Every community I care about is dead
I knew there was something wrong when my pirated copies of these games suddenly started vanishing from my hard drive! Curse you, DRM!
~ What the execs think will happen, I guess? What is the point of applying DRM to a game that has already released?
Yeah there’s a few ways they could be acquired. I don’t do Amazon or Kindle but they appear to be on Kindle Unlimited. They’ve also apparently been sent out for free a few times. I feel like it puts a bad taste in my mouth either way; even if I could sidestep the cost, by reading them it would still be supporting the books and therefore the gouging of others, in an indirect sense.
I haven’t read this series yet but it’s on my TBR. Is there some kind of actual justification for the price of these books? The combined total word count of all the books is ~350k, which is 50k words shorter than a few books I’ve recently read that cost $7-8 each. Meanwhile the entire Murderbot series costs $76 to purchase, most of them being 30k words for $12.
I’m lethargic on both getting around to reading it and not letting those hefty prices color my opinion if I were to read it, so I’m not sure if I ever will.
I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it’s more like gambling with your wallet if you don’t get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.
Everyone fully missing the point here. This is the banner image for !linux@programming.dev (that’s not where we are right now for the record), and it has a normal JPEG size of 7.7MB. When it’s served as WebP it’s 3.8MB. OP is correct that this is very stupid and wasteful for a web content image. It’s a triple-monitor 1440p wallpaper that’s used verbatim, and it should instead be compressed down to be bandwidth-friendly. I was able to get it to 1.4MB at JPEG quality 80, and when swapping it out in dev tools and performing A/B testing I can’t tell the difference. This should be brought to the attention of a mod on that community so it can stop sucking people’s data for no reason.
JXL is the best image codec we have so far and it’s not even close. I did a breakdown on some of its benefits here. JXL can losslessly convert PNG, JPG, and GIF into itself, and can losslessly send them back the other way too. The main downside is that Google has been blocking its adoption by keeping support out of Chromium in favor of pushing AVIF, which started a chicken and egg problem of no one wanting to use it until everyone else started using it too. If you want to be an early adopter you can feel free to use JXL, but just know that 3rd party software support is still maturing.
Something you might find interesting is that the original JPEG is such a badass format that they’ve taken a lot of their findings from JXL and made a badass JPEG encoder with it named jpegli. Oddly, jpegli-based JPEGs are not yet able to be losslessly-compressed into JXL files, per this issue - hopefully that will be fixed at some point.
I didn’t mean my post to be read as trying to convince someone to use Linux, but as someone trying to convince themselves to use Linux. It’s fairly common that people want to switch but have convinced themselves that unless they have their exact same workflow from Windows they won’t be able to.
Break the beef into smaller pieces first so the germs can’t find it.
I’ve seen a trend where people move the goalposts on the reasons they’re not able to switch. “If only this program worked I could switch”, but when that program is ported it’ll be a new excuse next. Sooner or later you’ll have to draw a line and say “99% of my stuff works, the 1% that doesn’t can get bent”.
Syncthing - No introduction needed. Couldn’t live without it.
Healthchecks.io (you can self host this) - Dead man’s switch monitoring for all my automation. Most of my automated scripts hit up a Healthchecks endpoint when they run, and if they fail to hit the endpoint on a regular schedule I get notified. Mandatory for my anxiety.
Just like real life you can also ignore the crime and say “that would take too much effort to solve”.
ZFS and BTRFS could update their codebase to account for these (if they haven’t already), but I agree that their extra mechanical parts worry me. I really don’t care about speed - if you run enough HDDs in your RAID then you get enough speed by proxy. If you need better speeds then you should start looking into RAM/SSD-caching etc. I’d rather have better reliability than speed, because I hate spinning rust’s short lifespan as-is.
Try installing this AUR package: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/lib32-libva1-compat
Usually torrents remain seeded because private tracker users are encouraged to seed everything forever. In addition, often if a private tracker has a bonus system they will offer extra bonus points for seeding low-seed torrents, and some even automatically mark torrents as freeleech if they’re below ~5 seeds, encouraging people to revive its seed count in a targeted manner.
Owning horses makes you live longer too. Or maybe it’s that only rich people own horses? Does putting the olive oil on the horses help at all? I’m down to try anything at this point.
This is really similar to reminds me of this post, which I think about a lot.
Edit: hopefully slightly more accurate
I used to be on medication for depression until I got a high-paying job. Turns out being poor was the root to most problems in my life.
Possibly, though I suspect that releasing your new DRM early is a good way to have it broken by the time you actually want to protect something with it.