GOG’s whole “thing” is having games be DRM-free.

Even Epic has a decent number of DRM-free games: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_Epic_Games_Store

And PC Xbox is just in the corner eating DRM paint chips.

I feel good to have gotten a 9070XT. I also suspect it’s going to be hanging around as my gaming GPU for about a decade…

An interesting gotcha that I don’t see universities actually addressing on any of this…

English-as-a-Second-Language students are generally being given a pass to use AI freely. The thought is that proper grammar and writing aren’t what’s being graded for many papers.

The problem is that they can just let AI write the paper and say “I only used AI for grammar”.

BREAKING: A Billionaire Said Some Bullshit.

I know downvotes are generally frowned upon here… But c’mon. This ain’t what we should be hyping up attention for.

I honestly think Reddit comments are >50% by bots at this point. It’s an absolute cesspool.

I just discovered Soulseek this week after running the -arrs for 2-3 years.

Soulseek is so good.

Yep. We’d just be solidifying the base of this whole pyramid scheme with our tax dollars.

And when the bubble pops, the handful of people at the top will have fucked off their trillions, and the rest of us will deal with the consequences.

I hate it, but it’s true.

When consumer prices tripled, sales didn’t go down anywhere near the 2/3 where they’d only break even. Instead, sales only dropped 15-20%, so they got massive profit & revenue increases while providing less.

To the manufacturers, that’s their signal that this is simply the new price.

I’m a little worried that the impending switch to InputPlumber on the Deck version of Bazzite is going to be really rough.

That was my experience also. Within minutes of spinning up any new subdomain with a dedicated A DNS record, I had bots that scraped it from https://crt.sh/ knocking on the door.

With wildcard subdomains and relatively obscure URLs, it’s pretty quiet.

“Oh no, we’re gonna get fined a hundred million for the extra couple-hundred-billion we made by price fixing & collusion. Oh nooooo… 💸”

The mutual funds in a typical 401k are just a bunch of stocks like this, wrapped up in a value meal package.

If you have a 401k, you probably already own stock in Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, etc…

They have a lot less runway to enshittify than everything else we’ve seen recently. Because AI is way more expensive than anything else we’ve gotten for “free”. Which means they’re already on borrowed time.

Hopefully they get it over with sooner rather than later. The longer it takes, the more my retirement savings gets fucked.

AI is just a financial grift to circlejerk money out of the stock market; and then reap a big, fat government bailout when the bubble inevitably pops.

If we share the profits, do we also share the risks? What happens to this plan when AI implodes?

Won’t help with Macs …

But if you really insist on using Windows or Office: look into Mass Gravel.

We tipped the delivery driver a few bucks for deliveries.

I’m saying that there weren’t businesses where the entire model was: “Pay 2-3x what this food’s worth in-store, and some rando will deliver it. They may even give you everything you ordered.”

I was 19 in the '90s.

When nobody paid $20 to have GrubHub deliver their $5 McDonalds order from down the street to their house.

The thing is… I’m lucky enough to be able to afford all of this. In part, because I avoid terrible-value purchases. When the price of something goes up 40 to 400% percent, I say to myself, “Wow, it’d be really stupid to buy that thing RIGHT NOW.”

Too many people apparently lack that critical judgment, and just have FOMO in its place.

Every Steam Deck has 16GB LPDDR5-6400. I’ll use regular DDR5-6400 as a stand-in. In 2 years, that’s gone from $100 to $300. So, +$200 in memory costs.

The cheapest 1TB M.2-2230 has gone from $70 to $170. So +$100 for the highest-tier OLED. (512GB M.2s are harder to find history on… but they also seem to have gone up about $100.)

So, the RAM & Storage in a Steam Deck now cost another $300. (Yes, I realize the components are probably cheaper for Valve. But it just puts the prices into perspective.)