Have you looked at Bluetooth LE Long Range? I believe more recent phones have it and it claims communication of up to 1km. In practice less in the woods I'm sure. Still a dramatic win over standard Bluetooth though.
BLE Coded PHY is on my radar. The theoretical range boost is huge, something like 4x over standard in ideal conditions. The challenge right now is that flutter_blue_plus (the BLE library I'm using) has limited support for negotiating Coded PHY, and both devices need to support it. But phone hardware has been shipping with it since around 2020 so the install base is there. Definitely something I want to add, probably as an automatic upgrade when both peers support it.
Yeah iOS supports BLE Coded PHY since the iPhone 12 / iOS 14. The tricky part is negotiating it at the library level. flutter_blue_plus doesn't fully expose Coded PHY yet so I'd need to handle it through platform channels on both sides. It's on my list though, the range improvement would be significant!
Oh, I thought that support was only present in some iOS 13 beta and then disappeared again? (At the OS/driver level; I’m pretty sure the hardware supports it.)
You're right, I was wrong about iOS 17 auto-negotiating Coded PHY. After digging deeper, Apple did support it briefly in iOS 13.4 betas but pulled it in iOS 14 and it hasn't returned. CoreBluetooth still doesn't expose PHY selection at all. The iPhone hardware supports it but the OS won't use it. So BLE Long Range is going to be Android-only for now. I've updated the roadmap to reflect that.
... Your examples seem to undercut your point if I'm understanding what you're trying to say.
In your first example the "cost" in the form of traffic etc. was reduced so more people "buy" in the sense that they go on the road until you reach a new "cost" equilibrium. In practice that equilibrium is quite close to the original cost so it doesn't fix the issue traffic. But if that same number of people had driven before the high way expansion traffic would have been way worse; the cost would have been too high so they previously opted not to drive.
In your second example by increasing the supply of money the money ends up costing less; it becomes worthless due to inflation.
When there's more of a thing it cost less.
To be fair, building more housing can be like highway example. If there's tons of pent up demand of people looking to move somewhere increasing supply dramatically can fail to move the needle on cost because there's many marginal buyers who all have basically the same price. If you've got a million people who want to move somewhere and are all willing to pay up to 500k for a house the price of a house won't fall under 500k until you've built at least a million more homes.
> ... Your examples seem to undercut your point if I'm understanding what you're trying to say.
That perhaps you shouldn't assume that kindergarten-level theories always correctly describe complex markets?
> In your first example the "cost" in the form of traffic etc. was reduced so more people "buy" in the sense that they go on the road until you reach a new "cost" equilibrium.
So go on, do continue this line of thinking. You built more houses.... then what?
Yeah that’s induced demand and it’s a good thing for the economy.
The rents are supposed to reduce only temporarily. But the goal is to not reduce is permanently. The goal is to increase land utility. Building houses helps with that cause.
> Yeah that’s induced demand and it’s a good thing for the economy.
No, it's not good. It leads to nothing but urban decay.
That's how you get Tokyo with a crazy price bubble, while beautiful traditional houses decay into dust just 3-4 hours away.
> The rents are supposed to reduce only temporarily.
Except that they don't even decrease. If your population is growing, so is your rent. And it doesn't matter how much you build (for large enough cities).
Again, this is simple observable truth.
> The goal is to increase land utility. Building houses helps with that cause.
Yeah. The goal is social engineering to force people into shoebox-sized apartments, to be ruled by their benevolent masters.
That's also why we're getting a global pushback against it.
> No, it's not good. It leads to nothing but urban decay.
This is subjective and loaded. I don't see any concrete point you are making.
>Except that they don't even decrease. If your population is growing, so is your rent. And it doesn't matter how much you build (for large enough cities).
They did temporarily in Austin - 19% after accounting for inflation.
Overall, making a city like NYC is preferred for any country. Even if the prices are really high, it reflects the economic activity of that city. Why would a house cost ~$800k if the person living there won't make multiples of it with their wages?
> This is subjective and loaded. I don't see any concrete point you are making.
Forced (by economy) in-migration into cities is a net negative for the country with stable or shrinking populations. It leads to objectively worse quality of life for people (less living area per person and more financial stress).
> Overall, making a city like NYC is preferred for any country.
Nope. Making a city like NYC is a recipe for disaster. Europe and the US are living through it right now. How do you think we got that kind of polarization?
When it's a zero-sum (since population is stable/declining) game, the losers are not going to take it lightly. They become an easy target for all kinds of populists.
> That's how you get Tokyo with a crazy price bubble
Are you really making an argument that rents in a place like Tokyo are not supported by real value creation? Are we supposed to all live in "beautiful, traditional" heritage houses? Those houses are often a luxury, and favored by the wealthy who can live with the resulting inconveniences. They're not a sustainable solution for the masses.
Not really, it used to be the case that a full third of Americans moved every year. Obviously life is more complicated than econ 101, but it's also obvious that a current undersupply of housing is one of, if not the primary, drivers of home pricing. Admittedly other factors like the governments interference in the home loan space have also had large effects on the market over the last century.
They're comparing Saudi Arabia to a drug dealer; I don't think they're ascribing any moral virtue to the Saudi regime. They just believe the Saudis are acting more intelligently.
They mean in the sense of sum, product, difference, and quotient. The comment they were replying to said KW/h (a quotient), but the term is KWh which is a product.
A fun fact, SCOTUS as a term predates POTUS by over a decade. So actually -OTUS was extended to POTUS from SCOTUS, not the other way around. Though both are well over 100 years old at this point. I think POTUS is probably the more well used term today, but in any legal context SCOTUS gets used more or less constantly.
I'd point out that at least in aerobic exercies (ie running and biking) its generally recommended that you shouldn't be pushing too hard for most of your workouts. If you're going out four days a week it's only on one or two of them that you're generally supposed to push yourself. The others should be at an easier pace. Which I tend to find more enjoyable.
There's also something to be said for seasons of maintaining a level of fitness rather than pushing for the next level!
I believe it's just a matter of intuitively useful units. There's simply too many seconds in a day for people to have an immediate grasp on the quantity. If you're using a space heater or thinking about how much power your fridge uses kilowatt hours is an easy unit to intuit. If you know you have a battery backup with 5 kilowatt hours of capacity and your fridge averages 500 watts then you've got 10 hours. If you convert it all to watt seconds the mental math is harder. And realistically in day to day life most of what we're measuring for sake of our power bill, etc. is stuff that's operating on a timetable of hours or days.
"litres-of-fuel per km-driven" (Volume/Distance) is still fully reductible to an area: litres is still a volume (1 cubic decimeter) and km is still a distance (1x10⁴ dm) Maybe you meant that the other way around? Distance/Volume (as in Miles/gallon) is an Area⁻¹ (Distance⁻²), which is more difficult to imagine in space.
Now, Kg is a measure of mass (or weight, depending on who you are asking), which throws density into the equation, which is proportional to the temperature, which will vary according to where and when the driving takes place. But since the time and place, and hence the temperature is (allegedly) defined when the fuel consumption was tested, the density is a constant, and as such you can leave it out from the relation.
If you car was fueled by a fixed pipe which it travelled along, consuming all the fuel in the sections of the pipe that it moved past but no more, what would the cross section of the pipe be?
> Now, Kg is a measure of mass (or weight, depending on who you are asking), which throws density into the equation, [...]
It's the other way round: chemically how much energy you get from burning your fuel is almost completely a function of mass, not of volume. (And in fact, you aren't burning liquid fuel either, in many engines the fuel gets vaporised before you burn it, thus expanding greatly in volume but keeping the same mass.)
> [...] which throws density into the equation, which is proportional to the temperature [...]
For an ideal gas, sure. But not for liquid fuels.
> "litres-of-fuel per km-driven" (Volume/Distance) is still fully reductible to an area: litres is still a volume (1 cubic decimeter) and km is still a distance (1x10⁴ dm) Maybe you meant that the other way around? Distance/Volume (as in Miles/gallon) is an Area⁻¹ (Distance⁻²), which is more difficult to imagine in space.
I don't think that the reciprocal is a problem. No, what I mean is that you can't cancel fuel with driving. Litres-of-fuel is a different unit than distance-driven ^ 3. Similar to how torque and energy are different physical quantities that you can't cancel willy-nilly, despite their units looking similar.
You might find a physical interpretation for an adventurous cancelling, and that's fine. But that's because you are looking behind the raw unadorned units at the physics, and basing your decision on that.
Units are a very stripped down look at physics. So units working out are necessary for cancelling to make sense, but not sufficient.
Also the UK gallon is different from the US gallon. And the same applies to all the other non-metric fluid measurements such as pints and fluid ounces. Historically the UK gallon was used throughout the former British Empire (Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc). By contrast, almost nobody ever officially used the US gallon except for the US (and a small handful of highly US-influenced countries such as Liberia).
I use the conversion factor so often that I know it by heart: 1 day = 86400 seconds. I punch that 5-digit integer into a calculator, not an approximation like 8.5e5 (which is the same length, haha).
I'm not sure if I would call it sarcasm, but it's a reference to a popular computer science joke format.
The first time I saw it:
>There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
The joke is that 10 is how you express 2 in base 2.
I think there is another layer to the joke, though; often in mathematics, computer science, algorithms, and software engineering, things get divided into sets, sets get broken down into two sets according to whether some property about the elements is true or false, and this joke echoes that.
As already said it was a PSA ran on TV in the US up until at least the 90s I think. It's not really a different animal when you think about it; at the height of summer the sun doesn't set until around 9 (at least in the northern half of the US), so the PSA is running probably half an hour to an hour after its gotten dark. Which was a pretty typical time for kids to be told to be home. Ie "be home when the street lights turn on." So the ads basically saying "your kid was supposed to be home over 30 minutes ago, are they back yet?
Edit: adjusted the times because I actually bothered to check when sunset is.
Key distinctions between Steam and similar contenders in other spaces (google play store, the apple app store) are that:
1. Steam isn't bundled with the OS, it must be installed.
2. Steam isn't a gatekeeper to installing software (as the app store is and in a somewhat different way as google has proposed doing with their plans to require app signing).
At least the US, and I assume most legal schemes, require an attempt to monopolize, simply being the best player in town isn't enough. Perhaps if the steam deck, etc. achieved a high level of market dominance you could argue that bundling steam was anticompetitive, but I don't see it yet.
Valve has market power though, which is a key part of a monopoly.
If tomorrow Steam decided to charge 30% extra to developers with the stipulation that sticker price must equal that of outside Steam, developers wouldn't have much of a choice but to eat the cost, because PC gamers are extremely reluctant to leave their Steam library and features.
A good example of market power is Apple vs Spotify. When Apple launched Apple Music, they changed Music.app into Apple Music on every iDevice in the world, with a handy subscription pop-up the first time you launched it.
This was massively anti-competitive overreach despite Apple not technically being a monopolist. You can easily install Spotify, and Spotify was much bigger. Without making this move, Apple Music would have crashed and burned, but Apple basically forced themselves into the market, using their marketshare and user migration reluctance as a crowbar.
The fair competition thing to would have been to show a pop-up on first Apple Music app launch, asking "hey, would you like to try one of these streaming services?", and show Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and Deezer in a random order. Just like Microsoft and their browser pop-up.
Then again, aside from a decade of stagnation (2010-2020 Steam saw very few updates, until Valve started working on the Deck), Valve hasn't really abused their position. Gabe Newell famously said that piracy isn't a pricing problem, it's a service problem, and Valve is a private company, so as long as he is at the helm I assume Valve is going to continue delivering good service. After that.. who knows.
The even more anti-competitive thing Apple does vs Spotify and all competitors is avoiding app store fees, while forcing all competitors to pay them.
To have the same profit, Spotify has to charge $13/mo when apple music charges $10/mo with all else being the same.
That's very obviously the App Store monopoly being used to give Apple Music a massive unfair advantage that is practically impossible to break through.
Steam does not have anything like that, if someone else decides to make "Epic Game Launcher" tomorrow for PC, that new company doesn't need to distribute it on the "Steam App Store" and pay valve 30% of all sales.
This meant in apple music, the user could open the app and it would work including paid features.
In spotify, you could open the app and it would tell you "You can't subscribe here, sorry" and couldn't even link you to a webpage you could subscribe at.
I'm certain a non-zero number of users couldn't understand what to do with that apple-approved error and gave up.
Maybe there's a reason that apple lost in court for that one.
"Monopoly" is a distraction. The issue is abuse of market power. Having market power is fine. You can't punish people for being successful.
Steam doesn't abuse being successful to lock out competitors. You can sell products sold through Steam via other platforms too. You can sell outside of Steam and give your customers Steam keys for the game. You can install Steam on different platforms alongside other stores and programs.
Nothing Steam does makes it harder for consumers to buy games from Valve's competitors. That's what matters, not whether Steam is very successful.
To be clear, I don't think Valve has abused their position at all. I was merely musing on how they could. Which would operate on a similar concept as Apple did: "my users will stay in my ecosystem almost regardless of what I do."
>so as long as he[Gabe] is at the helm I assume Valve is going to continue delivering good service
THIS. Valve I trust to be a good entity for as long as Gabe leads it. As soon as he's gone, Valve will be taken over by some accountant CEO and will abuse their market position (functional monopoly).
I kinda hope Gabe pulls a Patagonia and leaves Steam to some impenetrable legal entity that runs it for the good of the users.
A third difference is that I've seen no signs of steam actually abusing their standing in the market. If anything they seem to be nicer than they have to be.
They absolutely keep a larger cut than others. With Epic the first million you make is free. After much deliberation, steam changed it so that their 30% cut is reduced if you make more than 10M. For a lot of indie devs, its pretty much a death sentence.
That's Epic using its money from other markets for loss leader schemes in order to grab market share. It's a very classic move (same as free games), and it's always detrimental to the market and customers in the long run.
It's not a good thing, epic games is a garbage company. That they're actively losing money to prop up their store should tell you how bad of a thing it is if it ever succeeds.
High prices are a sign of their competitors failing to compete. Are they using their standing to make competing with them harder, somehow? For example, they dont do Amazon style prohibitions of selling the product cheaper elsewhere.
I'd love for the cut to be smaller, but it is absolutely not a "death sentence." With traditional consoles (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft consoles, and those before them), the barrier to entry is very high. If you are an indie, it is practically necessary to work with a publisher to get on those platforms. The publishers demand their own cut (in addition to Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft), and as they are running a business, they only take on games that they expect will make a profit. In that environment, weird little developers making weird little games will almost always be shut down before they can even see the light of day. I think it is a little easier in the modern day (you don't need a blessed dev kit to make a console game, for example), but I think the barrier is still not trivial.
The PC games space has always been more open. If you had a weird game you wanted to share, you could share a disc with your friends or make it available on your website. But, again, if you wanted to make some decent money, you probably needed a marketing department and to have a boxed copy on store shelves (which, again, means working with a publisher). With a few exceptions, hardly anyone would ever find your game otherwise.
With modern-day Steam, an indie dev needs only to pay $100 to put a game on Steam (and I believe that $100 is refunded if the game crosses a certain threshold of sales). Discoverability is still a challenge, but just by existing on Steam, an indie game has a chance to make a bit of money. Steam itself has some discoverability features that can boost the visibility of even quirky little titles. The indie dev needs to do their own work, of course, to get visibility, but they don't need to have major resources behind them to get that visibility. They don't necessarily even need to host a website anymore - the game has a page on the Internet through Steam after all. The indie dev can direct anyone who will listen to them to go there.
All that said, I do agree that Steam is practically a monopoly. If Steam decided they hate you for some reason, then that's it. You almost certainly do not have a viable path forward for selling your PC game simply because they have such dominance (see the recent controversy where major payment processors suddenly decided they would not facilitate the sale of lewd games, and Steam reacted by pulling any game that seemed to fall into that category. Although, even in that case, the harmful monopoly tactics are coming from different actors in a different industry). For the time being, I just think they are kind of a benevolent dictator.
Indie games pay for discoverabiliy (don't know if that's a word). To be clear, I mostly use GoG when I can, unless it's a multiplayer game with bad lobby/MP support (Firaxis/paradox basically)
Indie game development largely owes its existence to Steam. I know I would spend a lot less on indie games if I had to buy them from their own websites or, god forbid, through an awful laggy "app store" run by Ubisoft or Microsoft.
If competitors offer passable services for selling indie game developers, then indie game developers would be able to earn more money (due to competition).
This is why developers are hopeful for alternative services.
Your misunderstanding what monopoly means and represents.
Monopoly just comes down to marketshare, but it’s perfectly legal in the US to be a monopoly instead it limits what you’re allowed to do. For example a regular company can give a discount if you agree to only sell their goods, obviously that becomes problematic if the company has monopoly power so they are no longer allowed to have such agreements. The boundaries around what is a market trip people up, but it’s around what customers view as substitutes goods. If you don’t have a car then an EV can be a viable substitute, however if you have a gas car then you have some wiggle room on octane ratings etc but an electric car chargers isn’t viable substitute.
“In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises.[2] Although monopolies may be big businesses, size is not a characteristic of a monopoly. A small business may still have the power to raise prices in a small industry (or market).[2]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
I'm still finishing my first read, but I really recommend Cory Doctorow's latest book [1] "Enshittification:Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It" which covers the subject of tech monopolies and much more.
Reading it I learned about the term "monopsony" which is "a market in which goods or services are offered by several sellers but there is only one buyer" which is usually conflated with monopoly.
This is really the key here. Many people are commenting their experience as a games buyers, but this article is about the developers. Monopsonies are usually linked to lower wages in labor markets. In this case lower profits for developers from selling their games.
https://novelbits.io/bluetooth-long-range-coded-phy/
reply