Glad to hear!

People have forgotten because he turned out to be a sex pest…

But once upon a time Louis CK would get annoyed with piracy and sell copies of his new standup show at $5 with a no DRM copy of the file, just politely asking people to not pirate.

He made $5 million almost overnight which helped fund his foray into television with Louie which was on TV for five years.

This literally was the thing that took his career to the next level. Where he went from a comic with a pretty okay career to one with a massive career.

He used to do the same for other comedians, too. I bought a couple Todd Barry specials from his website the same way: $5, DRM-free media files.

I still have all those files backed up.

The only thing I don’t like about the word canal is that if you remove the C is spells anal! HA!

-Steven Gonville Toast

2024-2025: AI companies pour money and support into DJT leaving many of us perplexed given Silicon Valley’s history of being left-leaning.

Curtis Yarvin has been writing about his ideas since at least 2009, when I first heard of him and his “Dark Enlightement.” He’s the “philsophical” underpinning of Silicon Valley’s actual values and it was clear long, long before 2024.

He has the ear of people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and more.

From Wikipedia:

Yarvin’s ideas were influential among right-libertarians and paleolibertarians, and prominent investors like Thiel have echoed Yarvin’s project of seceding from the United States to establish tech-CEO dictatorships. Journalist Jason Wilson noted that Yarvin had “a serious intellectual influence on key figures in Donald Trump’s coming administration”. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, an informal adviser to Donald Trump, has spoken in approval of Yarvin. Political strategist Steve Bannon has read and admired his work. Vice-president JD Vance also praised Yarvin in 2021, and said, drawing from his 2012 “Retire All Government Employees” talk, that “what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

I just updated last night to 2.7.5 ha

Real and based. If you get them on GOG, you can download offline installers with no DRM. My GOG collection isn’t as big as my Steam, but it’s also fairly significant as well. Heroic Launcher on Linux is sweet for GOG games (you just have to plan out wine prefix and directory structure to properly have updates install).

That’s quite a lot of peanut butter. Is that also like peanuts just dumped on the hood?

This both brutally cruel and absolutely hilarious. I can’t figure out if I would ground those kids or reward them for creativity and effort.

Who up heating they meat rn

You would think that’s what every parent would prefer…

To be clear, this is just how Doctorow has always been, he’s always been that annoying nerd who needs to come up with new words/phrases. Enshittification is just the one that caught one.

See also: Whuffie, metacrap, and Schneider’s law. Those are all from before 2005. Like I said, this is who he has always been.

I am of two minds on Doctorow: One one hand, I appreciate his thoughtfulness and insight, and on the other hand I cannot stand how much of a weirdly pedantic nerd he is, especially when it comes to his own ideas.

Also I remember him kind of really sucking at journalism at first in the early 2000’s. I recall an article about Napster where he said “Napster’s original goal was to sell music to people” which blew my fucking mind because it was always meant to be a peer-to-peer network and my god, we have both lived through this era, how could he manage to get it so fucking wrong? I was especially galled because he had just been given a class to teach at UCLA while my friend who actually had a masters degree and his thesis was on the social network aspects of piracy and the co-evolution of control and resistance in computer networks was struggling to find a job as a teacher.

So due to those early memories, I may be a little biased.

Absolutely, that’s my point about them being widely abused.

This is an article by the guy who coined the term enshittification, so uhhh, pretty sure he knows what he means.

After reading the article:

Enshittification: The process by which a company starts by giving away everything seemingly for free, doing everything they can for both users and business customers. Then, after they have achieved enough network effect to keep people tied to their product, they begin to degrade the experience for users to make more money. Eventually, the same process happens to their business customers as well, as they have an effective monopoly over the space.

Technocarcinization: The tendency of technology companies to become both more surveillant and controlling of their devices (which they truly treat as theirs, not as ours) over time. Essentially tech companies all slowly become 1984 Nanny States in corporate digital form. Yes, enshittification is part of this process, but they are different things.

Why get a PC when it won’t work in a year they said.

Interesting because my Steam digital purchases go back to 2007 and I can still play them all.

My first digital purchase was the Orange Box and my second purchase was Psychonauts.

I had purchased Half Life 2 as a physical copy and it still works, too.

Sure they’re all just licenses, but a lot of effort has been put into me being able to continue playing them, including on Linux.

Yes, Valve is a different story because they’re a private company, but 20 years of license when I could play on any computer I owned at any time I think is showing that digital licensing isn’t inherently evil as much as it is widely abused for control.

That was kind of my point?

That just because it’s “dangerous” for children doesn’t justify banning it wholesale. Sorry I wasn’t more clear.

Yet Microsoft allows people access to host a private server while also putting up scary warnings for kids telling them to stick to the “safe” realms servers or whatever (are they even still called Realms? fuck if I know). On the one hand, it’s good they haven’t removed it entirely, on the other hand, it seems like that may be their eventual long-term goal with how they treat the private server ecosystem.

I also think Discord and Roblox contributed to people not knowing what the fuck “server” actually means anymore.

So is Microsoft who owns Minecraft who definitely presents private servers as dangerous (which for children may very well be true).

Essentially suits who don’t and have never gamed making decisions on gaming. They have no idea what the players want and don’t actually care because caring costs money.

True, but I still think there would be plenty for HR to be mediating in terms of employee-to-employee relationships. However, it’s a big ask for HR to stop being a “cover your ass” department that is otherwise dedicated to making sure things like sexual harassment and hostile workplace environments don’t impact the company itself despite existing in the company all the same. Because that too is a large function of HR.

I dunno about an xyz domain specifically but njal.la has good privacy protection with domains starting at 15€ annually.

edit: sorry nevermind just noticed you said ten years somehow my brain skipped over that.

Actually you know what, you’re right, I’m here for the Cajun holy trinity. I basically use those in everything.

The murderer was …