In most cases the creator doesn’t hold the IP anymore, they signed it over to the platform. I don’t think it’s cool to pirate indy games when you can afford them because in that case the money is genuinely being withheld from the content creator, but in a lot of cases depriving Amazon of $5 for a TV show isn’t going to impact anyone.

Agreed. I’m under no delusions, when I pirate media I’m stealing. I personally don’t believe it’s immoral to steal from super corporations, especially considering how much they steal from us, but some people disagree and with these types of moral arguments there isn’t a clear right answer. Even still, I think the majority of pirates are willing to pay for software or media when the service is priced well and more convenient than piracy.

Yeah, this happens a lot, especially when I’m tired. Luckily, I usually leave cues for myself so that I remember what I was doing.

Because the goal was to ban third party apps and they don’t want people trying to dodge it. u/spez seems to be personally offended by their existence and wants them gone.

I use Mullvad. They have you buy time upfront at a fixed price, have lots of payment options, and at one point were subpoenaed and proved to the Swedish government they don’t store any user data and therefore have nothing to turn over. They have a nice app too, I like them.

If the options are one liberal party and one fascist party, or just one liberal party, I would pick the one-party state every time. Anyhow, the Democrats are such an umbrella party that if they were the only party they would almost certainly break into two or more smaller parties, all of which would be far more tolerable than the Republican party.

It’s not social stuff. A lot of Americans are socially conservative, but social progressives and social libertarians (live and let live types) together make a clear supermajority. The problem isn’t that Americans are socially conservative, it’s that a large number of people have the notion that Republicans are good for the economy and Democrats are bad for the economy, and that therefore when things are economically rough they should vote in the Republicans. This group of people play a large role in why Congress flips so often.

Partly because of discrimination, partly because she lacks charisma. There are a substantial number of people that dislike her because she’s a black woman and they have biases against both, sometimes without even knowing it. There are also some people on the left that dislike her because she’s a moderate liberal that used to be a prosecutor. Honestly she’s about standard as vice presidents come, so though I’m farther to the left than her I don’t have any strong feelings on her.

I figured I’ll write up a tldr on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish in case you aren’t really feeling reading the articles.

Embrace: Meta builds a federated Twitter/Reddit alternative, potentially called Threads but is right now P92, that follows the ActivityPub standard almost perfectly. Various Lemmy and KBin instances federate with them and share information. Users from Facebook and Instagram flood into P92, making it one of the largest instances.

Extend: P92 starts adding nice, but proprietary features to their system. The allure of these features begins drawing users off of other instances to P92. Those instances are upset, but Meta insists it’s doing nothing wrong, continues to follow the ActivityPub standard in some form, and tells the other instances to just implement the features themselves.

Extinguish: Meta announces that due to incompatibility, they are withdrawing from the standard and defederating from everyone. Most users of this software are now on P92, and thus don’t mind. Meta gets a fully populated Twitter/Reddit alternative, and the remaining ActivityPub instances wither. Without user support, the standard fails, and a new open source alternative is created to replace it.

That strategy has been used to kill other open source protocols, and many people are worried it will happen again. My personal opinion is that servers should only federate with Meta if they follow the standard perfectly, and if they deviate even a little bit they should be universally defederated via software changes, but I’m sympathetic to the people that would rather be proactive than reactive.

Anna’s Archive is great, I’ve found the textbook for every college course I’ve taken using that site.

The Verge’s coverage of this so far has been really good. It’s probably because they think drama like this will get a lot of clicks, but even still I’ve enjoyed their articles.

I like it when various programs at least ask before invasively scraping my data. If asked, I’ll often say yes because I want to help the developers, but when it’s silent and in the background I have no control and I don’t like that

Reddit isn’t going to win or lose, it already lost. It has never been profitable, has been outcompeted by Instagram and TikTok, and was already showing signs of failure. The one thing that they had going for them was their relationship with the community, and they couldn’t even maintain that. At this point Reddit is a sinking ship, average people will move on to the next big thing and the power users will move to other places they can get their content seen, and Reddit may not be in the grave but they’ve already dug it and they are on the edge.

This is great news. People are correct when they say it too long, but even still I’m a lot happier to see news of things getting better rather than things getting worse.

It’s mentioned in the comment section that the developer made /c/syncforlemmy@lemmy.world as the community for the new project.

It’s honestly hilarious Reddit bungled this so badly as to upset everyone. Ah well, at least with this digital piracy community I can rest assured a corporation isn’t censoring discourse.

This sounds and looks really cool, looking forward to seeing its development

HTML scraping is standard practice for AI development in most major companies. It’s not even actually that difficult, there are tools like Selenium that make it really easy and manageable to completely automate.

Yeah, honestly he seems to have some personal beef with third party apps, like he’s personally offended and hurt they’re profitable when the main app isn’t. I think that all of this has just served to demonstrate two things clearly: CEOs, though incredibly out of touch are still human, and you don’t need to be above average intelligence in order to be rich.