teawrecks

I know it's a popular meme to say, "if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing", but that is brainrot. It's not even consistent with fair labor practices. It would be like a company saying "if your work doesn't produce value for me, then the time and effort you put in should not be compensated". That's not the deal.

Artists should be paid, and pirating art is stealing. It's just that, in the name of equity and the love of art, they might be OK with it if someone who can't afford it doesn't pay. But speaking on behalf of every artist ever: when a corporation who absolutely can afford it doesn't pay, it's stealing, and the artists want their damn compensation.

barrier to entry is higher than that because it first requires you to understand the technology at a base level.

I just don't buy that argument. Email is prolific and virtually no one knows how it works. IMO it comes down to marketing budgets.

I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.

Instead, for-profit ventures are motivated by money to come up with new ideas and push them into the mainstream with their marketing budgets. Then later, the fediverse copies those ideas, often with half-baked approximations that are hard to scale (usually due to bandwidth and/or moderation costs).

people just abandon the old one and join the new popular one. They'll leave when it gets shitty enough and join the new thing

I'm hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse's future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won't fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it's the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as "old reliable".

Slop isn't free. Not only does it look bad and drive away visitors, they almost certainly used an AI trained on unlicensed (i.e. stolen) artwork. There is no free lunch here.

The bounce yesterday was actually the dumbest thing ever. It's crazy that a tweet from a nobody can literally pump/dump the entire stock market these days. Everyone's fear/greed switch is on a hair-trigger (probably actually due to bot traders).

Edit: and now today he completely reversed the messaging and caused the same rally again.

To be fair, the "value" has been dubious for years. Everything was/is propped up on the mag 7, and all their promises are built on hypothetical tech, enshittification, and unsustainable business practices. The greed was/is waaay overextended.

The best part is, Trump is literally doing everything he said he was going to do without any deviation. All you had to do was listen to what he was saying he would do, and you would have known where we would end up.

So you shouldn't be questioning Trump's choices as much as questioning yourself for not knowing what they would be.

Next step is, "Why should we stop at people who have been convicted of their crimes?"

The thing I've been wondering about is, to what extent will they try quantitative easing and/or bailouts, as was the 2008 strategy. I don't think trump will endorse QE, but I think it's possible the establishment of the crypto reserve is so he can bail out his buddies. But instead of saying "I'm bailing out these billionaires" which wouldn't play well with his base, he'll say "I'm using USD reserves to diversify investments into crypto". Which pumps whatever coin he chooses, after which all his buddies dump on the taxpayers.

Good example. Hard to say if any of this rational will ever apply, though. I just expect him to either ignore anything a court says, or push it to the supreme court where the president is above the law.

Do you believe that the film industry didn't start until the 40s and 50s? Of course not. The first "films" came out around 1900, but the technology was still improving, and the industry was still figuring itself out. It wasn't until the 20s that both had progressed enough for real "traditional" films could be made.

Similarly, the gaming industry collapsed and rebounded twice before the 90s because it wasn't getting off the ground. The tech wasn't there yet. So yes, if you look at a timeline of the gaming industry, it was objectively in its infancy until "like the late 90s". The same way the dotcom bubble came and went a decade before the vast majority of people even realized the internet had anything to offer them. I get that maybe you were in a nerdy little bubble of early adopters, but I'm talking about the world outside that bubble.

• Note that revenue in ~1975 and ~1990 are basically the same. Industry revenue was mostly sideways for 20 years.
• Then the 90s came. People shifted from arcades to handhelds, mobile, PC, the internet.
• The number of games published per year increased significantly.
• And an explosion of objectively "influential titles" were published in this era. Many of which are featured in Bafta's list. (Though obviously Rogue should be on there).

To be fair, the video game industry is relatively young, and the games that built it to what it is today did come out during the years that correspond with millennial youthhood. If we made a list of most influential films today, a lot of them would be from the 40s and 50s, but that wouldn't be because a bunch of Silent Gens showed up to vote.

IANAL, but I assume lawyers are always looking for any precedent.

If someone claims someone else scammed them (in a civil or criminal case), they're going to appeal to past similar cases. The civil case might even depend on the outcome of a criminal case against the same person. If they're actually found not-guilty in a criminal case, then a civil case probably isn't going to go anywhere. So if trump can convince a civil class action lawsuit to settle because it looks like they won't win, then he can just pocket the difference.

All of this is my own conjecture as I see it, not to be considered factual.