It’s the same reason cheaters suspect their partners of cheating: projection. They have no moral objection to paying people to voice an option they want signal boosted, and therefore can’t imagine opinions being voiced against them is for any different of a reason.
Sounds familiar. Hype first, promise “next year” availability, deliver on promises never.
Almost perfect. You forgot to replace “community chest” with “shareholder portfolios”
No, it won’t. It will cause more of the supply to be reallocated away from consumers into enterprise, and that is exactly what the big tech companies want to see happen.
Having access to a computer and phone is as much of a necessity to survive in modern society as internet is. When personal computing is unaffordable to the point where subscription computing is a good enough “deal” for consumers to jump on, the ball will start rolling towards the inevitable price squeeze that we have no choice but to accept.
No, it is bad.
Suppose it’s used to verify your age when visiting Pornhub. How is Pornhub going to trust the user’s computer didn’t lie about the user’s age? A “just trust me bro” sent by the browser isn’t going to suffice; teenagers would find a way around that.
Thr attestation will have to be cryptographically signed by some trusted party—and that’s either going to be the government, or the operating system vendor.
If it’s the government holding the signing keys: the website can now verify that you’re a resident of $state in $country and use that for fingerprinting and targeted advertising. And what if your country doesn’t participate, or if Pornhub doesn’t trust the signing keys used by the government of Estonia? Tough shit, no porn for you! It would be impractical to manage all those keys, though, so why not instead leave it up to the operating system vendor?
If it is left the operating system vendor, it’s going to end up being exactly the same as Google Play Service’s SafetyNet “feature”. If you’re not using an approved operating system (a.k.a. Windows, MacOS, stock Android, iOS) you’re not visiting Pornhub. Or a banking app. Or applying for jobs. Etc.
This bill is a poison pill for device ownership and FOSS operating systems being handed to corporations on a silver platter.
Chinese, Russian and Iranian people don’t need us to fight for their ‘freedom’,
Oh look, yet another Tankie who thinks the grass would be greener where the lawn describes itself as communist.
How’s that “more freedom” been going for the Uyghur? Or maybe you meant the freedom to free-fall out a window when running as a political opposition to Putin?
No entitlement necessary.
People typically welcome more competition in retail spaces. Having the freedom to pick between store A and store B allows consumers to choose whichever works best for them, whether for convenience or service reasons. Look at GOG. Nobody is complaining that they exist, or that they sell a subset of the games that people could instead purchase on Steam.
What people don’t welcome is companies deciding they want a slice of the pie, entering a market, and then making the experience worse1. Coercing people onto a platform by removing their ability to choose is consumer-hostile. People complained when E.A. and Ubisoft made new games exclusive to their own storefronts, but they begrudgingly sucked it up because those were developed by the platform owners and they weren’t interfering with games they didn’t own.
What Epic Games did was make timed exclusivity deals with third-party developers2 and publishers in an attempt to stick their foot in the door, while providing the bare minimum service to consumers3. They made EGS for the publishers and offered little more to their customers than contempt and the occasional free game as a bribe to boost the Epic Games Store user counts.
The cherry on top was Tim Sweeney acting like the messiah of PC gaming coming to save it from the Steam monopoly, only to start behaving like a petulant child on social media in response to people justifiably being pissed off at Epic Games for the monopolistic shit they were doing.
If his decisions weren’t openly hostile to the people he expected money from, there wouldn’t be much of a reason for people to dislike him. But, through his decisions and actions both as the leadership of Epic Games and as himself on Twitter, he gave people plenty of reasons.
1: See digital streaming services, for example. Everyone was happy to just pay for Netflix. Some of them even paid for Crunchyroll, too, since it provided a separate catalog. Now, every media conglomerate has taken their shows off of Netflix and moved them to their own separate services at the same price point. It’s not a coincidence that digital piracy is making a comeback.
2: Such as with Ooblets, when they paid the developer after the game was crowdfunded to release it on EGS instead of Steam.
3: No user reviews, it took years to get a shopping cart, customer support being useless when people get locked out of their accounts, etc.
All you had to do was say nothing, Timmy.
You’re an asshole, but only PC gamers had a reason to care—because you tried to buy your way into a dominant position by employing anti-consumer, monopolistic practices like paying for distribution exclusivity deals with third-party publishers.
The best possible choice here, clearly, was to voluntarily align yourself (and by association, Epic Games) with Nazis and pedophiles. I sincerely hope the board forces you to resign, you absolute chode.
And native software.
Because JavaScript runs everywhere, we have companies creating “apps” and PC “programs” that are little more than glorified web views. There’s normally nothing wrong with having shared code across implementations, but when that shared code is a 4 MB bundle of crap that creates 100s of MB in dictionaries and JIT compiler caches, you’re ruining the end-user experience.
What’s next?
Wow, you weren’t kidding.
Over half of the first 20 items focus on AI, and that’s not even considering the ads.
when you do have big problems its still kind of annoying
Or small problems. Very annoying small problems. Like GTK 4 windows freezing when you try to close them.
Tea was storing its users’ sensitive information on Firebase, a Google-owned backend cloud storage and computing service.
Every time. With startups, it’s always an unsecured Firebase or S3 bucket.
Democratic governments should allow all voices to be heard, not silence speech they dislike.
That’s real fucking rich coming from the government that:
going after trump’s businesses will probably avoid a military response
More likely, it makes the poor baby (-hands) cry and throw a tantrum. Being the malignant narcissist he is, he thinks the resources of the United States government are entirely at his disposal. With that in mind, he’s absolutely going to demand a military response to any attacks on his businesses.
Whether saner heads prevail, all we can do is hope.
The good old dehu-Manosphere. Malignant, cancerous trash run by grifters and signal boosted by insecure mysognists.
Edit: I see we have some fans of Joe Rogaine, Jordan Small-Peterson, and or Andrew T-hate on here.
Only one? “Ukrainian liberal trans communists” is probably pretty high up there in his scapegoat list.
It’s more like a donut. Not all 4chan posters are DOGE staff, but all DOGE staff are /pol/ afficionados.
Someone should check the email and phone number of Adrian Dittman to see if they match Elon’s. Idiots can argue that it isn’t Elon despite speech pattern evidence, but it’s harder to argue when both of them share the same identifying info.
What would be amazing is if there was some way to have a fully declarative system that was integrated with a system update UI.
You would upload the config somewhere, your family’s streaming box would see a new update is available and either prompt them to install it or install it for them overnight.