Friendly reminder that we have already identified and largely fixed a climate change problem, the depletion of the Ozone layer, and we can fix other problems too:

The Montreal Protocol is considered the most successful international environmental agreement to date. Following the bans on ozone-depleting chemicals, the UN projects that under the current regulations the ozone layer will completely regenerate by 2045, thirty years earlier than previously predicted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

Modern consoles are pretty great about backwards compatibility. There's room to improve for sure, but an Xbox Series X/S can play all Xbox One/Series games, plus hundreds of 360 and original Xbox games. PS5 is a bit worse with only PS4 backwards compat. The Switch is in the roughest shape, because PowerPC emulator or hardware compatibility wasn't practical with the design or hardware of the original Switch.

They still have the benefit of being a fixed hardware platform with guaranteed compatibility for the games built for them.

Even if official support isn't possible past a certain point (Google and Samsung are pushing 7+ years, fwiw), all phones need to have a bootloader unlock mechanism for unofficial support past that point. LineageOS or mobile Linux with some broken functionality is still better than nothing.

A $600 PC with a dedicated graphics card is probably going to have a worse CPU than an M2 or M3 Mini, and probably no Thunderbolt. You would only be cross-shopping a PC like that with a Mac Mini if you were thinking of graphically-demanding productivity work, like video editing or Blender. If it's for gaming then the Mac wouldn't be in the running at all.

Ghost managed hosting gets more expensive as you get more subscribers, I don't think Patreon does. You also have to set up the payments processor yourself (usually Stripe), and if you self-host, you need to set up an email service like Mailchimp. Ghost also has much more basic community features than Patreon, and doesn't do per-user RSS feeds, so stuff like subscriber-only podcasts are more difficult.

The M2 Mac Mini is $599, or $499 if you can get the education discount. There is not a (new) Windows PC in that price range that has the same performance (especially performance-per-watt) and Thunderbolt 4. The M1 MacBook Air is getting a bit old, but it's on sale for $600-700 pretty often and will knock the socks off most PCs in that price range, especially in build quality.

Apple's pricing gets ridiculous when you try spec'ing up with certain memory or storage upgrades, sure, and most internal upgrades are a no-go. The base models of most of their computers are incredibly competitive, though.

Good news, there is a subscription service to prevent that and also still pays the creators.

The email signup and user management panel needs JavaScript, yeah.

I don't like ads either, but they are the only functioning way of paying creators outside of direct payments, especially with economic inflation and competition from streaming services eating away at people's budget for media. No one else has a solution that works under capitalism.

The two options for compensating a creator for their work online are advertisements or direct payments. There are no other functional alternatives. In a better world, more countries would have grants or universal basic income, but that's not the world that exists right now.

Right, that’s why ads exist.

Because it’s an additional source of revenue, and they can provide rewards outside of YouTube.

If you don’t like Google keeping a cut, then sign up for all the Patreons for everyone you watch.

Maybe just pay for YouTube Premium at at that point? It pays the video creators, and you don't have to have a janky playback setup.

If you like this article, please consider following the site on Mastodon/Fedi, email, or RSS. It helps me get information like this out to a wider audience :)

I don't think I've had issues with reddit, as long as you use the link to the reddit comment thread, not one of the shortlinks or the video link or something else.

The entire 2001: A Space Odyssey series should be a TV show.

I have informed myself. There is nothing personally-identifiable in the data Mozilla collects in Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid

Technical data includes information about your Firefox version and language, device operating system and hardware configuration, memory, basic information about crashes and errors, outcome of automated processes like updates and safebrowsing. When Firefox sends data to us, your IP address is temporarily collected as part of our server logs. IP addresses are deleted every 14 days.

There's a lot of people on here that see literally any telemetry or analytics as evil, even though it's a necessary component for any software at the scale of Firefox (especially automated bug reports). Mozilla makes it clear they collect as little data as possible: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid

Telemetry is not privacy-invading, it's pretty well anonymized. It's also a lot easier to change the search engine than it is to download a completely different web browser.

Firefox doesn't invade anyone's privacy.

Game publishers are not your friend.

"Gentleman's NDA" is not a thing. It's either a legally-binding NDA or it's not. It's within Valve's right to ban him from the game but saying the game shouldn't be covered at all is silly.

If every news outlet avoided a topic because the company wouldn't outright confirm its existence, we would never have reporting based on leaks and rumors. That's dumb and would make journalism worse for everyone.

If Valve wants to be shitty about it, that's within their right (unless they want to sue, which would be difficult to defend in court without a written legal agreement). It is also true that other outlets are free to do handshake agreements to not cover the game. The Verge didn't break any rules, and Valve already maintains a minimal relationship with the press, so not talking to The Verge probably wouldn't change anything.

The rest of the industry uses embargo agreements with mutual consent if they have private information. This doesn't change anything for other game companies, unless they also want to do private-but-not-private beta tests.

They did ask Valve:

Though Valve didn’t respond to my requests for comment

Valve barely talks to press anyways, in a very similar fashion as Apple. At worst, maybe The Verge won't get a Steam Deck 2 review unit ahead of time or something.

Yep, tech and game companies use invite-only systems to generate hype constantly. Bluesky is another recent example.

That's not how this works. The Verge didn't break an NDA or embargo because they didn't get either of those things. Valve allows random people to invite other random people to play, with just a "pretty please don't talk about this game" warning. There was already people talking about it online and leaked footage.

They didn't get an NDA.

Stock price is largely about future earnings potential, not current quarter or past results. That's why a company can have record-breaking earnings, but still eat shit in stock price for a while if it lowers predictions for next quarter.

The layoffs were announced at the same time as Intel's Q2 financial results: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/actions-accelerate-our-progress.html

If you want to beat inflation, dump the money in a high-yield savings account, or a 401k, or a stock index, or any of the other options that have something resembling banking protection/regulation. There are so many better options than a speculative investment that you lose entirely with a social engineering attack or a SIM swap.

Bitcoin's value is significantly more volatile than the US Dollar.

Okay, not the point.

Some of the "drawbacks" are the only way Firefox works as well as it does. If Mozilla didn't have usage telemetry data, automated crash reports, etc, Firefox would be a much worse application. This is how modern software development works when you have millions of users across a dozen or more platforms.