This is not the kind of person that the meme is poking at, but my late best friend was one of the best people I have known, and I talk shit about him all the time. It feels like being honest about his depth and complexity is a part of how I honour him; I’m firmly of the belief that if you have to lie about something in order to love it, then your love is shallow and false.

It’s unclear, because the relevant official bodies insist that things are fine

Damn, I didn’t know this, thanks for sharing. I am not American, and I was pretty young when Hurricane Katrina happened, so context like this is new to me. More reasons to hate Bush

How long have you been biking for you to see these changes? I.e. what is ‘lately’?

There are probably games or other media that you love that the average Stardew Valley fan wouldn’t click with. You’re not missing out, you’ve just got other stuff you enjoy.

"The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I’m sure they wave away the laws because of “financial security” or some other bullshit. "

I don’t know as much as I’d like to about the regulatory side of this, but I know that Google and other big tech have done a masterful job of proactively building themselves into systems such that taking action against them is difficult.

I think that’s part of why the US antitrust case against Microsoft a few decades ago fizzled out into nothing — even though Microsoft was deemed to have been a monopolist, the big question was how do we remedy that in a way that isn’t going to be harmful? The consensus on this amongst people who I respect is that the results of the Microsoft case was woefully insufficient and something that helped to lay the foundations of the big tech dominance that we see today.

When I first got into Android (I miss my Nexus 6 T.T ), it felt like I could do so much more with my phone than I can now. I had so much cool automation shit that leveraged stuff like Google assistant voice commands, but now it’s shit on so many levels. It goes beyond the user facing side of things; I used to use the app Tasker for a lot of the automation stuff, and over the years, it seems like the dev has been climbing an uphill battle against Google gating off functionality, and generally making things opaque and difficult for developers.

It seems like the relevant section in the Ubisoft EULA says

“Upon termination for any reason, You must immediately uninstall the Product and destroy all copies of the Product in Your possession.”

I read this wording of this to be stricter than the BG3 example you shared, because the BG3 one seems to be saying “if you don’t agree to this EULA (or if you agree, but later terminate that agreement), then you must uninstall the game”. Whereas the Ubisoft one seems to include Ubisoft terminating the agreement, rather than just the user. That’s just my interpretation of these snippets though, as someone who is not a lawyer. It’s possible that the BG3 EULA also includes other parts that would mean similar to what people are unhappy about on the Ubisoft EULA

“A torrent is never dead, it’s just waiting for seeders”

This comment section is surprisingly spicy

What’s really stupid about this cycle is that some of these fail-upward executives genuinely believe the crap they’re spewing. Weirdly, I think I respect the grifting executives more

Edit: by grifting executives, I mean the ones who participate in that cycle you describe, and are aware of the harms they cause in their wake, but don’t care because they’ve gotten good at knowing when to skip out

Saaaaaame. I’ve heard that semi-colons are similarly associated with LLMs; This is another thing that feels like an attack on me personally.

This made me laugh a lot. Well executed

I’m inclined to agree. I hate AI, and I especially hate artists and other creatives being shafted, but I’m increasingly doubtful that copyright is an effective way to ensure that they get their fair share (whether we’re talking about AI or otherwise).

“Constellation prize” is a funny title for this comic. I love it.

Huh, interesting. To me, “moggy” is just a slang term for a cat, e.g. “who’s a pretty moggy?”. But also, I’ve only once met a cat that was of a particular breed, so perhaps the general nature of “moggy” for me stems from that. (For context, I am from the UK)

I’m not typically someone who squees over photos of other people’s pets, but those are two beautiful cats

The vets that I have experienced tend to use the human’s surname as the pet’s surname. If that’s the case with you also, it is humorous to imagine a cat’s chart basically saying “Cat [your last name]”

No no, you’ve got it the wrong way round: autism causes telescopes

“Multiple new scylla songs too, Supergiant are spoiling us.”

Awesome. I love how catchy the Scylla songs are