skeaker

Your other points aside...

> I'm not against consumer boycotts, but it should generally come with a sacrifice on both sides--for consumers, that means missing out on the product or service.

I'm curious as to why you feel this way, genuinely. The decision to boycott means that there is no sale, full stop, so no money is being handed over. Why does anything after that matter? The important part, the money, is already decided from the start.

To be fair, the theory with the whole coin thing is solid, and I'd say it should count as something to be proud of even if in reality it gets tainted by speculative investments.

As they should. Never once have I seen any good outcome of ads on the web.

On the user end:

- People click scam download buttons or fake links and are blasted with scams or malware.

- Nobody I know has ever, not once, purchased something from an ad and been happy with it. The one person I know who did purchase something from a Facebook ad got scammed.

- The actual content people want to watch is delayed or interrupted by constant nonsense that they will never engage with.

So already there is absolutely no incentive as an end user to want ads. Then over on the content creator end:

- Because they work through clicks, ads generate a ton of bad incentives to make divisive content or just otherwise harmful content. See Elsagate for one way this manifests.

- For honest creators who make genuinely good and creative works, ads harm them by consistently underpaying them. Only the very absolute peak of content creators make a livable wage from ads alone. See the rise of Patreon and other such subscription methods that they have had to rely on to get away from ad revenue dependency.

- Ads also harm honest creators by incentivizing bad actors to steal their work, either by direct reuploads on various platforms or by simple plagiarism. See any Facebook page for stolen content or the whole James Somerton expose that happened a couple years ago for the plagiarism bit.

>Idk who still does this

Not my fault you're out of the loop.

Nobody said you couldn't do this too.

People can and do download games for free all the time and Steam is still there. People pay for Spotify when music has been openly free since Napster was the zeitgeist.

Citation needed, but also buying homes (that you don't intend to live in or actually use) is still hoarding, and is arguably even worse than hoarding wealth.

Did you keep a list of how each solution ranked? I'd be curious to see it (genuinely).

I would still call this practice malicious. There's no justifiable reason for that much of a jump in price in the first place.

> Do you feel that Wikipedia today is banned through the letter of the law? If so why is there a question of it continuing to operate there?

This isn't so much up to feeling as it is up to interpretation of the law. If there isn't a good way for Wikipedia to hide parts of itself and the law requires that it does, then it is effectively banned by the letter of the law.

The question of it continuing to operate exists because it is an obvious good to society that the law is yet to act on shutting down themselves. Right now it continues to exist in the UK despite being illegal due to the good will (or incompetence if you're not feeling generous) of the UK government.

Not sure this was the fault of ChatGPT as much as it was the fault of disinterested students bullshitting a class for credits. I've seen similar bad work in group projects when I was a student well before ChatGPT was a thing.

I haven't tried with too many games since the usecase only comes up rarely, but I know that Downwell and UFO 50 work this way off the top of my head. They come with a Steam dll that will try to launch Steam for the sake of getting achievements and such, but if you delete them or just don't have Steam they launch all the same.

Google turns up this Steam curator that lists games that run without Steam and are DRM-free out of the box, though it seems far from comprehensive: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38523697-DRM-FREE-GAM...

The PC Gaming Wiki has a couple of better lists it looks like: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g... and https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_...

Point not taken. That remains as the vast minority of all software. I can't link a counterexample because nobody would ever put an article saying "indie game has bug" or "IoT coffeepot has to be rebooted every few months," but I can assure you the majority of software has much lower stakes.

Not all software is life or death. I'd argue that very little of it is.

Definitely not all games, and for games that do have it cracking it is in most cases as simple as swapping out a Steam .dll (so very easy). It's primarily there as appeasement for devs who would be reluctant to engage with a platform with no copy protection, or in otherwords is mostly theater.

This would be a lot more compelling if we didn't already know where most of our money is actually dead-ending at (it's American billionaires).

Asinine complaint.

1. Not true in the slightest; you even contradict yourself. Engineering interests absolutely do grow from it like you said, and you will never get someone doing good work in an engineering career without a prior interest.

2. Life is not a career. Even just fostering an interest in something creative is invaluable on its own. Perceiving something as harmful because it isn't corporate enough for your tastes makes me extremely sad for you.

If all you need is to save bookmarks, could you not simply sign into your browser and use the built in sync feature?

Had a similar situation when I was young. Living far away only really impacts your ability to host events which can suck for things like your birthday parties, as getting a large number of people to all go out of their way is pretty much impossible. Other than that it doesn't affect your ability to socialize or attend events hosted by others.

Likening a game to a painting is just a false premise. Games are a unique medium that can in themselves hold lots of different things which inherently makes them hard to compare wholesale to other mediums. They can be similar to Chess in the sense of requiring strategy or a physical sport in that they can be almost entirely composed of the skill expression of the players. They can even hold paintings or novels in their entirety, or do something entirely unique that just can't be done in other mediums (my favorite example of that is Outer Wilds).

Regardless, they are far from dead. Multiple billions of dollars is still doing fantastic for any business, investors and shareholders be damned.

Might not be the best idea, unless we just so happen to be all the way at the top of the sequence[1]...

1 - https://qntm.org/responsibility

Yes, tech corps have actually have been investing in nuclear. See some recent discussion:

Microsoft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443

Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41840769

The major flaw in your argument is that Yahoo is still around. They still have tons of traffic, some of the most in the world, just behind Reddit. They are not constantly growing, yes, but that is exactly my point. They have a satisfied userbase who will use them for life as does Google. Neither is going anywhere any time soon. Both make billions of dollars annually.

The obscenely rich entities that buy up tons of property without actually using it do so because they only stand to gain even more money on it later. Making more housing would help in the long term for sure, but these entities would still buy up most of it as it becomes available. Remember that as long as they hold the vast majority, they essentially have a captive audience and can set whatever outlandish prices they want (especially when they collude as they have done). Something to restrict the number of unused properties a person can own would still be beneficial either way.

This also goes without mentioning the restrictions on "just" building new housing (land, time, and space, particularly space located near job sites).

Citation needed, my understanding was that housing prices are being driven up by real estate owners/agencies buying tons of property to either rent at extortionary prices or sit on until they sell for a higher price to the next sucker. Also stuff like the RealPage scandal where they simply illegally collude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41330007

I think the idea of a law that only allows a limited number of owned properties per person and requires them to actually be using those properties would be interesting to alleviate this.

I never really bought the idea of any AI company killing Google. They have too much momentum to really be seriously impacted, too many people who only use them exclusively and will continue to do so their whole lives on the name brand alone. They might risk a lack of "growth" but that only really matters to shareholders, not to end users.

Yes, but the connotation here was "conscripted which is a bad thing that made them unhappy."

This is a bad argument because it could very easily go either way. Post any source of yours for the 12 million number and I'll just as easily say it's fake too.

In theory people will steal Apple devices, then when they learn that digital locks make them impossible to use they will gut them for parts and sell those. Serial locking would defeat that. In practice, yes, it pretty much just exists to make them millions off of forced overpriced in-house repairs.