Every time I pirate a ubisoft game I regret it, I never play more than maybe an hour with them and then I have to seed them to get > 1.0 ratio (private site rules). So I just stopped pirating them lol.

Honestly had slight hopes for Avatar because the art team really outdid themselves, but I knew in the back of my head that the actual game would be shit.

I’ve tried Fedora 3 times years apart in my life and never had a good experience. The longest time I used a distro was with Elementary OS and Zorin OS, the latter of which I’m currently on.

I disagree, I think it’s always just about money. Power hungry-ness comes from the fear of losing your current position, the fear of not advancing and getting left behind. With power they secure the position they have. And it’s not just exclusive to the rich. You can see the exact same pattern in a random fucking McDonald’s.

If it was more profitable (and possible) to automate 40% of work at any given company (the ratio Gates said in this article), everyone would do it in a heartbeat.

In my country (in the EU) usually if a service charge is added on top of the order, it’s because that particular place doesn’t accept tips.

I’m kind of a generalist in terms of interest in the IT sector and have a surface level understanding of most things (professionally I’m just a fullstack webdev), one big crater in my knowledge is about how drivers work, really want to do something like this in my free time (next year because I’m pretty much drowning in tasks now). The closest (but still pretty far) to this I’ve done is write a small service that increases / decreases volume through pulseaudio based on ACPI events (windows tablet volume buttons weren’t working properly under linux).

Reading my comment back, excuse my writing style (too many brackets lol).

And of course each teams instance uses 2gb ram each because they’re very badly optimized electron apps.

I’m completely aware of the financial issues YouTube is facing, but they got themselves into this mess (and most other companies as well, who provide a service for “free”). They make users accustomed to a level of service, build a userbase and ride on investments with the expectation that they’ll figure out how to make money when they reach mass adoption.

The fact that youtube premium took years to even conceptualize is a massive failure on their part. Or how 1080p+ video wasn’t a paid feature to begin with. Making your users get used to a level of service, then making their experience more miserable and selling a solution to the problem they made does not bode well with people who have been on the platform before “things turned to shit”.

It also doesn’t help that the first course of action was to increase the amount of ads, increase retainment, “enshifficate” the platform in order to increase the time people spend on the site (=more ad revenue). Now I’m at a point that I can’t use YouTube without uBlock, sponsorblock, return youtube dislikes and Revanced (includes the latter two extensions for mobile), turning useless features off (or with the case of dislikes, back on) and stopping the bombardment of ads.

Youtube premium would still provide me with a worse experience, so why would I switch? They should figure out how to provide people additional value for their money, and shouldn’t have accustomed people to a level of service that they 100% knew wouldn’t be sustainable.

The answer to your question is the indie market. Lots of unique ideas, ton of games that are a product of passion and not profit chasing.

My personal recommendation because I don’t see it mentioned a lot is Pathologic 2. Product of decades of work and one of my favorite RPGs where every single choice you make does matter. It’s a pretty bleak and heavy game that has about a 30 hour runtime and it’s really stressful so it’s not for everyone but I personally loved it.

Zorin OS became my favorite distro, tried a lot over the years. Consistent, clean design and pretty easy to customize, compatibility is good because it’s based on ubuntu. Zorin connect is pretty neat too.

The underlying problem is the same, it just became more accessible to copy code you don’t understand (you don’t even need to come up with a search query that leads you to some kind of answer, chatpgt will interpret your words and come up with something). Proper use of chatgpt can boost productivity, but people (both critics of chatgpt and people who don’t actually know how to code) misuse it, look at it as a “magic solution box” instead of a tool that can assist development and lead you to solutions.

Search results have gone to shit since everyone and their mothers started doing this SEO-optimization bullcrap. Google obviously has no reason to fix this situation because it makes them more money when people spend more time looking for something. site:reddit.com was one of the mitigators for this problem…

I’d gladly ditch search altogether and use ChatGPT + browsing support, but that’s similarly dogshit because it’s working off of SEO-optimized bullcrap results too.

When streaming first came in I finally stopped pirating and felt a little bit better about myself. A couple years passed and I’m back to pirating, even built a Plex media server in the meantime.

My problems with telemetry:

Scope: if you provide a service which is a “wrapper” for doing other things, I do not want you to collect usage data. Example: an entire fucking operating system

Opt-out by default (or completely unable to turn it off) even if the service or software I’m using is paid: I want to have the ability to say no. Communicate properly what you collect when I get access to the service, allow me to say no and don’t hide it in 300 pages long TOSes. I don’t want to become your free UX tester when I already pay for the service.

Telemetry-driven development: I absolutely hate this both as a user and a developer. We see there are thousands of users using a feature, but it’s a low % in general, so lead decides we need to remove it from our product. I know that those x thousand people will be annoyed, and so am I when I’m on the receiving end of this.

Another reason that is not universal but service specific is making decisions that purposefully keep you on the platform, over optimizing the interface for maximizing profit.