Better a known locked door than inviting them into your home

Spyware. Make it stop.

Is this why everything feels EVEN SHITTIER than it did a year ago?

Sync still works great and is tighter than basically everything else. The other apps have made MONSTROUS strides in the past couple years, but I still have sync set up pretty close to how I want it. But, what I really truly want is Baconreader for fediverse.

Well, firstly, that Steam, as a platform, is DRM. Not all DRM is always-on enforcement.

Yes and no. When Valve first released Steam, there basically wasn’t anything like it. It was only for Valve games, it was required, and was basically always on DRM.

However, that also ended up saving PC gaming as a market and as a whole, because piracy was actually so rampant that publishers were looking at other options (consoles). So, when Steam as a platform showed being extremely successful at enforcing copyright protection but by offering the service of syncing your saves and letting you download the games you owned QUICKLY and repeatedly, basically eliminating the need for physical media, other developers eventually wanted in, and Valve eventually let some indie games on, which was a MASSIVE boon to their sales, too.

Then, other publishers wanted in, then they wanted their own digital distribution platforms, but then those platforms sucked and nobody wanted to use them, and those publishers whined a whole bunch (nobody seems to be able to figure out that you can’t do predatory shit and that you have to offer BOTH a desirable game AND a desirable platform, and those that have, realize it’s a lot of work and just go with Steam).

So, it’s not so much that Steam/Valve is the problem, it’s that they’re such a good solution, and that is hard/expensive to compete with. It’s not exactly simple, but it’s not exactly complicated.

Go pirate it and live your best life.

I do want to clarify, though, that always-on drm is ass. Just, for now, in exactly how they’re implemented, with all of the built up good karma, it’s acceptable.

The real questions we should be asking are “why does it not suck with steam, but does everywhere else?” and “what can we realistically ask of steam to improve the experience?” and “is there a better alternative?” And “Why is it like this to begin with?”

How do we improve this without just whining? Because all things considered, Valve would probably work with reasonable requests, if you had a good enough idea.

Good leader good.

Bad leader bad.

Holy shit. It’s still $7.25

What in the fuck?

Yeah, this. The 5-layer was introduced as a very low priced item even at the time.

Also, the $5 footlongs destroyed subway. Yeah, things are inflated now, but I remember the 5-layer quickly rose in price to like 2.99 after only a year or so.

I also remember dollar burgers being a thing and stopping and realizing how incredible they really were in human history that we got there at all (efficiency) and that they couldn’t and wouldn’t last.

Damn. Now that I think about it, the 2012ish “fight for $15” minimum wage for burger flippers and the corporate pushback political campaign and that rhetoric, the 2006/2017 metoo movement and the conservative political campaign and that rhetoric, and the 2011 occupy wall Street protests all sort of catalyzed into Trump. Jesus.

… It’s like… All of this, right now, is pushback and retaliation because society just wanted to be a little better.

And the 2020 tech workers rights improvements, where people were quitting together and actually pressuring employers, and now the corporate tech real estate pushback that we’re currently experiencing. Holy shit. All of the bullshit is just billionaires throwing around their weight and sinking their claws and teeth further in. Even the anti trans rights rhetoric now is PUSHBACK because that threatens to upend their house of cards of faith and hate by making people question stuff and realize it’s all billionaire bullshit. GOD. DAMNIT.

Man the loss of TB has been extreme.

Gaming and technology seemed to orbit him when he was alive.

Have you found a successor yet?

I miss The Mailbox and WTF Is…? so much.

Oh absolutely not… yeah no, don’t comply with that by any means, and encourage everybody else not to, too. I’m all for good progress and love tech, but I love it in a "it should serve us way, not the other way around.

Ai generate an adult face, display it on a display, point camera at it, “selfie”, ???, profit

Scratch that. Draw a face. See if that works. I bet you could draw a face well enough to fool the detection software.

Same. Sometimes ironically, sometimes actually.

The age old solution of TAPE.

What was rejected by the proprietary, looking to steal and rape from even their very engineers, has now been given to the commonwealth. As it should.

With intellectual property, you snooze, you lose.

These corpos think they’re hot shit and capitalism is impervious.

I’m not a communist. But when capitalism acts up like it has been, it needs to be taken down a notch or ten to be told who really matters: all of us. When the machine or the government stops serving its people, we rebuild it, because that is the purpose of the machine and the government.

A friendly reminder to ourselves.

Tesla was like ‘we could use lidar, but instead we’ll use CAMERAS’

You’d think so. But if you actually look for games that aren’t woke on there, there’s like one game nobody’s heard of because that list is really just a ton of stupid people complaining about stupid people things and trying to attract more stupid people. So basically, EVERY game is woke and the list is useless and anti woke people are sad and have nothing

I want to give you a hug. You must consume so much propaganda to think us different.

You’re making a lot of deeply flawed assumptions here.

Imagining bad scenarios doesn’t mean it’s the only thing one can imagine. Also, I don’t think the person specified in what way “we” are screwed; it could have been humanity in general, which would be akin to science fiction as a cautionary tale; it could have been internationally. Also, people often have mixed feelings about technology, and one person expressing a single comment of caution I think hardly defines the failure of all of whatever “western” civilization is.