Yep. When talking to Russians who emigrated away from Russia, you will find plenty of stories just like your sister’s friend’s one.

What the tankies idolizing the country seem to not realize is that living there as a national is oppressive. Your standard of living depends on staying in the good graces of the government—good graces that can quickly be lost by appearing to go against them.

The United States government is working its way towards that at an astonishing pace, but saying Russia has more freedoms is a complete delusion.

Chinese, Russian and Iranian people don’t need us to fight for their ‘freedom’,

Oh look, yet another Tankie who thinks the grass would be greener where the lawn describes itself as communist.

How’s that “more freedom” been going for the Uyghur? Or maybe you meant the freedom to free-fall out a window when running as a political opposition to Putin?

Agreed on both points.

If it was GOG and not EGS, the reaction would probably be very different. But, because people already hate Epic (for good reason), writing an article that appeals to schadenfreude makes for some easy ad revenue.

People also shouldn’t be idolizing corporations. They’re not our friends; we’re only a means to an end for them. The best case scenario for us is mutualism, and the worst case is parasitism. All it takes is a change in leadership or a change in circumstances to go from one to the other, and a constant need for growth encourages the parasitic enshittification we’re well acquainted with.

But you’re all rabid to hate on epic

If I had to pick between buying a game on Steam or Epic, I would pick the one which did some good things for consumers over the one that stuck their middle finger up at us.

There’s no denying that Valve’s contributions to DXVK, WINE, KDE, and Linux are a self-serving way to ensure Steam remains relevant after Microsoft locks Windows into a walled garden. Even so, the end result was an overall benefit for consumers. We would have had something like Proton eventually, but it would not have come nearly as quickly without their financial backing.

What has Epic done? A bunch of free games that I still don’t have enough time to play and would not have picked up anyways, great. That doesn’t make up for the rest of their wannabe-monopoly, anticonsumer practices like making exclusivity deals to railroad people into using their store by making sure consumers are denied a choice.

Fuck Epic, and fuck Tim Sweeney’s self-aggrandizing attitude. If he actually gave a shit about anything other than his ego, he would have spent his time leading Epic Games to challenge “the Steam monopoly” by providing a better customer experience, not posting on Twitter acting like the messiah of PC gaming.

I agree with your overall opinion, but I just don’t agree with how the problem was presented. Your statement, with more of the surrounding context:

… lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances …

The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”. Not acknowledging a community’s existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0’s piracy community because of EU laws, and it’s basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.

I wouldn’t have an issue with if you said a change in Lemmy “gives lemmy.ml exclusive control over promoting what communities show up as popular in other instances”. They don’t have the ability to censor the existence of communities that go against their views just the ability to censor their promotion. That’s a big problem, but it’s not as catastrophically bad as them having the power to censor the actual content on other instances.

I dislike centralization as much as the next person and have my issues with lemmy.ml being allowed to control anything outside its own instance, but I think the way you phrased it is misleading.

what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances

That suggests .ml has the ability to prevent communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances, while the anti-feature is actually about them being the sole source of truth for what counts as a “popular” community.

They can censor and curate that list to their authoritarian-apologist desires—which is a problem—but it only affects discoverability when browsing for popular communities, and instance admins can (and should) turn that off.

Your source is 3 months old and doesn’t back up your claims.

what does “hardcode lemmy.ml as a source to pre-fetch popular communities” mean in practice.

It is an attempt to pre-populate new instances with some popular communities which is seen as a way to improve discoverability. I find the general concept of using “popularity” for that to be somewhat problematic, but the main issue I have with the actual implementation is that it uses lemmy.ml as the source of truth for that, and there is no way to change that*.

Step 1: Make personal computing unaffordable.
Step 2: Rent “personal” computing as a service.
Step 3: Boil the frog by continuously restricting what people can do with the service.
Step 4: Wait for local computing to die.
Step 5: Stop LLMs from running on rented computers.

Hardware won’t last forever. Once they have full control over what people can do with computers, they have full control over the information people are exposed to. LLMs won’t help with that if the only ones that are accessible to the layman are sanitized and censored.

You would hope, but knowing how competent copilot is, it’s just going to turn out like this:

User:
I’m running out of space, can you help me clean up?

AI:
Sure thing, I can help with that. You have some programs that haven’t been opened since 2017. Would you like me to delete them?

User:
Yes

AI: OK, let me do that for you.

I apologize, but as an AI Agent, I am not allowed to delete files or uninstall programs automatically. You can remove them yourself, however. I have created the cleanup.txt file on your desktop, which you can run by renaming the file to cleanup.bat, right-clicking on it, and selecting “Run as administrator”.

User:
Thank you, I did that but it only freed up a little bit of space. Can you find more?

Error processing request: 0xC3E9A005.
Unable to connect to copilot agent service:
The system can not find the module specified: “kernel32.dll”

Username… almost checks out. It’s missing the leading /nix/store/.

Isn’t that worse? Chocolate ain’t exactly healthy for most animals.

No entitlement necessary.

People typically welcome more competition in retail spaces. Having the freedom to pick between store A and store B allows consumers to choose whichever works best for them, whether for convenience or service reasons. Look at GOG. Nobody is complaining that they exist, or that they sell a subset of the games that people could instead purchase on Steam.

What people don’t welcome is companies deciding they want a slice of the pie, entering a market, and then making the experience worse¹. Coercing people onto a platform by removing their ability to choose is consumer-hostile. People complained when E.A. and Ubisoft made new games exclusive to their own storefronts, but they begrudgingly sucked it up because those were developed by the platform owners and they weren’t interfering with games they didn’t own.

What Epic Games did was make timed exclusivity deals with third-party developers² and publishers in an attempt to stick their foot in the door, while providing the bare minimum service to consumers³. They made EGS for the publishers and offered little more to their customers than contempt and the occasional free game as a bribe to boost the Epic Games Store user counts.

The cherry on top was Tim Sweeney acting like the messiah of PC gaming coming to save it from the Steam monopoly, only to start behaving like a petulant child on social media in response to people justifiably being pissed off at Epic Games for the monopolistic shit they were doing.

If his decisions weren’t openly hostile to the people he expected money from, there wouldn’t be much of a reason for people to dislike him. But, through his decisions and actions both as the leadership of Epic Games and as himself on Twitter, he gave people plenty of reasons.

¹: See digital streaming services, for example. Everyone was happy to just pay for Netflix. Some of them even paid for Crunchyroll, too, since it provided a separate catalog. Now, every media conglomerate has taken their shows off of Netflix and moved them to their own separate services at the same price point. It’s not a coincidence that digital piracy is making a comeback.

²: Such as with Ooblets, when they paid the developer after the game was crowdfunded to release it on EGS instead of Steam.

³: No user reviews, it took years to get a shopping cart, customer support being useless when people get locked out of their accounts, etc.

All you had to do was say nothing, Timmy.

You’re an asshole, but only PC gamers had a reason to care—because you tried to buy your way into a dominant position by employing anti-consumer, monopolistic practices like paying for distribution exclusivity deals with third-party publishers.

The best possible choice here, clearly, was to voluntarily align yourself (and by association, Epic Games) with Nazis and pedophiles. I sincerely hope the board forces you to resign, you absolute chode.

Oh boy. We’re already at 13 out of 14 on the checklist.

There’s a whole lot of entitlement going on in that thread.

If the maintainers didn’t want to merge it because they had bigger issues to worry about, that’s that. Whining about it and trying to pressure them with prospects of “becoming obsolete [if you don’t merge this]” isn’t going to make a convincing argument.

They should either shut the fuck up and learn to RTFM, or maybe consider putting their money where their mouths are by actually paying to support the projects they seem to so desperately think they have a right to influence the direction of.

I feel like maybe the human DNA has degraded too much in 2 or 3 generations.

Ancient Greeks notwithstanding, being non-heterosexual was considered a disease to be eliminated or cured until people finally accepted that it was a natural part of being an animal. Would you say being gay is a consequence of flawed genetics, or would you like to try phrasing that remark a bit differently?

As a developer as well, I agree that they can get fucked. Bloated crap that wastes bandwidth and ruins first-time-to-paint on mobile devices by necessitating downloading and initializing a multi-megabyte bundle of npm packages.

As a user of the internet, I need websites to work, however. I would have disabled JavaScript entirely by now if it weren’t for the fact that doing so renders what feels like half of the entire web unusable.

Might be that there’s some way of blocking that behavior if you don’t like it, though, if I’m not seeing it.

Not without either breaking most SPAs (Single-Page Applications) or writing userscripts with site-specific logic.

The classic way of doing this crap was to make a placeholder page navigate to the article page. That leaves the redirect page in the history stack so when the user presses the back button, it just opens the page that navigates them forward again.

The modern way is to use the history API with history.pushState to add a history entry while listening for the popState event to check if the user pressed the back button. Unfortunately, both of those features have a legitimate use case for enabling navigation within a SPA. Writing an extension to replace them with no-ops would, in the best case, break page history in SPA websites. In the worst case, it would break page routing entirely.

You might be able to get away with conditionally no-oping their functionality based on heuristics such as “only allow pushState if the user interacted with the page in the last 5 seconds,” but it would still end up breaking some websites.

Add another to your list. It also started happening to me recently.

Oh, please. Nobody needs cough syrup when you could instead be drinking radium as an ailment cure-all.