VR has the same problem smartphones and tablets did until the Apple revolution. Consumers don’t care about technical details which nerds get stuck on. The technology simply isn’t there at the moment.

Right now VR is and will remain for bespoke applications. It will remain so for many iterations of technological advancement until miniaturization beyond anything anyone can ever dream of right now. The technologically inclined can reason about relatively insignificant details like transistor count or whatever. Consumers don’t care. Just like they didn’t care about tablets or even touch screen devices in general even though commercial products existed long before the iPad and iPhone. Nobody gives a shit about technical details. The final product from a layman user perspective is all that matters. Jobs knew this was the ultimate goal. The rest of the tech industry continues to struggle with internalizing it.

Even if they scrimp and save to produce a pleb model. It’s still just a bespoke device. A glorified screen that might have a few neat uses. People will then put it aside and forget about it.

This is the same kind of framing Google used when they were considered the little guy on your side as opposed to big evil corp.

For some reason I memory holed the first distro I used. There’s only vague recollection. I think it was SUSE or something. When Ubuntu came around I tried Linux again. That’s when I started to get the hang of things.

I’m pretty sure Shield happened because the Tegra chips were used in infotainment designs. It wasn’t just because of Switch as oft repeated.

The internet had a social contract. The reason people put effort into brain dumping good posts is because the internet was a global collaborative knowledge base for everybody.

Of course there were always capitalists who sought to privatize and profit from resources. The source materials were generally part of the big giant digital continuum of knowledge. For the parts that weren’t there we’re anarchists who sought to free that knowledge for anyone who wanted to access it.

AI is bringing about the end of all this as platforms are locking down everything. Old boards and forums had already been shuttering for years as social media was centralizing everything around a few platforms. Now those few platforms are being swallowed up by AI where the collective knowledge of humanity is being put behind paywalls. People no longer want to work directly for the profit of private companies.

Capitalists can only see dollar signs. They care not for the geological epoch scale forces of nature required to form petroleum. All that matters is can it all be sold and how quickly. Nor do they care for environmental damages they cause. In the same way the AI data mining do not care for the digital ecological disaster they are causing.

More over it’s a thought terminating cliche when someone says, “<thing> existed before so why’s it suddenly a problem?”. It seems to be yet another out of the bag of rhetorical tricks that wipes the slate of discourse clean. As if all the arguments against it suddenly need to be explained as if none of it had any validity. Not only that but the OPs are often seemingly disingenuously naive. It provides the OP with a blank slate to continually “just ask questions”. Where every response is “but why?” which forces their interlocutors to keep on elaborating in excruciating detail to the point where they give up trying to explain minutiae. Thus the OP can conclude by default they were correct that it’s not a problem after all because they declare nobody has provided them with answers to their satisfaction.

They talk as if they’re protecting our privacy when it’s really a global surveillance net. The spin doctoring is insane.

No politics was a rule on many forums. One of the things social media did away with.

Maybe instead of Torvalds taking lessons on how to be less of an asshole, he should be teaching developers how to be more like him.

The world needed the open internet to bootstrap the digital revolution. It wasn’t possible without the sum of humanity working altruistically to build the Library of Alexandria of software. No private entity could have possibly done it. It truly is an under appreciated marvel of the late-20th/early-21st century. FOSS contains the knowledge of software that runs the world. Now that such a thing exists I could totally see organizations (loosely speaking) wanting to conquer or ransack it. It’s quite clear by now there’s faction of tech with a tyrannical bent. I’d put them whoever they might be exactly as possible culprits.

Yeah everything is broken with anti-patterns meant to kill competition.

I keep a separate Google Chrome install with no addons for government and banking. Websites break things so badly unless you’re leaving yourself wide open to all their privacy snooping and what not.

For random web browsing the annoyances don’t matter as much. It’s unacceptable when it comes to important things. It’s all by (anti-)design.

Google hasn’t been dogfooding in a long time have they? I wonder what products Googlers use.

The writings been on the all for a long time. Public trackers are as good as dead. People have held on to a cocky attitude that there will always be somebody to take up the mantle but that hasn’t been true in so long. Anti-piracy has been winning by war of attrition.

The interest in bittorrent usage has been on a gradual decline for good decade at least. Try looking for some recent shows these days and you’ll be hard pressed to find many seeders for even popular ones. You’ll still be able to download it eventually but it’s a long way down from the heyday when obscure content was highly available.

These days everyone has streaming subscriptions or is logging in with someones account. The dwindling number of torrenters will download and watch relatively soon after release. Then the torrent dies real quick.

I’m pretty sure to much of the younger generations piracy means getting content from pirate streaming sites more than anything. The decline of PC usage has got to be a big factor too. There just isn’t anymore nerd culture of your PC being your main device much less leaving it running 24/7 with a torrent client. I bet soon enough as gen alpha comes of age, bittorrent will be a forgotten technology of the ancients.

Running their mouths on Discord. Using Patreon to profit from (not) piracy (but everyone knows it is). Reckless display of hubris.

The calamity of another great war may not be nuclear weapons but weaponized ad tech. Maybe then will the average person comprehend the gravity of the situation we live in right now. Maybe it will be so horrifying that no conventional weapon of mass destruction would be needed to cause a digital dark age as people throw away these privacy nightmare devices.

That isn’t unpopular opinion unfortunately. Otherwise the world wouldn’t the way that it is right now. We live in a surveillance apparatus that shapes our behavior. Nobody really cares except for the fringes of society.

If you poll people if they care about their privacy of course they will say yes. That is a rather superficial question. When you start polling in meaningful manner such as the uses of personal data the more the opinions become mixed. Some people really do think tracking and ads can provide them useful services. Such a rapacious form of capitalism is the prevailing mode of our time.

I think to some people the concepts of behavioral modification is too sci-fi to be believable. The topic sounds too much like ramblings of a conspiracy nutter about mind control. For others probably they think they’re smarter than psychological conditioning.

I think in theory simple check such as edits to the majority of a profile would be enough to detect it.

FYI: reddit orphans content. In other words your posts/comments are undeletable.

I found instances of such late last year by way of search results. I clicked a username to see more posts by that account. The only content on their profile page was a final deletion message about the API changes.

Their post history was discoverable by using “<username> site:reddit.com” on Google. All of their posts/comments still show up under their username instead of the normal [deleted]. Clicking the username takes you to their empty profile page.

So what we know from this now is that reddit has been saving original submissions. Whereas before their claim was that only the last edits are stored. Which is why the deletion scipts became a thing. People took it on good faith that we could delete our posts. At some point they stopped doing that. Or perhaps it was all a lie the whole time. Who knows.

They got $136k funding from an original goal of $10k. Did it go to their head?

One the biggest problems with the internet today is bad actors know how to manipulate or dodge the content moderation to avoid punitive consequences. The big social platforms are moderated by the most naive people in the world. It’s either that or willful negligence. Has to be. There’s just no way these tech bros who spent their lives deep in internet culture are so clueless about how to content moderate.

Bloatware has spiraled out of control. It’s a consequence of coding becoming easy and accessible. Programming is no longer the domain of idealistic nerds. It is possible for anyone to make garbage tech wares.