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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Question is: Good for who?

    IMO compared to what the base game costs, the price of DLC is often inflated. And this is not limited to Paradox.

    If you would split up the base game, with all its base content into separate DLCs, the base game would cost a lot more. And this is what DLC is all about. This is a bit a race to the bottom at how much content can we rip out content from the base game and sell it to the customer with inflated prices separately, without incurring too much of a public shit storm.

    DLC also plays with peoples completionists desires. Many just want to have the full experience, so they buy stuff, they would like not do, if it was a separate game.

    DLC also fragments the community, mods or multiplayer might not work for someone not owning specific DLC. Yet another psychological manipulation into buying them.

    So good for company stockholders, but not really good for people that prefer transparent and consistent pricing and quality.


  • Yes. Meat is expensive, and should be expensive.

    However meat replacement products cost even more, but they should be cheaper, because they are cheaper to produce.

    Diary free ice cream is more expensive. Cow milk is cheaper than oat milk.

    This isn’t just about not eating meat or animal products, this is the whole “vegan lifestyle” food that is unreasonable more expensive.

    Like buying more expensive vegan salt or sugar instead of normal one.

    And if you don’t do that, you are not a “true vegan™”. And the vegan police will come and get you!

    “Oh, the pepper you just ate was fertilized by pig manure, sorry you aren’t vegan anymore. You should have bought the more expensive vegan pepper.”


  • You can accept that they are making a better choice, but then you have to accept that you’re making a worse choice.

    No, people don’t dislike vegans or vegetarians because of their choices, they dislike them because they lord their, what they think “better” choice over others. And create in- and out- groups via labeling.

    Being vegan or vegetarian means that you have to spend more money in the store to buy food, because meat is heavily subsidized compared to vegetarian options. Also, because being vegan/vegetarian is not the default, many products are overpriced.

    Another point is that a healthy and varied diet using only vegan or vegetarian food doesn’t come so natural, so you have to research this more, which means you have to spend time, which again is a commodity.

    So it is not just about good or bad, it is also about privilege and class. So people should not go around making statements about other people making “worse” choices.


  • Currently being vegan or vegetarian is a choice of privilege. An healthy and varied diet becomes more difficult and expensive, when you start removing dishes from your pallet.

    So it becomes coupled with a status symbol, instead of being the default way. As long as people call themselves “vegan” or “vegetarian” because of their choice (people being vegan or vegetarian because of mental or medical issues, is different case), they highlight that status over “normal” people.

    If people are just not eating meat or animal products for whatever reason, without trying to use labels like “vegan” or “vegetarian” to highlight their status, then that is fine and a personal choice.

    Creating societal change, to make vegan or vegetarian the default position, will also lessen the status of the vegans and vegetarians, that use those labels as such. So they have incentives to not produce a political or societal change.

    Vegans & vegetarians should go on protests and lobby to make vegan food cheaper and easier than meat, so that it becomes the default. If they don’t do that, and still call themselves vegan/vegetarian then that might imply that it is all about showing their status, and people don’t like that.

    Consumer choice is a privilege and not about creating an effective societal/political movement. They should not be used as a status symbol.

    (Disclaimer: I eat meat and animal products very infrequently, only when my body demands it. I am also thankful for all vegans and vegetarians, because they gave us more interesting options in stores and restaurants.)


  • Not the drama itself should influence your judgment, but how they will deal with it.

    Whenever people work together on something, there will be some drama, but if they are dealing with it, then that should be fine.

    Nix and NixOS are big enough, that even if it fails, there are enough other people that will continue it, maybe under a different name.

    Even it that causes a hard fork, which I currently think is unlikely, there are may examples where that worked and resolved itself over time, without too much of burden on the users, meaning there are clear migration processes available: owncloud/nextcloud, Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo, redis/valkey, …


  • cmhe@lemmy.worldtoMemes@sopuli.xyzA bad influence
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    2 months ago

    A customer wanted to used Teams couple of days ago, I couldn’t make it work on my companies laptop, trying three different browers. I just loaded an empty white page.

    I had to use a laptop from another customer, that also use Teams, to do so, which worked, but gave me toothache, in terms of security.

    Both laptops where on the same network and both ran Debian and I tried the same browsers, without any plugins and jitsi-meet works fine on my companies laptop. So apparently the system need to be specially configured for Teams to work.

    I am staying with jitsi-meet, thank you very much.

    The customer, I got the laptop from, knew what they did and provided managed Linux Systems for people to be able to use Teams.


  • As I said, it is not impossible to move away from gh compared to many other cases in other industries, just that it is more difficult than necessary because vendor-lockin is allowed.

    If vendor-lockin was illegal, companies had more incentives to use established or create new standards to facilitate simpler migration between software stacks, without changing the external interface.

    For instance allowing your own DNS name to be used as the repo/project basepath instead of enforcing github.com, Allowing comments, reviews, issues and pull requests via email or other federated services, instead of enforcing github accounts to do so, providing documented, stable and full-featured APIs for every component of their software, so that it is easy to migrate and pick and choose different components of their while stack from possible different vendors, …

    There are so many ways that would improve the migration situation, while also providing more ways for other ideas to compete on a level playing field. If a bright engineer has an idea for improving one component from github, they should not be required to write a whole separate platform first.


  • Well the reason for that is the vendor-lockin and centralized technology.

    If your project for instance uses a similar development method as the linux kernel does, e.g. sending and reviewing patches via mailing lists and providing url to push and pull git repos from, it is quite easy to switch out the software stack underneath, because your are dealing with quasi-standart data: Mbox, SMTP, HTTP(s) and DNS. So you can move your whole community to a different software stack by just changing some DNS entries and maybe provide some url rewrite rules without disrupting the development process.

    I am not saying that the mailing list development process is the right one for every project, but it demonstrates how agnostic to the software stack it could be.

    If vendor-lockin is made illegal, the service providers would have more incentives to use or create standardized APIs, so that their product can be replaced by competitors. So switching to or from github/gitlab/… becomes easier.


  • It has more than you expect, if your project is established on github and want to move away you have to deal with:

    • migration of issues
    • migration of pull requests
    • migration of all review comments etc
    • migration of the wiki
    • migration of the pages
    • convince all contributors to possible create a new account somewhere else
    • changing of the project urls. I don’t think github offers a url rewrite service
    • forks on github will not have the new destination as the fork base
    • change the ci and release process
    • because you cannot add url rewrite rules to your old gh project, you might need to only ‘archive’ the project there with manually written text, to point to the new destination, for people to find it

  • You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.

    What the author is probably searching for is “vendor-lockin”, which is an anticompetitive practice for so long that it became the way many companies rely their business on. It favors established products over new-comers by making switching offerings difficult/expensive or even impossible, thus better products often have no chance of competing in a field, that was dominated by a single supplier for a while.

    IMO there should be strict regulations and high fines associated with it, because it hinders innovation massively across all industries.

    The cost of switching away from github for a project is high, but not as high as in other fields.





  • Nvidia has created a bit of a sore spot for many Linux Developers and thus users. Through their actions and non actions made it impossible to create FOSS drivers for their hardware that work well and are integrated and tested with the rest of the system.

    Many fresh users don’t seem to recognize the reason why they are having a sub par experience using their hardware is Nvidia and not the open source community. They often blame and complain to the developers of the open source drivers or applications, who either have to hack around hurdles placed by Nvidia or cannot inspect closed source drivers written by that company.

    It is IMO understandable that at some point the community stops providing free and unpaid customer support for hardware and software, they have no control over or don’t even own.

    If you would start paying them, then I suspect you might get better answers. Otherwise you just get information about stuff people are excited about.



  • What kind of comparison is that? sudo is setuid while Firefox and its extensions run as the user you started it as.

    Also sudo has just one very specific and limited use case, while Firefox is more of a platform for web content. I could argue that sudo itself is an ‘extension’ to a Linux system, like every application.

    You also don’t have to install all of those extension, you can choose which you trust, similar to a Linux system, you don’t have to install every application in the repository.

    If you say that the Firefox add-on repo should be more managed like a repository of a Linux distribution, where developers cannot simply upload their own software, but need to find a trusted maintainer first, I could agree to that. But that would mean more work and overhead.


  • Snap is just one case where Ubuntu is annoying.

    It is also a commercial distribution. If you ever used a community distribution like Arch, Gentoo or even Debian, then you will notice that they much more encourage participation. You can contribute your ideas and work without requiring to sign any CLAs.

    Because Ubuntu wants to control/own parts of the system, they tend to, rather then contributing to existing solutions, create their own, often subpar, software, that requires CLAs. See upstart vs openrc or later systemd, Mir vs Wayland, which they both later adopted anyway, Unity vs Gnome, snap vs flatpak, microk8 vs k3s, bazar vs git or mercurial, … The NIH syndrom is pretty strong in Ubuntu. And even if Ubuntu came first with some of these solutions, the community had to create the alternative because they where controlling it.



  • cmhe@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldYou guys need to stop
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    8 months ago

    If that is what it takes for people to demand and use more public transportation, then I am loving it.

    (I live near a city and don’t need to own a car. I only ever drove manual in the past, and also got stuck in a traffic jam occasionally. IMO it wasn’t that difficult to stop and go, but it depends on your car. I had more issues with a rented big transporter, that required to release the clutch while steping on the gas. But that is just practice.

    I remember driving a automatic transmission car once for 10 minutes or so, and it was very stressful, because it behaved so different.)