• 20 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Google tried to break regional US monopolies with Google Fiber, which to my surprise is still going despite Google’s best efforts to kill off projects that aren’t immediately successful and is active in 19 US states or around 40 different cities.

    The only way I can see this catastrophe ending is one of three ways:

    1. Satellite internet - Elon Musk would need to massively drop the price of Starlink to encourage others to switch, or a competitor would need to pop up and offer similar service at a lower price point, likely through Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic.
    2. The US collectively vote the Republicans out of office by a landslide and bring in a left-wing Democrat leader. Won’t happen for so many reasons.
    3. Mesh networks. Something like Freifunk but on a much bigger scale.


  • In just one night, I had lost a lot of the communities I interacted with over the years. Besides, you might hate Reddit (and rightfully so) but atm its too mainstream and widely used, and there sadly isnt a better alternative for a platform where you can access forums for any sort of niche topics, ask questions etc… Many of these are not available elsewhere, not even here.

    If it’s any consolation, sites like Geocities, Slashdot, Digg, Tumblr, Twitter and Myspace were once mainstream. Reddit will fall, especially if Spez continues to drive that place down the shitter.





  • I use Firefox because Google killed Manifest v2 support and (with it) uBlock Origin. Unfortunately they seem to be heading towards the AI slop route.

    Yes, Edge and Brave exist but one is maintained by Microslop and will likely also follow in Google’s footsteps, and the other I don’t particularly trust because they have a homophobe as CEO and did some crypto token shit with their ad system.

    A bunch of y’all would have been ragging on Blender 10 years ago. Ragging on Krita. In 2012 acting like gaming in Linux was doomed. In 2015 acting like Kdenlive would never reduce crashes and improve functionality. Acted like Darktable would never be competitive with Lightroom. Godot would be no good for anything more than 2d sidescrollers and never compete with Unity 5. A bunch of do nothing fence sitters. Firefox and GIMP developers contribute more to the good of humanity than anyone crying about them in this thread

    The last time I used Linux as a desktop OS was around 2008. Back then the state of FOSS was absolutely dire.

    I used to have a shitty Packard Bell PC at home which was weirdly partitioned, 20GB dedicated to the C:\ partition and 100GB dedicated to D:. An asshole “friend” at school goaded me into pirating Norton PartitionMagic and using it to merge the two partitions and pretty much totalled my Windows installation. As I didn’t have a backup CD I had to use Ubuntu for a few months.

    The only game I genuinely got working on Linux was World of Warcraft and even installing that was a pain. WC3 was supposedly “Platinum” on Wine’s AppDB but would often freeze and didn’t support using the mouse to move the camera. Some versions also couldn’t connect online.

    Fastfoward to today and gaming on Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds, in large part thanks to Valve. The only games you genuinely can’t get running are those with kernel level anticheat software.




  • I wouldn’t really count Valve as a competitor because

    1. Their pivot towards Linux came from a perceived threat that Microsoft could force users into using their app store exclusively, and effectively shutter Steam out of the market entirely. This is something Microsoft have already done with Windows 10 S.

    2. The OG Steam Machines were a massive flop for various reasons, and the new one Valve is creating in-house is set to be priced more equivalently to a gaming PC than a home console. It’ll give a nice accessible path towards PC gaming but because they’re not selling it at a loss and recouping that money from software sales…

    3. PC gaming has always been treated as its own separate thing since home computers became a thing.

    4. While the Steam Deck has been incredibly successful, handheld gaming is also its own separate thing, and their main competitors in that regard are Nintendo, Asus, Lenovo and all the budget Chinese Android handhelds designed with emulation in mind.


  • Do you want a future where PlayStation is the only home console? Because that’s how you get a future where PlayStation is the only home console.

    And with Sony holding a monopoly (not counting Nintendo because they’ve pretty much been doing their own thing since the Wii), they’re gonna jack up prices and force exclusivity deals to further consolidate their monopoly, as any company with such a dominant market position would.


  • Phil Spencer was a shit CEO. He absolutely cucked the hell out of Microsoft’s gaming division by releasing all their exclusives on competing platforms and eliminating any reason to even buy an Xbox Series S or X console.

    Newsflash: Exclusivity sells games consoles. It’s why you don’t see Sony pushing their IPs on other platforms other than in very exceptional circumstances, i.e. Helldivers 2 and MLB The Show. In the case of Helldivers 2 it was their biggest and only successful live-service release in recent memory, and The Show likely got ported elsewhere due to pressure from Major League Baseball themselves.