flatlined

No but you see we at Google aren’t locking down sideloading. It’s the individual app developers. With the api we gave them for that express purpose. Totally not us locking stuff down though, so EU please ignore us trying to indirectly close doors in our walled garden?

Which (pr nightmare aside) I wouldn’t be against. It’s not gonna fly, people are accustomed to ‘free’ browsers to the point they’d balk at the idea. Even if they weren’t most would take a free chromium based browser or Firefox fork over a paid alternative that doesn’t give them anything extra. But browsers are massive pieces of tech, they need a lot of dev time, and the money needs to come from somewhere, just relying on volunteers won’t cut it.

Mozilla has been looking for sources of funding for years, sometimes in ways that are their own type of pr nightmare and sometimes in ways I’m not thrilled by, but I get their predicament. I wish there would be (more) state funding. EU, US. Whatever. Much like governments should invest in public transit we should invest in critical software infra.

I also wish Google’s other branches were divorced from their browser dev branch. The stranglehold on the web given to Google by chrome is a huge part of the problem.

On the one hand that’s supposedly to do with competitive advantage. It makes sense to try to even the playing field, which should have nothing to do with objection on ‘moral’grounds. I’d argue this is mostly a good thing given the iffiness of many groups’ morals.

Case in point, your exact examples, which brings me to the other hand. Banning trans athletes on ‘fairness’ grounds is bullshit. In most sports there’s no known competitive advantage. Where there’s an imbalance they tend to show disadvantage. The rare cases with an advantage for trans athletes tend to disappear the moment you correct for size/weight, which is not something we’d exclude cis athletes for. None of your examples should have happened. They do not hold water on fairness grounds, and any moralistic reasons behind it are reprehensible.

It’s a variation on the old saw of “how much is the difference between a million and a billion? About a billion”. Once numbers become so big, it’s hard to grasp the relative sizes. That said, I’m also interested in a more comprehensive breakdown. Seeing who are impacted, how much and where.

What combination would you recommend to replace most common GitHub functionality?

Moddb was mentioned. Another good one is thunderstore. It all depends on the game though. Valheim (and several other units based games) is very active on both Nexus and thunderstore, stalker games tend to be moddb, &c. Nexus tends to be the main one for most games though.

I mostly like Nexus (paid member), but I share the concern about it being the only game in town for most games. Nexus is heaps better as a site than both moddb and thunderstore ime, but the lack of real alternatives is putting way too many eggs in the same basket.

What tools would you recommend to fund good forks. I’ve had a Firefox extension or two but they’ve either creased working or weren’t fantastic to begin with. Currently just using the network graph, limitations and all.

Agreed, and in my experience (Asus board) it’s functional but a bit buggy, so not an easy recommendation. Still, if you want or need team red it’s an option. Price premium sucked, but wasn’t actually noticeably more than if I’d gone team blue. Not sure I’d do it again in hindsight though. Fully functional but only 90% reliable (which is worse than it seems, in the same way a delay of “only” a second every time you do something adds up to a big annoyance) is perhaps not worth it for my use case.

You can get amd with thunderbolt. The motherboards with thunderbolt headers are bloody expensive, and you’ll need a 200 bucks add in card (which needs to match the motherboard manufacturer I think), so it’s not exactly cheap, but it is possible.

It’s a thorny issue. In the position of an indie dev/studio i get using cheap (or free) art, be it voice, textures, whatever. In a way a properly licensed ai trained voice is no different from using assets from an asset store.

On the other hand, the current crop of ai are less than fair about where they source the data, so good luck getting a morally neutral voice right now, leaving aside the legal aspect.

A big issue beyond that is how it’ll completely wreck the industry. If Alice licensed her voice for cheap, and I can get it to say whatever I need with minimal hassle why wouldn’t I use that over paying more for a voice actor, where I have to wait on them to actually record and rerecord her lines? I’d be paying more for slower results and more work.

Then you realize this is true not just for me but for most groups needing voice lines. This means that even if an individual voice seems ethically sound, considering the wider context and impact on other voice actors it becomes far less simple.