They like it because they either work for it or hope to work for it and be in a position of power.

I was referring to Google banning ad blockers more than Opera’s move to bypass the block in chromium. I should have clarified that in my original comment, but I was quite sleep deprived when I wrote it.

They’ve been actively fighting libraries over the years, with renewed fervor in the last decade. As numerous others have pointed out before–including the article I linked–if libraries hadn’t already been such a long-standing concept for centuries, they would 100% not be allowed to come into existence nowadays. Hyper greed has poisoned every facet of modern society.

I truly hope this leads to the collapse of Chrome’s sheer market dominance. Fuck Google.

This is incorrect. Look into how SuperPACs get around the normal laws for donator transparency.

I have rarely encountered places that don’t accept cash. The only places I’ve seen signs that state no cash are smaller businesses and/or street merchants/vendors.

Regardless, I agree with the spirit of your comment. I rarely use cash anymore simply because carrying it around is inconvenient. You have to know ahead of time exactly how much something is going to cost and then when you get coins back, that’s doubly more inconvenient/annoying.

Ultimately, OP’s post is a little melodramatic. Gift cards are meant to be more personal, although in the specific context they wrote, it does feel a bit half-hearted (“Thanks for helping, here’s a random gift card I found in my wallet that I never used!”).

The SEC is the regulating body for the US stock exchange. Numerous companies on the stock exchange are heavily involved in Bitcoin. And if I recall correctly, Bitcoin is also exchanged through platforms regulated by the SEC. There are other things the SEC oversees that could be directly/indirectly related to crypto as well.

I wouldn’t think so, since Mastadon isn’t inherently “owned” by any one company and doesn’t rely on an advertising business strategy.

Hah, that’s interesting. I tried looking up to see if that’s true, but I’m not finding any reliable sources, only sites and articles talking about the first message sent on ARPANET.

It’s weirdly used as a normal social media platform by a ton of people I’ve worked with over the years. I have no idea why, tbh, but they’re out there.

It depends on the context for me. Repairing/replacing something on like my lawnmower or car? Video all the way. A simple CLI command/process? A quick write-up is often preferred for me.

You don’t need to ask, as there are tons of well made videos giving great breakdowns of the most popular distros and the pros/cons of each while also showing demonstrations of a user session within them. To me, that’s far more informative than a broad, generalized typed paragraph. However, I will concede that I’m more a visual, hands-on learner, so this is subjective.

And I agree, creating a boot disk is very simple and straightforward. The likelihood of GPT/Gemini getting it wrong is low. Especially Gemini/Copilot, as they basically just regurgitate the top tech site articles in this context and will cite the links it used (e.g. stack exchange, Tom’s hardware, etc). But like I said above, it can still happen, so why not just look up the source material for something so simple? I doubt any time is really saved by using AI in this instance. Not to mention, if you’re more of a visual person, it’s nice to see someone else give a demonstration.

To each their own, though. Neither method is necessarily the wrong/better one.

Eh, just look up a reputable YouTube channel and guide. Chatbots can randomly make dumb mistakes that a total newbie won’t recognize, potentially causing them a lot of headache.

And no, I’m not one of those diehard anti-AI people. My work has its own custom GPT model and I utilize it almost daily for menial tasks. But even having it generate script boilerplate and whatnot, I sometimes notice it writing stuff that won’t work and/or does it in a really verbose/weird way.

it is literally the whole damn point of shoving AI down everybodies throat…

To be fair, it didn’t start out that way. A lot of tech companies just didn’t want to be seen as being behind while OpenAI was making shockwaves around the globe. Iirc, after ChatGPT hit the mainstream a couple years ago, Google’s CEO was said to have sent a company-wide email demanding their own AI research become their number 1 priority.

Now that they finally have their own competitive model, they have to justify why they spent hundreds of millions of dollars over numerous years on this tech. Unfortunately for the rest of us, this just means enshittification will reach new levels… sigh…

Iirc, tasks requiring elevated permissions wasn’t the main complaint, maybe just one of the most vocal ones.

Even with good hardware, it was not optimized for performance in general. This was amplified by the fact they also marketed Vista as having a wide range of older hardware support, which resulted in many users upgrading from XP only to have their performance absolutely tank. I think there was even a lawsuit because of how they marketed some devices as, “Vista ready.”

Regardless, Vista was still better than Windows 8.

Iirc, didn’t the article say that was one of many hypothetical scenarios they try to plan accordingly for? Like you said, it’s been awhile since it came out, so I could easily be wrong. I imagine it won’t be a problem any time soon, though. There are always desperate people, and simply changing policy to allow rehiring people that had previously been fired/quit would open eligible candidate pools back up.

Or, y’know, they could just make working there not be miserable.

I’ve been using a Steam Deck for almost a year damn near daily with maybe 1 OS crash that was largely due to a very unstable game. How is ArchLinux unstable, exactly?

This is the correct interpretation and the crux of the matter in Valve’s view. Why should they be forced to allow other retailers to sell Steam keys at whatever price they want, effectively taking money out of Valve’s pockets, when it’s Steam providing all of the actual services for said key to function?

This should not be confused with gray market key resellers, by the way (e.g. G2A, Kinguin, etc) . Those aren’t the same as retailers like Fanatical or GreenManGaming.

There was another case in 2021 that originated this complaint and some of these plaintiffs in the 2024 case actually broke off from that one to start this one. We’ll see what evidence they actually end up bringing to court to argue their case and how legitimate it is. All I know, is this will likely end up with Valve stopping third-parties from selling steam keys entirely.

They’re only doing this because of the class action being brought against them. It’s cheaper to let this go to court than to try and settle tens of thousands of individual arbitrations. In fact, there are plenty of companies now reversing course and realizing how badly forcing arbitration can backfire.

Edit: For those unaware: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/video-game-giant-valve-hit-with-consumer-class-action-over-pricing-2024-08-12/

I was super annoyed when they first took away the links. “Pages are more dependably available now,” is such a lazy excuse. Storing the cached content probably wasn’t even that expensive for them, as it didn’t retain anything beyond basic html and text. Their shitty AI-centric web search was likely the main reason for getting rid of it.