The decryption key for DVDs.

Yep. When talking to Russians who emigrated away from Russia, you will find plenty of stories just like your sister’s friend’s one.

What the tankies idolizing the country seem to not realize is that living there as a national is oppressive. Your standard of living depends on staying in the good graces of the government—good graces that can quickly be lost by appearing to go against them.

The United States government is working its way towards that at an astonishing pace, but saying Russia has more freedoms is a complete delusion.

Chinese, Russian and Iranian people don’t need us to fight for their ‘freedom’,

Oh look, yet another Tankie who thinks the grass would be greener where the lawn describes itself as communist.

How’s that “more freedom” been going for the Uyghur? Or maybe you meant the freedom to free-fall out a window when running as a political opposition to Putin?

Does it do multiple monitors stress-free too? Thanks!

I’m not the same guy you were talking to, but if you use Wayland, multi-monitor should work without any issues.

You would hope, but knowing how competent copilot is, it’s just going to turn out like this:

User:
I’m running out of space, can you help me clean up?

AI:
Sure thing, I can help with that. You have some programs that haven’t been opened since 2017. Would you like me to delete them?

User:
Yes

AI: OK, let me do that for you.

I apologize, but as an AI Agent, I am not allowed to delete files or uninstall programs automatically. You can remove them yourself, however. I have created the cleanup.txt file on your desktop, which you can run by renaming the file to cleanup.bat, right-clicking on it, and selecting “Run as administrator”.

User:
Thank you, I did that but it only freed up a little bit of space. Can you find more?

Error processing request: 0xC3E9A005.
Unable to connect to copilot agent service:
The system can not find the module specified: “kernel32.dll”

Username… almost checks out. It’s missing the leading /nix/store/.

If I had a dollar for every time on Lemmy that I encountered a mysognistic CS student that thinks they know more than they do, I would now have a dollar. And that’s quite a fucking shame, considering I’ve been here for years.

The industry you’re trying to break into was founded by women, LGBT folks, and people who envisioned technology as a path towards the betterment of humanity. Do better. You’re acting like a disgrace to its legacy.

No entitlement necessary.

People typically welcome more competition in retail spaces. Having the freedom to pick between store A and store B allows consumers to choose whichever works best for them, whether for convenience or service reasons. Look at GOG. Nobody is complaining that they exist, or that they sell a subset of the games that people could instead purchase on Steam.

What people don’t welcome is companies deciding they want a slice of the pie, entering a market, and then making the experience worse¹. Coercing people onto a platform by removing their ability to choose is consumer-hostile. People complained when E.A. and Ubisoft made new games exclusive to their own storefronts, but they begrudgingly sucked it up because those were developed by the platform owners and they weren’t interfering with games they didn’t own.

What Epic Games did was make timed exclusivity deals with third-party developers² and publishers in an attempt to stick their foot in the door, while providing the bare minimum service to consumers³. They made EGS for the publishers and offered little more to their customers than contempt and the occasional free game as a bribe to boost the Epic Games Store user counts.

The cherry on top was Tim Sweeney acting like the messiah of PC gaming coming to save it from the Steam monopoly, only to start behaving like a petulant child on social media in response to people justifiably being pissed off at Epic Games for the monopolistic shit they were doing.

If his decisions weren’t openly hostile to the people he expected money from, there wouldn’t be much of a reason for people to dislike him. But, through his decisions and actions both as the leadership of Epic Games and as himself on Twitter, he gave people plenty of reasons.

¹: See digital streaming services, for example. Everyone was happy to just pay for Netflix. Some of them even paid for Crunchyroll, too, since it provided a separate catalog. Now, every media conglomerate has taken their shows off of Netflix and moved them to their own separate services at the same price point. It’s not a coincidence that digital piracy is making a comeback.

²: Such as with Ooblets, when they paid the developer after the game was crowdfunded to release it on EGS instead of Steam.

³: No user reviews, it took years to get a shopping cart, customer support being useless when people get locked out of their accounts, etc.

All you had to do was say nothing, Timmy.

You’re an asshole, but only PC gamers had a reason to care—because you tried to buy your way into a dominant position by employing anti-consumer, monopolistic practices like paying for distribution exclusivity deals with third-party publishers.

The best possible choice here, clearly, was to voluntarily align yourself (and by association, Epic Games) with Nazis and pedophiles. I sincerely hope the board forces you to resign, you absolute chode.

There’s a whole lot of entitlement going on in that thread.

If the maintainers didn’t want to merge it because they had bigger issues to worry about, that’s that. Whining about it and trying to pressure them with prospects of “becoming obsolete [if you don’t merge this]” isn’t going to make a convincing argument.

They should either shut the fuck up and learn to RTFM, or maybe consider putting their money where their mouths are by actually paying to support the projects they seem to so desperately think they have a right to influence the direction of.

As a developer as well, I agree that they can get fucked. Bloated crap that wastes bandwidth and ruins first-time-to-paint on mobile devices by necessitating downloading and initializing a multi-megabyte bundle of npm packages.

As a user of the internet, I need websites to work, however. I would have disabled JavaScript entirely by now if it weren’t for the fact that doing so renders what feels like half of the entire web unusable.

Might be that there’s some way of blocking that behavior if you don’t like it, though, if I’m not seeing it.

Not without either breaking most SPAs (Single-Page Applications) or writing userscripts with site-specific logic.

The classic way of doing this crap was to make a placeholder page navigate to the article page. That leaves the redirect page in the history stack so when the user presses the back button, it just opens the page that navigates them forward again.

The modern way is to use the history API with history.pushState to add a history entry while listening for the popState event to check if the user pressed the back button. Unfortunately, both of those features have a legitimate use case for enabling navigation within a SPA. Writing an extension to replace them with no-ops would, in the best case, break page history in SPA websites. In the worst case, it would break page routing entirely.

You might be able to get away with conditionally no-oping their functionality based on heuristics such as “only allow pushState if the user interacted with the page in the last 5 seconds,” but it would still end up breaking some websites.

Add another to your list. It also started happening to me recently.

A horse can call itself a duck, but that doesn’t make it a duck; it’s still a horse.

Likewise, a country that calls itself communist while practicing capitalism under a hierarchical ruling party isn’t communist. Even if every member of the CCP had equal say in the country’s policies and direction, 8% of the total population is far from representing the working class, let alone being led by them.

They’re not communist, correct. They’re capitalist.

I’m surprised you didn’t stick with NixOS. After spending tens of hours learning how to use it, the sunk cost fallacy is strong.

Any distro works.

Any non-LTS distro works*

Using a distro release based on a 2 year old kernel with brand new hardware is asking for a horrible experience. For gaming especially, you’re also losing out on months/years of improvements to Mesa.

I was going to make a joke that they could also replace the taskbar search bar with an AI chat bar, but after reading the article, it turns out that they’re planning on doing that for real:

Windows 11 taskbar is now being “upgraded” with AI-first features. Microsoft is working on the Ask Copilot bar, which may replace Windows Search in the taskbar.

Oh, no. I’m saying Microsoft owning your operating system and using it to push their data-harvesting software as a default browser is a monopolistic practice, whereas using Chrome by itself is just reinforcing an existing monopoly. The same goes for Mac and Safari or Android and Chrome.

Neither option is good, but it’s a step in the right direction to punish a corporation for their active attempts to subvert competition in a bid to establish their own monopoly in place of the current one.

If you have to pick between two monopolistic corporations, using both of them but giving each a little less of your data and attention is a way to mitigate the risks and damage.

If Microsoft can harvest data on how I use my computer, I can at least make it a bit harder for them to harvest my browsing habits too by not voluntarily giving them browser telemetry on top of that.

There’s plenty:

• Not supporting monopolistic practices.
• User preferences.
• Diversifying your software so you don’t get trapped in an ecosystem.
• Not having Copilot stuffed down your throat.
• User preferences.
• Making it possible to rip Edge out of Windows for the purpose of debloating.