It does say, prominently, “Who you vote for is secret.”

Isn’t that a serious federal crime? How did they not get caught doing that?

There’s absolutely no way I’ll donate after they announced shutting down mozilla.social in favor of flushing their money down the AI path.

On the other hand, it’s the absolute least intrusive marketing, you can turn it off permanently, and it supports Mozilla who are one of the main bulwarks defending privacy.

Especially on mobile.

Its Ubuntu 24.04. When I started it, it took quite awhile and then said “there as a problem, please log out”.

Now that I’ve got it started (where I’m posting from now), it still refuses to arrange my monitors. And I have no idea what this 5th, 13.3" monitor is supposed to be.

It looks like my issues are related to this hardware. I guess that’s understandable. I thought this hardware would be transparent to the OS, and apparently it’s not.

If I hit apply here, it will fail and put them back in a line. I’ll also get around 4 fps and no cursor on the additional monitors.

I installed a fresh copy of, I believe, Debian. Wayland, for some reason, couldn’t handle 4 monitors, with one above the other three.

Not the issue I expected on a fresh install. Oh, and the biggest issue I had with Windows was copied straight into Linux. I want my (single) taskbar on a monitor that isn’t my primary.

I’m currently back to Windows. It was already going to be a rough transition, and missing the ideas I was looking for while also adding complications just hasn’t made it worth it.

Mumble is another strong, open source, self-hosted option.

You can get a RaspPi instead, and after a year or two you’ll have saved enough electricity to have paid for itself.

It certainly isn’t when you’re spending more than that just to get exclusives.

You’re right. Hosting files is more difficult than creating art for the game. Steam deserves a bigger cut than artists.

Game files and updates need to be distributed

You also recognize that 30% of each game sale applies to each game sale, right?

Do you really think 30% of developing a game is hosting not just the original game, but also the updates and the save files? CDNs only make it cheaper.

Steam is able to charge 30% because they effectively have a walled garden on PC games. Very few publishers are well known enough to successfully sell their game outside of Steam.

It’s not as egregious as the Apple or Google stores, but they’re basically all in this together. It’s like the old mob families where they split territory.

most are quite happy with the services they get back from that 30% cut.

I agree with most of that, but this part just isn’t true. 30% is highway robbery. It’s a scam. But PC gamers are trained that Steam is where the games are, with few exceptions. If you don’t pay steam their cut, your game doesn’t sell at all.

Consider all that goes into development of a game and compare that to the effort/infrastructure to host a download and display a webpage. Is Steam really providing 30% of the game experience?

I think Steam could be profitable at less than a 10% cut.

Disagree. I prefer XML for config files where the efficiency of disk size doesn’t matter at all. Layers of XML are much easier to read than layers of Json. Json is generally better where efficiency matters.

Goodbye Chromecast!

Hello, thing that’s totally not Chromecast.

If I have vegetables or alcohol, I’m going through the cashier line.

If there’s no reasonable cashier line it’s 50/50 that I’m walking out.

They were legally not allowed to as part of an agreement to not be s monopoly and allow competition.

It’s tiered pricing. All the chains are doing it now. Jump through hoops or pay double.

Which isn’t a bad idea, but I’d still want some kind of parental controls like Android has to limit screen time. I don’t need Netflix.com to be all or nothing, but I certainly don’t want it to be four hours a day either.

You also don’t get a lot of anti-vaxxers at a 50% mortality rate.