4grams

Yeah, I got your incredible wordplay, clearly mine sailed over your head (unsurprisingly).

I can tell this is how you see the world.

Dude, I don’t get why you are so very interested in carrying water for billionaires. I’m truly baffled in these conversations why people just insist on defending people who will never know they exist.

lol, good for those in power maybe.

You are walking away with the opinion that there are good billionaires who have your best interests in mind. I mean, that’s an opinion, just a really stupid one.

I’ll be fine here in the actual world.

Sigh, steam has zero support, like actually none and it’s well known in the industry. It’s 100% a drm platform, you must have an internet connection and a valid account to play your games that you purchased. You only have access to any of them because they allow it.

Again, I don’t care about your opinion because it’s wrong, and I will judge it the same as I judge people who have other similarly bad opinions. I do wish you would realize that your idea of a good billionaire is bullshit, but that’s to protect you from falling for the shit they are peddling. No skin off my nose if you choose to continue to suck up to them.

I will stand by my original statement that there is no such thing as a good billionaire. It’s this statement that I’m defending and your “nuh-uh, he’s really cool” has done nothing to convince me otherwise.

No, but I definitely have knowledge of what you don’t.

Look, suck up all you want, but there just is no good billionaires. There are ones where the goals are temporarily aligned, but to think that any of them do what they do for the benefit of others is just a moronic take. Some probably started that way but ALL billionaires alive do what they do for themselves, their own power and control. Gabe is better than most, but he’s still on the list and has done many terrible things. Valve is better than most gaming companies, but it’s still a DRM platform that has no customer support and dictates how the industry has to bend to their will.

I can tell you haven’t done your research because there are many stories of valve fucking people over, and again, valve is arguably a net negative for gaming in general due to how it’s completely destroyed the idea of ownership. We all only have access to our shit due to their good graces. I personally hate having thousands of dollars of things I’ve paid for, controlled by one single company (I too used to assume they were the good ones).

Because you don’t do much research outside of the ways that it’s impacted you.

There is factually no such thing as a good billionaire, and to pretend it’s an opinion based thing is just yet more lickspittle behavior.

There are less bad ones, but you cannot become a billionaire without hurting a shitload of people. It’s arguable that valve has been a terrible thing for pc gaming since it’s led to the death of ownership. But this is one of quite literally thousands of things that can be litigated in his case.

Update- this is like saying “in my opinion, donald trump is the best president we’ve ever had.” You can think this, it can be your opinion, but it’s wrong, and tells people a lot about who you are. Sticking up for billionaires is one of the more pathetic things a person can do.

There is no such thing as a good billionaire and to say otherwise is just lickspittle behavior. Gabe does not care about you.

There are no good billionaires, period.

I’m convinced this is all to normalize keeping your data in the cloud and other 3rd party hands. It’s hr decline of the PC market, the fact that games, movies and music no longer come on media you own, instead is now just a license to use the content…

This is all part of the strategy of ensuring we do not own our data. They want all storage of all the data to be something we have to pay to access. They want to control everything, and make access to it a subscription.

I don’t think it’s as hard to draw a line as you are portraying it. The hypothetical nurse and bread factory is a non-issue, we’re talking fractions of the bottom line of any of the involved parties. This mulvad thing is the majority of the financial backing of a party by one high level person, who’s made his money from this organization.

I’m quite comfortable putting them under the same umbrella, and quite comfortable ignoring the hypothetical.

But think there might be a philosophical question here, but I kinda think this is begging for one a bit.

I had a flight safe multitool, one that specifically had no blade, nor anything sharp. It only had tools for my camera. I also had a fisher space pen which they said looked too much like a bullet.

Both were confiscated, but they couldn’t figure out how to open the front flipper knife I had with me, so they let it through.

The TSA bullshit isn’t about keeping us safe.

Just had this thought, and realized all my backups had been through a flood. I wound up with several damaged disks, but was able to get all the content off of them, damage was to the outside edges, and most of them didn’t have much data written.

I have a Blu-ray burner, but I’ve never burned one (only a couple DVD’s). Probably never will.

This is really about training AI, isn’t it. They’ve tapped nearly all the sources of human text output already, so now they want to create as much more of it as possible, as quickly as possible. They will tap into conversations and use it as a new data source, mark my words.

Good thing we’re about to give them a half a trillion dollars. Goddamn the entire world sucks.

I understand the authors reasons, but for me personally, having paid for the app, I’ll use it until it no longer suits my needs. Right now it does early what I need and does not cause me any issues. As soon as the enshittification hits me though, I’ll abandon it for something else. I also would not recommend someone purchase it, given the new pricing, and the availability of free alternatives. Had they been there when I paid for Plex, I’d be using them instead.

It’s something new anyway. I’ve dealt with bureaucracy my whole career, but mostly about shuffling numbers from one spreadsheet to another. This one is about helping shuffle people from one place to another. So, I’m used to slow, deliberate pace and hitting political walls. I’m hoping this time at least it’s doing something tangible.

I had nearly this exact conversation with my son on the way home tonight. Different details, but the same lesson. The world has abandoned practicality in favor of aesthetics and grift. I have quit several jobs because of the awful short term thinking, some of them good jobs that were the envy of my peers.

I start in the public sector next week, where I get to do things that have a direct impact on thousands of people in the state. I was hired specifically because of my practicality. I sincerely hope this is what I’ve been looking for.

This would have been a baffling question to me just a few months ago. But lately as I’ve been expanding my self hosting journey, I have realized that most people don’t use computers anymore except for at work. I just assumed everyone needed and wanted a PC, but my kids only care about them as game consoles, any other task is handled by phones or tablets.

So, these days I’m putting more effort into stuff that can be used for both. Im trying to de-big-tech myself and the cloud stuff is where we are mostly locked in. Evaluating Nextcloud at the moment and it’s maybe what I need; works great everywhere I’ve tried it so far. I do worry about enshittification though.

Yes and no, I only buy refurbs these days, so long as they work out of the box, they have been far more reliable than retail drives from a box store.

Definitely higher incidents of DOA drives, but the ones that work, have been pretty solid.

Still don’t trust spinning rust, so in addition to dual parity raid, I also have a full backup copy. But I no longer have reservations about refurb drives…