TheTechnician27

Pythagoras was pretty wild, being a very early proto-vegan.

As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.

It was complicated, to be clear (hence “proto-vegan"), but that kind of statement today would be controversial.

Park Chung Hee like:

(South Korea in the 1970s averaged a 53-hour work week and had, in 1978, 15x the worker accident rate of their neighbor Japan. Source is p. 457 of “A Concise History of Korea” 2nd ed. (2016) by Michael J. Seth.)

So a no-name journal (Journal of Psychology and Brain Science) from a no-name publisher (Hapres) that has a prominent, red “Total Views” count at the side.

Yeah.

Man, am I the only one who sees emojis used in place of bullet points and thinks “An LLM definitely wrote this”?

Alright, let’s just say it’s perfectly fine because of the problem Valve creates by making you open Steam when you play games. It’s just 64-bit for the runtime, not even the client itself. It’s 2026. I’m not going to act like this is an accomplishment.

You recall correctly. It’s another one of Canonical’s attempts to shoehorn their trash.

Are you butthurt that I called it a monopoly because it is one? Its status as a “benevolent monopoly” doesn’t make it not a monopoly; its competitors’ incompetence doesn’t make it not a monopoly; competition existing doesn’t make it not a monopoly; that it’s not an illegal monopoly doesn’t make it not a monopoly.

Its incredibly stable market share, which is deeply entrenched because you don’t own the games you buy there and can’t bring them elsewhere.

The point of pointing out that Valve is a monopoly is that they have functionally no real competition to worry about; they have all the leeway in the world to improve their client, so I’m not going to clap like a seal when the container for the software gets 64-bit support in the year of our lord 2026.

That it’s weird for Valve’s client to be running inside a container?

My other software isn’t containerized that I know of. I don’t run Firefox in Docker.

It’s 2026. An experimental version of Steam’s runtime container – a very normal thing for your software to have – is now 64-bit. This is worthy of praise somehow for a multibillion-dollar corporation whose only real job is to do bare minimum maintenance of its storefront and rake in 30% of profits from its monopoly.

Glad to know where the bar is.

After the death of real, actual investigative journalism platform BuzzFeed News, should we really be posting

BuzzFeed seems like an inappropriate source for a community called /c/economics (RIP actual investigative journalism at BuzzFeed News). Given economics is a social science like psychology or anthropology, it feels like posting to /c/psychology with “If You Did More Than 14 Of These Things Growing Up, You’re Probably An Anxious Adult Now”. No offense, of course, OP; you do great work on Lemmy, and these tarrifs are fucking corroding the US economy.

Why pay for anything ever if it’s going to potentially get taken away?

Because it’s called “lifetime”? As in the entire point of the product is that it will not ever be taken away with the exception that the company goes out of business? “Why pay for anything if there’s nothing enforcing the core premise of the product?” The gardener advertised a “whole-yard mow” for $100, but I’ve already gotten the area around the driveway, and honestly would it really be that bad if they just stopped right now?

You can talk about odds all you want (although I think around $100 million in VC funding puts those odds squarely in favor of “lifetime” users getting the floor sawed out from under them Looney Tunes-style), but the fact it’s even possible is what’s deeply disturbing, because it’s deliberate. Lifetime’s meaning should be unambiguously stipulated in a contract, not inferred. Know why? Because companies out there advertising “lifetime” subscriptions right now have little disclaimers like “approximately like five years or so but honestly we don’t really know or care lol this license disappears whenever we want it to”).

People are assuming it’s for the lifetime of your Plex account, but my response is: based on fucking what? Plex on their website doesn’t seem to specify this anywhere, even in their terms of service. People asking on their official forums receive responses saying things like “probably for the lifetime of your Plex account” with no sources to anything. I’m not trying to sealion here; I literally can’t find a single instance of Plex stating officially in writing or verbally what “lifetime” actually means to the end user. If Plex isn’t going to rugpull, why can’t they add a single sentence to their TOS saying something like: “The purchase of a lifetime pass grants the user a non-transferable license for [blah blah] starting from the date of purchase. This license will not be revoked unless 1) the associated account is terminated by the account holder or 2) the aasociated account is terminated by Plex for one or more of the reasons outlined in section [blah]”?

They could, they should, they don’t, and you have no good explanation, otherwise you would’ve offered one by now. They have enough money to afford a legal team that wouldn’t overlook that. The answer is that they want to reserve the right to destroy the “lifetime” pass whenever they want. If you can find official documentation from Plex Inc. saying that if I buy a lifetime pass today for $250, the license will only end with the termination of the account, then I’ll have no idea why they make this too hard to find, but I’ll take back everything else I said in this comment and stop using “lifetime” in scare quotes. I genuinely want to know if they say anything about this anywhere.

Another reason donating to FOSS is better than paying for proprietary software. Proprietary software devs get to run around stealing whatever code they like from the open-source community and never suffer any consequence because they don’t make their source available. I can think of a select few proprietary projects that have the balls to be source-available.

If you want to intentionally create a system that lets you evade accountability for stealing code, “fine”, but I have zero respect for you or your product, and I’m certainly not paying you a dime. I’ll put my money toward the developers who work to better the world instead of the rat fucks who steal from them to make money and pollute the software ecosystem with proprietary trash.

You literally said you have Plex pass in the other comment, why are you playing dumb?

They care about the people who don’t have a “lifetime” pass? Having empathy for others who don’t have what you have, caring about the ethics of a company whose products you use (and who you’ve given money to), and taking a stance that software should be as free and open as possible aren’t “playing dumb”. If anything, as someone who isn’t just using Plex for free, they’ve earned more of a right to complain, because they’ve shown they’re willing to pay for quality services but think this one is exploitative.

Maybe they’re worried that existing features will become locked behind a tier that the “lifetime” pass doesn’t apply to? Maybe they’re worried that their “lifetime” pass won’t be so “lifetime” if “lifetime” wasn’t explicitly defined to mean lifetime at the time of purchase? Anything bad that can happen will happen with VC-fueled enshittification.

I also want to emphasize that relicensing from the GPLv2 to something proprietary is damn-near impossible for a project this large with a team who are so ideologically motivated to make FOSS. If I today submit a PR to the Jellyfin codebase, they can’t legally relicense to a proprietary license without 1) getting my consent to give me ownership of their work (I’m not likely to be paid off or convinced it’s a good thing that work I submitted for free is being enshittified), or 2) removing my work from the project if they can’t get in touch with me or if I say no. To emphasize: this process is affirmative.

Thus, the process is to survey who’s contributed to the project, reach out to anyone whose work is still in the project (preferably in writing in a permanent, court-admissable format like email), ask them to transfer ownership of their copyright to you, keep track of who’s said no, said yes, or not answered, fulfill conditions for anyone who wants something in return, and meticulously rip out all of the code from people who say “no” or don’t answer. One of the project’s major contributors died 10 years ago? Legally, too fucking bad: they didn’t relinquish shit to you. Rip out that legacy code and start over.

Just like for instance if you want to take a Wikipedia article and own it for yourself, you can’t just go ask the Wikimedia Foundation nicely. You have to contact every single contributor whose work is extant in that article, and rip out work that isn’t explicitly given to you by its owner.

Some points as someone who does not use Tailscale:

• Tailscale the software is under a BSD license. Plex is proprietary.
• The discussion in this thread about Jellyfin is less corporate versus non-corporate (where in the context of proprietary software this would be payware versus freeware) and more FOSS versus proprietary software.
• To be clear, Tailscale is proudly doing the same Series C venture capital bullshit as Plex. They’re seemingly just as corporate as Plex, but at minimum, the software as it exists right now isn’t tied down to Tailscale.
• Additionally, Jellyfin + Tailscale means that you’re using Jellyfin, which is FOSS. Using FOSS doesn’t just benefit you but also everyone else using it because it benefits greatly from the network effect. Any money that goes to Jellyfin that would’ve otherwise gone to Plex is given back to the community and hard-working developers rather than lining some soulless venture capitalist’s pocket.
• With Jellyfin + Tailscale, everything you’re using locally is FOSS. With Plex, none of it is. And even taking corporate into account, with Jellyfin + Tailscale, most of what you’re using locally is non-corporate. With Plex, all of it is.

TL;DR: This isn’t a binary “corporate versus non-corporate”.

Dollars to donuts it’s the corpo-fascist “tread on me harder, daddy” version of “freedom” they’re advocating for.

Not quite. Jellyfin does take in donations, but they intentionally hide this feature on their website – first you need to go to their Contribute page, then you need to read “Find a way to contribute” blurb and notice and click Other, then you need to click Help Pay for Expenses, then they give you a speech practically asking you to reconsider:

As a project, we generally do not like asking for donations - we are entirely volunteer-run and intend to keep Jellyfin free as in beer, as well as free as in speech, forever. We do not wish, support, nor intend donations to privilege any user’s voice or priorities. That said, if you do want to help us cover some operating expenses like our VPS hosting, domains, developer licenses, metadata API keys, and other incidental expenses, check out our OpenCollective page to donate. Our entire budget as well as all expenses are publicly visible there.

And then you have to click that link and intentionally donate money – any amount you want either one time or monthly. The level of integrity compared to Plex – who take in VC money hand over fist and are descending into nickel-and-diming their customers – isn’t night-and-day: it’s the surface of a star and the center of the Boötes Void.

same can be said of FOSS. back channel deals, betrayals, hostile takeovers. all of these things can(and have) happen to FOSS projects. all under a false pretense of “openness”. it’s stupid easy to change licenses and lock out contributors. it’s happened several times. although you can technically argue anything before the license change could be forked, the event usually puts a bad taste in the public mouth and contributions dry up anyway. nobody wants to support a project with uncertainty.

“you could technically argue”??? That’s literally, unambiguously the law. That’s how the licensing works. This isn’t a technicality; it’s a fundamental, widely understood feature of the license. On top of that, licenses like the GPL have extremely stringent requirements for changing the license. (Here, Jellyfin uses GPLv2, so we’ll go with that.)

Everyone with work in the current codebase has copyright over that work under the GPLv2. Nobody relinquishes that to some centralized entity. Thus, you have two options for every single individual person whose contributions are still extant in your project: 1) get their consent not just to relicense but to the specific license you want, or 2) remove their work from the project either because you can no longer contact them or because they’ve said no.

The fact that you called this process “stupid easy” for anything but the smallest, most insular project is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard today, and I’m not even wasting my time with the rest of your comment given how shockingly willing you are to not just speak about things you have zero understanding of but to somehow arrive at the most false statement possible about them.

Here’s Jellyfin’s ‘How to Contribute’ page.

Here’s Jellyfin’s ‘How to Contribute’ page.

Absolutely true for FOSS. For freeware? My opinion is that it’s money wasted because, unlike FOSS:

• I have no way of auditing what I’m putting money toward.
• There’s no way for the community to keep it going if it stops or goes to shit.
• Money given toward proprietary software is money that would be better spent to FOSS whose developers actually give a shit about bettering the world.
• Proprietary software isn’t worthy of your respect or support. At best, use it if there are no FOSS alternatives, but don’t give money to something that could rapidly enshittify at any moment with no recourse and no way or recouperating your money.

Exhibit #46,853 for why freeware will inevitably fall out from under your feet and why you should exclusively use FOSS wherever possible.

“A solarpunk polity would replace centralised forms of state government with decentralised confederations of self-governing communities […]”

Stalin notoriously loved checks notes heavily decentralizing government power akin to anarcho-communism.

It’s good to see a politician who actually stays informed about these kinds of issues.

Jesus christ, chill the hell out. 💀

1. Who still writes letters anymore? Uh… A lot of people? Especially sitting senators to massive, multi-billion-dollar corporations? Would you have preferred they go on some shitty social media platform to “ayo get your shit together fr fr”? Fellas, is it gay pretentious to use your position in government to bring attention to an issue? Have you never written a letter?

2. One of the reasons a neo-Nazi fuck just won the election is because these online spaces allow fascist rhetoric to run rampant. You’re bringing up a borderline nonsensical edge case to justify why action shouldn’t be taken in 99.999% of cases.

3. Writing coherently about an actual issue facing a platform like Steam actually shows that he’s more in-touch than most politicians. You sound deeply insecure.

I don’t think you can block yourself. Maybe ask the Lemmy devs to implement it?

A US senator can absolutely, unambiguously write to a private corporation in an unofficial capacity asking them to more strictly moderate their platform. You’re just parroting “muh freeze peach” having zero idea where that starts and ends.

Fantastic for the health of the surrounding community too.