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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I knew about ad blockers before I started using one. Small sidebar or header ads weren’t really enough to convince me I needed one.

    Now the Internet has so many popups, ads, aggressive video players, requests to accept cookies, all because some people figured out how to make websites more profitable by making them worse. It’s sad, really. The Internet of old was great.




    1. I’ve learned a number of tools I’d never used before, and refreshed my skills from when I used to be a sysadmin back in college. I can also do things other people don’t loudly recommend, but fit my style (Proxmox + Puppet for VMs), which is nice. If you have the right skills, it’s arbitrarily flexible.

    2. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day. Pricier hardware could have saved me money in the long run. Bigger drives could also mean fewer, and thus less power consumption.

    3. Google, selfhosting communities like this one, and tutorial-oriented YouTubers like NetworkChuck. Get ideas from people, learn enough to make it happen, then tweak it so you understand it. Repeat, and you’ll eventually know a lot.


  • I don’t think anyone intends public funds to be quite that sticky; public education is itself a public good, and having once attended a public school really has nothing to do with developing a product 20 years down the road.

    Also, writing open source code can support a viable business. Not every example has been successful, and some have been sold to hypercapitalist owners who wanted to extract more profit, others have failed to keep up, but Canonical is doing alright with it, Red Hat did for a long time, among others. Plenty of bigger tech companies also employ people to write open source software, despite it not being the company’s main business, React, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and so many other projects. Those engineers definitely aren’t working for free.






  • I mean, the problem isn’t the existence/obviation of jobs, but what we do next when it happens. If the people whose jobs are automated away are left out with no money or employment, that’s a serious problem. If we as a society support them in learning something new that puts their skills to good use, and maybe even reduce the expected working hours of a full-time job to 35 or 32 hours a week, that’s an absolute win in my book.



  • I see what you’re saying. As an isolated event it’s pretty meh. Maybe it sucks for the two people who used it.

    In a sense, Musk was betting that Twitter’s API was undermonitized, and by raising the price, he’d make more money than he’d lose in people leaving the platform. He bet Twitter’s relevance against some money. Yeah, not a lot of people used it on Switch, but every rejection of his bet, that Twitter isn’t worth the price, hurts Musk’s bottom line. And it’s kinda on him; Nintendo isn’t defying him, he was just wrong.



  • Because nobody buys them? I have a reasonably nice 1080p60 dumb TV, and when I decide I want to upgrade, I’ll be looking at 4k (or maybe 8k) signage displays. Being part of an app ecosystem at this point is a design defect on a TV, and the superior product costs more, so fewer people buy it.

    I also suspect the usable life of a smart TV is a lot lower, to the point that paying twice as much for a signage TV may not equate to twice the price in the long run. Fewer parts outside the panel that can slow down or fail entirely



  • I think the biggest issue is titles; what people expect of mobile games, perpetuating itself into a weak catalog of original titles, with a few good ports. Mobile games are largely designed to be heavily-monitized, Games as a Service, and/or gacha titles… profitable design choices, but not because they make games better.

    Having a more standard control scheme would help get more ports of console games, but I’d love to see more mobile games that use the existing interface/formfactor well. Pokemon Go circa 2018 was a good game that only works on mobile, and I’d love to see more of those.