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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • The problem with these fundamental rulings is that they’re largely trying to fit square objects through round holes. When a simple ruling is made to essentially say “to current law, no”, the law itself ultimately becomes meaningless, because older games couldn’t be easier to pirate. Most of them are smaller than a TikTok video, and are so cheap/easy to host that you’ll never stop them from being shared. Hell, emulation has come so far that you can effectively emulate these games on a browser, on multiple devices, even devices that don’t natively support gaming.

    The smart thing to do would be to say that maybe the legal framework that embodies retro gaming needs to be researched and heavily considered. It’s a hard task that’ll require many lawyers, many fights, and lots of lobbying to ensure the word of law is worth something. Sadly, it’s easier to say “lol no” and to essentially just promote piracy.











  • Not quite. .NET is owned by the .NET Foundation, and while it’s heavily influenced by Microsoft, it’s an independent entity. C# is owned by Microsoft, but frankly they’ve put together what was even then far more advanced than anything Java could do even now.

    To be blunt, back in the 2000’s it was this exact mentality that pushed me towards C#. Instead of people bitching and starting holy wars about Java, Ruby, and other languages, the .NET community just quietly got on with things and built some fantastic tooling. Furthermore, it was one of the communities that helped me go from hapless junior to someone able to give technical talks on what I had learned, or even speak to giants in the industry like Jon Skeet.





  • I am somewhat biased, as an employee of a big tech company - but I am okay with them moving into different industries as long as they don’t undercut while also providing just the worst employment experience of all time. It sucks to see nice startups from passionate people get steamrolled by a 100 person org full of people fearing for their job while some exec rides the coattails of their boss.

    I’d be more supportive of big tech if they were nice places to work, but many of them simply aren’t. They have “prestige” (whatever the fuck that means), but some of them are full of some of the most broken, beaten-down people you’ll ever meet.





  • No shit, good fucking luck getting a business to purposely neuter itself.

    Any reduction in operations or separating into new businesses would almost certainly be an effort to trim expenses/fat, and not a realistic effort into creating multiple viable businesses.

    With that said, I’d definitely cut Cloud. They’re a distant and expensive third to AWS and Azure, and it probably doesn’t make the kind of money that other arms will make.


  • While I do think that many of these companies need regulation, I think it would be very easy for many of them to cut off a finger or two to save the body, especially when you factor in that many departments of these companies either operate at a loss, or are in positions where they are losing market share.

    For Google, losing Chrome would do very little for them. Fill the board with several execs, and it’ll be Google-aligned for the next decade or so. They could also kill off Music, Docs, Fit, Pay, Keep, almost a dozen products that could either be killed or spun off into separate businesses. The same goes for Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, countless businesses that have a finger in a lot of pies.

    EDIT: This is why people on the fediverse don’t like Lemmy…