Twitter isn't and never was useful as an organizing tool. Arab spring was a failure. Twitter is actually more useful to the ruling class than not because it gives a way for the masses to expend it's restless energy without changing anything.
I use vanilla gnome. Dead simple, no nonsense, gets out of my way. Perfect DE for me.
One of the other interesting twin cities facts is that we have a very large theater scene, one of the biggest in the nation outside NYC.
You should think about Minneapolis. The winters are gnarly, but very few climate change related problems on the horizon, reasonable cost of living, one of the most bike friendly cities in the U.S.
Switched recently and using Nvidia. It's a headache either way but I've had less issues with Wayland than x11.
Crickets are more sustainable than plants as a source of protein.
What I dislike about these threads is that it always devolves into shitting on blue collar workers. Of course pickups are useless city cars but have you all ever met somebody from a town of 1,000 people where every single person works in a blue collar trade? These things do work that you can't do in a different type of vehicle.
Threads like this are echo chambers of privilege. Maybe instead of shitting on tradespeople, shit on car and oil companies who enshittify the whole system.
Also pickups in 2023 that look like this are more powerful and more fuel efficient than more modest looking pickups from 90s or 00s. You may not like the aesthetics of it, but who fucking cares, you're not driving it, you're just the one judging someone else for having different taste.
From your source:
With the exception of recently released blockbusters, there is no evidence to support the idea that online copyright infringement displaces sales
Denuvo is used almost exclusively in exactly the scenario where the study supports the idea that piracy hurts sales. I don't think the study helps your case.
As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service issue.
I've selected this text as I think it's the heart of your post, if you disagree then let me know. I don't agree with this statement, I think that it is a rights issue, and I think I can prove that with a thought experiment.
Suppose for example, game companies took this idea to heart and did not do anything to stop piracy, they only focused on providing the most seamless storefront and gaming experiences possible. They create a store that works perfectly, has all the features you'd want, and has no DRM of any kind - this includes no log in needed, they go by the honor system. They expect people to only download a game that they've paid for. Here's the question: will people pay for the games or not? I have a view of human nature that people generally go along the path of least resistance, and I think this is born out by evidence (but I could be wrong about this). Some people will pay for the games on moral grounds, the vast majority will not. If a developer wants to get paid, they have to make sure people pay for it. And now we have DRM. The goal of DRM is to make piracy annoying enough that the path of least resistance is to just buy the game.
This, to me at least, proves that piracy is only a service issue in a world where DRM exists. Because DRM makes piracy annoying. If people find the DRM more annoying than piracy, it has failed to be effective DRM.
So to get to the heart of things, I agree with you that when DRM is more annoying than piracy something has gone terribly wrong. Denuvo, in my life, for the way I play games, is not and never has even gotten close to being more annoying than piracy.
But at the end of the day, I don't think it is morally or ethically wrong to put DRM on a game or storefront. I just see it as something to work out on a practical level, case by case. But I made my original comment in the first place because it seems to me like a lot of people have issues with it on a moral level, which I think is silly.
Because you didn't make it. I'll grant that western ideas about intellectual property are weird and inconsistent, but I'm taking it as a given that we hold that idea in common. If a writer writes something, that sequence of words in the order they wrote is their "property" and they get to determine who gets to see it.
I am cognizant that in this kind of space a lot of people probably won't hold this view of intellectual property and there are good arguments as to why it shouldn't exist at all. I suppose at this moment I'm not really in the mood to go down this rabbit hole, so forgive me if that is where you want to go.
You know these are valid concerns, and I have two thoughts about this. The first is that I don't understand how this doesn't also apply to Steam or Epic Games or any other basic storefront (except GOG of course). I see a lot of headlines about Denuvo but none about Steam. People seem to selectively apply their hate in this matter.
The second thought that I have is that I agree that this is a problem, but I don't see any other way around it. This is just the trade off of getting AAA games. These are big, complex pieces of IP that require millions to hundreds of millions of dollars of investment that the company making them has to recoup. To ensure that you actually get paid, you have to have DRM. Companies wouldn't shell out the millions of dollars on DRM unless it was proven to actually work. As I see it, if you like AAA games you just gotta weigh the cost on a game by game basis.
The Bible as lame as it is to say. Particularly Ecclesiastes and Job. Absolutely brilliant, beautiful, full of humanity.