Apple discontinued its own Apple Pay Later service in favor of just integrating third-party payment services, like Affirm: https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/17/apple-pay-later-united-states-ending/

Friendly reminder that we have already identified and largely fixed a climate change problem, the depletion of the Ozone layer, and we can fix other problems too:

The Montreal Protocol is considered the most successful international environmental agreement to date. Following the bans on ozone-depleting chemicals, the UN projects that under the current regulations the ozone layer will completely regenerate by 2045, thirty years earlier than previously predicted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

Even if official support isn’t possible past a certain point (Google and Samsung are pushing 7+ years, fwiw), all phones need to have a bootloader unlock mechanism for unofficial support past that point. LineageOS or mobile Linux with some broken functionality is still better than nothing.

A $600 PC with a dedicated graphics card is probably going to have a worse CPU than an M2 or M3 Mini, and probably no Thunderbolt. You would only be cross-shopping a PC like that with a Mac Mini if you were thinking of graphically-demanding productivity work, like video editing or Blender. If it’s for gaming then the Mac wouldn’t be in the running at all.

Ghost managed hosting gets more expensive as you get more subscribers, I don’t think Patreon does. You also have to set up the payments processor yourself (usually Stripe), and if you self-host, you need to set up an email service like Mailchimp. Ghost also has much more basic community features than Patreon, and doesn’t do per-user RSS feeds, so stuff like subscriber-only podcasts are more difficult.

The M2 Mac Mini is $599, or $499 if you can get the education discount. There is not a (new) Windows PC in that price range that has the same performance (especially performance-per-watt) and Thunderbolt 4. The M1 MacBook Air is getting a bit old, but it’s on sale for $600-700 pretty often and will knock the socks off most PCs in that price range, especially in build quality.

Apple’s pricing gets ridiculous when you try spec’ing up with certain memory or storage upgrades, sure, and most internal upgrades are a no-go. The base models of most of their computers are incredibly competitive, though.

Firefox doesn’t invade anyone’s privacy.

Yeah, the destructive editing and lack of a content aware fill is made me stop using it and go back to Photoshop. Krita also seems more usable these days in the FOSS world. The name is a lot easier to fix than those missing features, though.

No exclusivity for games

Valve doesn’t need to pay for exclusivity because it already dominates the market. There are many games that are effectively Steam exclusives because they are not available through other methods on PC. Half-Life 2 received a lot of criticism at launch for requiring Steam.

They purposefully made SteamOS open source so that other companies can easily release portable PC gaming products

SteamOS is open source, but you need a license to use the Steam brand, and Valve doesn’t allow that. One company tried to make a handheld console with SteamOS, but it can’t be legally bundled with the hardware: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/10/24033161/ayaneo-next-lite-steam-deck-competitor-steamos

That said, who knows what happens when he dies?

Yes, that’s the point of the article. If you need one specific person to stay alive for something to continue functioning well, you don’t have a business, you have the British monarchy.

Valve has avoided many of the same anti-consumer moves as other tech and gaming giants, likely due to its smaller size, status as a non-public company, and the long-time leadership of Gabe Newell and other executives. Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism, and there are already examples of anti-consumer behavior.

Valve is not immune to enshittification, and it has already happened on some level with minimal current Mac support, facilitating gambling through item trades, etc.

I would like to see more collective action, but it’s also incredibly difficult to put your housing situation on the line when the US (and most states) does not give you a functional backup. As you said, it’s capitalism at work.

I mentioned in the article that 5G home internet is not a solution for everyone. The reliability varies significantly by location and network quality—some people have no issues, for others it’s unusable. It’s not a perfect solution that will fix the US’ infrastructure problems, but in the meantime it is making a difference for some people.

It seems pretty well established at this point that AI training models don’t respect copyright.

Yeah, Hindenburg isn’t like a team of journalists or anything, but if they cited other sources in their report and it seems to be pretty accurate. If there were big issues then Opera should have been able to point them out, and that didn’t happen.

I mean, yeah, just leaving it at “china bad” is still xenophobia. Tech companies in the US and other countries can be just as shady.

What was discredited?

RISC-V is also really exciting, yeah. I’m curious if it will have to go through the same slow progression in form factors that we saw with ARM (first embedded, then phones, then tablets, etc.) or if we’ll get high-performance RISC hardware more quickly.

I have 2FA through Authy on my Microsoft account.

I don’t know if those useful features are the main reasons VPNs are used, though. There’s evidence they are used often for bypassing blocked sites (like VPN downloads jumping in Russia recently), most of the other advertised privacy and security benefits are questionable. Most of them don’t advertise torrenting/piracy because that’s a legal gray area.

There is no expertise in that interview, that’s the problem. It’s the Ghostery dev making vague statements that Engadget partially misinterprets and then everyone else gets wrong. The main insight there is that content blockers need their lists updated on a daily basis for YT which is not new information.