Let’s be honest: I, as a customer, want to make informed buying decisions. I want to buy food that is tasty and maybe is healthy, but not based on some image that some marketing guys want to push. I want to choose the car which is best (and cheapest) for my purposes, and don’t want to be hearded into buying something else. I want to choose the best insurance for me and not be mislead by some emotional ad showing me a happy family.

And I really do not want to be manipulated in an emotional vulnerable moment so that I buy something. That’s shady as fuck

Back in the day I played a browser game called “Inselkampf”. That was way before anybody did the whole monetization and one of the earlier browser games. Totally free, no micropayments. It was awesome: You had a level playground. People formed alliances on their own without the game having such a feature. We hang out in IRC channels. We plotted wars, starting in the middle of the night in order to surprise the other alliances. We had diplomats talking to other alliances. People started alt accounts and snuck into the enemy alliances in order to spy on them. Some rose to top ranks, leading to epic betrayals and epic wars.

Everything from that is gone. The game is long offline. The players dispersed, the IRC channels abandoned, everything never to be repeated

I remember those screenshots in the mags back in the day. Yes, I want to play that version, too - and the tank and heli looked so cool back then!

A decentralized service like Mastodon will have the same issues when governments are knocking on the door. The turkish government totally can force all those small turkish instance admins to defederate instances who are not reacting to legal threats. And all those small admins don’t have the resources to fight a lengthy legal battle against their own government

Kids don’t buy $500 consoles with $90 games. Parents do.

Yeah, but other people have other use cases and Wordpress is a good option for them

Yeah - the article is really interesting

It totally makes sense - the dirt has to go somewhere and a cheap bag which you can take out and throw away sounds better than a tiny compartement that you have to shake out spreading the dirt everywhere

Even better:

Even better, if you’re doing the wash and left your phone in the other room, Samsung’s added touchscreens to its washers and dryers, including the new Bespoke AI Laundry Vented Combo washer / dryer ($3,099). This lets you answer a call directly on the built-in 7-inch LCD screen.

You can take calls with your clothes dryer!

I’m not really familiar with Stellaris, but with EUIV you really don’t need all DLC. Basically the DLCs are fleshing out one faction. So you get some special features and events for the Ottoman Empire, Venice or China that enhances how they play. If you do not want to play as Ottoman Empire, buying the DLC is pointless. If you have several hundreds of hours played, buying a DLC gives you something new and an excuse to start the Venice playthrough. I assume that they are handling Stellaris similar

Mostly people are nostalgic for specific games because they played them in a special time in their lifes. Those early teens where you start to appreciate more complex stories, where you have the time and motivation to spend hundreds of hours on a game over a summer, maybe with your friends sitting near you all experiencing the game together for the first time. And as bitter as it sounds: There might be better games around now, but no game will be able to give you that experience.

If you’re not selling access, why should you care? You are providing a service to your users and if they want to stream from you, they will figure out how to do this

It was difficult to setup

I’m not really sure here - I just did the setup and you literally paste one command into your terminal. There you’ll find the Jellyfin IP and port, visit it in a browser and you’ll get a simple wizard which guides you into setting up your libraries. Which also is not complicated, you just select a folder where your stuff is?

There is an international court that is responsible for prosecuting individuals for crimes like genocide oder crimes agains humanity. It’s sensible to collect all evidence and put Zuckerberg & Co on trial to see how deep their involvement goes

English is not the author’s native language. So maybe give him some slack?

You don’t need a kill switch. If you’re flying F35 and the US decides to cut you off, you won’t get replacement parts. Some repairs are only available in the US, so your fancy bird won’t fly much longer

Reddit is calculating its MAU differently. They seem to be counting even not-logged-in users coming from search engines - without that numbers like “1 billion monthly active users” really don’t make any sense and even that is a crazy metric, if you think about it. There is no way that 1/8 of humanity is browsing on Reddit in a month. Lemmy seems to count only users who are doing something (submitting, commenting, upvoting)

The problem is that many companies can’t do that as they can’t give you their custom server code. The only solution here would be to change design from the beginning so that devices can work without servers and are also so secure that they don’t need security updates

There is a difference between me reading a book and learning from it and one of the biggest companies in the world pirating millions of books for their business. And it really gets bad when normal users are getting sued for tenthousands of dollars when they download a book or a MP3 and Meta is getting defended for doing the same thing, but in a much larger scale.

Yes, we know that copyright is broken. But if it is broken, it has to be broken for all