I love that someone downvoted you for this when there's been a very real and recent trend of major studios and publishers chucking staff into the wind right after successful game launches.

That whole instance is a dumpster fire. It's not lemmy.ml levels of brainfried, but it's not much better.

Companies are the new de facto legislators manufacturing narratives to push their ideas along. When that doesn't work, they simply use their overwhelming market share to push us there anyway, replacing our law with policy.

Nations that aren't instituting forced ID for internet use are still going to be pulled along for the ride unless they have their own digital systems to effectively replace US tech hegemony, and look how long it took to make two thoroughly "mid" mobile operating systems.

If you're worried about this sort of over reach, then consider trying a Linux distro on your phone, or a spare if you can afford it.

Replacing the complete ecosystem is going to take time and effort, and it's gonna suck but better now than never.

🏆

Cursed comment award

If we have to give our data to NYT to read it, it's not actually free.

Trump would love this; he'd sic ICE on them and call them terrorists.

"Canada INVADED us to try and shut down our country in collaboration with ANTIFA! They're nasty and OUT OF CONTROL! Governor Carney isn't doing anything about it so we might have to step in to get things under control again..."

They'd all get moved around the US to limit the effectiveness of protesting at any one facility and then they'd deport most of them to some other country just to be dog cunts about it.

All part of the plan to keep "suspected illegals" (BIPOCs) from voting on election day.

Hello, fellow eldritch being!

"But not many people know how to use it to it's full advantage"

This is, of course, their insane attempt to regulate access to information that will ultimately be the stepping stone they use to justify banning VPNs, computers without government controls, and so on.

Is he, though?

Couldn't have happened to a more deserving species. Shame about all of the others that are dying with us.

Wait until you see the new PR hotness that is MAP (Minor Attracted Person)

🤢

I always hoped I'd see his parasitic empire collapse, but I didn't think it could actually happen. It's not guaranteed, yet, but it's not looking good for ol' Larry Lawyer-up.

Today, I asked Gemini to play my Lofi playlist (my car has smart bullshit 'cause EV) to help my kid relax during a road trip, and it started playing music from the Rocket League soundtrack (and no, it wasn't the lofi releases).

I remember when Google Assistant came out more than a fucking decade ago and it was vastly more capable of correctly interpreting speech, but they just kept cutting its capabilities to save on compute.

Now, Gemini is just as fucking dumb right out of the gate, but you can pay Google a monthly fee to get the "better" version, which I'm sure will only be better for a little while until they make it dumb too and introduce a higher tier to bilk us some more.

Can't wait for this legitimate gripe to be the thing Valve uses to axe this policy!

/s in case this was somehow confusing

It's because they'd be more expensive if decentralized; all of the extra equipment required to transform the output, step down voltage and such would need to be replaced with thousands (millions?) of smaller units that do the same thing at an individual home/building level, requiring a larger trained labour force to install/maintain/replace them.

Personally, I think that would be rad, but most people don't care to learn enough to safely be power engineers and if you're in a 2 year backlog to get your home solar sorted out after a hurricane, you'd probably wonder why they didn't do it this way instead.

I should've known you'd have a mature reaction. Maybe when you're no longer able to share your "thoughts" freely, you'll finally be forced to be the pleasant person you couldn't manage to be without Brother's firm, guiding hand.

Can't argue on merit, so you baselessly dismiss it as conspiracy. No one should have to wait 24 hours to install an application because Daddy Google said no.