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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I’d argue part of this is true because of minimum wage and wealth disparity.

    When you have a healthy disposable income, it feels more reasonable to give out some donations for good online content. But that’s not the case for a lot of people now.

    It sucks because monetization models definitely influence the types of content we get. For instance, freemium video game models with cash shops are better for our current wealth gap, while a large set of consumers having extra cash through the year is much better for expensive, well-produced singleplayer games.




  • The obvious reaction to anything typically free getting paywalled is vehemence, of course - and that’s my thought given Reddit’s track record.

    Still, if it weren’t them, I’m thinking about how this could be done in a classy way. Most people are not willing to engage on topics like politics because there will always be an unending army of trolls arguing in bad faith about them or needlessly engaging in flame wars. If there’s some form of friction behind entry, that CAN at least get people to think twice about insulting each other.

    Price tags as a form of friction are problematic, of course, in that they “only allow access to the rich”. As such, I’d also be open to other ways of making it “difficult” to enter in a way that people could still do with no money. The silliest idea that comes to mind is that people must mail a physical postcard requesting entry (which could then loop back to price tags, since that uses a stamp)






  • The dog whistle of “maybe it’s not for you” is pointless, since all we’re doing here is talking about preferences and opinions of design. Whether something is “complicated” or “poor design” is very subjective across many fields. It’s easy to laugh at someone pushing at a “Pull” door, but less so if there’s a pushbar there and they don’t speak English.

    I could easily be facetious and suggest “Maybe Windows is just too complicated for you” but that’s similarly needlessly talking down to people’s intelligence. The topic only came up because it’s frustrating there’s no operating system out there that:

    • Has wide support
    • Doesn’t nag you with AI features
    • Designs its filesystem paths in a way that is consistent, informative, and readable between devices, regardless of user preference or configuration.

    For now, issues like the last one are what keep me on Windows, and I’m not even claiming they’re easy to solve.



  • While it might be suitable for server environments with 400+drives, all home setups will have fewer volumes than there are alphabet letters, so it’s a suitable setup there.

    Someone else identified how you can run an extra command to identify actual location of a file, and while that’s useful, it’s an extra step that’s unnecessary when the design of the location string itself also identifies that. Unless you can tell me which drive /home/supra-app/preconfiguration/media is on - without running something different. (Vs windows: C:/Users/Someone/AppData/supra-app/preconfiguration/media) That’s what the design of WWW URLs was for - you never have to ask which domain a website is on, and it can even inform you about whether a site is trustworthy.

    I don’t think you’re helping your case by showing there’s no drive location convention at all. A friend plugs a USB device in your computer while you’re busy in the kitchen. He’s fine if he just uses a UI autopopup, but if he needs the full path, he has to ask you where you’ve set up auto-mounting, if you have at all.


  • This is what’s made me a little more okay with digital video games. The chance that some bizarre event will lead to that game becoming unplayable is non-zero. But, that’s the case for physical game discs as well.

    I’m upset at events like The Crew’s removal and hope for more laws to make such things unlikely. Still, I’m generally accepting that by and large, publishers don’t try to delete or remove access to people’s games. There’s no specific motivation in it for that particular evil.

    Movies, however, I’m reticent. I liked being able to buy a few cheap movies on digital services, but Sony’s mass deletion of their library makes me hesitant to continue there.



  • I know the filesystem is simple to Linux users, but the semantic form of physical drives getting a letter always made more sense to me.

    I have three drives in my computer. So they’re labeled C:, D:, and E:. You can’t place a file on “The Computer” - it’s stored on some particular drive. If I install a game on the E drive, and then later somehow remove that drive and bring it somewhere else, that game remains on that drive, even if it’s no longer E.

    On Linux, as best I understand it, if I have three drives, two of them are at /dev/hdd0 and hdd1. But they’re not actually there, they’re accessed at /media/hdd0 after mounting them (or at least, that’s the convention, and if it’s someone else’s computer, good luck). Then you either begin every game installation path with that annoying prefix, or you start configuring a dozen symlinks. If you place an item in /home/documents/notporn, then who knows which drive it’s on because you don’t know what symlinks someone set up to make that folder.

    Windows does have symlinks too now, which has been nice for hacking a few installation directories, but I appreciate that it’s an exception, and everything else follows relatively logical division of space, rather than this hybrid system where the filesystem isn’t just stored files but also devices, programming concepts, and more.


  • I don’t think customer support can be resolved by free market forces. If someone has purchased the product, has a problem, and is trying to contact support to resolve the problem, they’re a bit too far gone on the model of free consumer choice, and that instance won’t affect the free market.

    I feel like we need legislation that, when a customer has a problem, they must be able to contact the company for a refund or resolution, AND, communication with an “AI” does not count as that communication.