You say that as though corporations are fucking everything up for their own amusement, rather than in the service of making sure the “regular American” gets their luxuries for cheap.

I have to occasionally remind myself that some awful people go to church for the same reason sick people go to hospital. They can tell there’s something not right.

You’re just grasping now.

So you’ve never run out of space on your HDD, or replaced your machine, or wanted to lend or sell your game? You’re in the minority.

Publishers have proved time and time and time again that they can’t be trusted to keep that download available to you after you’ve handed the money over.

Discworld (1995) came with an actual t-shirt in the box. But there was an insane period in the early 2000s where they’d stopped doing manuals, maps and other extras but still packaged the disc in a box the size of a 450g cornflakes packet.

I’m ok with manuals not being a thing, because it’s a reflection of improvements in both software and game design where you don’t need to read 24 pages of text before you can play a game. But I’m not ok with publishers basically killing the secondary market.

People seeding obscure shit is what makes the whole thing viable. Keep up the good work.

I was once at a massive global company that seemed to actively encourage it. Access control in the building was super tight and we weren’t allowed on each others’ floors, had separate break rooms, the lot.

To the manufacturer? Pennies. It’s made of the same stuff DVDs are. They’re only expensive to the consumer because the entire industry hates the idea of them.

You don’t even have to get high-mindedly preachy, it’s a bad take on its own terms, since it hinges on the notion that the population at large are all “dumb” and therefore deserve bad things.

Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. Enshittification is the inevitable result of shareholders demanding endless growth at all costs.

Remember, they could have easily negotiated license terms that wouldn’t have had this outcome for people who already paid. They chose not to. This wasn’t forced on them unexpectedly.

Also, the record high temperature in Singapore (1 degree north of the equator) is 9 degrees Celsius lower (37C) than France’s record (46C).

What’s rarely communicated clearly enough is that “warming” means “more energy”. If it had been called something like “atmospheric energy buildup” from the start, maybe there’d be fewer people saying dumbshit like “so much for global warming” every snowstorm.

Fuck Joanne Rowling in particular, BUT, I don’t think this particular post is a good example given what it’s actually saying…

The astonishing part is how they manage to both be overly heavy-handed on moderation and STILL keep floating a fuckton of racism and other bigotry to the top.

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“Months to years” is the exception not the rule in the UK, you’ve been fed bullshit corpo propaganda. I’ve always been able to see a GP within a day, and when I needed some minor physiotherapy it was about two weeks.

The only person I know who’s had to wait more than a couple months was an elderly relative who wanted some quite complicated ankle surgery in order to be more active, and ended up going private - which is just as much an option here as it in the US, only considerably less extortionate since instead of being a cartel they’re competing with free.

Yeah we can’t expect them to be able to hire the expertise required for this, it’s not like they made over $1,000,000,000 net income last year or anything. Oh wait…

My coworker was making a browser extension recently and noticed that most of Facebook’s frontend code is crazy bullshit designed to make it difficult for scrapers and bots to navigate the DOM.

The saddest part of it is that none of it is particularly effective, it just means they had to write 2 lines of code to grab the fields they wanted instead of 1, so all that’s happened is Meta have made everything worse for everyone and burned an extra kajillion client-side CPU cycles worldwide, for almost no benefit.