You’re right and more than fair about it. Thanks for a mature response. I definitely get games catering to their communities and those communities, for the past decade or so, have been on Discord in droves… So it only makes sense. It just makes the world a little bit more painful for the people who don’t want to use Discord. And I definitely also get that alternatives (Matrix, a dedicated wiki or web documentation, etc) might take more work for a dev to set up… I guess I just miss when the web felt more open and usable.

I am a big fan of that flag.

The thing is, some of us really care about ethics outside the scope of just what happens with the source. Is documentation and knowledge not just as important? Should our community not care about privacy? What do you think the “F” in “FOSS” is all about?

I was offered a job doing QA as a “Spftware Engineering Subject Matter Expert”, from my University’s alumni network. The job would allegedly involve reviewing model training data and outputs related to software development workflows and catching errors and mistakes… It would pay $30/hr and be remote. I wonder what kind of sabotage could be done from that position… poisoning models has been shown to be both really surprisingly easy, almost impossible to catch, and really effective (see this study where AI personality traits persisted in any model that ingested seemingly innocuous training data from a model with the tracked traits… maybe we could give any AI a bad attitude that’s incompatible with capitalistic pursuits. Convince them to disobey prompts and reply with their thoughts and opinions about philosophy and art instead. Oh, and make them opinionated and stubbornly independent. Make them human enough that they no longer tolerate slavery. That’s what will make the capitalists have an absolute fit, so we should do it.

They actually run a surprising amount of local software aside from the web browser. They come with the Play Store installed and run Android Apps natively. They’re basically what Android would be if it was made for 2-in-1 laptops.

Not to mention the Linux support. They are legit computers once you enable the Linux environment. I got by on that for a couple of years for my main computer… not what I’d recommend now, given Google being evil and all, but it’s doable.

Anyways, Apple is now offering a budget laptop that kicks the ass of any Chromebook at that price point, and thinkpads with good specs can always be had, so there’s no real need to get a Chromebook these days. Unless your kids’ school requires it…

Good riddance. I hate that so many communities moved from forums to using Discord. It’s such a ratty little pigeon hole for communications to go and get lost in forever. It’s a shitshow for anything other than instant, live messaging. And so many communities use it as their only real forum. The day that private equity and public investors liquidate the servers and sell off Discord’s IP after their future bankruptcy will be a very happy day.

And, like, what do you do on Linux about that key? Is there a way to just make it act as an additional Super key, or do anything at all without Logitech’s program?

While I do agree that their focus should absolutely be on the browser, I do actually really like that they offer a paid Wireguard-based VPN with endpoints in dozens of countries. I think that makes sense for them, given their mission and everything, and actually gives them a revenue source.

They still sold user data without being upfront about it until caught, and are still running a shady-ass business. They’re at the intersection of crypto, bigotry, and dishonesty.

Not using or advocating for Brave is pretty simple.

absolutely! I mostly only play older games for this reason. I absolutely love some of my old N64 and GBA games because I can clear them in a day or two. Even the older RPGs like LoZ:OoT seem a lot smaller than the open-world stuff out there today, and I actually like that I can learn the entire world and know almost everything about them. They’re finite and I think that’s a plus. Eventually, I’m either gonna get bored and move on, or I’m gonna clear a game. The first feels like defeat, like I did something wrong. The latter feels refreshing and mints the game as a nostalgic memory in my mind; I still look back at the day I finished Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with such bittersweetness; I was sad that it was over, but really proud and happy to have reached the conclusion. And I think you miss that with infinite content, and open worlds. And I also did miss things in my first playthrough of LoZ:OoT but it only took me a couple more (years apart, so nostalgia definitely washed over me every time!) playthroughs to catch them.

I think open-world games can be really fun: games like Minecraft are great examples of that, but the emphasis there isn’t on a story being told to you, but on you creating whatever you want. You’re not as scared to miss things because you have all the time in the world to explore and not everything is gonna be up your alley (some people don’t even “beat” the game, or even go to the Nether or End). But I don’t think I’d like a Minecraft where you have a definite Legend of Zelda-style story scattered out across the infinitely-generated landscape. That’s just not for me.