Why would you conclude that a subscription based model makes them immune from corrupt financial incentives? Quite the opposite. That’s my whole point.

Up-selling and cross-selling. It’s just business. Who’s ever going to pay $25/month if the $5/month plan does everything anyone ever possibly needs? Their lowest level pricing model relies on making you anxious about running out of searches eventually, not finding everything you need within that window each month, and not having effective enough tools to find what you need at the basic level. You may personally reject that you need anything more than the basic plan, but the company’s financial incentive is to convince you of the opposite, and don’t think for a second that they’re not eventually going to try to convince you that you need to upgrade. It may seem like $5/month and $25/month are not that far apart, but multiply that across some arbitrary number of users, say, 100,000, and you’re talking about $2 million dollars PER MONTH of potential revenue on the table. And there’s no guarantee they’re not going to eventually start pushing even more expensive products and plans.

They have partnerships with other businesses too, and while those seem like nice enough businesses on the surface, they’re still businesses and they are going to have motivation to find ways to drive traffic and prime you to get subscriptions to them too. The problem is not that these partnerships exist or that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s that they’re another corrupting influence when money is involved and changing hands.

To be clear, I’m not saying anyone involved is evil, that they’re actively doing this now, that they are even necessarily moving in this direction, or that they’re even slightly corrupt at all… yet, but they’re swimming in the corrupting waters of subscription-based dark patterns and they can’t help but be influenced by them. The lust for profits will inevitably drive them mad. It always does. Enshittification does not make exceptions for good intentions.

No, it’s just trading one centralized search product that is free and profits by using your data and manipulating you, for another that you have to pay for and profits from you more directly but still has financial incentive to keeping you engaged and searching instead of finding. Run your own decentralized SearXNG instead and take it into your own hands. Search isn’t something that should be controlled by anyone who’s in it for a profit.

I will maintain creative control of my life by boycotting EA forever. It’s one of the key plot points in my story.

What if we compromise on fractional thousandths of a kilodog?

Journalism is dead. Capitalism killed it, because they did not want any reliable witnesses to or records of what they are going to do to humanity and the planet. History is written by the victors, and they have already crafted their own narrative of technological enlightenment. And we’re not in that story. At least not in any way we’ll recognize ourselves.

Forgejo also has significantly more active development. Feature-wise, I believe they’re currently working on adding federation via ActivityPub as one of the main goals. I also think they have a much better designed and documented system for workers and actions at least at the time I went to spin one up. I switched to Forgejo and haven’t really looked back.

That’s fair, I hate it too. Java is way better, mine is so heavily modded I can barely stand vanilla Minecraft anymore. The only reason I know what a shitshow Bedrock on Linux is, is because my niece was at first only allowed to play on Switch and that’s only properly compatible with Bedrock, and she likes to show me around her worlds that she works on. I eventually convinced her parents to give her access to something that would let her play Java instead and since then we’ve only looked back at Bedrock once, and she was disappointed too haha.

They’re talking about Bedrock edition, unless there’s some new method of running it that I’m not aware of. Minecraft Bedrock is available as a UWP app through Microsoft Store, which is only available on Windows, phones and consoles. It is not compatible with Steam, Wine, Proton or Linux in any way, The only known way to run Minecraft Bedrock on Linux is to install the Android App for Minecraft Bedrock in an Android emulator, there is a wrapper called MCPLauncher for this purpose.

Alternatively, you can use a translation layer like GeyserMC to use Java edition in a way that’s interoperable with Bedrock, but the Bedrock edition itself is not currently available on Linux.

Sounds like fun, good luck!

More Financial Engineering to try to obscure the fact that they’re all caught in a rapidly expanding bubble that they’ve lost any hope of controlling.

Instead of just centralizing everything with Google, let’s ALSO centralize all of that through Cloudflare too. If we centralize enough stuff onto enough different monolithic platforms it counts as decentralized, right? /s

If an option exists that nobody should ever choose, why is it an option? In what situation would this option ever make sense?

I’m a relentless idealist too, and I get where you’re coming from, but idealism alone isn’t a winning strategy. The state of the world right now proves that. Sometimes you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. This is important precisely because it is so minor and inconsequential: the stakes and consequences for failure are so low while there is absolutely no legitimate argument against it. Not to put too fine a point on it: People are losing hope in our ability to create any change at all. We need a win. We need to start getting traction, and start making progress somewhere. We need to show people that these battles against corporate interests CAN be won so that they are willing to try to fight more of them in the future, including eventually the bigger ones where there will be real consequences and really serious forces entrenched against any efforts for change.

This is just a first step, a tiny example of giving the finger to “the man” to prove that we still can, taking back a sliver of power and agency. It is not the last step, it is merely a beginning, an almost invisibly tiny crack in the armor of capitalism and corporate rights in favour of society and people’s rights. It’s certainly not going to fix the world on its own, but once we’ve got some cracks in the armor, we can keep working at them to make them bigger and eventually maybe we’ll start making real visible progress.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to solve the problems of the world overnight with a single petition too, but that’s not realistic given the scale of the opposition and resistance we are facing. Late stage capitalism and corpo-fascism are not weak or fragile and they have grown to a scale that is almost inconceivable. We will not beat them in a single blow. We will need to hammer at them for a long, long time before we even start making any serious progress. We have to be prepared for a long, long fight, and relish these small, small victories when we get them. Because every victory is valuable and every one counts. Especially ones where we don’t have to fight to the death to achieve them. Small, cheap victories are the best when our resources are so limited. It’s going to be a marathon not a sprint. Right now they’ve got all the money, all the power, all the media, all the organization. A single large decisive battle would almost certainly mean we lose, and lose big. This is guerilla warfare. We will fight on the fringes and fight them where they’re weakest not where they’re powerful. Eventually the balance of power will shift as long as we keep winning battles, but it isn’t going to change anytime soon.

While it’s good to thought-experiment this sort of thing out to try to understand the most problematic areas, the reality is that the internet will never “completely” go down it’s too heavily distributed and not quite enough of a monoculture for even a perfect storm of worst case scenarios to conspire to bring everything down. Like the article mentions, even if only two computers are still running and networked together that is still technically an island of the “Internet”.

And even if everything somehow did completely go away for a time, of course we could start it up again, worst case we would just start making islands and then reconnecting distant islands to each other one at a time; the same way we restart that other great distributed machine: the power grid; the same way we created the Internet the first time, and actually probably much faster because most of the planning, layout, protocols and physical infrastructure is already well-established. It will just take time and work, it will be a a slow and chaotic process, modern life will grind to a halt at first, those things we rely on like the power grid, utilities, and payment networks will be prioritized but will only gradually start working again bit by bit, and it will never get back to exactly the way it was when it started, but the same sort of things happened after 9/11, in the great east coast blackout in North America, during COVID lockdowns. The world shuts down, the things we do and the way we do those things suddenly changes, becomes uncertain and difficult, non-essential stuff might not even be possible for awhile. But essential stuff mostly still gets done no matter how awkward it is to figure out how to do it. It’s not pretty or fun, but we manage, until eventually the problem has gone away and we don’t have to manage anymore.

For one thing, OP misspelled “crypto pump and dump scam” in such a confusing way that it appears to be 5 different words completely.

I think Louis Rossmann’s heart is in the right place, his work for right for repair is genuine, his disdain for New York’s intolerable bureaucracy is completely understandable and justified, but it is leading him in bad directions and has been ever since he linked up with FUTO. Never trust a billionaire and never let them delude you into thinking they care about you or anyone. He is being used for his reputation and his audience and when they are done consuming those things for the billionaire’s cause’s benefit he will be left with neither one and the billionaire will move on without slowing down or shedding a tear.

I’m not going to pretend I can judge its potential for commercial success, I’m just saying I think that hypothetical K-pop idol game would’ve been a more interesting game than Inzoi is currently or seems likely to ever be in the future I see for it now. That said, I’m not dying on this particular hill and I don’t have any particularly strong opinions about it so if you think I’m wrong about that you’re totally entitled to that point of view and I’m not going to try to defend my beliefs any further, I think I’ve said all I could possibly have to say about Inzoi at this point. Where the game goes from here is something which reality will eventually tell us, but I’m not optimistic about it.

Yep physical media is for newbies. It has its place, for newbies, but soon enough you should graduate to a level where you don’t need it anymore. The Internet becomes a complete and easy to use library once you know where to find it. Yarr, matey, it simply be data archival an’ don’t let Davy Jones’ lawyers be tellin’ ye otherwise.

Ehh, I wasn’t worried about that until the AI stuff happened. Even a K-Pop idol simulator would’ve been an interesting start. Filling in the content to a level that creates compelling stories and gameplay takes time. It takes years of expansions for Sims games to start getting decent levels of content and stop feeling soulless and shiny and bland compared to the previous game (arguably Sims 4 hasn’t even gotten there yet but that’s more of a Sims 4 problem).

Once Inzoi started trying to fill in the content with AI they thought they could rely on that to shortcut their way to success but I knew it wasn’t going to work. It needs the human touch, it’s gotta be quirky and have its own individual character. K-Pop idol might’ve been exactly what it needed to stand out if they had leaned on that instead of trying to fill in the gaps in content with bland and soulless AI, which is exactly what life sim games DON’T ever need more of.