Well, he’s a great filmmaker and a fantastic actor. I don’t like his personal politics, but I do also tire a bit from having to immediately throw everything through a lens of “do I agree with this person” before I’m willing to engage with anything they do.

My worry isn’t that we will have a rational war. War isn’t rational to begin with.

My worry is that we will have an irrational war. All it takes is a button push to end the world.

100% this is a jump-the-shark moment.

I sort of think what they’re releasing will stay free for a long time. That’s not my concern.

My concern is that since they’ve been acquired by Canva you can tell how Canva is thinking about Affinity; it’s a pure subscription driver towards Canva.

So given this is what Canva wants to do with Affinity, I have no doubt that Affinity will focus on shipping features that drive towards Canva subscriptions. That means other features will atrophy and that the future of affinity is one where you’re increasingly finding it diffficult to use, if you’re aiming to use it as an alternative to Adobe, without a subscription.

So this is subscription software by another name - it just creeping subscription, slowly boiling the frog in hope we won’t all jump out. Make no mistake, the fire has been lit and it won’t be long before the water gets warm.

Enshittification here we come.

Going with the spirit of the question, not the text (I don’t really think we are forced to pay for “extra” things, it’s all choice):

But one area I cannot comprehend is people buying cars on finance only to keep up with others who buy cars on finance.

Triggered much?

Yes. Like people, if you want the nuggets of gold, you need to go dig them out of the turds.

This endless separation into “managers” and “not managers” is so unproductive. Everyone manages something. That’s why you’re employed.

This is actually worse. It’s copy/paste with an AI “correcting” any view that doesn’t conform to Elon’s view.

Vigilant team of right wing AI bots correcting any “libtard bias” as soon as it occurs.

This really solidifies the US’ splitting into two. Now there are two versions of “truth”. It breaks the heart.

I think people, and this paper, misses a few elements.

4K encoded content often has significantly higher bitrate (well, duh, there’s more content) and often higher than the simple increase in pixel density would suggest. So content with heavy moment (flocks of birds, water, crowds etc) still looks better than 1080p, not because of the increase in pixel density, but because of the decrease of compression artefacts.

Second, high dynamic range yo! On a still picture on my TV it’s hard to see difference between 1080p and 4K but it isn’t hard to see the difference between SDR and HDR.

So I still vastly prefer 4K content, but not because of the resolution.

The world is definitely worse for younger people. I’m raising four kids and I weep for them.

Smart phones and social media have a LOT to answer for. I know that won’t necessarily be a popular opinion but that’s where I find the root of the problem. Well, that and FPTP election systems.

Fastmail. Getting better and better, profitable and charging for services.

Posthaven. Not getting better and better but started good and staying good. Profitable and charging for services.

Unraid. Getting better and better. Not cheap, but a lot simpler to operate than TrueNAS for day to day stuff.

Kickstarter. Yes they’re a virtual monopoly but so many awesome things I’ve joined through it (though fuck you Eve/Dough for roping me into your shitty monitor which never really worked).

Virpil controllers. Rock solid, made by fanatics and rightly loved by fans. Cannot speak highly enough about their hardware (though their attitude to customer service is … Eastern European).

Affinity products. They might be cresting though and about to roll steeply downhill towards enshittification valley. But I still love them for now.

Linux. What’s not to love.

Lemmy. In fact so so many open source products. Honestly, it’s hard to grasp the quality.

The western economy is a boom and bust cycle, most often driven by US loosening of economic controls. I’m sure the Chinese property bubble will burst too and then we have to deal with that one too.

How I long for social democratic, Nordic style government everywhere.

Setting up a fully automated system to download, track and organise Linux distributions onto a NAS under the stairs. I used to subscribe to a bunch of services that would provide access to all sorts of Linux distributions for a flat monthly fee, but I realised that I often was only really interested in one or two specific Linux distribution so I really didn’t need to pay for these services.

Now I just download the Linux distributions that I actually want to install. It also prevents my kids from endlessly installing different Linux distributions. Not really a productive use of time.

Congrats, you managed to turn this conversation into a socialism vs fascism conversation. It wasn’t easy but you spotted an opportunity and you took it. Now we can all talk about your favourite topic!

Of course not speaking for experience. I’ve personally never broken the law.

But often when companies listed their contact information they’d have a phone line and a fax number. If those numbers were near each other, you could pretty much guarantee that there would be a phone number somewhere in that sequence, or just past it, that would let you dial into their network, often weakly guarded with default password on common user names.

While it could take a little while, I’m aware of people collecting company phone numbers and war dialling overnight to find the network service number. Once you spoke to a modem it would give you a telnet connection and there was hardly ever any form of rate control. The worst I’ve hear about was getting chucked off after three attempts. But you could just dial up again.

I’ve heard of many, many company secrets being found that way.

I actually do think I’ve invented a data structure for interleaving multiple streams in a single file in a really efficient way. I can’t find something that looks like it, and it seems obviously faster and more logical than anything else I’ve seen. It’s the level below B-trees so not optimised for least amount of lookups within a record table, nor would it be efficient for adding records in a middle of the stream, but for treating data streams like files (append, shrink) I do think it’s significantly more efficient than what else I can find. One of these days I really should submit a paper and see what reviewers say.

Yes! Yeeeesss!

Let the distribution flame wars begin. Strike Zorin down with all your heart and forget that it is Linux and a move away from Windows.

Let the snake eat its own tail!!

All in all, my current JDM Citizen Exceed pretty much fits the spot as my forever watch. Solar charging, atomic radio signal reception all around the world, forever calendar on the date display.

I bought it, put it on, and haven’t given it a single thought since then. It’s always correct date and time and it always works.

I’d take a Chronomaster or Grand Seiko just for kicks but then I’d have to worry about price and scratching it. The $1100 Exceed ticks all boxes.

I actually managed to come off it completely. Even though Lemmy is 10000x smaller, it still scratches the same itch for me.