So I’m not a fan of guns but, “marketing guns” is not per se illegal nor unique to video games. Yet the lawsuit separates out video games specifically. So I am not sure I agree that it’s less crazy at the end of the day.

So I did read the article, and… I’m not understanding a word you are saying. The families are suing a video game company for a gun in their video game. Also the article is not at all making the emphasis that you are making between marketing a specific game and video games writ large (the article kind of speaks to both of those at the same time and isn’t making any such distinction), so I don’t know what you are talking about. As far as the article is concerned this has everything to do with the fact that the gun was in a video game, and even Activisions statement in response was to defend themselves from the idea that their video game is a thing that pushing people to violence. So even Activision understands the lawsuit as tying their video game to violence.

I’m not saying I agree with the logic of the suit, but I literally have no idea what you think in the article separates out video games from the particular model of gun because that is just not a thing the article does at all.

I agree that the steam machine was too early.

I don’t know how it could ever start from zero without having to go through a growing stage. I think it was just necessary to have modest expectations, and so far as I can tell, valve partnered with third party vendors and didn’t lose $$$ on it.

Moreover, the downstream effect has been to set the foundation for the Steam Deck, which has been a smashing success. It just takes time to build up a mature ecosystem.

I was never, at any point, as much of a child as I was told I was.

Fast forward to today, I ended up killing him and am writing this from jail.

Okay, important question here: are you writing this on Android or iPhone?

My Puxl was from eBay.

To be honest, I don’t know much about how credit cards can be associated with phone hardware. I would think it could conceivably be tied to phone #s. In my case the phone is unlocked and it’s not an esim, which I understand we will all be moving too soon.

I wonder if it might have something to do with Google Pay or Apple Pay that ties hardware information to payments? And as for Esim, it might make it so that you can’t distinguish phones based on their physical sim card so it perhaps introduces a possibility of reliance on hardware.

But this is all speculation on my part. I just don’t know and I haven’t made whatever precautions would be needed.

That’s what I did!

Very good to know. After following your Github link, I found my way to the blog post that it looks like you are quoting:

https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/announcement/State-of-the-Pipe-2023/

NewPipe is a killer app I would say, with nearly Youtube Red level functionality in something that’s free and OSS. A bit afield from privacy, but you do get to access youtube stuff without logging in.

Syncthing is brilliant, although for me it has had a heck of a learning curve to keep straight. Might just be me though.

Are you sure that you actually know how to browse the rooms? I just opened my app, and I see, just for some examples, Linux gaming, vegan, and pine 64 all having activity within the past hour or so.

I mean it’s no discord by any stretch, But you’re actually straight up saying that even the most active ones are 100% dead, there’s something going on with how you’re browsing and looking at the rooms.

I feel like one of the biggest communication problems with stuff relating to open protocols or fediverse stuff, is that no one knows the lay of the land, there’s no broadly held consensus of whether things are active or not, what the culture is like, and you end up with people making confident matter of fact statements that are just transparently not true based on cursory examination.

When Mastodon was new, reporters would just make matter of fact claims that one of its downfalls was that instances couldn’t connect with each other, even though that was called federating and just one of the most basic built-in features. Not that I’m the biggest fan of Blue Sky, but now that people are talking about blue sky, I’ve seen people just matter of factly claim that Blue Sky was 90% furry porn and rage bait. A totally outrageous claim, not even remotely aligned with my experience, but, just because there’s no settled consensus about what’s going on, there’s not really any disincentive for someone just coming in and randomly saying that.

Exactly. For any proposed change, it’s going to run up against what I like to call Status Quo Extremism, which is a mindset that suggests that “But that would be different from the status quo” counts as a defeater argument against proposed changes.

The combination of incentives would, as you note, need to be driven by niche interests rather than attempting to reproduce the incentives of the top 0.01% of YouTube creators.

It is but there’s just not enough content to get me to fully stop YouTube yet

I don’t think anyone is proposing an overnight switch. You’ve got to take the long view. That said, I do think when it comes to federated activity pub style projects, Mastodon has gotten off the ground, Lemmy has exploded, pixel-fed seems to be doing pretty good, but the video stuff appears to be a tougher nut to crack.

Wait, what? I don’t think they were talking about piracy. They sound like they’re talking about something more like a C-Span type thing, envisioned as a YouTube alternative.

Because it’s pointless.

This is like Marvel Movie brain except applied to OSs. This mindset suggests that the only conceivable rationale for an OS is that it’s tied to shiny brand names and commercial rationalizations.

Despite this insistence, numerous alternative OS’s do in fact exist and have been listed here. And the range of motivations extends beyond just having glossy icons for whatever the first 3 or 4 companies that pop in your head.

You have:

• experimentation and novelty/niche interest that don’t align with specific commercial interests (e.g. Menuet OS, TempleOS)
• user-oriented design philosophies with specific definitions of speed and useability (e.g. Haiku OS)
• study/teaching in academic context
• niche/emerging product categories (QNX)

If you are able to understand why people would have these kinds of interests, it’s the kind of thing that lights a fire in your mind, and for some people, sets them on a career, or opens up a major new interest, or leads to them having fun with projects that scratch their own itch, so to speak in ways that do lead to commercial applications (lest we forget that every FAANG has an origin story about how it started with tinkering in a garage). “Because it’s pointless” makes me feel like I’m witnessing that inner fire of curiosity and sense of possibility die in real time.

It doesn’t mean there’s no barrier to market penetration or no difficulty creating a kernel, but there’s so much more to the WHY of creating an OS than getting listed on Nasdaq.

Perfectly stated! The moralizing story kind of serves as cover, as a complete blank check to excuse practically any behavior of the lender, without any limiting principle.

And there’s the rub. Sure, it’s a financed phone. It doesn’t follow that we have to suspend judgment on the means they resort to, to enforce their terms.

It’s really interesting how the right has embraced moral relativism on a case-by-case basis. Often it is a strategy to quarantine/localize ideas, so as to avoid the need to reconcile them to any broader worldview.

It’s also a strategy for insulating ideas and events from history that they want to shelter from criticism, like criticizing slavery, theocracy, monarchism, etc. I’ve seen real cases in the wild where criticism of slavery was dismissed as “presentism”, as inappropriately imposing present day moral values.

Between Dale and Amelia, the Earnhart family has been through a lot.

Pretty sure the Scrub Daddy came first! It gained huge notoriety for being on Shark Tank, as one of if not the most successful Shark tank product in history, and it’s now in every Walmart and Dollar store in the country.

So the meme treats the derivative like it’s the original, which I suppose is true to form as an indicator of how people lose track of ideas as they get constantly recirculated.