As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released ..

I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren't a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).

Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam' s DRM didn't do that.

The HL2 disc installer didn't require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.

You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.

Steam wasn't always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.

Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.

Mint was a reaction to Gnome 3, the unique workflow upset a lot of people and the people behind Mint decided to build Cinnamon desktop (its Gnome 3 made to look/work like Gnome 2). They needed a distribution to build/test their work and so based a distribution off of Ubuntu and called it Mint.

As a bit of explanation, there are only a few projects which attempt to build an entire linux distribution from scratch. This involves finding code from thousands of sources, work out packaging, etc.. We call these 'base' distributions, Debian is the base distribution for Ubuntu, Ubuntu is the base distribution for Mint.

Ubuntu tends to be slightly ahead of Debian in the software versions it uses and automatically enables the 'non-free' repositories. Ubuntu tends to push some Canonical specific things like Snaps (which everyone hates)

I believe Mint rolls the Canonical specific things out of Ubuntu and you get the latest version of Cinnamon.

Its all a bit...

Not really.

There are multiple ways to approach and conceptualise multiplication, division, simultaneous equations, binomial distribution, probability, etc..

I have met a few maths geniuses and we teach Maths the way they think and conceptualise Maths.

In my last job I was viewed as a superstar because I could take the algorithms the data scientists produced and explain them to non data scientists.

I didn't change the underlying maths, I tailored what to explain and examples to use based on my audience. This tended to get people really excited at what the data scientists had done.

Its the same with teaching, people need to understand and conceptualise a problem in a way that makes sense to them.

The GAO has performed an annual review of the Space Launch System every year since 2014 and switched to reviewing the Artemis program in 2019.

Each year the GAO points out Nasa isn't tracking any costs and Nasa argues with the GAO about the costs they assign. Then the GAO points out Nasa has no concrete plan to reduce costs, Nasa then goes nu'uh (see the articles cost reduction "objectives").

The last two reports have focused on the RS-25 engine, last time the GAO was unhappy because an engine cost Nasa $100 million and Nasa had just granted a development contract to reduce the cost of the engine.

However if you took the headline cost of the contract and split it over planned engines it was greater than the desired cost savings. Nasa response was development costs don't count.

Congress reviews GAO reports and decides to give SLS more money.

From a business perspective, you need to assess the impact of the regulation on your profitabiity and then consider if investing business funds elsewhere would lead to greater profitability.

WhatsApp have a single product and have market dominance due to first mover advantage (e.g. everyone is on WhatsApp, so everyone uses WhatsApp). Due to the nature of the business pulling out doesn't make sense unless they only have a limited development team and having them work on UK legal requirements prevents them working on EU requirements, however they are largely similar... (e.g. opportunity cost).

Many 'BigTech' products were developed by small teams, the biggest barrier for entering the market isn't technology but user adoption (KBin, Mastodon, PeerTube & Lemmy demonstrate this, all were developed by 1-2 people in their spare time).

So a 'BigTech' company exiting would be giving up the market in that country and any profit and creating an opportunity for a new small company to grow and eventually compete with them. For example if Facebook pulled out, I'm guessing people would switch to NextDoor, if Twitter quit people would move to Mastodon, etc..)

The US Technology sector is filled with Libretarians who get upset at the idea of regulation. I'm not sure Shareholders/Venture Capitalists would react well to them making decisions for those reasons.

That kind of character conversation is exactly what you would see if escaping wasn't being done properly.

Definitely a bug in KBin there

The biggest issue with switching is your "must have" applications.

A lot of people spend time trying to make them work, it often doesn't work well and so they go back.

Take Sync, Linux has similar solutions (insync is a popular one), but there alternative solutions. Perhaps the server could run syncthing or your tooling supports ftp, etc..

The key thing is not to ask for the equivalent of X, but think what you actually use X for.

So if you use Sync to share video on Slack, you don't need a Sync replacement you need a way to share video on slack.

Alas I think Photoshop is the one killer application

If Firefox, MS Teams, etc.. were on a website called "nazis.social" would you still happily sign up?

Tankies will tell you the rape and abduction of Ukrainian children by Russian soliders is western propoganda and Russia is right to invade because Ukraine isn't a country and provoked them.

Tankies will tell you China's forced sterilisation of Ughurs and their mass execution for organ donation is just western propoganda or justified because the west has done worse things.

This is why I asked my original question, their views are as extreme and unpleasant as Nazi's. The only difference is general awareness of how vile they are.

Personally I don't care what communities are on lemmy.ml or lemmygrad.ml. Those instances are administered by Tankies, everyone on those instances has chosen to associate themselves with Tankies.

I choose not to associate with Tankies.

KBin/Lemmy should provide a combined local view for duplicated magazines/communities across the fediverse. Treating the concept like a hashtag.

The point of the fediverse is to distribute content so no one has a monopoly. People squatting on communities/magazines don't understand there is nothing stopping people creating one on a hundred other instances.

Each kbin/lemmy instance decides to follow magazines/communities from others through activity pub and stores it locally for the instance.

Having the UI retrieve all local posts with the same magazine/community name (e.g. m/[email protected] c/[email protected]). Wouldn't be hugely difficult, I believe Kbin uses postgres database as the local store and suspect it would be a tweak to the SQL query it runs.

Even if that wasn't an option, there is a means to get all of the magazines/communities from the kbin UI/lemmy REST API. As well as retrieve all posts for a specific magazine/community. So you could do it entirely in a web client, for KBin it would be more work.

The combined view wouldn't change how you comment on specific posts. The issue is where do you post and what view would take dominance (e.g. if a magazine had themed itself).

The solution here would be to default your local instance if it exists or the instance providing the most posts/comments. Perhaps with a drop down so users can choose.

I would also configure things so instances can select a site wide default if they can't moderate it effectively. For example pushing all posts to the star trek instance rather than local magazine with a mod who is MIA.

This would remove most of the concerns users have about the fediverse, since they wouldn't be confronted by different instances. To them the fediverse is <insert instance> it would also encourage distribution of content.

I will die onthis hill along with David Mitchell and could NOT care less what people think.

Is the author quite early in their career?

The reference to their code not being accepted screams imposter syndrome. Which is really common in junior developers.

The stuff about not being heard and not being involved in project management. Comes off as a junior who lacks the confidence to assert themselves or a senior who hasn't made the senior -> tech lead transition.

One of the big junior -> senior lessons is learning when to ask for help. A junior feeling completely overwhelmed not wanting to bother people is a fairly common problem.

I think every article is missing a key issue and no one has asked Spez yet..

If 3rd Party Apps and AI services are making millions (as he asserts) why isn't Reddit competing in those areas?

3rd Party Apps aren't in a war of new features, putting a 5-10 person development team together to analyse the competitor apps and match the features would kill off the unique selling point of the 3rd Party Apps. Why hasn't Reddit done this?

LLM aren't new, the first appeared in 2018. Why hasn't Reddit assembled a team to exploit their own data? In my experience 1 data scientist backed by 2 software engineers can do a lot. It isn't a huge amount of people needed.

Even if you buy his argument that they companies are profiting from Reddit, Reddit is a platform those companies are building value from. Reddit isn't providing those services and so those companies profits aren't "stolen" from Reddit.

It's like company who sells art supplies. They sell them to a painter for £100, then a painter sells their artwork for £1000. The art supply company then gets upset it didn't get £1000 for its supplies.