It’s a shame that after all this time, Lemmy’s web UI still sucks. It feels like nothing user-facing has changed since the Reddit exodus first started. Thankfully, third party apps can fill that gap, but most users’ first interaction with Lemmy will be the web UI. Does anyone know why the UI portion moves so slow? Do the maintainers not want contributions, or is it that nobody wants to contribute?

I suspect you’re just repeating arguments you’ve heard, so don’t take this internet rage personally, but that is complete bullshit.

• Hosting costs nothing. Devs will gladly foot the bill for that if given the option. Even if you distribute your apps on AWS (which is notorious for severely overcharging on egress), your expenses will be no where near 15%-30% of your revenue.

• Payment processing is a competitive field outside the appstores. Even 15%-30% is ludicrous when “overpriced” processors like stripe charge 2%-3%

• APIs are not something sold to developers. They build them as part of the operating system because they have to. That’s how it works. They could try selling licenses, but it would result in devs not building on their fancy new features.

(you didn’t mention the ones below, but people with your argument usually do, so I’m adding them for completeness)

• Security is also bullshit. The Appstore and Play store are FILLED with malware. It is not physically possible to manually review the sheer volume of apps published to those stores. They also are not incentivized to improve the process much, because each time your kid or grandma accidentally activates a $40/week subscription, Apple/Google take a 15%-30% cut.

• Curation/promotion is bullshit. Discoverability on these stores has always been bad, but has been particularly awful since both Apple/Google have started selling search ads in the store. The other day I almost accidentally downloaded a fake ChatGPT app because it was the first result when I searched, it had a very similar icon, “ChatGPT” in the name, 5 stars, and millions of downloads.

These stores also heavily incentivize devs to push subscriptions. I suspect (but haven’t confirmed) that the Appstore and Google Play both rank subscription based apps higher than others, and subs tend to pay a lower revshare fee than other monetization types.

I could go on all day about the rotten dumpster fires that are these disgusting stores. The only people who defend them are fanboys and people who have never actually had to deal with them professionally.

“You are not going to take my child,” Rebekah Hubley said. “This is the most ludacris thing I have ever heard in my entire life.”

Wow, seriously. I’m constantly surprised by how low USCIS can go. You’d think they’d want to roll out the red carpet considering the value immigrants can bring to this economy! Border towns complain about immigrants filling up their neighborhoods, but there are tons of area codes that would be happy to take them in. And besides, if you don’t like your neighbors, then move bitch! People like this give southern hospitality a bad name, and a they should get back to fucking goats or whatever it is they were doing before the internet.

So good on you, Rebekah. Most people don’t stand up for themselves, but you’re doing some good shit.

What’s wrong with copyright law? It definitely needs to be reformed, in particular the term lengths and the nonsense-laden DMCA. But for the most part, it’s a good thing.

“When drug companies won’t sell taxpayer-funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less,”

Cue the legal bickering over what counts as “reasonable”. I think the definition is clear: the only reasonable price for medicine is the lowest possible price. And the only way to ensure that is to not award drug patents in the first place (at all, but especially if development was funded by taxpayers).

OpenAI is no different

That’s not exactly true. OpenAI is structured like Mozilla, where there’s a nonprofit parent part which owns a for-profit subsidiary.

Idk all the details, but I suspect that the typical exit strategy isn’t in the cards for them without some legal shenanigans.

There’s also a distro called Hannah Montana Linux, but that doesn’t make Hannah Montana literally Linux.

I keep seeing stuff like this but I don’t get it. Azure is Linux because if it was Windows only, nobody would use it. It’s a shit service filled with tricks to lock customers in.

It’s obvious that WSL is EEE. It only exists because of their focus on the cloud, and they realized that Windows was a poor dev environment for Linux software. Microsoft is directly incentivized to kill Linux so people get even more locked in to their ecosystem.

Is the reason you have a good impression of them because you use VS Code? That’s not even open source. The proprietary parts are all more spyware and walled garden shit designed to lock you in.

Or maybe you’re not a dev, and it’s because you like Xbox gamepass? That’s an anticompetitive attempt to monopolize the game industry. It’s unsustainable and designed to price out the competition and lock in customers, which is classic monopoly shit. It’s the best deal in the game industry today, but prices will shoot up when they get the market share they want.

The golden rule still applies today, as it did 20+ years ago: never trust Microsoft

I actually have experience porting games and engines to consoles. If it runs on a development PC (likely Windows), they have the build system and platform layer implemented, which is the hardest part. Porting the content is also an important step, but really only for consoles, which usually have limited memory and power.

Typically the only problem with “PC ports” today is when the game wasn’t designed around mouse/keyboard, or when the devs didn’t make an effort to optimize it on consumer specs (although nowadays console architecture isn’t too different from PCs so there are more optimizations that work across platforms). Another potential problem is when the game gets a lot of last minute hacks to fix bugs in order to ship on a console and those hacks don’t survive a platform transition, then the publisher just tells them to ship as is since there’s no certification process on PC. Basically, the problems are almost always logistical/business decisions due to a lazy/cheap publisher.

None of that is going to apply to this game. Rockstar has always intended to ship and fully support PC from the beginning. They had the technology, the talent, the incentive, and the time to do it. The most realistic explanation (IMO) for the PC delay is that they’re trying to double-dip.

You mean that’s how Bill Gates gives your baby autism.

Fuck that shit. I’ll release all Microsoft code under GPL so people can figure their own shit out. As for people who built their business on Azure? The will reap what they sowed.

Make me your king, and I will take us to the GNU-Slash-Linux holy land.

Sure, but GTA 6 is 100% already working on PC. Not just because they develop the game on PC, or because they’re building on top of the RDR2 engine (which is already ported to PC), but because they planned to support PC from the beginning, and that type of engine work usually gets ironed out early during development or in pre-production.

I was just pointing out the flaw in your tire analogy though. TBH I’m not saying they should give free copies to people who bought it on other platforms. That’s unprecedented for giant publishers like this. But I am pissed that they’re delaying the PC version since you can be sure it’s a calculated plan to ensure PC gamers buy the game twice. They collected enough analytics and surveys to know that a significant amount of GTA5 PC gamers also own a next-gen console. It’s all very nefarious.

Unless it’s either PS5 or Xbox exclusive (not both), I don’t think that’s true. Sony and Microsoft wouldn’t collude to prevent launch on PC. That’s extremely illegal, even for companies that are masters of dodging antitrust laws.

The most realistic explanation (IMO) is that Rockstar did their research and found that most PC players also own a console, and will very likely buy the game twice in the long run.

Or if we’re being charitable, maybe the game needs more optimization work before it can run well on the Steam deck, and they want that working before launching on PC.

Tires cost materials and labor to manufacture, but digital games cost nothing to copy.

Stay classy, Lemmy.

Around $3 trillion dollars so that I can buy Microsoft and shut them down, paving the way for the GNU/Linux desktop.

And since it’s GPL that any additions are compatible with the GPL, which the ad / tracking stuff they’re likely to add likely isn’t.

That’s a good point, although I wonder if there are any ad SDKs that are GPL compatible? There’s no reason that couldn’t exist AFAIK.

However, there’s also the much simpler scenario where they straight up replace the apps with something completely different. This company buys apps all the time, so I’m sure they have at least a few calendar, gallery, file browser, etc apps lying around that they can reuse.

I’m not a lawyer either, but the GPL doesn’t say anything about commercial use. Zipo can sell the code in the apps without having to ask permission from contributors. The only restriction is that they have to keep their modifications open source (which that Github response says).

But the main point is that the Zipo people bought out the Google Play listing, giving them access to the millions of users who have those apps installed on their phones. They likely don’t give a shit about features/keeping the apps closed source. It’s just a purchase of the userbase, likely for shady reasons.

This also means that forking the Simple Mobile repos isn’t even likely to accomplish much. Sure, it’ll put control of the repo in the hands of a more trusted party (which is significant), but since it’s open source anyways, it’d be easy to catch any attempts to sneak malware into the apps. And if all development effort moves to the fork, Zipo can still take that fork and redistribute it under the “Simple Mobile Tools” name.

Ultimately, the fucked up thing here is that the original developer, Tibor Kaputa, sold out millions of users. Forking isn’t going fix that. Fuck him. The only thing that will fix this situation is if Google takes down their store listing, but that’s not going to happen. Hopefully F-droid does.

Obviously. Without lead poisoning, the right lose their base of support.

(ir-)relevant