Heck, I’d say even give money to those big corps so long as they are being reasonable with the price and availability. Reasonable varies by person, of course. But for me, I’ll pay for any $70-90 game (the normal price for new games now in Canada), but stuff like Sims DLC or how the original Mass Effect only let you get DLC through some dumb BioWare credits are cases where I’d pirate no regrets even with my current income.

After all, there won’t be AAA games if people don’t pay for them. I have (mostly) no qualms with big publishers pocketing a significant profit on those games if they get made well. Bigger problem I have is with games that get rushed to the point of impacting quality, but that’s something I see more for changing how you approach that individual title. Stuff like mistreating staff (crunch time) is a bit iffier. I still lean towards giving them my money, since nobody enters the game dev business without knowing it’ll involve crunch and I do want the devs to be rewarded for their hard work with a commercial success (cause that’s unfortunately just how success is measured in our capitalist society).

There’s also that moment in No Man’s Sky when you figure out what the story is implying. I’m being vague here to not spoil it for anyone. But it doesn’t have a single point in time where you piece it together. There’s a growing amount of evidence before the game outright tells you what’s going on.

There’s a lot of common patterns, but you have to understand how URLs work. You have to recognize which URL parameters are tracking ones or even just might be tracking. And that means you have to know how they work and that takes a moment.

In brief, URL parameters start after a ? in the URL and are formatted like key1=values&key2=value2. You can’t usually remove all parameters because not all are tracking. To further complicate things, URLs can also have an anchor starting with a # character which will be after the URL parameters. You often don’t want to remove that (though theoretically the anchor could in fact contain tracking details).

It’s often trial and error to see which parameters you can remove. I do this a lot since I write a lot of technical documentation. Clean URLs make the documentation more compact and less likely to break. It’s not just tracking stuff, but sometimes you need to remove temporal data that makes a page display data from a specific time when you want it to just default to the current time (etc).

We absolutely could do things if society as a whole agreed to. Billionaires only exist because we let them exist. The only thing stopping us from taxing all money over a certain amount is us.

Unfortunately, I have little faith in our ability to convince people that we should massively step up our taxation. We can’t even get billionaires to pay the percentage of income tax that they’re theoretically supposed to pay. How are we supposed to convince enough people to go above and beyond?

A huge number of people somehow have the idea that billionaires deserve this money. Or that just because their wealth isn’t cash means we can’t take it away.

If they try to leave to another country, arrest them for tax evasion and seize every asset they have. Don’t let them do any business in the country without paying their share. Get other countries to band together on this until there’s nowhere for them to run except shitholes. Even if we can’t stop them from being rich in Ireland (and on that note, we should punish tax havens with sanctions), we can stop them from using their wealth to affect other countries.

Some of these I get, but I don’t get the T9 thing. T9 was so bad! It took ages to type many words. Today’s predictive keyboards are miles better.

Also, no software updates? Sure, every now and then there’s a shitty update, but most updates are great. New features and especially bug fixes are amazing. Used to be that if something had a bug, you just had to deal with it. There’s no guarantees it’ll be fixed today, but many companies do fix their bugs at least eventually. The ability to iteratively develop is huge for software quality. These days, unless you’re developing something that absolutely cannot fail (like a mars prober or radiation therapy machine), it’s widely agreed upon that iterative design is superior to “waterfall” design of trying to plan it out all ahead of time. Part of why is so you can get feedback continuously instead of only after you’ve committed to months of tech debt.

I don’t personally get the appeal of many gaming YouTubers. I’m not personally very into watching other people play videos (not review, but just play). I can kinda understand some people wanting to watch that, but it always surprises me just how many people watch it and for how long.

It also seems all too common that they have very questionable views and their fans will defend them to the death. I don’t get that either. There’s some YouTuber creators I really enjoy, but if they said horrible things, I sure as hell aren’t going to defend them at all, let alone to the degree that some gaming YouTubers get ardently defended.

I don’t think that makes sense if you’re worried about defederation. Porn instances are particularly at risk of being defederated from (and thus you potentially can’t interact with large communities).

That’s misleading because that’s not that often. Most of the cops are beating up innocent black people, shooting your beloved dog, and performing no knock warrants on the wrong house.

his disdain for the poors.

Correction: his disdain for everyone who isn’t himself. He doesn’t even treat his own kids well. His trans daughter changed her name to not be associated with him.