MudMan

That’s some nonsense, though.

For one thing, it’s one of those tropes that people have been saying for 30 years, so it kinda stops making sense after a while. For another, the reason it doesn’t make sense is it doesn’t account for modern computers doing more now than they did then.

In 2016 I had a 970 that’s still in an old computer I use as a retro rocket, and I can promise you that wonderful as that thing was, I couldn’t have been playing Resident Evil this week on that thing. So yeah, I notice.

And I had a Galaxy S7 then, which is still in use as a bit of a display and I assure you my current phone is VERY noticeably faster, even discounting the fact that its displaying 120fps rather than 60.

Old people have been going “things were better when I was a kid” for millennia. I’m not assuming we’re gonna stop now, but… maybe we should.

In places with a strong Apple presence, maybe. Android, and Samsung specifically, are very much in a position of absolute dominance of the market in many regions. Samsung phones have no “selling points”, they are the default choice.

The future of what?

I mean, most people won’t know or care, and there are plenty of worse things Samsung has done in the past decade. I stopped buying their stuff for those reasons after the S10. I’m sad to report they don’t seem to have noticed or shown the adequate amount of remorse.

I think the self-hosting community needs to be more honest with itself about separating self hosting from building server hardware at home as separate hobbies.

You absolutely don’t need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server, but I do see building a proper server as a separate activity, kinda like building a ship in a bottle.

That calculation changes a bit if you’re trying to host some publicly available service at home, but even that is a bit of a separate thing unless you’re running a hosting business, at which point it’s not a really a home server anyways, even if it happens to sit inside your house.

Eden/Azahar seem to be the current meta replacement for the newer Nintendo platforms. I wonder how much of that is a crowdfunded assessment of quality and how much is a result of modern emu communities being driven by preinstalled bundles in launchers, handhelds and install scripts (think ES-DE standards or Retrodeck/Emudeck defaults).

Either way, hey, they work fine, so… yay?

No worries, I appreciate that.

FWIW, I don’t really care about downvotes either way. I am clearly not here to pander, with my “NUANCED POINT IS NUANCED, YOU NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY CHILDREN” persona.

Alright, this is great, but also people need to start confirming GOG drops before the Steam launch. I check for GOG launches whenever I buy a game, but just this month there’s been a couple of big games that got stealth GOG launches just after their Steam release and it’s been extremely frustrating. I don’t know if it’s a publisher thing to work around pirates waiting for DRM free versions or Steam being dicks about it, but it’s infuriating.

Honestly, even at the time that entire “benefit of the doubt” garbage read like some combination of active collaboration and outright denial. It’s nuts that Trump rode it to a second term, honestly. As late as the week of the election people were having haughty conversations about the lack of ties between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign and those morons still elected them again because Harris was too weak on Israel or whatever.

I mean, I’d normally not assume an entire culture is incapable of parsing reality, but there are still supposed American leftists going “they’re both the same” on this site right now.

Which reminds me I’m trying to cut off American politics from my media menu as much as possible, so maybe it’s time to mute this stuff and move on with my day, because man, what a group of weirdos.

It is absolutely fair to criticise them for the stuff they are actually doing, yes.

That’s why I wrote:

I mean, that’s all really bad. Why do we need the hyperbolic “Google is killing Open Source” framing? The real thing is bad enough and it doesn’t make me show up to argue about it. Plus you could have accurately stated “Google kills anonymous apps, threatening alternate app stores” and that would have been 100% accurate and just as horrifying.

Again, there is no need to slippery slope this crap, because it’s bad now. So why even point out how little you trust Google will do the bad thing they said they are doing for 100% real and imagine a worse thing they’ll do later, even if it’s likely that they will? All it does is invite pedants like me to argue with you, which can then be weaponized by Google to say you’re deliberately misrepresenting the issue.

I know. And I didn’t defend Google’s ownership of your phone.

See how annoying that is?

The second person is rhetorical there. I’m saying whether you believe that in all caps and bold letters is entirely irrelevant to whether the video title is misrepresenting the issue.

I don’t care who you trust, honestly.

I have no patience for slippery slope arguments to justify poor reporting or misinformation.

For what it’s worth, I do think there is a slippery slope and it’s reasonable to expect things to tighten down the line without regulatory intervention.

But that doesn’t matter, because this is bad even if nothing like that happens down the line, and even if Google can’t be trusted the coverage is misrepresenting the issue.

Man, I hate the Internet.

Cool.

So title the video like that and don’t misrepresent it and I’ll be here agreeing with you.

“But I disagree with what Google is doing” is a non sequitur here.

I mean… yeah, but also I’m very well on the record disagreeing with that and calling Trump a fascist since day one. Not that I expect you dig through my online presence to corroborate it.

I’m not American. The presence of fascists in US politics has been a commonly accepted truth in anybody anywhere left of demochristians for half a century. This isn’t “hindsigh”, it’s “I recommend always reading what people say about your country in foreign newspapers”.

And for the record, we got fascists, too. We’re just less shy about calling them that, maybe? Certainly don’t have any delusions about ourselves in terms of being inoculated from fascism at a fundamental level. The idea that Americans would have survived Bush, let alone the overtly fascist Trump without noticing or acknowledging it seems outright bizarre to me, but there you go.

I mean, Stephen Miller isn’t even shy about it. Even if you are the kind of European that would argue Berlusconi wasn’t a fascist and could maaaaaybe entertain Trump is on that same level of “just horny criminal idiot” you surely would have had zero questions after hearing five minutes of Dracula Hitler back in 2016.

What? Everybody thought fascism would come from the inside in the US. Even if you slept through the first Trump term this has been a thing since the 1930s. Surely during the Cold War, and definitely for everybody outside the US itself, but… I mean, were you alive during the whole “war on terror” nonsense?

Had the post-Reagan, post 9-11 US fascists successfully brainwashed even left of centre normies into thinking that was not the case? Were Americans that oblivious?

You guys keep misrepresenting things I disagree with and make me fact check them, then argue with me as if I’m agreeing with them.

Google isn’t killing Open Source Android apps, although it may very well kill F-Droid. Open source devs can definitely still register and provide their apps as a standalone APK.

This does open the door to Google refusing to grant an account to people they don’t like, although they haven’t done that yet, and it should be noted that as they present it once you have a dev account you can just sign as many apps as you want.

The real eff you from Google to F-Droid here is that they are presenting two types of accounts you can use for this: dev accounts, meant to publish on Google Play (although potentially you could just… not do that) and student/personal accounts that are free and they claim are meant for hobbyists. I’ve heard rumbings online about what the dividing line will be between them, so that may be a functional workaround for anybody who doesn’t want to be on Google Play, but I haven’t seen anything specific from Google on it other than “it’s coming”. It does stand out that “I’m an Open Source dev who doesn’t care about Google Play” is not part of the equation here, though, and “I’m F-Droid and I intend to build and verify a TON of apks” is also not accounted for at all.

And of course there now will be a direct paper trail between any signed app and an organization or individual, which is a legal liability issue for a number of app developers. At least on phones. Non-Google certified devices (think Android SBCs and handhelds) should still be able to load unsigned APKs, although those are residual.

I mean, that’s all really bad. Why do we need the hyperbolic “Google is killing Open Source” framing? The real thing is bad enough and it doesn’t make me show up to argue about it. Plus you could have accurately stated “Google kills anonymous apps, threatening alternate app stores” and that would have been 100% accurate and just as horrifying.

It’s a “me” problem in that “I” think the indies vs AAA lines are increasingly inconsistent and nonsensical. “I” also find the concept of “pirating against” to be extremely disingenuous, which is why there is a whole post explaining that after the line you quoted.

The hell does “piracy against big companies” even mean?

Man, pirate what you can’t afford if you must, just… you know, be honest about it. I’m always annoyed by people doing the thing they wanted to do anyway and presenting it as activism. That’s not how that works.

For the record, while I think there’s plenty to be critical about in modern gaming, “DLC”, “game has a launcher” and “game is ported from other platforms” are not that. “A game I played on the PS3 was too expensive when I wanted to rebuy it” is somebody giving you bad value up front, not some ideological stance you’re taking.

For the record, I also didn’t buy it because I also didn’t think their launch price was right. In fairness, it has since been on sale for 30 bucks multiple times, which is a lot more reasonable.

And again, I’m not saying don’t pirate it. Do what you want. Just don’t be weird about it.

No, no, Jeff Ennis worked as an actual superhero briefly in the 1970s you’re thinking of John Ennis, who created The Boys as a musical in the 90s, but he was mad about his working conditions.

No, it’s much more interesting than that.

It’s an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all and being a bit of a petty bitch with a bit of a dudebro sense of humor that, frankly, we all overrated at the time because when you were a teenager in the 90s you thought Preacher was hilarious and much smarter than it is, and it got to his head a bit.

And then it’s an accurate representation of Eric Kripke who was very much the right age to have gone through that, taking the material and going “well, that Trump guy sure was a thing, huh?” and “aren’t you kind of over all those MCU movies, also?” because superheroes in film were at the same point in 2019 than they were in comic books in 2006.

Don’t be the teenager we all were in the 90s and assume that “edgy and mean and over the top” is the same as “smart and realistic”. It’s not.

I’ll say that the show is at least less callous than the original material and it’s at least trying to be political, which makes it slightly more plausible and internally consistent than Ennis’ HR complaint of a comic book. Hollywood has a history of taking this edgelord crap (see also: every single Mark Millar adaptation) and making it palatable by applying the same mainstreaming and dumbing down that kills every Alan Moore adaptation. Turns out if the original material isn’t that smart to begin with that’s actually a good thing to do.

Apparently both this one and the Samsung one are selling well, so… Somebody does.

This has come and gone. Feature phones had their thin&light phase, too. And it suits the manufacturers because they’re doing this work to make foldables anyway, so selling the thin candybar is a free side gig. Which is probably needed, because to riff on your point, what consumer wants to spend 2K on a bad tablet with a plastic screen that folds into a mediocre phone?