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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • This is not how patents work. At all.

    For one, patent owners are generally more than happy to license their technology to integrators, and even competitors, if there is money to be made.

    More importantly, patents cannot be used to get exclusivity on products. Rather, patents can only protect novel approaches to how a product is made or served.

    The patent system is designed to protect R&D costs exclusively, not some get out of jail card for anti trust. Of course, the patent office isn’t perfect, the system does get abused in anti-competitive ways. But in the end, it’s rare that that results in less consumer choice, because of licensing deals.





  • You are right, crypto has nothing to do with currency printing. And yes, the environmental side too is a problem (unless it is produced inline with recycled energy) But governments issuing currency is a relatively recent phenomenon. Historically, people traded de facto currencies and IOUs amongst themselves.

    Bitcoin was conceived out of the 2008 financial crisis, as a direct response to big banks being bailed out. It’s literally written in Bitcoin’s Genesis block. The point of Bitcoin has always been to free people from the tyranny of big government AND big capital.

    Crypto isn’t that popular in developed countries with functioning monetary systems… untill of course those big institutions fail. I am still quite surprised, this side of Bitcoin is rarely discussed on Lemmy, given how anticapitalist it is.

    I get it libertarian, bad. And to some degree, there are a lot of problems there. But the extreme opposite ain’t that rosy either.






  • Who the f. has time to manage all these bills, apps, accounts… What’s next, 2FA to sit around for an app to update, so you can sit through a “what’s new” tutorial to unlock a pen just so you can write something down, all for the “convenience” of not having to run out of ink?

    You know what people with money and no time do? They buy 20 dumb pens and then just toss one in the trash when it runs out.

    The intersection between people who have money to burn and patience to deal with tech bullshit is extremely small.

    The parodies write themselves now.






  • Sounds like neither of you watched the video. Fortunately, I did so here’s a quick summary. The thesis is that music is getting worse, for a few reasons. Author argues:

    • Auto tune and other modern digital sound production tools are overused to correct pitch and timing, making music too synthetic. Real music has imperfections that makes music just sound more artificial. Basically, taking the human element out of it.
    • Streaming has cheapened the value of a single song because of how easy it is to skip to another song. So arguably it is not technically just worse music, it’s our appreciation for it.

    The first point has been touched on by many other people. It’s a common trend in a lot of places outside of music too. People are replaced with machines and processes in a lot of settings especially in corporations and commerce, and while that’s great for efficiency and predictability, it creates a sterile landscape devoid of human expression. This is not to say all music has this. But mass market music is a chief culprit.

    The other point really resonates with me with videogames and videogame sales. You can get a dozen great steam games for the same price as a single Nintendo title, yet I probably put 10x the time into that one Nintendo title than all the other steam games combined. Had to get every bit of value out of that expensive Nintendo purchase. YMMV on this point though. I don’t stream music so I can’t say how it has affected me personally.