These bans, first of all I’m certain they became an urgent issue to pass only after social media in the NATO aligned world turned sour on Israel, nothing gets passed so fast with near universal support unless it has to do with pushing the imperialism agenda without calling it imperialism. Geopolitics and surveillance are some of the only topics with near unified positions in the major political parties of a country

Besides that, whatever supposed think of the children faux concern get espoused, I bet on these failing because it doesn’t solve root causes of insecurity nor does it address anyone that is legally an adult. Worries about cost of living, this solution is to try and block kids from knowing too much about that. Scared of war and getting drafted or lose the appeal of of volunteering to join because of social media, ban social media. In the vein of that, kids aren’t patriotic and don’t support historical allies like they used, maybe they don’t look at their countries history including recent history with pride like previous generations, already deciding they don’t want to have children by the time their legal adults - solution is ban social media. The solution is just marketing control rather than improving living standards

That never wanting to address adults things. People settle into their beliefs once they have to start taking responsibility for themselves. So new legal adult through their 20s. Really that period might as well be the age of adult children since we’re in school so long now and take so long now to hit adult milestones like owning a home so it seems like people these days chase youth/escapism well into their 30s. This whole period of life is rife for radicalization and developing of antisocial behaviors but we only ever want to talk about the children with solutions that won’t fix their fundamental issues of financial, health, transportation, whatever insecurities of an adult they will inevitably face. I’ve been hearing all about focusing on children since they’re still developing while adults are lost causes for decades now. It’s becoming clear to me that no one wants to tackle problems of adulthood even though we live in countries with aging populations with less and less children enough that we’re now seeing student populations shrinking causing school closures and district mergers

If they didn’t screw up locals power and water prices, they wouldn’t have so much popular blowback. Noise complaints have been a thing about crappy data centers for a long time. Two, employment is just a short surge to build and fit them out. Data centers aren’t employing people long term like non-automated manufacturing hubs. You’re not getting a hundreds of thousands member strong data center workers of America union to champion new builds. I haven’t come across a city where damn near everyone I meet works in relation to a data center. At least not yet. I do find that for damn near every sort of manufacturing/warehouse giant employers

Newtypes are the future. Those whose souls aren’t weighed down by earths gravity will chart humanity a path that saves earth from the gluttonous earthnoids

On the higher end of action cameras, it’s GoPro, DJI, and Insta360 that are very good. They are better than the budget brands. Problem being the budget brands are still pretty good. It follows phones. Before small camera sensors sucked. By like 2015 it reached a point of good enough for the vast majority of people. Good enough 1080p for YouTube. Then 4k came along and the same thing happened where camera sensors at the budget level became good enough for the vast majority of people. So it doesn’t matter if you find people in video communities all trying to get people to buy the $300+ GoPro or DJI action cam or else they’ll regret it, plenty of people will try the ~$100 ones and find them very good for their use case

DJI at least has an evolving drone business. GoPro exists as an experience enhanced brand where the experience enhanced is being undercut by other competitors and on the premium end, DJI sells more stuff and people have a habit of buying stuff from brands they already have. So if you have any thoughts of shooting video with a drone, for an action cam you’ll probably buy DJI. Just want to strap a camera to your helmet or whatever, any of the plethora of ~$100 action cameras will do. GoPro’s lane has shrunken. It has premium competitors while not being competitive for the entry level

I’ve been PC gaming since like '98. There’s been at least two dozen digital storefronts competing with steam. A few before Steam became more than a Valve game store/launcher too. Everyone else screwed up. Stardock sold Impulse and everyone that has owned that did nothing with it. Desura existed. Amazon digital game purchase and library management has barely changed in the last 15-20 years. EA downloader became Origin and that was solid but barely any games released on it for I imagine one reason being it didn’t have some easy self publishing. UPlay has sucked for 15-20 years now and gave birth to always online single player game DRM. Battle.net was nothing but Blizzard until COD started showing up. EGS didn’t have self publishing until like 2 or 3 years ago. Direct2Drive never changed. GamersGate, GreenManGaming, etc never evolved. Humble Bundle was born off Steam keys and has barely changed. Bethesda and Rockstar Social Club were trash from day one and never changed. Games for Windows Live tried to get us to pay to play online multiplayer even when it would be player self hosted servers or peer to peer or a third party publishers servers. Also install limits and an overlay that would crash your game. Windows 8+ Store used to make your storage unreclaimable without formatting the drive. Itch.io wants to be the indie devs ideal store by taking practically no cut but then it’s also the least enticing platform out there for users. Desura was more enticing. There’s now that indie game gamepass like launcher now. Android games as Google tried to get people to play Android games on PCs now through their Android VM/emulator for games thing. Probably way more I’m forgetting or never heard of. I used to actively seek Steam alternatives but now I’m like whatever happens happens

There’s what devs have been able to do since the 90s, sell on your own website. It was terribly painful to do in the 90s and early 2000s before payment processers and AWS matured as services for digital first companies. It’s easier now but still a pain if you want to be legit and have customer service and account your expenses to anticipate charge backs, refunds, stolen credit card purchases. Barely anyones going to be early Minecraft, League of Legends

Plus PC gaming is in competition with consoles and mobile. Especially consoles though. They mostly have the same games being sold. They compete for players. Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo are equivalent to PC as a whole platform, not just PC OS with Steam on it. Consoles just you can’t bypass the console maker. A PlayStation key off Amazon or Gamestop is always a code to redeem in PSN whereas PC it’s now usually either Steam, GOG, EGS, or distant fourth Amazon or Microsoft/Xbox

Really what people want but won’t build even though it’s what they effectively always espouse is to form a non-profit that develops a store with public finances and some cap on profitability. Enough to continue developing and maintaining and a rainy year(s) fund. You need a legit organization to handle bank accounts in all the countries/currencies served. Legal entity to handle all that liability. Seems like all the people capable of doing that do not have interest in coming together to jumpstart it and get the legal stuff in order. You have stuff like Flathub (games there too) which has announced a year or two ago that they’ll be incorporating the ability to charge for software or at least take donations on store pages and it’s been over a year since they formed some legal entity to handle that and it’s still not rolled out. I think we idealist are bad at effective collective action

When the expansion comes out, it’ll certainly have higher peak concurrent player numbers on steam than at any other point in its steam history

Back when it was only Roku boxes, I don’t recall any ads at all on the home screen. Then when I got a TV with Roku built in, I recall it also being zero ads. That was like 10 years for the Roku TV where it still had no ads on the homescreen of the RokuOS. Then they added that big right banner ad. It was that for a number of years and then they added a row at the top advertising some streaming apps. Then they started this beta program for the new layout and they jacked up the size of the content advertisement space and pushing your stuff further down where your cursor focus defaults at when starting the TV/Roku. The expanding presense of advertisement icons have been pretty rapid.

Roku used to be have no advertisements. Then they started trying to be a digital storefront for movies/tv and that was just a button on the side list menu. Then they started adding advertisements more and more

Altman can try to hype up how everyones going to subscribe to them someday all the while their subscriber base is being eaten up by competitors.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-projects-chatgpt-plus-subscriptions-to-drop-by-80-from-44-million-in-2025-to-9-million-in-2026-made-up-using-cheaper-subscriptions-somehow/

Local stuff. I still believe the small parameter, ~1B free local, ones will suffice for the vast majority of how people use LLMs and there’s still going to be a few years of improvements there until investments dry up. Eventually I bet more and more phone companies will include one of these small ones out the box. Pretty much like a nice search engine that works offline like if you’re out on a major hike. Cloud stuff, there’ll be stuff like Proton’s Lumo where they’re taking free open weight stuff and piecing them together for users.

OpenAI’s thing is they’ll make up for falling subscribers with advertising. So pretty much we’re advancing fast in the search engine race of the 90s/early aughts. We’ll at least have Gemini. ChatGPT maybe ends up crashes in value someday and bought up by Microsoft or some other company. Deepseek, Qwen, Kimi. Claude like ChatGPT maybe survices or crashes and gets adsorbed by another company. Proton continue to exist as the company making AI products out of free stuff. Eventually the pace of improvements moves at a crawl and it’s pointless to be paying for the best paywalled stuff. Just use the free stuff like how everyone mostly uses free search engines

Most people are single issue voters and demographics don’t change that. Race/sexuality/gender does not imply some deep overarching ideological alignment to the degree that people treat those as. It’s just some single issues and/or social group tribalism and then outside of that, they’re often all about themselves and everyone else is lazy/entitled/whatever. Spend enough years regularly doing political/community/social outreach/work, town halls, etc. Things that put you regularly in contact with people in need or saying they have unmet needs and listening to them. Also spend enough time in art communities. Surface level people may sound like they’re really about some humanistic standard. Doesn’t take long until you unravel to find someone that’s just really about getting there’s

Watch out of people that make aesthetics, popularity, a major part of the their personality and how they judge people. Social justice as top care on their socials and verbally, but racist as hell in practice with how they date and treat people and talk behind their social group members backs. Social justice peacocking but in practice finds poor people uncultured and disgusting before ever talking to them. If they dress the part, they’re an artist. If they’re an artist that wears worn down clothing, they’re uncultured and likely problematic.

Away from that, I don’t know anyone that brags about buying a knife set that’s a fundamentally good cook. Someone getting started trying to get good may get one but they usually want to get rid of it not long after trying to fundamentally do well in a kitchen. Social status home cooks may know a small set of recipes but just change the size of their pots and pans and they fall apart. They can’t scale with portions and don’t know ingredients independent of a complete dish. Knife blocks, people regularly just drop a knife in the slot and dull their knives. Knife blocks also have so many redundant knives where they’re like 1cm different in size. Same with pan/pot sets. Also non stick stuff. Have like one for fish and eggs and a silicon spatula to flip. It’ll last a super long time. A non stick pot to boil noodles in, fresh noodles are in and out. Dried noodles don’t even take that long. If you’re cooking some chunky noodles and you can’t manage stirring it occasionally for 10 minutes, come on. Other stuff, learn temp control and your ingredients. Stop burning stuff. It’s practice. And when you mess up, learn to clean your encrusted pans. You’ll get there

Gardening. Develop and maintain your soil. Your aesthetics won’t make up for poorly maintained soil. And if you’re starting with rocky dead clay, no till gardening doesn’t apply to you yet. You can till at least once here to quickly deal with compaction and introduce life to your soil. If it’s your first year, be patient and don’t be shaming people. At least make it a few years instead of being a first year asshole and then quitting because gardening takes a lot of maintenance. A lot of repetitive busy work

Decor, if you newly own the place, consider how old the pipes, insulation, electrical is. You may want to handle that before piling in new furniture, decorations, painting walls. Also what happened to the whole environmentalism stuff. In my experience people that place a major emphasis on decorations to express their individuality and/or aesthetics are often vocal environmentalist but mostly fail because of their need to show off.

Aesthetics hide a lot of mediocrity. Don’t be fooled by aesthetics

It’ll be packaged up in plasma 6.7, I think mid June. Then it’ll be easy for distros to make it available. I want to try it but I don’t want to change distro or build it myself. When 6.7 rolls out, I got my computer plugged into my TV with CachyOS handheld edition. Right when Plasma 6.7 is available in the Arch repos, I’m installing it

My understanding is that they pushed it to some people as a beta and eventually they would roll out the update to everyone even if they opted out of the beta. I opted out to go back to the not as bad homescreen and blocked it from the Internet in my router settings

Centimeter by centimeter getting people towards signal and matrix chats

I’ve defaulted to ddg for like 2 years now. Solid. Good enough. Really what happened is that SEO optomization websites even before the AI craze made Google search so awful that ddg became just as good if not better for me than google

Looks like postmarketos already put in work to have systemd working in it. That takes care of my concerns there

If they get out some solid linux drivers, I’d buy one. Same thing for me when it comes to anything risc-v. I’m buying out of interest in a new alternative

Assuming you meant drm free books

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/drm-free

Not every book on kobo is drm free from what I remember so keep an eye on that

It’s like how the US can block mergers between companies that aren’t based in the US. Companies want to operate in these markets. If a major regulator says no, they have two options. Remove themselves from the market the regulator that denies them regulates or spin off into multiple companies if that’s actually possible operationally for the multiple companies to exist. Somalia regulators can block an acquisition in their country but that wouldn’t change much for the company as Somalia has a small market and little international influencer. If China or the US or the EU say no, a company that wants to operate internationally will lose a huge market and will now have a way more difficult time doing business from other companies that operate multinationally

Fifa Ultimate Team which eventually made its way into Madden and then 2K with NBA

Fifa ultimate team for video games pre-dates Valve doing crates in TF2

Nice. Hoping the Steam Machine follows soon after. Time for PC to finally be my local multiplayer living room machine