shit_game

This is legitimately the stupidest comment I've seen on HN all year. One of these people have devoted billions of dollars to eradicating disease, providing education, developing living conditions and essential infrastructure, and improving quality of life and life expectancy for the worlds poorest, globally, for decades. The other has cozied up to corrupt kleptocrats and every other manner of scum to benefit himself while enriching himself at the expense of everyone else, particularly in his recent quest to become the worlds first trillionaire.

The temptation to succumb to Godwin's Law is so, so, so strong. How shitty and horrible of a person does one have to be for someone on HN to admit that they are a shitty and bad person? At some point the Big Bang sterotype of "nerd" who jerks off to the idea of a rich guy who "computers" and "businesses" and "engineers" outgrows tiresome and becomes despicable once said rich guy facilitates/encourages/actualizes concentration camps. Grow up.

The introduction gives me strong PoCorGTFO vibes. I miss writing with personality, regardless of how I care for it.

I love the jank present. It validates me.

I don't disagree about privacy being valuable, but I don't think you quite understood my writing. "The Bomb" in this conversation is not the literal atom bomb. Perhaps the Dr. Strangelove metaphor confuses this for some, but "The Bomb" in this context is "all my shit got ganked by hackers and now my indentity is forever stolen by anyone who pays a dollar". I don't believe that this shares any semblance of metaphor with the nuclear threat - the threat is individual, survivable, and its consequences yet-unknown because of these two factors. It's arugably pretty rational for someone to be favorable of a nuclear device in its capability of facilitating MAD (and arguably uneasy peace) at a national scale - I don't believe anyone could ever reasonably argue that global perpetual inescapable indefensible identity theft (with the added bonus of potential for persecution) is worth reading license plates or sniffing bluetooth or capturing residential internet traffic in order to "catch terrorists" or "save children" (neither of which has ever actually been done with these methods).

>I simply stopped worrying and began to love the bomb

This may apply to the consequences of ones data being subject to so many breaches and leaks and thefts, but it should not be the attitude one adopts towards the idea of ones data being taken and used by so many parties. At some level, my data is my personhood - it is my evidence of myself, and my record of myself, and my proof of myself. It encodes who I talk to, what I'm interested in, where I go, and what I do. My health, my finances, my habits, vices, schedule, family, friends, coworkers, beliefs. People more clever than myself use this data to advertise to me; people more powerful use this data to surveil me. When will people more malevolent use this data to persecute me?

I should not have to love the bomb because the bomb will kill me.

No, todays Jagex is just as oblivious and short-sighted as ever. They don't only make OSRS. It took Jagex over a decade to remove Treasure hunter (microtransaction gambling) from the game despite its addition (and continued operation at the obvious requirement of whatever of several, 7-ish? PE firms owned the studio). It was added for the obvious goal of increasing revenue on top of subscription cost, but grew into a game feature that overcame traditional levelling and moneymaking in exchange for real world payments. There was a period of about 5 years where the meta for training any skill was to kill engdame bosses and then gamble with the gold you made, using the xp rewarded from treasure hunter to level up. It was simply a more efficient use of time to train any of the 26 skills by not training any of the skills and instead gambling. It was so bad that they added an option for this interface to gamble multiple times upon a single user input and automatically redeem the rewards.

OSRS as a product is unique in the MMO space because it really is a product of passion. RS3, the former Jagex cash cow, was a product of a private equity. Now, after over a decade of profit extraction, everyone I knew who played it has long since quit because the updates became sparse, the artstyle because sanitized and generic, and the game mechanics became predatory. I don't blieve that any specifics have ever been made public, but the general understanding is that OSRS is largely unmolested because the playerbase were provably people who violently reject microtransactions, and the private equity owners would have killed their best possible investment by modelling it after RS3.

Jagex the company, for all its success, is a bad game studio. Look into all their shuttered and unreleased games, and their declining playerbases. Christ, their Transformers Universe game went live for a public beta and was shuttered after 2 weeks with full refunds, at the development expense of Stellar Dawn. OSRS is an anomaly that Jagex is lucky to have, and not something they are capable of recreating.

A significant factor in vapes not overtaking cigarettes is the tobacco lobby; they pay to play in legislature to ban vapes and associated paraphernalia in many US states, as well as create their own vape products to play both sides of the market. It's difficult to use vapes to quit smoking cigarettes when vape juice and single use vapes get banned, yet cigarettes remain legal.

"I am not <this thing>, but if I were, I'd have <this opionion> about it." isn't a terribly convincing argument. Opinions (good ones, at least) are shaped by experience - what experience is there to shape your opinion on AI affecting art when you aren't an artist?

People could return to burning down enterprises that they find unsavory or detrimental to society, such as they did during the industrial revolution, but this is problematic in that it's violent and not something the modern person often considers as viable. A part of why people consider this unviable now is in-part due to the consequences of these surveilance technologies. It's difficult to accomplish a revolution when everyone is being spied on all the time.

>this is going to be a massive business liability.

No. this is going to go "unnoticed" or at least unactioned. These are surveilance devices - compromising their value as source of surveilance is neither in the interest of industry (who are selling and buying the surveilance) or government (who are buying and acting on it). The age of shame is over. Current world goernments have flourished under the premise of being terrible, horrible, awful, evil enterprises that do bad for the sake of either being bad or enriching the bad - a consumer device with a ToS that says it will spy on you spying on people is nothing now. Laws be damned, because laws mean nothing now. These devices bery well may soon be the only lawfully available devices in the consumer market precisely because of their surveilance capabilities. Governments are reluctanty catching up to the capabilities of digital technologies, and they're finding them more useful now than ever before. We will be burning witches again before we ever prosecute tech companies for doing bad things.

I can get that being annoying. I enjoy that keybinds are a configurable thing in the linux distributions and DEs that I've used, and I've found that most tend to have sane defaults. I assume that the situation is similar in macOS, but I don't know. The last time I've used any version of macOS was in 2008 during school, and I was far too young to really "get" computers, so I never experienced them in the way that I assume many people do now. The only other Apple products I've used since has been some combination of fourth gen and seventh gen ipod nanos (which were excellent, save for windows iTunes). Is there some secret sauce that Apple has that I'm just unexposed to that makes it wonderful?

What are your gripes with linux desktops?

> The fine ends up back in their pockets in months in the form of loans and grants and tax avoidances and so on.

More importantly and less often talked about, these fines end up back in their pockets because Meta is a defense contractor in all but name. Governments gladly buy data from these companies; the US hapily buys data because it circumvents the 4th amendment. The reason the US does not have strong data privacy laws is because strong data privacy laws are antithetical to big tech, technofascism, and a surveilance state. Yes, the people running these companies are doing evil unto the world for profit, and arguably yes, they ought to face justice for such, and yes, what they are doing ought to be illegal because it is morally wrong and incredibly damaging. But when that justice is monopolized by the same governments that rely on these evil acts to fulfil their desire for power and self preservation, nothing will happen. Meta has been complicit in multiple genocides, yet you will never see it on any lists that harm its business.

Aunty Donna were so wise.

This strikes me more as an art project than a commercial endeavour. It can obviously be both. I've worked with a friend on a similar boutique concept, and one of the driving factors in its possible success is scarcity economics, or the deliberate limiticy of products that drives intrigue, percieved value, and experience. These are all things that brand designers work tirelessly on (either to embody or avoid, branding is a very bizarre world in which many approaches work in many markets). I would wager a good bit that this probably lost money in isolation, but it being part of the design firms portfolio, it probably adds more value than it cost in credibility and brand identity/authenticity for themselves.