• 0 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle
  • Yes. You know when you see headlines like “internet service shut off in X country amid Y event”? It’s like that.

    All of this is fleeting. If the govt decides to deny you access to anything online, they can and will. The only ones left communicating will be on radios. Backups of individual sites are great and all, and necessary, but they mean next to nothing on a grand scale if a government makes such decisions.

    At this point in the timeline it is an eventuality everyone should be aware of.

    Of course, there are economic reasons why internet access en masse probably won’t get shut off at the tap(s). But it may end up being the case that true, free communication, as we think of it currently, is impossible due to restrictions on speech through automoderation, or just good old coercion through fear.








  • This result is predictable for a lot of different things that started as products and seem to be ending up as services.

    Microsoft wants Windows to be a subscription service with the associated perks to the company (namely, targeted ads, and also extreme control over anything the system does, including this ad scheme), and so an increased number of people seek a more traditional OS.

    The movie industry pushes streaming down everyone’s throat as a highly fragmented market where media ownership no longer exists; thus an increased number of people start to return to physical media.

    Car companies push to paywall features of their cars behind subscription services. An increased number of people seek used cars which have no such paywalls.

    The patterns are clear, in my view, but the C-suite is always driven by a naïve lust for ever-increasing profit.













  • I use Foobar2000 for music. It is feature packed and so customizable. It’s available as a snap using Wine (I think it’s the only snap I have installed, in fact).

    I really wish there were a Linux binary available but it has been Windows-only forever. The closest Linux player I’ve seen is Deadbeef, but Deadbeef’s library plugin does not work at all like Foobar’s (the later stays updated by monitoring the music folder and shows things by tags, not folder structure). Apparently the Deadbeef plugin is being updated to be more Foobar-like, but it isn’t there yet.