❤️ sex work is work ✊
These fuckers should just release digital first, and physical comes when it’s done being printed and distributed. This anxiety over “oh no a finished game got leaked early” is manufactured drama. If the game is done, then it doesn’t matter when it gets released, except for artificial marketing angst. Make a good game that players want, and it’ll be purchased. Eventually. It doesn’t have to all happen at exactly the predicted moment.
This kind of confusion illustrated by Telegram users is exactly why it was the right thing to do for privacy when Signal removed support for SMS because it’s not encrypted. People still whine endlessly about it, but most users are not very savvy, and they’ll assume “this app is secure” and gleefully send compromised SMS to each other. All the warnings and UI indicators that parts of the app were less secure (or not at all in the case of SMS) would be ignored by many users, resulting in an effectively more dangerous app. Signal was smart to remove those insecure features entirely.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point here (I have no idea why people engage with shorts, maybe they do love that format) but I wanted to push back a little on the idea that a product must be popular simply because corporations continue to offer them. Especially with social media, where users are actively discouraged from making their own decisions as much as possible by The Algorithm.
I think there are plenty of examples of things that people continue to use (and often even pay for the “privilege”) despite major aspects of those things being generally reviled by everyone who uses them:
OnlyOffice can also be integrated with NextCloud or WordPress or a bunch of other stuff. I believe it can also be used standalone. Personally, I found it’s interface much more polished and usable than Collabora, though it’s been a couple years since I compared.
Yeah technically you aren’t supposed to ride on the sidewalks here (USA) but there’s barely any safe infrastructure to do otherwise, and I’m sure as hell not going to ride on the street with the death machines honking all over the place, so the sidewalk it is until city infrastructure is less car-brained.
Thank you for providing a non lethal alternative method. I’m uncomfortable with how much death humans gleefully visit upon the insect kingdom when they don’t have to.
I haven’t seen anyone mention nutritional yeast yet, but that’s become my go-to seasoning for almost everything; popcorn, pizza, scrambled eggs, bread, ramen, soft pretzels, and of course on fries. So damn good!
(Yes, I realize the name “nutritional yeast” sounds vaguely unpleasant and unappetizing, but I promise it’s incredible if you like savory flavors, and it can also be used as a cheese powder substitute in vegan recipes.)
Your statement did leave some wiggle room to quibble over what exactly “very popular” means, though I don’t see how popularity is a useful metric when we’re talking about free software which doesn’t rely on user purchases for revenue. Ultimately it comes down to how funding the development of each software is accomplished, and whether that can be done effectively without selling out.
However, if we must compare funding strategies based on popularity, then we can. I’m not sure where you got your usage numbers from, but I’ll use your percentage to normalize for the number of employees paid through the funding strategies of both examples to compare the effectiveness of the approaches:
For purposes of discussion, I’ll assume that you are correct that Blender has 2% of the popularity of Firefox. Normalizing that for comparison, 2% of 840 Mozilla employees is 16.8 employees (round down because you can’t have 0.8 of a person).
In other words, if Firefox were only 2% as popular as it is now (thus making it equally as popular as you say Blender is), Mozilla would be paying 16 developers with it’s funding strategy.
Conversely, Blender is able to pay 31 developers using their funding strategy. This means that, even when accounting for popularity, Blender’s funding strategy is 2x more effective than Mozilla’s at paying developers to work on their software.
Again, I don’t agree that popularity is an important metric to compare here, but even when we do so, it’s clear that it is entirely possible to fund software without resorting to tired old capitalistic funding models that result in the increasingly objectionable violations of user privacy that Mozilla engages in lately. They could choose to do things differently, and we ought not to excuse them for their failure of imagination about how to fund their business more ethically. Especially when perfectly workable alternative funding models are right there in public view for anyone to emulate.
it’s simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation
Please don’t excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that it’s unavoidable.
There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standards… it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.
Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock is what I think of as an example of turning a good character into a Mary Sue. He’s always pulling things out of his ass that he’s inexplicably been planning all along, or surprise he’s incredible at some random thing that just happens to be crucial at the moment.
Every Sherlock is like that to an extent, but that version was the worst.
Give it a shot again, something changed recently in Proton (I assume) that made Vortex “just work” for me on my Steam Deck. I didn’t even need to do any fiddling, I just ran the installer exe from desktop mode using Lutris and whatever Proton was latest, and it installed perfectly. Vortex now runs entirely as expected, even from game mode.
AdGuard has a list of trusted DNS providers, which seems like a good source. Many of the ones in that list are free as well.
Looking through their comment history, they proclaim their honesty quite often, it’s pretty funny when you’re looking for it 😆
I’ve now tagged them so I’ll remember that they are very honest:
I’ve been enjoying Apostrophe:
Some great favorites of mine that I haven’t seen mentioned here yet:
The ability to pick a cloud-storage provider to use for automatic 3rd-party game sync. It sucks that I can’t play a non-steam game on my deck and then resume on my desktop or vice versa.
Admittedly it’s a bit of manual tech fiddling involved, but you can accomplish this by using network shares and some careful scripting. For example, I’ve got both my desktop and steamdeck with a launch script configured in Lutris on both. The script symlinks a network share path to the appropriate save game location for each game before running the game. Granted you have to figure out where each game wants it’s save to be stored, but that’s not too difficult once you get used to it.
Fiddly and nerdy for sure, and not for the non technical, but it’s pretty nice, I’ve found! Would be even better if there was some more automated solution though.
I think you need to take a break and get some perspective.
Besides, the Twitter link was already posted by the OP, why would it need to be posted again?
I’ve historically used PySide (the free-license version of Qt) but for simple stuff like you’re looking for, you might get some mileage out of the Toga GUI toolkit. It’s relatively new, but promising.
I’ve actually been pretty impressed with the whole suite of BeeWare stuff in my informal testing so far; it’s a nice little bundle of tools. (Specifically I’m interested most in their distribution approach; building Python apps for distribution is a giant fucking pain, but this group seems to have improved the experience significantly.)
I use the same one I used in Chrome before switching, it works in Firefox too: Imagus
Oh no, somebody who might be Russian took a family vacation to go fishing with their loved ones!? What an orgy of indulgence! The audacity!