So this is malware, right?

The enshittification of Steam would really sting and significantly harm PC gaming as a whole.

As GabeN ages, I really worry about the day when he finally hands control of that company over, because as soon as ROI becomes their primary objective, it’s game over.

Prioritizing the experience and quality of the platform over profit maximization has actually earned them more money in the long run as they’ve slowly snowballed over all their competitors. I really hope the new stewards understand this and genuinely love gaming as a whole as it seems a lot of decision-makers at Valve currently do.

Over 20 years, easy. I started my PC life as a Mac user, switched to Windows for gaming, then switched to Linux for freedom. VLC has followed me the whole way and been a must-install since the first time I used it.

You may like archeology. My wife is an archeologist and she says that a lot of it is using science and history to make sense of people’s trash.

The thing to remember is our post-industrial conceptualization of trash is a little different than the past. For example, broken projectile points and their flakes are essentially just really old trash that was dropped when it broke or wasn’t useful anymore.

If you really like this, it’s not that far off from how archeologists date stuff. Though they collect a lot more datapoints, have more context, and use more references.

My family stayed at my house and “the TV wasn’t working,” because it doesn’t have network access and I use an Nvidia Shield instead, so they connected it to the Wi-Fi and ad overlays showed up in the menus! I’m still mad about it years later.

Luckily I dodged a bullet and it didn’t brick it or anything, and the ads went away when the internet access did. I just disconnected it from the network and manually banned the MAC address in case anyone else tries it again.

As soon as RAM isn’t more expensive than the TV.

Graphics are really good though.

Lmao desperately trying to justify sunk cost, I see?

You’re right, it’s not scraping, it’s worse. Most AI bots do scrape sites for data, though since MS has direct access to the GH backend, they don’t even need to scrape the data. You’re giving it to them directly.

The issue here is trust. Microsoft, along with every other company invested in the AI race has proven repeatedly that getting ahead in said race is more important to them than anything else. It’s more important than user privacy, ToS, contracts, intellectual property, and the law itself.

If they stand to make more money screwing you over than they stand to lose from a slap on the wrist in court, the choice is clear. And they will lie to your face about it. Profit machines as big as MS don’t care. They can’t. They are optimized for one thing.

Your confusion is understandable since MS has called like 4 different products “Copilot”. This refers to the coding assistant built into GitHub for everything from CI/CD to coding itself.

All code uploaded to GitHub is subject to being scraped by Copilot to both train and provide inference context to its model(s).

Basically having your code in GitHub is implicit consent to have your code fed to MSs LLMs.

Maybe in a modern context, but compared to the movies at the time, it was kinda mind-blowing.

There are a few reasons, but I think this is the the most common. People accept almost anything if it means they can click one less button.

I’ve spent many hours reducing extremely complex things down to a couple simple steps, only to have people say it’s “too hard” because they need to copy-paste a single URL.

Translation: They going to try to “marketing” their way out of this hole.

Nothing about Windows or Microsoft will fundamentally change.

There’s definitely some “our team, their team” going on, but this isn’t really the same thing.

“Following TikTok’s sale to a Trump-aligned business group, our office has received reports, and independently confirmed instances, of suppressed content critical of President Trump”

This is not a criticism of the sale itself, but of reported censorship after the sale. Make no mistake, Newsom is still on the side of the billionaires. He just wants the billionaires to return to their progressive facade.

I just recently deleted my account and uninstalled the app. I’m not going to lie, it was hard because I had finally curated my algo to some pretty decent content that wasn’t just brainrot trash.

But I’d rather be bored than give Oracle anything.

EDIT: Also Loops is neat from a technical standpoint, but it feels like a ghost town coming from TikTok.

iOS and Android provide these statistics to app developers. Anonymized stats on installs and account statuses are totally fair telemetry imo.

💯

But so much of the content is uncreative. The same songs and sound effects to some stupid reaction video.

How is that different from most social media platforms, though? Have tried browsing an uncurated YouTube recently? If there’s any incentive to boost views and engagement, people will optimize for that.