A little off topic but I’m kinda new to Linux myself, why do you dislike Gnome?

I’m already planning to. I run Windows 10 and as soon as that stops receiveing security support (or really as soon as I have the time) I’m gonna be swapping over to Linux for good.

Plus, would the rule remain that it only takes one house member to initiate a vote to expel the speaker? If so then that’s all they’d be doing. I mean I’d say fuck it, if yall can swing it give a shot, I just think that dems fucking with the republicans heads by backing McCarthy is more likely.

If McCarthy survives with democrats help than I think it solidifies the idea of an intraparty split between what used to be called establishment republicans and the hard right. For my part I think the republican party is causing real and actual harm to the nation and to the world at large. If this breaks their coalition and gets them to fight amongst themselves then great. Aside from that I don’t really care all that much.

Think that’s where it started actually.

I’m kinda more in this camp. I think Russia and the GOP are working together (kinda hard to live through 2016 without believing that on some level) but does that mean that Russian intelligence has “flipped” the GOP? I don’t think so.

I think it’s more of a convergent goals kinda situation. I think one of the things that the GOP wants to do to American politics is turn it into a open moneymaking venture. Not saying that it isn’t defacto already there, but it is still looked down upon and technically criminal behavior to accept bribes and the like. Matters of enforcement aside.

Not only is that kind of blatent corruption already prevalent in Russian politics, Russia for there part would love a united states that they could just bribe to get off their back. The GOP is trying to comodify American politics and by consequence American power abroad and Russia is looking to be their number one customer.

Does that mean that Trump gets marching orders daily from Putin? No, probably not. There’s probably some level of communication between them, but I doubt any of that takes the form of any kind of directives or anything.

Eh, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. As people have said above the infinite free money is drying up. That’s a fact that all these corporations have to contend with. The only difference between Twitter and Facebook or Unity and Google is that Twitter and Unity have made their dumb decisions already. Facebook, Google, and others have navigated this fairly well so far. But they are feeling the same pressures that Reddit and Unity did and eventually they will bend to them too.

Obviously not a lawyer, but I’m not 100% certain that the billing terms would stand up to legal scrutiny. It’s been kinda hard to keep up with this story so my apologies if any of this is wrong, but I believe that they said they were wanting to use an “aggregate proprietary model” to determine downloads. What that basically means (I think) is “we’ll tell you how much you have to pay us but we can’t independently justify any individual charge”.

Again, I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know of anything off the top of my head that’d make that illegal, but it also doesn’t really feel like it’d square with how things work. I mean if companies could just make up a number and say you owe them that much without being able to say why or whether or not that number comports in any way with reality, then what’s stopping every company from doing that? What’s stopping a magazine for example from coming back to you and saying “Yes, you paid us for the magazine. But our proprietary aggregate model that totally reflects reality promise tm suggests that you might have shown that magazine to two or three other people after you purchased it from us. So that means you have to pay us three instances of the review licence fee.”?

I don’t know. Obviously this is all scuzzy and morally wrong. It’s just that even factoring in that this is a subscription service and that they are a corporation with an army of lawyers who’ll likely win any challenge to it, I can’t really shake the feeling that there’s something fundamentally legally wrong about that aspect of it in particular that wouldn’t hold up in court. Even for them.

There’s a part of me that legitimately wonders how far Twitter could go as an influncer bubble. Granted this is unlikely to happen but if everyone who’s not an influencer just left for Mastodon and Twitter just became a hollow shell of influencers trying to sell products to customers who just aren’t there, how far would Twitter’s inerta carry it before anyone realized?

I kinda don’t get these articles. “Giuliani expected to surrender” the fuck else is he gonna do? Flee to Russia? Make a run for it? Cover himself in his own melting hair dye like Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to escape from the predator? I’d fucking love to see him try. But really the fuck else could he have even done?

That’s what I don’t get. These are expectations that I’ve had for years. The indie space has kinda proven that creativity will take a game a hell of a lot farther than cash ever will. With few exceptions I simply don’t buy AAA games anymore because honestly I just don’t expect the same level of effort will be put into making them.

I’ve actually been wondering why that’s the case for a while. Like is it a limitation of something their doing under the hood of GSUITE products?

It’s like Elon has read every book with an evil corporation in it and decided to make it his whole ascetic. X corp, sounds like the big bad that some plucky band of YA book protagonists have to team up to take down.

Ok so this is just desperate right? Like chasing 3rd party devs off could theoretically force more people to use their app, the reddit gold thing could be them paving the way to put in something more abusive. But this? Hoping to annoy your users to the point that they’ll pay you a ransom to make you stop? How is this anything other than embarrassingly desperate?

I also feel like Reddit skewed slightly more towards this demographic then a lot of other social media sites did. Like that’s not to say that you didn’t have this demographic on Facebook or Twitter, but Reddit always felt (to me at least) like it more aligned with the sensibilities of this crowd in part because of some of the same factors mentioned above. So I think a lot of the folks who ended up here tended to be the techier edge of the already preexisting techie bias that existed on Reddit.

Yeah, I think that’s a possible way that this goes down. I also think that if they did that it’d be a mistake. I think Apollo, RIF, and the other 3rd party apps are gone. Even if reddit announced yesterday that they were going to keep the API free, let alone negotiate a middle ground, I think 3rd party apps are gone and not coming back. On the 3rd party level I don’t even really think it’s the cash grab that’s the problem, it’s the lack of communication and trust. Even if reddit were to bend over backwards to try to keep them, I don’t think there’s anything they can do to make up for the lack of trust this has created in reddit’s leadership. Same thing goes for the mods. The mods are arguably reddits most important users. They make the site usable for everyone else and if reddit was ever to become profitable I think the people spez would have to thank for that would be the mods who made the spaces that people wanted to come be a part of. They can’t trust reddits leadership either. It doesn’t matter what shiny new toys reddit may try to roll out to make their job easier, it doesn’t matter what exceptions they try to carve into their new API policy. Common thread here is noone wants to sink their time into something that might change as fast as reddit has shown it can. Being a 3rd party dev or a mod takes a lot of time out of your day. Faced with the choice of leaving or laboring for a company that clearly doesn’t respect the value you add to their service I think that most would choose to flee the sinking ship.

I haven’t been back since the blackout originally began. Kinda intimidated because I know I’m going to have a lot of backing up to do. Plus the emotional toll of gazing upon the dumpsterfire with unprotected eyes. Once I get my backing up done though I don’t think I’ll have a single reason to go back. I don’t think there’s really anything anyone can do to stop spez and I think it’s only a downward spiral from here on out. Starting fresh is the way to go. Spez made sure of that.

Thank you for noticing.