensive but everything has tradeoffs).
I live in Tampa Bay, so I'm quite familiar. It's pretty rare to have a V rating, precisely for many of the reasons you mentioned. But, at the same time, handwaving it away as unimportant is also silly. It's an immensely more dangerous situation to be in flooding with moving water, as opposed to just rising water conditions. If nothing else, it's important to know for evacuation purposes. I would never willingly stay in a V-rated zone if there was a chance of storm surge. Then again, I didn't buy the V-rated house I wanted and instead found a house 40 feet above sea level, so maybe that's just my risk profile.
And I didn't disagree with you regarding building. You were wrong about storm surge always being static -- it mostly is, but importantly sometimes isn't. But you weren't wrong that there's not a lot to do about it. This is one of those situations where nature will win if it wants to. Best thing you can do is just not be there when it does.
If people are going to build cheap houses, it makes sense to spend a little bit more on adding the hurricane ties (it's not like they're expensive or difficult to use). It might not be perfect, but it's surely better than just relying on gravity.
On one hand, sure, but on the other, Earth doesn't care what we expect. And humans don't build rationally most of the time. Most cities are hundreds or thousands of years old.
Flooding we experience is largely due to destruction of wetlands that used to act as a buffer for excess water during storms, and paving over land for cars making the surface impenetrable.
It would be a massive waste of resources to build out every city with a drainage system capable of handling any amount of rain. Houston had ~30 inches of water dumped on it during a somewhat recent hurricane, designing and building infrastructure for that level of storm is not realistic. I’m not familiar with storm sewer capacity design, but I’m confident they aren’t designed to flawlessly handle a 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 year event.
It's not even amounts of rain that are necessarily the problem.
In my area, big rainstorms sometimes include hail, and if some of the hail/debris is big enough to block sewer grates, then the deluge of water will quickly sweep hail and other debris into the partial blockage until the grates are thoroughly clogged.
I'm not sure how you could adequately design against that while not having storm water grates that are hazardous to people/animals/etc.
>one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets
In some cities, certain streets are designed to flood during heavy rain, and are an integral part of routing the water away from neighborhoods and businesses, and into the drainage systems.
SV is the most cloistered place I've ever seen. I'm comfortable assuming that nobody in any position of power at Waymo ever thought to themselves "gee maybe the weather is different in this new city we're deploying to, perhaps we should test that"
As a former engineer and manager at Waymo I can say with the confidence and sincerity of firsthand experience that this is not the case. People at all levels of the company think deeply about how different locations have present different challenges, including different weather.
Also it's not like we never have flooded roads here in the valley.
Whatever is going on, I'm confident it's not a result of straightforward parochialism in the way that you say you're comfortable assuming.
I worked in the field, not at Waymo. Everyone in the business is acutely aware of weather, along with hundreds of other factors, many much less obvious.
The engineers whose expertise you assume away are actually debating corner cases like the one we saw of someone carrying a bicycle on their skateboard.
In fact the companies run test campaigns in shitty weather all over the country on purpose, at great expense.
Public transit is a function of city design, less so much the presence of public transit. If you can’t walk to a stop, or if your destination isn’t reasonably accessible from that network, it won’t be used for that trip.
While it sucks for many other reasons, autonomous vehicles are actually a very good solution to public transit in most American cities. What I envisage is a dense grid of virtual bus stops in N square miles surrounding a rapid transit stop. You hail using an app, and a minibus (8-20 pax) adjusts its route to collect you and get you to that rapid transit station. The inverse happens for people arriving at that station, where routes are planned as the train approaches, so people heading to the same general area can be directed to the same minibus.
Who is "we?" The cost to develop self driving cars is not exactly being felt by society at large.
It certainly isn't stopping anyone from improving public transit, but it seems like you believe it's this and not any one of a bajillion actual factors to blame.
This is not true. If a king has all the money, then whatever the king wants is what society builds. The use of resources by tech companies to build self-driving cars uses resources for things that might otherwise have gone to some other approach.
Google's use of resources does not occur in a vacuum. Moreover, if cities decided to pass laws that would slowly transition all road infra away from private vehicles to shared public transit, then Google would lobby against that.
For public transit to function well (i.e. competitively with private vehicles), traffic needs to be much reduced (e.g., imagine no traffic lights and no traffic). Google's private cars on the roads do not move us in that direction. There is no doubt that they are technologically impressive, but they do not provide greater utility than investing in shared infrastructure would.
Last mile is still a thing. We need long distance public transit, regional public transit, local public transit (buses, trams, cable cars, ...) and we also need hyperlocal public transit (taxis, autonomous vehicles/"peoplemovers").
if you want people to use public transit, you need to make it not be a mobile homeless shelter. otherwise everyone who can afford to will insist on a private transport
Public transit and public places will continue to decline in cleanliness and quality for as long as the rich suck resources out of local municipalities.
They do the same things with public schools (pulling educated teachers to teach in private institutions) and with medical care (pulling physicians into private concierge practice).
If all the rich people had to take public transit and send their kids to public schools, they'd start investing money and (human) energy / capital in making the public infra better.
The investment of resources by rich people into their own private enclaves is entirely rational and can be solved only by wealth taxes that preclude such action (by making it impossible).
They depend on public investment to build and support road infrastructure. If one accepts your point of view, these companies depend on massive government subsidies. Or perhaps they should pay for the construction and upkeep of the roads their vehicles use.
All companies (and indeed individuals) rely on and benefit from various public goods, such as roads, law and order, and an educated populace. They pay for these public goods through taxes.
These robot vehicles pay road use taxes, like other vehicles do. And when used commercially, they pay taxi tariffs. There's even an EV-specific road tariff in CA to make up for the lack of gasoline tax revenue.
I'm not sure why you would assume to the contrary.
True. While we're at it, let's not fixing roads as well. Also electric cars. Also what's the deal with space exploration? Fix what's on earth first please.
There's a long tail of unpredictable events in the AV industry that you end up seeing, especially since the cars in aggregate end up driving more than one could over a lifetime.
At a previous employer, we've seen anything from cars getting mooned, a SUV slowly driving past the AV, the rear window roll down, and someone poke their head out and start throwing dollar bills at the AV, a convention of people dressed up in animal costumes, the "Miami left," and so on.
So it's much less of "maybe we should test that" and more of "we don't know what we don't know, so let's gather some data." In practice, the cars have lidar so they won't crash into solid objects that aren't recognized, they just end up getting stuck in embarrassing situations like these.
I haven't encountered one as a driver either, but I'm pretty sure "Don't drive into roads with water on them" was a basic safety question on the permit test.
You haven't been driving for 25 years anywhere east of the Mississippi river if you've never encountered road flooding. Accepting they can't predict everything sounds reasonable. Failing to account for a routine occurrence is negligent.
My guess is this was brought up but getting the product out there was more important to the business so it got ignored.
Now that it's a problem for them, they get to hide behind an "oops sorry, let's fix the really obvious thing now", almost like taking "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" to malicious levels.
This jives with CRUD software in general, where people are not usually rewarded for preventing future issues and instead rewarded for waiting until it's a visible problem and then fixing it.
This seems silly -- they roll the service out to individual cities in different regions, one at a time. Why do you think they do that? I'm pretty sure this is exactly that testing that you're referring to.
They can, and I bet they have! But they cannot afford a test track that accurately reproduces every condition exactly as it will be encountered in the real world. At some point, it is judicious to test with real-world conditions, and simulating only gets you so far.
They can simulate "driving out of a raging fire" but not a flooded street? This seems like an admission that the fancy "world model simulation" doesn't actually mean much
IMO there is a lot of daylight between “is not perfectly capable of simulating all situations and always used perfectly to the full capabilities of the system” and “doesn’t mean much”.
No simulation is perfect, so ideally you have a feedback look constantly looking at new real-world data as it comes in and finding where the simulation has errors, and updating the simulation to improve the correlation between the simulation and the real world over time.
My guess is they did have flooded street sims but the correlation was much lower than expected, or the details of the situation being simulated (lighting, building locations, how dirty the water is, ...) were sufficiently different from the situation that was encountered that the sim based training didn't generalize to the new context.
"Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? "
I remember when this was brought up in a Cruise (RIP) crash. The situation was that another human driver had hit and run a pedestrian who had been flung across the street and under a Cruise self-driving car. The cars were getting complaints for making too many emergency stops in the middle of the street, so it dutifully dragged the lady in the under-carriage a couple of more feet to get off to the side of the road.
Suffice to say that that had not coming up in simulation.
P.S: Lady survived but the Human hit and run driver is still at large. No one wrote about them or cared.
It can just mean that nobody though about flooded streets, what's way more reasonable than it seems because of the birthday paradox.
But that also means they need a long time to adapt to a new situation. That may be very bad depending on how fine grained a situation is defined, or it may mean nothing and in a few months they'll be back without problems.
Well fortunately the rest of the planet is a lot more similar to Arizona than Venus or the moon of the bottom of the Ocean, and they're already doing quite well in like 25 other markets, so...
~80% of the population of the US lives east of the Mississippi, where road flooding is a dirt common event. Waymo's been smart so far to cherry pick markets that cater to their vehicles obvious limitations. That doesn't exempt them from criticism for failing to account for routine conditions in new areas they've chosen to move into. Additionally "doing quite well" is incoherent given it's been 17 years and Waymo is still unprofitable.
Can Waymo cars even sense or detect flooded roadways? That is when it sees images of water covering the road, is it smart enough to know the car might get pushed into the raging waters?
This is one of the reasons why I switched to Apple Maps years ago. Google Maps kept giving directions to small backroads that I knew were prone to flooding. I noticed it when Google announced they were changing the algorithm to save people gas or something.
Yeah, it makes me wonder about their planned rollout to more of Southern California, where flooded roads aren't uncommon, especially in some of the valleys.
To me standing water sounds like obvious thing to include in testing. And maybe even design some reasonable technical solution like sensors near say wheels.
Areas with water should not be that uncommon that vehicles would never accidentally enter them. So seems like pools of say 10cm deep water should be included in testing.
Just because there are real world failures doesn't mean they didn't do simulations. It could just mean the simulation didn't account for something different in the real world.
The website for software engineers is assuming that a production failure means nobody did any testing before prod...
So what you're saying is that something far worse happened here. They did test for flooded streets but some slight difference caused the model to fail in real life.
To be fair, there will always be something that fails. So the more important question is probably the frequency and severity of those failures.
It may not be usual in Atlanta itself, but living on the Southeastern coast within a mile or two of the water, for 30+ years, it’s a surprisingly common occurrence. I’ve got old photos around of kayaking through downtown Charleston during college, for instance, where the street flooding is not only usual but a many times per season occurrence. Lots of seaside areas have the same issue.
That is wild. What happens to all of the flooded property? Do they tear-down and rebuild everything after every major flood? Or massive rennovations? It cannot believe this is truly possible as flood insurance would become impossible expensive.
I just moved from an apartment right next to where this Waymo got stuck: https://old.reddit.com/r/Atlanta/comments/1tj00sl/flooding_i... and I can say that that particular intersection floods about every time it rains hard. That being said, yesterday's rain was particularly heavy and I hadn't seen that intersection flood that bad since before Waymo started being rolled out here
It’s been clear for a while to anyone without money riding on this that the relatively “easy” part fooled a lot of people into assuming that the last push to full self driving wouldn’t be radically greater challenge.
Why is some software SuperMarioBros and other Microsoft Word? 'cause that's what the specific software is written to produce and the other is written to do produce else. Consciousness is not some magically thing on top of a information processing, it's what that specific bit of information processing produces. It's functional, it does stuff.
It should be kind of obvious due to the fact that we are conscious about our human self, not neurons, not brains, not microtubules or any other random implementation detail. We have zero clue what is going on in our brains, but we do have a high level description. Just as our brain can take some random electrical impulses from our eyes and decide that that's a "cat", it can take all the other input that goes around and conclude that that's a "self". It's perception, the brain trying to figure out what parts of the world it has direct control over.
> the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.
The problem with that common definition is that it doesn't make much sense. Every philosopher that ever talked or wrote about the hard problem and qualia did so with plain old physics, by moving their mouth or using their hands to move a pen or keyboard. You can, in theory, trace how those physical interactions happen, all the way down to the neurons. Meaning the reason why they talked about qualia boils down to plain old physics.
There is no scenario where the easy problems are solved and the hard problem remain. For there to be a hard problem, the easy problems must be unsolvable, but then you don't need a hard problem, since the easy problems are already hard.
> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?
Consciousness isn't something the information processing has, it is something the information processing does. It's a function, not some magic property that happens on top.
Consciousness is simply your brains ability to figure out what part of all the sensory input it gets can be attributed to the "self", just like other parts might be labeled as cats, dogs, table and chairs, some will be labeled as self.
And I am sure one day somebody will boil that down to some nice math, since fundamentally it's about networks. If the brain wants to move a hand from one spot to another, that's easy if it is its own hand, a couple of nerve impulses and it will happen. If that hand belongs to somebody else, moving it is a whole different ballgame. That fundamental different in connectedness should be expressible.
Alternative suggestion: Force them to open up the service and allow third party clients. Take Art. 20 GDPR "Right to data portability" and extend it to public content.
> There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server
Carrier-grade NAT stops you pretty good. And if you make past that hurdle, HTTPS might stop you. And without Google's help, nobody will find you anyway.
That's where this whole thing went wrong. The modern Internet is quite terrible at actually connecting computer and people. Everything is segregated into clients and servers, and to get anything done you need a middle man.
It's a bit more tricky, a Generic HID just gives you a DirectInput device, while reasonably modern games use Xinput. Microsoft never provided a way to map DirectInput devices to Xinput. For Xinput to work a Microsoft specific USB protocol is needed, not a Generic HID device. Many third party controllers have a switch or button combination to switch between XInput and DirectInput modes for this reason.
Microsoft has a new API with GameInput that addresses this situation and allows mapping Generic HID devices onto game controller via config file, but it doesn't work retroactively, it only works for games that use the new GameInput API.
Valve could of course provide a way to switch and emulate other protocols too, just like other third party vendors do, but there is no USB standard that makes things "just work" in Windows when it comes to gamepads, you always need extra drivers, USB modes or other hacks.
On consoles the situation is even worse, modern consoles deliberately lock out any unlicensed third party controller. Playstation3 was the first and last console that supported standard USB controller, while PS5 doesn't even support PS4 controller.
Most of them I would assume. Everything from 2006 forward started to use Xinput. DirectInput support only shows up in racing sims, flight simulators, fighting games and emulation. But all the big AAA games have been built around Xbox360 style control schemes for two decades.
But it's all a bit theoretical, since most modern gamepads have Xinput support, and the generic HID devices are mostly flightsticks or SNES-style gamepads that wouldn't have enough buttons and axis for modern games in the first place. Another issue is that most games don't offer input remapping for gamepads.
But with SteamInput and homebrew tools like x360ce there are many ways to make generic USB devices compatible Xinput, so it's not like you can't use them. It's just not something that works out of the box.
That may explain it then. I use flight controllers and driving controllers. Both just show up as generic HID devices and both are easily used in the games I play.
Prior to Steam there was StarForce and other copy protection messing up your OS and DVD drives, and plenty of stuff needed online activation as well. Of the last few physical games I bought, none work anymore, Bioshock couldn't be installed due to lack of patch servers last time I tried and Arkham Asylum failed due to GFWL being dead. Even when everything worked, you often had to manually go hunt for patches, sometimes multiple that needed to be installed in the right order, and that might not even be compatible with the localized version of the game you had.
Still sucks that used games died and the forced game upgrades that come with Steam have their issues too, but PC gaming was a horrible mess before Steam cleaned that up. Heck, I'd rather rebuy a game on Steam than find out what those vintage DVD copy protection does to a modern Windows. Most PCs don't even have a DVD drive anymore anyway.
There were definitely issues, but I think that some of those basically extend from Steam and the way it worked. GFWL was Microsoft's competition to Steam, so it just copied Steam (~3 years after a Steam came out) and worked similarly to the way other physical releases worked after Steam became popular.
It's true that some of the heavy DRM was an issue back then, but I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward. Steam probably won't live forever, and there are tons of titles on Steam that use Steam DRM, third party DRM, or rely on servers that will kill the game eventually. Just because the lifecycle is longer now doesn't make it less of a mistake than it was previously.
My biggest complaint, though, is that the ownership terms simply got shittier with Steam. Many of those old games, even from big, "evil" publishers like EA, explicitly allow license transfers in their EULAs. Steam explicitly forbids transfers.
> I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward.
I am sure it's going to be an issue at some point in the future, it already is an issue when it comes to sharing games or keeping older versions around, but what's the alternative? The alternative isn't no DRM, it's whatever DRM Apple, Google, Microsoft, Epic, EA and friends come up with, and of all of those, I take Steam any day.
Even GOG kind of loses to Steam here, as while GOG gave us DRM-free downloads, Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation and I'd rather have Steam DRM on Linux than being stuck on Windows with DRM-free GOG games. And unless I am missing something, GOG's DRM-free games didn't lead to a used digital games market either, they explicitly forbid selling or sharing in their user agreement[1]:
>> 3.3 Your GOG account and GOG content [games] are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else.
Digital goods ownership is just not a thing that exists at the moment. There was an attempt based on blockchain with Robot Cache[1], but that just shutdown.
Says you. Steam made DRM a no-brainer for developers and even got almost all players to stop complaining about it. If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.
> Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation
No, Wine gave us Windows-emulation. Even DXVK was not originally developed by Valve. They polished it all to make it more user friendly and fixed game specific issues, which is nice of course, but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.
> Digital goods ownership is just not a thing that exists at the moment. There was an attempt based on blockchain with Robot Cache[1], but that just shutdown.
Right of first sale is well tested for digital goods sold on physical media and cannot be restricted by EULAs no matter what they say. Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?
> If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.
We went through numerous years of that before Steam became a thing, almost a whole decade passed between the Internet getting popular and Steam really taking off. DRM filled DVDs and online installs with activation limits were the results.
> but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.
Let's also not pretend that fiddling for hours with Wine configs is somehow similar to pressing "Play" and having stuff Just Work™. That extra level of polish that Valve provided is critical for making it actually useful for the masses.
> Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?
Can you show me a place were I can buy used digital games? Itch.io doesn't disallow reselling games as far as I can tell, but yet we don't have a used digital games market. Buying a random .zip file, with no proof of ownership, is just not something people are interesting in.
Would the model even need that breath of knowledge? Humans just look things up in books or on Wikipedia, which you can store on a plain old HDD, not VRAM. All books ever written fit into about 60TB if you OCR them, and the useful information in them probably in a lot less, that's well within the range of consumer technology.
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