Why would you want to turn ownership of a country-sized apparatus that acts solely in your interests into something as motionless as cash?

My answer is usually “I don’t use computers the same way you do, so I probably won’t know what you’re talking about.”

Yeah no, it’s a totally fair question and I get the spirit of it, but it’s still interesting to reflect on the way that video games have a pretty strange concept of genre or “format” vs. other media like video or print.

Maybe it’s cuz games are so heavily influenced by their associated hardware.

I mean, I guess everything is, right? Early printing press is mostly pamphlets not books (aside from the bible), and you don’t get TV shows without TVs.

It’s kind of like asking for the best video.

It wouldn’t make sense to compare TV shows, movies, Youtube videos, TikToks, sporting events, commercials, journalistic footage, etc. all as a single category.

Idk. So do you ask for “best RPG” or something like that instead? Seems overly specific now.

Most universal answer I can give is:

Every country that has attempted communism has been desperate and vulnerable.

Desperate to find a strongman to save their crumbling old government, and vulnerable to having the CIA appoint their own strongman in turn.

OneDrive does exist on macOS.

Forbiddet

I never give money to the homeless. They’ll just buy drugs and alcohol.

I keep it for myself. So I can buy drugs and alcohol.

—

For real though, I try to give $5 if I can. Some people will waste it, some will make good use of it, and it’s impossible to tell from the outside looking in. So I might as well swing at every ball. Giving to charities is good too, but they don’t reach everyone (for all sorts of reasons).

over the long term–and I’m talking, like 20-30+ years–it could be positive. One of the things that made the US economy strong in the 60s was the fact that we had strong labor, and strong manufacturing

Looks to me like the strong economy of the 1960s coincided with ending 20-30 years of high tariffs… Sooo…

My most successful standups have been like:

“Okay, we’re all here. Anyone wanna take a look at anything together?”

“I need some help with XYZ. Alice, can you take a look?”

“Sure.”

“Anything else? No? Alright, let’s do it.”

Typically less than 2 minutes of whole-team time, at our desks. Really just a reserved pivot point where it’s okay to interrupt each other’s tasks to ask for some pairing time. Sometimes an unofficial second one would happen after lunch.

Best of Module - by Module

Module has always been my soundtrack through hard times, and I was fortunate enough to get a signed copy of this album.

It’s a pretty well-constructed compilation and I think it’s worth a listen, no matter what you typically like.

But uh… I might be biased:

People wondering what Chrome has to do with a search monopoly:

The obvious benefit is that they can default the user’s search provider to Google.

But the more nefarious benefit is that, by controlling both the client and server, they can unilaterally decide the future of web standards. They don’t have to advocate for proposals, gain consensus, and limit themselves to well-supported standards the way other companies do. They can just do it, gain the first-mover advantage, and force others to follow suit.

If they don’t like HTTP/2, they can invent their own protocol and implement it for their search servers and Chrome. Suddenly, using Chrome with Google Search is way faster than using Chrome with Bing or using Firefox with Google Search. Even if Microsoft and Mozilla don’t like the protocol, they now have to adopt it or fall behind.

This has happened. QUIC was deployed in 2012. Firefox gained support in 2021.

They’re doing the same thing with Privacy Sandbox, and you can also look at browser feature compatibility tables to see how eager Google is to force their own interpretation of every not-yet-finalized web standard as the canonical interpretation.

Edit: Also, JPEG XL vs. WebP.

FTC works. For now.

Lemmy does not understand that people are leaving X cuz of Nazis, not cuz it’s a centralized corpo platform.

Yellow Mountain Imports is great.

Yes, unfortunately, and it’s healthy to recognize that. Good on ya.

Some are just opportunists, but there are certainly true believers — either in specific technologies, or pedal-to-the-metal growth as the only rational solution to the world’s problems.

Andreessen is pretty open about it: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

And Lina Khan will be right there!

Humanity is so fickle, it’s impossible to tell.

In the US, we went from overwhelming opposition to gay marriage to overwhelming support in less than a decade.

On the other hand, we went from aggressively eradicating CFCs and fixing the ozone hole to dragging our feet on renewable energy for several decades.

Even further back, we went from back-to-back world wars and economic collapse to a tentative global peace and prosperity.

Monarchy seemed inevitable for ages, and then multiple democratic revolutions all sprang up in quick succession.

Equality was fundamental to the Constitution, but we still haven’t healed the wounds of slavery.

There seems to be no telling. Some problems languish for a long time, but then see massive improvements in the blink of an eye. Some obvious fixes lay dormant for an offensively long time.

When I think about this stuff, I get a weird mix of hope and despair and guilt and frustration and impatience.

It seems unfair that we got stuck with these particular crises, with no guarantee that we’re actually prepared to handle them. (Maybe that’s the entire story of humanity.)

And then I remember what Tolkien had to say about such things:

My big thing is a new TV. We have a 46” LCD from 2009 that often refuses to fully power on. I’ve been dragging my feet on replacing it, just cuz I know the research is gonna be demoralizing, with how dystopian a lot of the “smart TVs” are. But now there’s some real time pressure, so I guess I have to.

Coincidentally, I was already planning on upgrading my personal dev machine (to an M4 Mac Mini) and my retro handheld (to a Retroid Pocket 5), as well as my first dip into XR glasses with the Viture Pro. So I’m kinda ahead of the game there.

I’ve been (im)patiently waiting for the next version of the Orange Pi 800, but if tariffs hit before then I’ll probably just skip it. Analogue 3D is also likely to exit my wish list.

I’ll probably move up the timeline on adding storage to my home server if I can afford to. And some microSD cards, since I seem to always need yet another one.

I’ve got a few friends who were looking at upgrading their PCs this year, so I’ll probably be helping them shop and seal the deal before things get weird.

I wouldn’t expect many outrageous Cyber Monday deals this year. Most mfgs probably wanna stretch their inventory so they can delay price increases and stay competitive. That said, there’s also bound to be companies that are poised to strike early because they have already de-China-fied their supply chains. But even they are bound to be cautious.