informed choice

The cookie popups that litter the modern web today are a great example why this is probably a bad idea.

The casting alone is all you need to know to expect an unmitigated disaster.

Terminals are powerful and flexible, but still slower than a dedicated UI to see states at a glance, issue routine commands, or do text editing.

Terminal absolutists are as insufferable as GUI purists. There is a place and time for both.

The benefit of AI is overblown for a majority of product tiers. Remember how everything was supposed to be block chain? And metaverse? And web 3.0? And dot.com? This is just the next tech trend for dumb VCs to throw money at.

Just wait till the advertisers find out the eyeballs they are paying for are also just AI sock puppets. Enshitification strikes again.

If you could buy one, would you?

I’m pretty sure Windows is a key part of their “cloud stuff” strategy. You are right that consumers are not the direct focus of Windows, since they are not the direct paying audience, and that shows in the direction Windows is going, but getting consumers to use Windows is a big part of creating corporate buy in for Microsoft cloud services. Corporate environments will shun Microsoft cloud services if employees can’t use Windows, or Windows features run afoul of corporate policies (like blanket LLM bans).

I also have the same question. So I upvoted you. Also, where does this fall on the chart?

So what you are saying is maybe the free market is not that efficient.

What would be a more efficient economic model (with objective of getting quality goods in people’s hands)? A cooperative?

Makes me wonder if other economic models collapse under their own weight too.

So the solution to consumers making informed choices is to have the consumer buy everything and test everything personally?

No.

Been here since the redipocalypse, browse All daily… Haven’t seen a single post about sports.

when they were a scrappy bunch of nerds working out of a house

Much of the recent criticism relates specifically to toxic/bro culture and a work culture that encouraged cutting corners, mistakes, and burnout. I’m not sure what was going on in the house behind the scenes was a model of a professional workplace.

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

https://opensource.org/osd/

Paradoxically (or not), restrictions on selling software is a fundamental violation of freedom. When the OSS movement says free, it means freedom as in free to do what you want, not free as in free beer. Of course, that freedom also includes the freedom to give it away.

So in practice, that usually results in exactly what you lament: free software with a business model on top to support its development and pay programmers so they can eat.

I have spent more money on Palworld in a week than I have on Pokemon in 2 decades…

And finally, Fallout 4 targeted gamers. It’s a gamer’s game, you know? It’s for lore nerds and RPG fans and tacticool nuts and all the rest. HogLeg was for Harry Potter fans. It needed to drag fans across media types to secure a big enough audience.

This is… perhaps, the very formula for its success. Perhaps the gaming crowd isn’t that big. Perhaps, HL was not chained to a particular demographic and instead had the freedom to appeal to a wider audience.

I know of people who picked up a controller for the first time in their life because HL was a Harry Potter game… just saying.

The “here” part of the question changes the entire meaning of the question, rendering the stated answer completely off topic (cause, you know, “here” is not the only place you can earn money for food).

Depends on the instance.

There’s power in organizing and voting with your wallet collectively. Reject companies that trample your customer needs and convince others to do the same.

Just admit that you stole something and that you don’t care, it’s not that hard.

You are not wrong, but maybe just a bit of perspective:

In my city, you can go to the public library, borrow a DVD, take it home, watch it. 100% legal. 100% free. No library membership fees. And they have multiple copies of most DVDs, so it’s not like it’s some lottery to use the service.

It feels a lot like downloading a movie without paying anyone to watch it. The only difference is you gotta go outside. Oh, and no guilt tripping.

Anyway, what’s my point? Well piracy is only illegal because some people (not everyone) decided that everyone is going to pay an equal, but not necessarily an equitable, share to fund the development of said IP (unless you have a library in your area to counter this, partially). Worse, that everyone will keep paying a very small group of people money we’ll after the development of said IP has been paid off. Even worse, that small group of people will use their profits to corrupt the legal system to ensure that that protectionism continues to serve their benefit, not others… Point being, you can pirate, and care… care a lot.

Victims are created when piracy affects small production houses struggling to make ends meet. Victims are created of everyone else when the law is abused beyond it’s original purpose to squeeze consumers.

So you too should be honest and not call it theft. Piracy is piracy, good or bad. To compare it to the crime of theft is to perpetuate the marketing of those to stand from a black and white view on the matter.

This isn’t really the issue.

The real issue is that people have become so soft, so INCREDIBLY dependant on convenience, that they have given up all control. Having autonomy/privacy/ownership over your own environment is just too much work. It’s easier to just let someone else handle the surveillance system for you. What could go wrong?

This issue of complacency plagues just about everything, from cloud computing and banking to transportation and housing.