Someone needs to be reminded that anticompetitive practices are illegal

Save us, EU. You're our only hope. Sincerely, USA

This keeps happening—can you lot make some laws for a change?
Edit: oh wait not like that
- It's cool I fixed it now.
  America, moments after outlawing IVF
  Just as an aside, I'm an American that emigrated to Canada. My province (BC) is currently passing a law to make one attempt at IVF free for everyone (starting midyear in 2025)... laws actually can be used for good.
- California tries its best... There's a bunch of pro-consumer laws that other states don't have. There's the CCPA which is similar to GDPR (including the right to know and the right to be forgotten). You must be able to cancel a service easily online if you can sign up online. Store gift cards aren't allowed to have expiration dates. Gift cards with less than $10 on them must be redeemable for cash. Stricter laws against false advertising. And a bunch of other useful laws.
  Not as good as the Australian Consumer Law, but better than pretty much every other US state.
Cries in britland
- You are welcome to rejoin
- The UK adopts various EU rules, a lot of stuff even sold in Northern Ireland has to abide by EU rules (so just say that Apple did make separate lightning and USB C phones, they'd have to use separate operations to sell specific ones in parts of the UK and not others, it probably would have been easier for them to just sell the European models)
Hey, y’all did a good job with the FAIR act. Keep working on it
Canada, too. We're somehow even more feckless at anti-trust.
- I'm still amazed that I'd never heard about Nortel until this year.
EU, we need your bunker-penetrating rockets. Sincerely, Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians.

Nvidia: bans platform translation layers for CUDA

Meanwhile AMD: is forbidden from releasing an open source HDMI 2.1 driver supporting 4K@120hz because of HDMI Forums requirements.

Oops. Someone hacked the server and now the code is leaked online. How terrible.
DisplayPort gang?
- Sadly also not an open standard, in reality but they are friendlier to FOSS.
- Accidental DisplayPort guy checking in. I didn't even know it was a thing until I bought my graphics card. It seems like I dummied my way into some good tech.
- Does DP support CEC or ARC nowadays?
Mindless fanboys: AmD aNd nVidIa aRe LitEralLy tHe sAme!
- It was hilarious seeing Intel bent over the proverbial barrel for a while after AMD put out Ryzen, be nice if they could do the same to nvidia.

These companies are wielding way too much power if they are not afraid to act like this in the open. Bring back making the board of executives and C Suites lives hell when a company so much as inconveniences you.

I want to see fines that have real teeth. No flat rates. Some defined amount per violation, in addition to forfeiture of all revenue derived from or connected to the violation(s). It might be complex to figure out what revenue that applies to inside a large corporation, so to help with the assessment you get a group of government auditors attached to your company for as long as the assessment takes. You pay their wages and provide them with whatever office space &etc they require, and they have a position on your executive board and full oversight of company operations until your debt to society is fully paid.
Regulatory violations should risk ending the company. If you can't run a profitable business legally then you shouldn't be running a business.
- Personally, I think it would be easier for all involved to just fine based on a percentage of global annual revenue from the date of the violation to present. If they want personhood so bad, then they can have this too.
  Edit for an example: let's say Intel does anticompetitive behavior 15 years ago and a court case finds them liable for damages today. Add up the last 15 years worth of global revenue, and take a percentage of that.
Mandatory jail sentences would be ideal.
- God would I just absolutely bust
- Just to play Devils advokat here: Wouldn't that just completely discourage anyone from taking up a new CEO or similar role since you are now liable for some illegal activities that might have happened without your knowledge and long time ago.
  You would at least need very good evidence beyond reasonable doubt that the person in question actively put into motion the illegal activity and knew that it was illegal.
  Placing blame on a single individual might feel satisfying but does not nessesarly punish the correct responsible. When cooperations get as large as Nvidia, Intel etc. it functions in my opinion like one giant complex organism and legal issues like these are often systemic and involves hundreds of people who took decisions.
  I think massive and progressive fines are in fact a good tool because it punishes the "organism" that is truly to blame and not an individual who might be to blame.

Yeah fuck this.

... What's a translation layer?

In general, it translates instructions into something readable by whats accessing it. A popular translation layer on Lemmy is Proton. Its how the Steam Deck can play all those windows games.
Got a Windows app you want to run on Linux? Wine and Proton are well known translation layers.
I guess Graphics Cards are similar. CUDA is basically the NVIDIA equivalent of .exe I think.
- Cuda is an Nvidia specific method for using a graphics card to do computation (not just graphics), like physics simulations.
  Translation layers would let you use software designed for other graphics cards to work with Cuda, or to let Cuda software work on other graphics cards
I think it's about translating cuda to ROCm instructions or something.
~~it's stuff for using AI (like stable diffusion) to render images.~~
EDIT : turns out I know jack shit
- You're thinking of transformers.

So a knife maker can now forbid me to cut chicken with it?

- But at least you wouldn't download a car, right?

I give it about 10 years before the EU is invaded by the US after corporate lobbying

Or a couple of months if the EPP win the next EU elections.
- I need context
Ahead of schedule!
A guarantee of deploying to europe would be great for military retention! Everyone is tired of fighting forever wars in the desert
I give it about 10 years before the EU is invaded by the US after corporate lobbying
No need. The US most likely pushed Ukraine and Russia into a war that essentially is a way to put so much pressure in the EU economy that things will fail one way or the other.
- Russia (and Putin) are so weak the USA forced them to invade their neighbour?
  Cope.
- The US promptly forgot that Ukraine existed once they gave Russia their nukes back, and didn't bother to think about them again until Russia invaded. The major exception being Hunter Biden, and he has never been in politics so he doesn't count.

Can a EULA ban fair use? Google v Oracle might have something to say about this.

It can say whatever it wants unless invalidated by a court or an existing law saying otherwise.
- Yup, it's not a question of laws if there is no enforcement.
Probably depends on your country's laws. Here in Estonia most EULAs aren't valid because pressing accept on those isn't legally binding.
- What if we don't accept the EULA? Like why do we need to accept Nvidia's EULA to create translation layer of cuda?
- @FluffyPotato @zea64 Nice haha.
EULAs should not exist.

If translation layer can be banned with EULA how is wine not dead yet? M$ loves Linux or what?

MS loves money. If Linux makes them money, great. If not, fuck it.
- "...because it makes us money" could be put at the end of any slogan to make it 100% honest.
- Well for sure they profit on Linux but I doubt they are using Wine.
The EULA of the CUDA SDK bans reverse engineering output of the SDK to make translation layers (and such compatibility aids in general).
That makes it more legally dangerous and/or harder for devs. It has no effect on anyone not using the SDK.
- How is that Nvidia can ban reverse engineering and for example Nintendo can't. I'm sure they would love to just say in EULA that sorry but reverse engineering Switch is prohibited therefore every emulator is illegal
I'm willing to bet that Linux is irrelevant to Microsoft. It doesn't threaten them, Microsoft has it's core business elsewhere
- Their core business is hosting linux for other people at this point.
- Microsoft do make money from Linux though. For example, Microsoft SQL Server runs on Linux, and you can use Linux in Azure (both of which are part of their core business).
- Not that irrelevant. They even have their own distro: Mariner
- This one goes in the hall of fame for sure
- Microsoft's operating system accounts for a vanishingly small percentage of server hosting, and their deathgrip on personal computing is starting to slip. (Particularly as Android has already replaced Windows as the most popular operating system.)
  Microsoft is well past "not worried", looking at "too late to do anything about it" in the rear view mirror, and barreling toward "cease to exist if they don't continue to stick the landing on interoperability with Linux and Android".
  Microsoft's long term relevance plan counts on cloud tools on Linux and their Office Suite on every platform.

This has been said time and time again but fuck Nvidia. Preventing compatibility layers ensures games and programs that need this stuff are extra unreliable, bloated and enshittified.

They can prohibit whatever they want, but how enforceable is it? Does Nvidia intend to play whack a mole by checking for translation layers?

Nah, they'll just pull "Nintendo move"

"How dare you use software on your hardware," says another worthless gaggle of bastard morons.

Just have Jensen Huang flop his dick out and say CUDA is an anti-competitive tactic. It wouldn't be less obvious.

Now imagine Microsoft banning the translation of DirectX to Vulkan. Could they do that? That would kill gaming on Linux in a snap.

Don't give them ideas

Who said anything about heroes? Villains sometimes want to stop other villains, too. In fact, probably often.
- To be fair thor is undoubtedly firmly in the hero category, and they are depicted as him in this meme Thor Ragnarok.
  top slider is hella (villain) middle is Thor (hero), bottom is Surtur (villain)
ZLUDA originally only supported on Intel since it was designed by an Intel employee, but AMD hired him to make it work for AMD instead. So in a way Intel is somewhat important here.

Here's the problem:

Doesn't matter the country/countries. Due to bureaucracy and lobbying, this will take forever for anyone to get anything done. And by the time it's done, something better will have appeared and will be using any and all loopholes present in whatever bill they pass to do the exact same shit that is happening now.

Bottom should be MooreThreads or some other Chinese GPU maker

It's too technical.