cook_pass_babtridge

I remember that time of the internet too, and agree that that was a better time for independent creators. But people on random blogs weren't breaking stories like the Panama papers, or the LAPD Rampart scandal, or anything that takes months or even years of investigation and interviews with sources. At the time, that was being paid for by the people buying newspapers, which people don't do any more.

And I disagree that paywalls are part of enshittification. For me, enshittification is when a news outlet tries to stay "free", covering their sites on ads and sponsored content, and puking out articles which are just lists of tweets, while having their articles written by unpaid interns or AI. See: the Independent, Evening Standard (both now owned by Evgeny Lebedev), and every single other paper that doesn't implement a paywall. I know lots of people who have been driven out of the journalism profession because you just can't make a living on it. Sure they can start a blog, but that won't put food on the table, and it won't allow them to spend huge amounts of time, and in many cases money, to actually get to the bottom of something that powerful people don't want you to know about.

Enshittification doesn't just mean charging for your services. It refers to when VC-backed startups use their vast funding to offer something for free, then make it worse and worse by trying to monetise it more and more. People deserve to be paid for their work. If you value their work, you should be paying them.

Sorry for the rant, I just really think that the reason journalism has taken such a massive nosedive in recent years is because hardly anybody is willing to pay for it. Similar to music: as a listener it sucked having to pay £12 for an album. But now on Spotify the artists are getting a pittance for something they've worked their whole lives to create.

Journalism costs money. Unless we enjoy being fed propaganda by billionaires who can afford to dump money into news organisations we should get used to paying for journalism.

If someone graduates from Columbia without knowing how to block a door then I feel the money has been wasted on them.

Yeah I play fighting games on both an 8bitdo fight stick and a PS4 d-pad. I'm still not sure which I prefer. Fight stick feels more accurate but I can react much faster with a d-pad.

I'm still not very good at these games though, so I can't speak for people at a high level!

I think the difference here from GTA is that this is a shared virtual world where the actions of players shape the society inside the game. If they're creating a society where stimulated child abuse is shrugged off as just someone's private life (even though it's essentially public to everyone on second life) then I wouldn't want to participate in that society, and if I worked for the company making second life I wouldn't want any part of it.

Aren't these mostly things he said he'd do in his first term?

You can argue about it all you like, but if you say the word "antisemitism" then people will assume you mean anti-Jewish sentiment. Because that's the agreed-upon meaning. Pineapples aren't really apples, but that doesn't cause confusion because people know what the word "pineapple" means.

I love the idea of an open source engine becoming the industry standard, even if just for indie titles. Blender is a great success story and shows that FOSS can compete with industry standard creative software.

You lose friends when you refuse to communicate with them because of the app they're using.

Please don't do this. One of the best experiences about university is meeting new people. Don't cut people out of your life because they use the wrong chat app.

I heard he does an hour of vocal warm-ups each day. I'm still amazed at how good live the Stones still are. Being this healthy at 80 doesn't come easy, and I don't think he's done drugs in a while! (Keith Richards quit cocaine and alcohol around 2008 after falling off a tree he was climbing)

Apparently they've gone back on this now: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/08/zoom_ai_legalese_update/