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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You’re being too literal with the term copyright. Fundamentally what copyright has always been about is preventing someone else using your work for their own gain without your permission. In that respect yes, copyright is critical in the digital age. The problem is that it’s a compromise. It balances the rights of someone who has “purchased” a copyrighted work with the rights of the creator.

    Generally the balance that has been struck is that as a purchaser you have the right to do anything that you want with a work except to sell a duplicate of that work. You can sell the work, so long as you no longer retain a copy of it yourself. In practice this means transferring rather than copying. How exactly that’s accomplished gets into the weeds a bit if you start splitting hairs, but what’s important here is the spirit of the thing, nobody is going to care if technically you both have a copy for some short period of time in the middle of the transfer process.

    As for “copy protection” aka DRM that is and always has been complete bullshit because it is a fundamentally intractable problem. There’s exactly one way to enforce copyright and that’s the legal system, anything else is doomed to failure.

    We also desperately need to prevent companies from using that monopoly to prevent older works from being available by having the copyright and not publishing the work

    This is solved by limiting copyright to a short duration after which the work enters the public domain. If a company wants to squander a copyright by sitting on it for the limited time they have it that’s fine but they’re only hurting themselves. The only reason this is an issue now is because of the ridiculous century long copyright terms we currently have. If copyright was reduced to a decade you would never see this happening anymore. That said a safeguard should also be in place to prevent copyright being used as a censorship weapon by the wealthy. I think a “use it or lose it” clause that immediately enters a work into the public domain if it’s not available for some period of time (maybe a couple years) would nip any potential issues there in the bud.




  • Well AMD just blatantly copied Nvidia’s naming scheme for their new GPUs so maybe they’ll copy Intel for their CPUs. I mean, they kind of already did, since the Ryzen 9 is basically i9, and the Ryzen 7 is basically i7 etc. It’s mostly AMDs mobile CPUs that have horrendous names, but Intel really isn’t much better in that department.



  • Well there’s basically two possible states. Either Luigi didn’t do it in which case the one who actually did is the hero and Luigi is just a proxy for this unknown individual, or he did do it in which case Luigi is the hero. Either way doesn’t really change the sentiment as at the end of the day someone who was actively making the lives of millions of Americans worse and directly contributing to many thousands of preventable deaths was killed. Who actually pulled the trigger is kind of immaterial.







  • India is just like anywhere else, you get what you pay for. There’s plenty of cheap dogshit contractors there but there’s also some pretty good “expensive” ones. I say “expensive” because they’re still cheaper than domestic, just a lot more than the cheap ones.

    The interesting bit though is that the end state of all this outsourcing is an inversion. As US companies pour more and more money into foreign contractors the quality of those contractors steadily increases which then drives their prices up. Concurrently with that as the domestic market languishes and skills atrophy domestic prices fall. Eventually the US will find itself as the cheap 3rd world country the other countries are outsourcing to. That assumes of course other countries are as blindingly short sighted and stupid as the US. The more likely scenario is that those countries enact subsidies, tariffs, and tax breaks to protect their domestic markets in which case the US doesn’t become the hot outsourcing market and instead just continues to fade into irrelevancy.





  • The opt outs don’t work. Even if you opted out of the telemetry that only disabled some of it, not all of it, and MS constantly re-enables it with updates. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to uninstall OneDrive, But. It. Keeps. Coming. Back. Windows 10 you could previously disable most of the worst crapware that MS shoveled in. Windows 11 you can’t disable it, they just don’t give you the opt outs anymore. It’s all mandatory. Even worse, they started backporting that stuff into Windows 10 as well. Did you notice when MS silently installed copilot on your Windows 10 system?

    Ultimately though, I just don’t want to keep fighting a losing battle against a company I despise. I’m done giving my money to them. It would be one thing if they provided a good service that I enjoyed like Valve does with Steam, but the last time I actually liked a version of Windows was when XP was released. It’s basically been downhill since then. If there was a decent alternative to Android I’d switch that as well, but unfortunately Linux phone just isn’t ready for prime time yet. But thanks to the amazing work by Valve, for gaming systems, Linux is finally a viable alternative.



  • One thing you’ll have to do (which is kind of annoying that it isn’t enabled by default) is go into the steam options and toggle “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”. That enables proton/wine for everything in your library. In the early days of Steam on Linux Valve setup a white list of games that ran under Wine that mostly contains their own titles in it, and for some reason they just never removed that behavior even though that list is unmaintained these days.


  • Not every game that uses anti-cheat, there’s plenty that do run fine in Linux, but the major ones it’s unsupported. Technically the games run, and run really well, it’s just you’ll get banned for running under Linux. The big ones I’m aware of that don’t work are Valorant, GTA5, Destiny 2, LoL, and Apex Legends.


  • Steam is available and runs great. Valve has really put an insane amount of work into making Linux gaming smooth and painless. They have their own flatpak equivalent called pressure-vessel that steam uses by default, and everything that steam supports in Windows is 100% supported in Linux as well. If you check out protondb.com you can put in your steam account name and it will scan it and tell you any games in your library that will have issues in Linux, but outside of a few of the competitive shooters that have super aggressive anti-cheat generally everything either works out of the box, or after some minor tweaks (typically adding a few launch parameters).

    Additionally, there’s an excellent unified launcher called Heroic that lets you connect with and use the GOG, Epic, and Amazon Gaming stores, and provides a convenient wrapper around Wine/Proton for actually running the games.

    Finally there’s another launcher called Lutris that a lot of people swear by and supports some of the less used stores like Itch.io, although when I tried it recently I ran into some problems getting it to work.