Internet of Things is a terrible no good idea, but Intranet of Things has some potential. Entirely local mesh networks like Zigbee and Z-wave solve most of your problems, doubly so if you properly confine their controllers into their own non Internet routable subnets.

It’s honestly my biggest complaint with the Matter standard, it has Internet bridging baked into the design while the prior standards made that completely optional.

Except for all the time of the maintainers that’s being wasted. Time that is very finite and that for many of these people is a thankless unpaid job that they’re donating their nights and weekends towards doing.

When a crypto wallet is lost all “money” in it is irrevocably lost with no way for anyone to ever retrieve it.

That said it would be hilarious if one of these bots hallucinated a wallet address so everyone trying to donate to it just sends their money into a black hole forever.

The tricky part here is that many of these reviews aren’t about how they feel about the game but rather how they feel about the developer or publisher, often based on wildly inaccurate speculation. Valve has a particularly tight rope to walk on this one because it does seem problematic to dogpile some game because of a perceived opinion that has nothing to do with the actual game itself.

One possible solution would be to add a category system to reviews that let’s reviewers correctly categorize their reviews, purchasers exclude categories they don’t care about, and Valve only removes miscategorized reviews. Categories could be something like “game contents”, “game bugs/technical issues”, “drm”, or “publisher/developer opinions”. Maybe make an entry form on the review itself for each category and you can just leave any category you don’t care about blank in your review.

This might also help solve one of the more long standing problems with Steam reviews which is that reviews of early buggy builds often linger long after those bugs have been fixed and can provide a somewhat inaccurate impression of the current state of the game.

There’s already a compatibility layer and it works really well. Most android apps run fine on Linux. The big problem is Googles security layer which is also what causes problems for alternative Android builds like GrapheneOS or PostmarketOS. That prevents you from running certain apps (mostly banking but notably also includes Google Wallet preventing tap to pay) on devices with unlocked bootloaders as well as Linux. Any non-official version of Android, or even an official version running on a device with an unlocked bootloader is going to have a problem.

Beyond that having tried a Linux phone as of a couple years ago it had significant usability problems such as unacceptably high battery drain and the inability to receive push notifications when the screen was locked. Some of these issues may have been solved since the last time I tried it, but at the time the experience wasn’t one I would recommend to anyone nevermind the average person.

As always piracy is a symptom not the problem. People pirate when a) they don’t have enough money or b) the experience for paying customers is significantly worse than for pirates, or c) the price of services far exceeds their perceived value. Piracy was down for a while because Netflix and Hulu were relatively cheap (or free), ad free, and the economy was doing OK so most people had a little disposable income.

Now that we’re in a recession that’s starting to look like it might turn into a depression and Netflix and Hulu (and others) have cranked the prices of their services up and stuffed them full of ads, yeah I’m not in the least surprised to see piracy surging. Every time you turn around there’s another email from some service letting you know they’re raising prices another couple bucks a month, and a bunch of people cancel their subscriptions and start sailing the high seas.

Keepass (and its client variants, like KeepassXC which is pretty great) is even more secure because there is no server, just an encrypted file you can store anywhere.

And simultaneously less secure because it’s up to you to handle keeping your vault synced between various devices and most people are significantly worse at keeping systems secure than the professionals at the password managers.

Self hosting a server of some kind or using something like Keepass on a single device (with offline backups) is the most secure option, but as usual with security doing so trades significant convenience for security. For most people who are uninterested in making sure their servers are kept up to date week to week letting professionals handle it is the better option.

It’s a workaround for the historical trash fire of JavaScript in the browser. Since nobody could agree on a way to do something other than JS in the browsers they came up with this gradual replacement where initially WebAssembly was just a special version of JS, then they turned that into a bytecode interpreter. The end goal was to let you use any language as your browser scripting language but the implementation isn’t there yet. It’s pretty painful to do anything with the browser APIs via WebAssembly because you’re still using the terrible JS APIs rather than something more ergonomic for the language you’re using and you need to write JS shims around all your non-JS code.

Basically it’s a start, but it falls short of what’s needed. Since you end up needing to write a bunch of JS anyway you’re mostly just creating more work for yourself rather than being able to avoid JS in the first place.

That said, by accident it’s also created something close to a universal bytecode since a very wide variety of languages support compiling to WebAssembly.

Any police testimony not accompanied by some kind of recording should be inadmissible in court. Likewise any evidence collected while a camera isn’t recording should also be inadmissible. Police have shown again and again that they can’t be trusted and they’re almost always a less reliable witness than some random bystander. It’s about time we actually started treating them that way.

It’s not the whole country, it’s the perfect storm of the absolute worst people who spent the last few decades working to seize power combined with the death throws of late stage capitalism. The political and economic elite in America (and most other countries) have merged and corrupted each other beyond redemption, but the ultra capitalist systems of the US means there are few if any effective checks to their power. In a properly functioning country the government checks the power of corporations via regulations and laws and in turn is checked by the will of the public but in the US the incessant corporate propaganda has convinced a depressingly large chunk of the population that government regulations are inherently bad and that everything works better when corporations are free to do whatever they want. That combined with the absolutely blatant bribery and corruption in US politics means that corporations control the US government rather than the other way around.

The whole thing worked for a little while while the corporations were at least pretending to somewhat care about consumers and things like anti-monopoly regulations, but now that Trump has shown the government is very loudly and publicly for sale to the highest bidder they’ve all gone mask off and are just doing whatever they want. The problem of course is that they’re also run by morons that either don’t see the cliff they’re all collectively racing towards or just don’t care because they’re planning to bail out with all the profits while the greater US economy burns.

Ultimately this is the sprouting of the seed that was planted back in the 50s from an amalgam of the cold war anti-communism propaganda and the latent racism that was never properly dealt with following the civil war.

Sure but it’s also a badly done lawsuit for that. It’s a class action of Valves customers when the percentage almost entirely impacts developers and publishers not customers. If this was really about Valves cut it would be a class action by developers. The reasons it isn’t are that that’s a much smaller group, consumer protections don’t apply to them so that would be a much harder case to win, and finally they would struggle to find developers willing to join that lawsuit. There’s also the slight problem that the 30% cut is the industry standard. Both Apple and Google take a similar cut. I’m not sure who originated that as the standard, could go all the way back to brick and mortar stores or it might have originated with one of the games consoles, but Epic is actually the odd one out in this case not Valve.

As someone else pointed out there are things that Valve could be better about, things like lootboxes in some games or the frankly predatory CS item markets. The issue of course is that none of that is actually illegal even if it is anti-consumer. It would also be nice if Steam had some actual competition, but there isn’t anything Valve can do about that, rather it’s everyone else that needs to get on Valves level.

It doesn’t have anything to do with Epic, it’s because Steam provides a great service with a ton of features nobody else offers, and Valve has demonstrated time and time again that they make policies that benefit consumers.

It would be great if Steam had some competition, but Epic ain’t it. What people want is another service of equal quality to Steam. Instead the best we have is GOG and that still falls well short of feature parity nevermind the anti-consumer cesspool of Epic.

Suing Valve isn’t going to do anything to improve the situation. Realistically what could Valve do to be “less of a monopoly”? Lower the percentage they take of sales? Consumers wouldn’t see any benefit from that only developers. Ironically it would also increase Valves monopoly because if they took a smaller cut there would be even less reason for companies to sell on Epic as Epics lower cut is literally the only reason developers (outside of Epic literally paying some of them mounds of cash by way of exclusivity contracts) pick Epic over Steam.

If Epic really wants to do something about Valves monopoly it’s simple, they just need to offer all the same features that Steam does. Things like family sharing, streaming support, a cross platform store and launcher, and an excellent review system so people can better understand the games they’re thinking about buying. Until that happens yes people will stick with Steam because it’s the objectively superior experience.

Keep collecting them. Each one you get costs Epic money and helps counter some of that Fortnite cash that lets Epic keep paying for exclusive contracts. Keep bleeding them and eventually they won’t be able to keep buying exclusive releases.

I still don’t get this. As far as I can find, Steam doesn’t allow steam keys to be sold cheaper elsewhere, but they don’t bother with prices of games in other stores.

This is tricky. Officially Valve doesn’t have any rules about non-Steam game prices on other stores. Unofficially evidence has been put forward by way of emails between developers and Valve that seem to show that Valve unofficially requires price parity with other stores and will punish games that offer lower prices elsewhere.

The charitable interpretation is that their policies are worded confusingly and some of their agents are misinterpreting the rule requiring Steam key prices to be uniform as applying to non-Steam keys. The uncharitable interpretation is that Valve knows such a policy would get them in hot water with anti-monopoly laws and so they’re careful to make sure it stays an unofficial policy.

The best thing anyone could do with it is get them to rm -rf / their server.

If you can bypass it in the middle it is by definition not end to end encryption. The entire point of end to end encryption is that only the endpoints are able to decrypt the messages and everyone in between only has access to the encrypted messages. If that’s not the case that’s just normal encryption not end to end.

Translation: please keep pouring money into the bubble

Sure it’s a useful skill but not one in significant demand. We have an absolute glut of MBAs and a desperate need for anything but an MBA so why are we paying people to get more MBAs?

The point is we don’t need more MBAs, we need people educated in useful skills. Should every MBA program be closed? No probably not, but we definitely have way more than we need. Cutting funding for things like MBA scholarships and closing down the majority of those programs will go a long way towards moving the majority of potential future MBA students into useful programs. We need less managers and more engineers, fewer CEOs and more chemists, hell fewer analysts and more plumbers.

There are many problems with modern capitalism and even if we never handed out another MBA degree again that would not even remotely solve everything, but the MBAs are making the problem worse. It’s a minor thing but it’s an easy thing to do and it would make a difference small as it is.

China is pushing hard to make their domestic brands the new standard world wide so they’re not worried about whether the bubble pops or not. They want to drive prices down even if that means selling at a loss because they know that’s what it’s going to take to dislodge the entrenched players. For better or worse it’s likely a winning strategy because the existing players are more concerned with maximizing their quarterly profits rather than meeting any kind of consumer demand or indeed even selling to consumers at all.