steam came at the exact right moment to prevent region locking regulations for online gaming. granted companies and special interests still want to de-globalize gaming for licensing cash, but that’s never going to happen as long as steam is a monopoly. any company taking a cheap shot at steam such as epic or discord or EA can go suck it.

As long as Gaben is alive steam will be the good guy. Even if they charge 30%, and I thinm it’s why things are actually pretty neat on steam on the consumer end, because they can either choose to bill the consumer or the developer, and I’m personally always pro-consumer first - albeit for small indie publishers they should (if they already don’t have); a means to launch a company with their game and not give 30% to Valve and be kept from much needed resources to grow their business, much like Valve would benefit from such deals long-term if the developers do a good job and bring in a lot of buyers with their next title in the future. AAA companies is a whole different matter, no passion, no soul, just money-milking-bullshit, should charge them 50% to 70%! they get off easy with a measly 30%.

But yeah, as for the overall topic itself, I do not understand why anyone would want another netflix situation. I don’t want 300 game libraries and accounts installed on my computer, eating up resources, time, and email space - if I could have just one, super convenient and nice place where all is collected and no foreseeable concern that it will suddenly go bankrupt and die and take my investments with it (like some of the game libraries already have). If that ever becomes the case (e.g. when Gaben dies one day), I’ll be the first to sail the high seas out of spite and convenience. I’m fine with monopolies as long as they benefit the end-user first, like Valve.

nah, it’s basically my experience with flatpak and snaps on ANY distro on ANY machine. the fact that everyone’s moving to this crap is beyond me. Am I the only person on the planet that expects a modern computer to run snappier than a PC from early 2000? sure seems like it sometimes, especially when pretty much any software released since 2018 runs electron. Hell, now every manufacturer is moving to ARM like it’s some revolutionary hardware - no, it just vastly improved energy usage AT THE EXPENSE OF PERFORMANCE. we might as well stick with what we have and just pump less energy into the damn thing and have the exact same results.

blimey.

I get the convenience; I do …but it can’t possibly be worth the sacrifices?? sigh.

the day of coders who knew what they were doing is long since gone. now it’s just click and play frameworks to pump out garbage and oversaturate the ecosystem.

yes. they’re “censoring” algorithms designed to create engagement=profit, which are causing massive harm to society. i don’t see anything wrong with it at all. and like you, i’m on the fediverse because there isn’t an algorithm, our exposure is curated by us, not by engagement-bot-5.

.se mirror still up and working. looks like it was just a DMCA on the main domains.

Since I started keeping up with all this locally, here is what has happened.

• About 20 years ago, there was a ring of realtors who would were actively manipulating the prices by buying and selling to themselves. They were caught eventually, but they had already caused the damage they set out to do, artificially hiking prices for their buildings.
• About 15 years ago, the government realized that people needs to take more loans for the economy to grow because when you get rid of taxes on the rich there isn’t enough money pumped into the economy to make it grow. So they gave away thousands of social housing units to their friends (private entities) for free who then sold them back to the public.
• The landlords has since been running an “upgrading” scheme of apartments and houses all over the place with shitty things like a new fridge or a new and improved window or whatever have you, which allows them to increase the rent considerably outside of the limitations the law specifies. Of course this sounds like a bad idea because if you aren’t renting to anyone you’re losing money - but when the price of renting is 3 times the original price, it means they will still be profitable if they lose 1 in 3 renters. Not surprisingly, people have started to complain there is nowhere to live because of these conditions. The government isn’t stepping in, because they need these people to buy properties rather than rent - forcing them to take loans, and bolstering the economy. It’s why they started giving away apartments in the first place and causing this issue.
• As a response to demand though, and show of good fate, the government promises to build more houses. By giving contracts and money to private entities (their friends) to construct new homes. And to “fix the issue with cost”, they promise a 20% discount on the price per unit to any buyers who invests into buying the apartment before it is finished construction. Naturally, the buyers of these houses and apartments immediately sell once the unit is finished, netting a 20%+ profit on their investment. Now suddenly there is a huge upswing of houses and apartments, none for rent of course, and average people can’t afford to buy them. Investors though, they keep buying up everything, much of it is empty and not used, and sit on it for 3-5 years, and sell it to the next guy (or if they find the illusive average person who can suddenly afford it).

This is not to mention that the door was opened for american and chinese investors to buy up properties and land, shooting the average prices through the roof. Together with the government (of course a rightwing government has been in power for the past 20 years, causing all this to happen in their quest to privatize and let their friends milk tax money, reduce taxes on the rich, and balancing it out by forcing your average joe to take a massive housing loan), reducing the loans to just 3% to make them “affordable to average people”, which further spikes prices upwards and it ain’t coming down until something catastrophic happens.

i don’t understand the question. what does it matter what they do with it when the point is to make housing affordable again, in a permanent way.

i’m so tired of this bullshit. all because of greed. the only real solution to all of this (without completely bricking the economy) would be “one family one home policy” (married/legal) made into law. no more landlords, no more nonsense. got 3 homes? too bad, time to sell. market oversaturated? well go the fuck down in price to the damn value you bought your houses for 20 years ago. own an apartment complex? too bad, it’s now owned by the habitants council (those who actually live in it, like it actually works in many places). and make hotels the sole exception to the rule.

no more homelessness.

no more shelters.

no more trailer parks.

no more need for social housing.

no more assholes buying up property abroad and fucking the locals.

everyone’s happy except the 0.001% landlords and market gamblers. who now have to get actual jobs. or have well paid jobs already and didn’t need to sit on 4 houses because they got in early.

the problem is privatization for things that doesn’t even make sense to privatize. if the cost of discovery is too high for a private entity then why are they the ones to supply it? they aren’t actually doing anything but taking the foam from the top of what everyone else have collectively created. it’s like the privatization of energy, a natural monopoly that literally runs into negative value through surplus. or the privatization of mandatory services that cannot be sustained at cost such as nation wide mail delivery. if it doesn’t make sense the right choice is the only choice yet here we are lol.

what’s wrong with MX? isn’t it basically just debian stable but with xfce as default?

this wasn’t a problem with cashless infrastructure tho, this was a problem with monoculture. if the globe stopped using microsoft for gov and business, and instead threw their tax money towards open development; as in - the people, not microsoft, these kind of global issues wouldn’t exist.

sounds like they rather spend that RND on pocket lining over contributing to software dev.

just like email.

well to be fair bitcoin is on point as a decentralized currency.

The law must apply to all, including public servants. As they are beholden to the public, they are subject to review and FOIA requests are automatically granted for the content.

Now I’m suddenly not so against this law. Journalists paradise. They’ll have a field day!

even if fuel is cheap it’s still has an upfront cost per production and can be manipulated based on demand to ensure prices never drop and always go up.

or i mean, super, nuclear is obviously what society needs, because energy supply is a natural monopoly and nuclear uses fuel you can burn based on demand and guaranteed awesome profit as a private entity unlike infinite energy resources that produces surplus energy and only benefits society and not the shareholders and owners who are the only ones who obviously matter.

whatever russia says, they mean to do the opposite. they’ve been pulling this nonsense from the start and this is no different, and we know this because they are STILL THERE. if they wanted peace, THEY’D LEAVE. ukraine doesn’t have a choice, they have nowhere to go. they can’t pull out of the conflict because they are literally the one being invaded. there is no logic to this argument. it’s like ordering cheese and wondering why you are served cheese. it’s plain and dumb.

using cinnamon. and yeah base software is largely fine. but non-base productivity apps are largely built in electron. cinnamon even offers a webapp tool so in some cases i can at least avoid it.

people who like fast apps should care because like 99% of current software developers are building electron apps instead of giving us something that actually lets your high end computer behave like a high end computer.

the only modern chat application that doesn’t run electron today is Telegram.

the only cloud note taking app that doesn’t run electron is …uh. doesn’t even exist.

the only…

i can’t even think of something i use that was released after 2016 on my computer that doesn’t run at a crawl because of electron. fuck electron.

bs. discord is absolute trash for anything but live chatting. it does nothing different from plain old irc with a bnc and bots. they just took irc and made it easy for stupid people to use and slapped voice comm on top; which also already existed. using it as an archive, broadcast and support system is like trying to use a hammer to screw in a screw. people just use discord because people use discord. just like people just use facebook because people use facebook.

if you want to manage a community, you should use discourse. it’s the most modern alternative. if you want a public chat, use any chat you want that supports public chat, the only difference between all of them is what level of privacy they provide.