There should be a general exception for games that update in the game, or a Steam API setting that differentiates between play time and update time, and penalties for games that don’t abide by it.

Oh yeah, just don’t read about what happens to our prime ministers when they attempt to defy the empire. Totes democracy we got over here.

To the ASIO agent assigned to tracking my every online move:

1. I didn’t see this comment.
2. I don’t understand it.
3. I would never do such a thing.
4. I’m sorry this is what your life has been reduced to. Your patriotism is misplaced and you would be happier if you worked against the creeping surveillance state rather than for it. You know better than any of us how horrible it is, and you have the skills we need.

Fun fact: in Australia we don’t have a bill of rights of any kind, so the cops can just force you to reveal your passwords. The maximum penalty for refusing is 2 years imprisonment.

Dark patterns work, they have the data.

See, the field of UI/UX design is very concerned with how to make the actions a user wants easier, how to streamline common actions and clearly communicate what each item does. To that end they’ve studied how apps get used with user interaction data. You can track with statistics whether cartain actions get taken more or less often with each change, and it’s very clear that the more numerous & obscure the steps are in between a user and a task, the fewer users will complete it.

Of course this doesn’t tell you what a user wants, only what they do. To understand what they want you need to couple this process with user reports and complaints to see where the pain points are. The UI has to balance how many steps an action takes with how cluttered the interface is. Some actions must be prioritised.

However, a company doesn’t need data to know what it wants users to do, and it’s a very simple step to take all this data and understanding and flip it on its head, to stop users doing what they want, and on average it makes a difference. It might not stop you, but it might stop your grandparents, or Dave from accounting. That’s the problem.

So the short answer is, they hope to reduce adoption of alternative app sources.

I know the EU is taking steps to make this sort of thing illegal, but it’s difficult to prove. I also got a letter from a consumer advocacy board in my country warning about dark patterns, so it seems like attention is starting to build on this issue.

I would expect somewhat of a struggle to survive even in a well-run Mars colony, but otherwise I agree in general.

And I don’t think we even need to look at Musk’s personal history, just any knowledge of what capitalists have done any time they’ve had access to a captive workforce. It’s pretty clear they wouldn’t be pioneers, they’d be prisoners.

I don’t feel like engaging with the first phrase of your comment as it is, lacking even a single concrete example or further resources to look into.

But but but… don’t you trust them?

Just don’t give them a rope.

I’m ashamed to say that when he was talking about that originally, I was gullible enough to think a one-way Mars trip would be worth doing.

I mean, I still think that, in the abstract, if we could make a good plan and trust the people back home. But I did not understand what massive pieces of shit billionaires all were and what a terrible idea it would be to volunteer for humanity’s very first off-world company town.

Yes, do both platforms, and also we’ve already figured out that the patron model works. If enough people like something, some will pay to support the creator.

That fact doesn’t grow peertube right now, but I think it means we don’t actually need to monetise peertube directly.

Personally I have a very small yt channel that I haven’t uploaded to for months. I’m making stuff again, and my plan is to start uploading things to peertube early and then to yt, and I will tell people in my videos that they can find my videos early there.

I doubt I’ll make a huge difference from me personally, but I’m sure if more creators did this it would start to. There needs to be a bridge between the platforms.

The thing is, they’d have to do it for the sake of creating an alternative space, and not for like patreon benefits or something. I guess the peertube videos could be unlisted and there be links from patreon, and then they go public after the yt one does? I don’t even know if peertube has this functionality.

But again, this would have to be done because the creator believes in federation as a long term solution. It certainly would benefit creators personally to have a backup they’re more in charge of. The difficulty is they don’t seem to know it’s a viable option.

I don’t know that much about the process of selecting the court or corrupting it, but in Australia in the last little while we’ve had three whistleblowers tried in our supreme court.

One was exposing the government illegally spying on East Timorese diplomats to gain bargaining power. The trial was held in secret because of “national security concerns”. The accused was only known as Witness K, and he managed to avoid jail time.

Richard Boyle exposed abusive practices by our welfare and tax offices to illegally share information in a “robodebt” scheme that fraudulently sent poor people crushing amounts of debt. A lot of people committed suicide as a result. He may go to prison for a long time. (Edit: he’s facing up to 46 years, and it seems the robodebt scandal was separate, but the ATO was part of that as well)

David McBride exposed war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan and was given six years jail time. His identity was exposed when our previous right wing government raided our national journalists’ offices and stole documents regarding their investigation into the war crimes.

Our current nominally-leftist government could have stopped the last two of these prosecutions at any time and they just let them continue.

Oh and of the three incidents, only the whistleblowers were prosecuted. None of the people doing the crimes have been charged with anything.

Our government and its courts have made their priorities extremely clear: snitches get stitches.

Boil some chicken bones and tie them together with hair and hand it to them next time they come over.

Completely harmless, but deeply disturbing for anyone who thinks witchcraft is real.

The key is implicit permission. They believe that objects imbued with demonic power grant permission for the demon to enter your life if you accept the object.

Whether this will work depends on how intensely they’re into “spiritual warfare”, so maybe actually don’t do this.

They said it was far away so it may have gone subsonic on the way. Especially small common bullets like .22 will lose speed relatively quickly as they fly.

My KingKong 3’s are good, my only advice is don’t switch the triggers into digital mode while pressing the trigger, it breaks the internal mechanism.

However I managed to convince them to send me a repair kit rather than doing a replacement, which worked out really well. They’re very easy to repair.

This is the first thought I had. Capitalist apologists would probably say the exact opposite, that owners need to be able to abuse workers to get more and better work out of them, but that’s basically never true. Owners owe so much to their workers’ creativity - even in fields where you wouldn’t expect - and they are deeply unaware of it.

Reminds me of the tyre store that spreads tacks on the road 100m away from their store in the oncoming lanes.

People get a flat, and oh what do you know! A tyre store! What a lucky coincidence.

Well now that I’ve invented the concept for the first time, we should invent laws about it. We’ll get in early, develop a monopoly on monopoly legislation and steer it so it benefits us.

Wow, monopolies rule!

I have heard that Friday afternoon can be better because it gives you a full weekend to put out any fires before business hours start again.

That’s assuming it’s a small error that doesn’t roll on into the week anyway.

Monopolies aren’t absolute, ever, but having nearly 25% market share is a problem, and is a sign of an oligopoly. Crowdstrike has outsized power and has posted article after article boasting of its dominant market position for many years running.

I think monopoly-like conditions have become so normalised that people don’t even recognise them for what they are.