epicide

Honestly, this is true for all streaming, not just Spotify. Stream if you want, but also buy albums from them if they offer it. Merch is even better.

Hell, even if you... acquire the music files unofficially and go buy a t-shirt or poster, the artist is still probably getting way more than they ever would have from you streaming all their albums on a loop.

I've been using one of the Kobo Clara devices running Plato (built in Rust) for a few years now. Other than a couple of minor bugs early on, I've had no issues.

It's largely the exact device that I want my book reader to be:

* Small and lightweight

* Nice epaper screen

* No need for an internet connection whatsoever

* Natively understands EPUB

* Just reads books -- no ads, no markets, no apps, no upsell

The built-in Kobo firmware isn't great. IIRC Rakuten/Walmart hoover up and sell your reading habits, etc. Hence one reason why I don't connect mine to the internet (running Plato probably fixes this, but restarting the device doesn't immediately go into Plato). The device is also weirdly sluggish with the default Kobo software, and much faster in Plato.

You quickly get used to regularly checking things you actually care about, and the rest has to wait until YOU care.

This was the biggest thing for me. Before, I was paranoid that if I turned off notifications, I'd miss something important. As though I didn't miss notifications anyway.

Getting used to regularly checking (important) things also has two wonderful side effects (at least it did for me):

* My "mental notification system" got better. Because I was less dependent on my phone doing it for me, I developed the skill more on my own. * The apps and services that I checked less and less frequently became more obvious in how unimportant they were to me altogether. I have far fewer apps and accounts now, making me MORE punctual overall.

That's precisely why I don't ever accept the bribe. If I don't like the non-discounted price, then I don't buy it. Now they neither get the data nor the sale.

What's frustrating is that a lot of grocery stores do this. If you sell something absolutely necessary, such as basic foods, you should not be allowed to do the whole "mark it up to mark it down" strategy.

Also, a tip for most grocery stores (at least in the US): enter in any area code plus 867-5309. Chances are high that somebody has registered it. It's better than sharing with a family member because so many people are using it, the data becomes less useful.

Alternatively, ask the clerk to "use the store card". Usually, they will oblige.

You absolutely do not need a camera crew, a sound crew, set designers, and caterers to make a film. You need a director and scriptwriters, but those can be the same person. Do many film sets have all those? Absolutely. But one can still make a film without them. Some of the best films ever created were mostly the product of one person with a budget less than half that of the average car.

Would you be able to create big-budget movies without said big budget? Of course not. I obviously like some of those too, but who's to say that the larger budget made them better? It feels like you're conflating art creation with art business, but they are not the same thing.

Capitalists who capitalize on creative outlets need capital to incentivize them to do so. It's basically circular.

Those of us who create for creation's sake need no other reason. I create because I want to, not because I want to use it to gain capital.

Sure, those lines get muddy when you want to do it professionally, but that's a separate argument.

Because employers don't tend towards security. In fact, many actively punish somebody for "sandbagging" or simply taking too long if they even suggest a security concern.

I think you mean "subsidized" instead of "inflated".

Right, I always forget that the sr.ht link is to the application itself.

For anybody else who needs it, the page with info about the service is here: https://sourcehut.org/

Sure. If you really wanted to, I think the pages are simple enough that you could add your own CSS tweaks via a basic browser plugin (or whatever is the current go-to plugin for doing this).

For me, I only use a forge's viewer/navigation for cursory glances or sharing links to others. If I need to spend any real time digging, I'll clone the repo.

SourceHut sounds very close to what you describe: https://sr.ht/

They make it rather easy by providing an audio pronunciation: https://forgejo.org/static/forgejo.mp4

With my American accent, I don't quite say it exactly like the recording, but pretty close: "for-JAY-oh"

Hiring and firing people aren't symmetric actions.

They're asymmetric because hiring more people costs more than just the salary. For example, some folks' entire jobs are to recruit and hire people. Once they are hired, you have to onboard them, etc. So the more you hire, the more you have to pay the folks with supporting roles (either directly or by way of them not having infinite time/capacity).

Firing people isn't free, either. It comes at the cost of bad PR and severance, but the latter is voluntary and calculated by the company, and the former is quickly forgotten by anybody that matters to a publicly traded company (investors).

That means not hiring those two people in the first place is usually cheaper than firing them later.

To the original point: Cloudflare isn't hiring fewer people; they are firing people. If they are trying to grow (like every single investor is counting on them to do), then why would they fire people (the cheaper action) now when they would likely need to hire people (the more-expensive action) later in order to meet that increased growth?

The charitable answer would be that the people they are firing were deemed unable to adapt to using AI for all of this supposed increased productivity. But Cloudflare aren't saying that. In fact, they're saying the opposite by stating it's not about individual performance.

Because firing is not a zero-sum for hiring.

Hiring 1 developer instead of 3 is not the same cost as firing 2 developers.

Given that everybody, including Valve, are in the same boat, I'm not sure Nintendo is that much worse off for this.

It's true that fewer people will be buying fewer consoles as a whole, but gaming is a pretty competitive market. I'm sure Nintendo will take a hit regardless, but probably no more than the likes of Sony, MS, Valve, etc.

Like any gold rush, the only people who win are the ones selling the shovels (in this case, Nvidia).

They don't list price changes for the Lite outside of Japan, but I'm sure it's coming too.

The Japanese Switch 2 is going up by 20%. The US model is going up by about 10%.

In Japan, the Lite is going up by over 35%. If we assume a similar pattern (US going up by about half as much as in Japan), then that'd take the $230 Lite to more like $270.

I still like my Switch Lite, but almost $300 after tax for it would be absurd.

Like healthy food, simplicity doesn't taste good. At least not on the surface.

It is an acquired taste and is easily lost. When your own instinctual heuristics are being weaponized against you for profit, you have to continually fight to maintain a discipline of nourishment. The sugar high is too addictive.

AI is a fast food of the creative mind.

You can think of it in terms of tolerances. Beej's (and others you mention) style is like a tighter tolerance: it fits to better effect at the cost of fitting in fewer places.

Personally, I'm in the audience that that style works well on, but I can also see how it might be harder for someone to follow that style. e.g. if English isn't their native language. Similarly, I imagine that style is also much harder to localize (not just translate).

I think both techniques are great and I don't think they're mutually exclusive. That is, you can still inject flavor and style within the confines of a technical style guide. You just do so in a way that's less... flamboyant?

I don't think that's something that RSS (or any other alternative) can fix. I don't think RSS is as toxic as algorithmic feeds, but they are still cut from the same hyper-connected cloth. If you want to fight the algorithmic drip, promote people to connect with others in their community on a small scale.

Even if you have to use the internet to do it, making time to talk (with your vocal cords) to a friend on a regular basis can be much better than mindlessly scrolling or reading endless news feeds.

What might be even better are various other social activities away from a computer. It doesn't have to be highly social either. Just being in a park or library with other people silently reading or feeding ducks can be a highly positive semi-social experience. Just silently enjoying a common experience draws way more connection than the various "social" media apps out there.

Have you ever tried to dock a Steam deck to a TV?

Yep, works great with non-proprietary docks vs even using a 3rd party dock on Switch has led to bricked units.

Have you ever tried to use physical media with a Steam deck?

I haven't tried, but I'd be surprised if plugging in a USB optical drive wouldn't work. That'd be pretty silly though, but so are some of the Switch physical releases when the bulk of some games isn't actually on the cartridge.

I think the better thing to look at is DRM instead of specific transmission format. Steam itself is a grey area for DRM (some games are DRM-free IIRC), but you can also use things like Lutris... or generally whatever you'd like. Takes a bit of tinkering, sure, but a whole lot less tinkering than getting anything unofficial to run on a Switch.

Have you ever tried to get 5 hours of battery life with a Steam deck?

Yep, works great. I'll still give the point to Nintendo because they prioritize battery life so much more, but if you aren't running the SD at full tilt with a large 3D game, it can get decent battery life.

Have you ever put a Steam deck in your pocket? (I do have big pockets, but at least with the Switch Lite, it's possible.)

I would love a Steam Deck Lite or something. That's probably the biggest reason I keep my Switch Lite: it's easy to just toss in a bag on a whim while the SD (and other Switches) require planning to actually use them.

Nintendo will be just fine.

Yup. They're probably still sitting on piles of cash from the DS and now Switch. People were saying Nintendo was doomed when the Wii U did poorly, but others at the time rightly pointed out that they've probably got enough runway to have a few more total flops of consoles.

I personally will never use a platform that can kick me out on a whim, or could screw me the moment Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus.

Losing Newell is a valid concern (again, for Steam as a platform), but Nintendo is certainly an interesting choice to say they won't kick you out on a whim, given their track record of bans, lawsuits, and just being particularly litigious.

Wake up and... do what exactly? Tell others to "wake up" ad nauseum? The whole "wake up, sheeple, you're being manipulated" is both correct and amusingly self-terminating.

Metacognition, for all its benefits, comes with the newfound sisyphean task of being unable to intentionally avoid thinking about a white elephant for an entire minute. "Don't be influenced by the ads/media/propaganda" works about as well.

So perhaps the best way to reduce manipulation is to find a way back to sleep sometimes. A sort of meta-meta-cognition, if you will. It's self-awareness all the way down.

Or for corporations that produce things of negative value and force people to waste a big chunk of their lives on administrative tasks.

Agreed and in both cases I'd rather have quality than quantity.

Of course, but if there's a game that I really would like to play, it doesn't matter how good some hypothetical version of it might be if nobody ever ports it. The quality of a nonexistent game(/port) is zero, no?

There have been pretty much no native ports of big games since proton got pushed by Steam. All Linux game porting companies have either shuttered or switched focus to only Mac and mobile. There were many more native releases in the period before Proton than now.

I suppose we are just in different circles of "big games". Before Proton, I can't recall the last time I saw a AAA game with Linux support. The occasional indie game had support, but that's still the case. World of Goo 2 just came out with native Linux support, for example. DRM free too, if you buy it direct from them.

In a way where they can in the future publish changes that break the game on Linux without you being able to complain because what you bought is a Windows game.

This is the case regardless of native vs Proton. Just because a game has a native Linux version at some point is not a guarantee that an update won't break it nor that they won't just drop Linux as a platform outright.

Absurd. There were plenty of native programs released before either compatibility layer.

And there are still about as many (in my experience) with both compatibility layers.

We learn to live with it, but it isn't right, for simple pieces you can tune a piano for that exact song and make it sound much better

"Better" is always relative, so it's often more correct to say it is/sounds "different".

For example, a true temperament guitar can sound weird/"wrong" to some people. A lot of folks are used to those compromises just being part of the sound. Similar to a "honky tonk" piano: if you tuned it differently, it would come across as a timbre change more than simply "better" tuning.

In the grand scheme of things, there are professions and arts that were once considered essential to everyday life and in ways that we today don't even consider. The profession is lost to time, but so is the need. It's the in-between transitional state, where the profession is in the process of dying, that is the most painful period.

Some day, the last note played on a piano will be played and lament for the piano tuner will die with it.

At what point does my weekend project become a "critical online service"? At what point does my Pong clone become a game that needs regulating on how it's built?

Is it illegal for me to create a piece of art (i.e. a game) whose sole purpose is to demonstrate the fragility/absurdity of modern software abstractions by building it in some insane nesting of APIs?

I don't ask these to rhetorically imply that we don't need more regulation. I completely agree that there are online services that need way more regulation as they have become infrastructural.

These are all questions that we have to collectively (and not just programmers) discuss and decide where the lines are. It's not as simple as "force a set of simple as possible exe file format and OS interfaces."

This is the native app vs Electron argument all over again (except limited to proprietary AAA games). "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" and all that.

Yes, a few game devs will drop native Linux support because building and maintaining just the Windows version and relying on Proton will be cheaper for them. Some number of them would have inevitably dropped native Linux support anyway. Take Rocket League for example. For most games, very few would have EVER had a native version for Linux. Source: the decades of PC gaming history prior to Proton.

Even with regular WINE being available, it's not like game devs were testing how their game ran in WINE. Currently, if your game doesn't work in Proton (and therefore the Steam Deck), you get an "Unsupported" icon on your store page. Getting that Deck Verified green checkmark is an actual economic incentive for game devs to support Linux in any way, even if that way is unsavory to some.

So, like Electron, the argument is less "Electron app vs native app" and more "Electron(/Proton) app vs no app at all".

Also, given that Proton isn't preventing developers from still offering a native Linux version, you really can't say that Valve/Proton are why those devs are dropping it. The developer is still choosing to drop native support.

A number of games (and non-games) can be added to Steam via the "add non-Steam game" option and then used with Proton. There's also Lutris.

I paid for YT Premium for years until I noticed just how atrociously YT runs in Firefox. There were also the accusations that YT slows down the video pages for anybody with an adblocker... even if they're paying for Premium.

I block ads at the DNS level and am not about to tweak things forever just to de-mangle my paid-for YT experience. So I dropped Premium, started supporting channels that I actually watch directly via things like Patreon, and watch YT videos via tools like Invidious and yt-dlp.

Local video players such as mpv and IINA are so much better than the YT player has ever been in any browser and I don't have to worry about buffering. The bonus is that I can keep a backup of favorite videos sans baked-in ads or whatever customer-hostile tactic Google dreams up next.

It seems like OP meant for it to be negative because they think that it is negative. You're just explaining their point back to them.

Just because transactions are "basic" doesn't mean they aren't also negative and, therefore, exploitative.

The bit about them not selling your information outright: the way that they sell those ads is based off of your information. The way that they do so matters, but not as much for this particular conversation: they are still exploiting your data regardless of the precise way that they package it.

Yes, you can use their services to get features and abilities for free. Nobody is saying that part is bad. The problem is that they have made it hard/impossible to go anywhere else if you don't want to use them.

The "company stores" of yore also made it particularly easy to get the tools and supplies you needed, but it was still an unfair trade. The fact that Google and Facebook make such massive economic profit off of something supposedly so worthless as personal data just doesn't add up.

It feels like any platform that allows for one-way initiation of a conversation is bound to increase in spam as the platform grows in usage (phone calls, email, SMS, various social media, various messengers, etc.).

Do any platforms require that both parties add one another? (And/or allow for restricting an account to such a mode)

e.g. if user123 and user789 wish to communicate, then user123 must add/contact user789 AND user789 must add/contact user123. Until both do so, then nothing happens.

It's more work to legitimately establish contact with someone, but that seems like it pales in comparison to the effort produced by spam/scams.

Same thing with verifying identities. In order to actually establish proper contact with someone, you need to communicate with them via some outside means (ideally in person) in order to establish the connection. Requiring both parties to enter/scan some ID/code/whatever seems like it would only facilitate proper verification (though not guarantee it, of course).

I'm sure that I'm missing something, though. I assume I'm just not familiar enough with these platforms and that some/all of them provide such a feature. It's just odd to me that spam sounds like such a problem when it feels like the above solution would be highly effective and simple to include.