I used to do the same, but I lost a lot of confidence in GOG after they retroactively restricted their cloud saves to 200 MB.

My hundred-hour Witcher 3 save is exactly the kind of thing I want backed up, but that’s no longer possible. And the very low limit they set, and the urgency with which they started deleting the very data they were expected to keep safe, reeks of a desperation to save money that makes me hesitant to invest more in their ecosystem.

I really want them to succeed though, and I think they have the right idea with Galaxy. Even Epic giving me games for free doesn’t make me actually use their client or store.

But somehow the obvious idea of forming a consortium to develop open standards and implementations for game clients, doesn’t seem like something that will ever happen.

I think the key was that Steam wasn’t created to make money, but to solve problems they themselves had, like “How do we get new versions of Counter Strike out to all these players?”

Then as Valve wasn’t the only company having these problems, the solution could easily be sold to others.

If the other companies really wanted to crack Steam’s near-monopoly, the solution would be to tackle the problems associated with not having all your games on Steam. Work together on a open-source launcher supporting all stores, similar to GOG Galaxy. First make something useful that tackles an unsolved problem, then you can make money off it when it becomes successful.

Instead they go in just trying to make a buck, and end up just being worse versions of Steam.

That ended up being a bit of a rant, but I’m frustrated at their shortsighted market strategies :p

I dream that the reason AMD delayed their launch and are being so cryptic, is because they saw how underwhelming the 5080 was and decided to make a card (perhaps a 9070 XT) that matches its performance at the price of a 5070 or something.

Now I don’t think that will happen. Their previous market strategies have been very uninspired. But there’s certainly an opening here to make a play for market share and make Nvidia look like greedy fools.

Why upgrade from a 4080 to a 5080?

It’s at the level where, after spending hours there, I feel like it has to be a conspiracy to waste your time. Because there is no way there could organically be that many posts about a topic without there being any useful or correct information.

Seems suspicious. There probably is such an option hidden somewhere. Because whenever you get a clear answer there, it’s invariably wrong.

Perhaps it was a poor choice of words, when I said “organizing” I meant everything required to run an event (with thousands attending). From planning and programming to picking trash and cleaning toilets.

I assumed it was just a very dirty, tough job requiring some specialized equipment and skills. Are you saying it’s somehow fundamentally different from other human activities?

My experience organizing non-profit events have shown that most people actually have no problem doing dirty jobs for no material compensation. If the following things are true:

1. They understand why the job is important
2. They feel responsible for the job (usually comes from being given autonomy and trust)
3. They get recognition for doing it (social rewards are actually very powerful)
4. No one else is getting compensated either.

I understand that this seems foreign to a lot of people, because this is not how work is generally motivated in capitalist society. You are used to your job being rather unimportant, with little autonomy, little trust, not much recognition from society and some people definitely profiting more than others. Your primary motivator is the threat of violence (via homelessness, starvation etc.), so it’s hard to imagine what would happen if that was removed.

That to me is the core idea of Anarchism, to base your organization on volontary cooperation rather than coercion.

An interesting side-note is that the people who do the dirty jobs in these circumstances often take great pride in it, forming an identify around doing what others are not willing to and calling attention to it as a way to get more recognition.

What are some of the outstanding issues that haven’t been addressed? I feel like there are genuinely good ways of doing everything these days

They’ve done amazing work trying to turn the clusterfuck they started with into a good language

How many of these “lacking features” are actually standardized? Of course some draft under development by Google will only work in the latest version of Chrome. It might not even work in future versions of Chrome, since it’s not standardized.

If you built something that requires such a feature, it’s you who is choosing to write code that is incompatible with the standards and only works on a particular browser version. You can’t blame others for that.

Even before Trump, the US illegally deported lots of citizens by accident. Because practical legal protections against deportation were shit even back then.

So they don’t even have to make it legal. Just impossible to practically fight illegal deportation.

A source https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Hundreds-of-citizens-end-up-in-deportation-11719324.php

That’s what all the coffee and wine is for!

Is this how people can claim that Arch is stable, they just redefine breaking to exclude anything that might actually happen?

Debian in particular is rock solid, even Debian Unstable has been very reliable for me if you want a rolling release with newer packages.

But I’ve also had very few problems with Ubuntu. My mother has used it for ten years at this point and will happily apply any dist upgrade she’s presented with, and rarely does she need support.

A pro tip is to check out the alternative desktop environments. A lot of people rightly hate Ubuntu’s awful default DE, but it’s not a core part of the distro, there are other complete desktop “flavours” available in the repositories and installers that will give you them from the start at https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavours

(Switching an installed system from one DE to another is in principle as easy as uninstalling one desktop meta-package and installing another, but you got to make sure you get the right packages, or you might run into annoying conflicts, so I would not recommend it for a newbie)

What do those NGOs have to say about Julian Assange or Steven Donziger

“RSF defends Assange because of his contributions to journalism” https://rsf.org/en/rsf-dispels-common-misconceptions-case-against-julian-assange

“CPJ welcomes reports that Assange will be released in plea deal” https://cpj.org/2024/06/cpj-welcomes-reports-that-assange-will-be-released-in-plea-deal/

“USA must drop charges against Julian Assange” https://www.amnesty.org/en/petition/julian-assange-usa-justice/

“Biden Should Pardon Steven Donziger” https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/01/biden-should-pardon-steven-donziger-before-leaving-office/

I’m getting the distinct impression you have no idea wtf you are talking about

the stories that come out first tend to be most biased

I honestly think the concept of news is actually harmful, because it’s about reporting what happened, not about making the audience understand the subject. It puts a premium on getting the report out as quickly as possible, and favours the most shocking events and interpretations that draw people’s attention.

Ultimately most news are “empty calories” of information that mostly give an illusion of knowledge. “Explosion in Herptown, dozens wounded” does not meaningfully increase your understanding of the world, it mostly just makes you scared. It will take weeks until the cause and consequences of the explosion can be fully understood, and a lot of research to put that into perspective.

If you do not know the extent of pressure asserted on Chinese media that is willful ignorance.

Of course “our media” (whatever you mean by that) is the only media that can report on it as Chinese media is heavily censored.

If you want to know the extent the information easy to find.

Here’s some of what Reporters Without Borders have to say

“The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the world’s largest prison for journalists, and its regime conducts a campaign of repression against journalism and the right to information worldwide.”

“The Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party sends a detailed notice to all media every day that includes editorial guidelines and censored topics.”

“Independent journalists and bloggers who dare to report “sensitive” information are often placed under surveillance, harassed, detained, and, in some cases, tortured.”

Source: https://rsf.org/en/country/china

This is from The Committee to Protect Journalists

“China has long ranked as one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists. Censorship makes the exact number of journalists jailed there notoriously difficult to determine, but Beijing’s media crackdown has widened in recent years”

Source: https://cpj.org/reports/2024/01/2023-prison-census-jailed-journalist-numbers-near-record-high-israel-imprisonments-spike/

Here’s Amnesty International

“Chinese authorities continued to severely curtail rights to freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly, including through the abusive application of laws often under the pretext of preserving national security.”

Source: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/east-asia/china/report-china/

Don Lumo is in with them!