• 2 Posts
  • 277 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Advertising, by design, is intrusive. It’s fighting for space in your mind whether you want it to be there or not. We can shelve that topic because it’s a side item here.

    The difference between making a big deal of nothing and being completely on-topic is that the article itself goes into the responsibilities of publishers and platforms, how they have a responsibility to make the internet a better connected, more human-friendly place. You don’t see massive sources of misinformation locking down their content, but you will definitely see potentially credible sources of information doing that. It’s counter to the premise of the article entirely.

    I don’t believe it’s myopic at all to point out that it’s backwards to expect the internet to thrive when quality information isn’t readily available. Sure you can use a different search engine, seek out free content and resources, all of which require an in-depth dive to find anything worthwhile.

    The topic of this post is why the internet is dying, and while I recognize people need to make money to eat I think these news media sites are more than capable of providing for their employees with or without a paywall. Megacorps like Google, Meta, and Microsoft having control over what gets the most clicks is definitely contributing to rapid enshittification. Especially when they’re sending most traffic to articles that either have a paywall or a steady feed of bullshit.


  • The paywalls restrict the flow of quality information, which happened before LLMs started scraping the web. If you don’t have money to spend on all of these news subscriptions you aren’t allowed to educate yourself. It’s class-based gatekeeping, plain and simple. They could tactfully include ads, but no one ever tactfully includes ads. They introduce pop-ups, fullscreen banners, interjections every 25 words, or the best is the articles that are just slide shows that take you through 30+ webpages.

    Edit: I’d also like to point out that this article already has an ad at the beginning. So they are still making ad revenue even if they aren’t giving you complete access.




  • I think the reason may be two-fold.

    The first part, in the eyes of most older people, a man is not supposed to be emotional or give into their more “feminine” feelings. This means they don’t want their wives or children to be the ones that hear the things that concern them or probably scare them, deep down. Most of the stances of conservatives seem rooted in fear, not reason.

    The second part is that you are another man, a younger man, and because they don’t know you well you are less risky to tell these things to. They can confide their fears in you because you are a young man, with a life ahead of you and you’ll give them an ear even if you don’t intend to. Really they are probably hoping someone will hear them even if they can’t really pour their hearts out.












  • Our eyes also have the ability to desensitize to higher levels of light input, so the sun at high noon will be really bright but it’s the same as if you were in the complete dark for an hour and walked out into a brightly lit room. The eye gets used to the bright light. The same thing happens walking inside a low-light house from a bright day, it will take a minute to adjust but once you do your eyes have a completely different perception of light intensity.

    With the solar eclipse, even 1% of the sun showing still lights an area greater than indoor lighting or perhaps even outdoor lighting, so we perceive it as still somewhat bright. This is sunset-level sunlight but the source is above instead of behind the horizon.



  • At what cost though? Like a single parachute without an automatic release system costs hundreds, if not thousands. You multiply that by 150 and it’s infeasible. Now include an automatic deployment system, and we’re talking tens of thousands per unit. Not including maintenance and repairs, long-term storage costs, the added weight on the plane. All these costs would be added to passenger tickets at a markup, so that $450 flight across the country is now a $700 flight. The risk also still remains because of depressurization issues, even if you make it to the surface your blood might boil in your body and still cause you to pass.

    Logistically, plane accidents that result in loss of life are so rare that it would make more sense to equip every car in production with ejector seats then it would to equip every plane seat with automated parachutes.



  • So Ubisoft has just pulled the server plug on The Crew rendering the game useless for everyone who bought a copy? Obviously a ploy to get people onto the new entries but the only issue is that since it’s not an offline game, they have rendered a good inaccessible. This was probably in the TOS, but even so I think one could argue that is a terrible position to put a customer in who may have spent more money on DLC and likely spent a lot of time on progressing in the game.

    Arguably, if Ubisoft is going to make profit off DLC, they should be forced to at the bare minimum either refund a fair amount of the purchase back to the users or allow the DLC to be used in a later release, along with giving pre-existing players a discount towards the newer entry. That’s how you treat your customers right.