I was absolutely terrible at that. I had really bad homework grades and completion rates exactly because of shit like that.

“You gave me a 500 word question. I can’t make 1500 words out of it. If I’m going to fail anyways fuck turning it in.” (No, no part of that approach was intelligent, but I just couldn’t fill space with obvious trash. My brain would shut down.)

Yeah, I get shit occasionally in random places for using bigger words when they actually would take multiple sentences to replace.

But there are a fucking lot of people who use big (or obscure) words purely as a kind of signaling that they’re smart, rather than for communication. And it’s usually really obvious to people who have better vocabularies (or better understanding of the jargon in a specific field) that they don’t know what they’re doing.

If after looking up a word, the rationale for the word choice doesn’t become understandable on at least some level, it’s probably nonsense. (There are some super smart people who just don’t know how to communicate though and think the word’s as simple to everyone else as to them.)

I honestly don’t know how. Any non Nintendo 3D game it’s instantly super obvious. And any game at all it’s obvious if you just try to navigate a menu with it.

They make the $10 Chinese junk alternates look amazing by comparison.

I’m not just talking about the drift. The actual intended product is ludicrously imprecise out of the box.

It changed gaming. The steam deck probably doesn’t happen without the switch. It clearly demonstrated the market for a handheld that manages large scale 3D games with complex mechanics.

But the joycons suck at more than connectivity. Straight out of the box those joysticks are fucking terrible, and they degrade hard and fast.

Fuck everything about blocking the hardware and hardware mods, but if it’s true that he was packaging games with it, you don’t even get to any of that, because they’re probably going to get every dime he has for “selling” their games.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/the-secret-power-of-read-it-later-apps

So this article was included with Omnivore, which is suggested elsewhere in this thread, but it does provide a bunch of well structured arguments for the utility of a dedicated app.

Thanks for this. I don’t usually dive into longer format article stuff because I find it on my phone and reading on my phone sucks. I tried pocket, but it didn’t function at all on my reader.

This solves that problem reasonably well.

(Edit: also an RSS reader? Maybe I should start using RSS again. I do wish it offered paged navigation controls to better work on an ereader, but it’s definitely an improvement still.)

I would much rather pay full price than still pay for a DRMed version that’s effectively guaranteed to be supporting some sort of organized crime group. Mass distribution at scale, with DRM, by definition means Russian organized crime, or a drug cartel, or some other global bad actor on that scale that’s doing shit like trafficking humans, arms dealing, drugs, etc, as well.

But ignoring that (and that I generally buy my content), I wouldn’t pay $.10 for an illegitimate copy that had an added layer of DRM on it. It’s fundamentally fucking repulsive for some subgroup whose whole business relies on bypassing someone else’s copy control to add their own.

DRM on pirated games is fucking gross as shit.

I tried. It’s basically the only app I couldn’t get to work on my boox.

If you’re scared about Microsoft tracking your UX engagement on a website, the best way to make sure your sex life stays private is to file it in federal court.

Yeah it’s not really supposed to be “funny”. It’s just Barney being corny because that’s who the character is. (When he’s not being a sociopath with women.)

Because it’s a copy. It’s literally that simple.

Libraries can operate because of first sale doctrine. You can do almost whatever you want with a physical object that contains a copyrighted work.

What you can’t do is copy it. There is no possible legal way to distribute a digital copy of a work without an explicit license from the copyright holder. There isn’t even a legal concept of “owning” a digital copy. You purchase a license.

There’s really no credible argument that their distribution of books even might be legal.

Their only defense is fair use, and there’s no precedent for a “fair use” defense justifying copying a work wholesale for mass distribution. (Yes, “one copy at a time” to multiple people is mass distribution.) Copying a whole work has effectively only qualified as fair use when that copy is not re-distributed, and is actually for a personal backup.

The constitution explicitly grants authority to regulate IP. There’s absolutely no path to a constitutional issue, and constitutional issues are the only way you get laws overturned. “Other legal doctrine” means something like violations of due process somewhere in the chain, which is a constitutional issue, or direct conflict with another law.

The only possible judicial remedy is the premise that it’s fair use, which there’s a lot of precedent that it isn’t.

What Internet Archive did is digitized physical books, then loaned out their “one copy” with DRM. Their assertion is that this constitutes fair use. I don’t really think there’s any merit to that argument based on the law and the body of precedent, and fundamentally tend to dislike legislation from the bench (judges just arbitrarily reinterpreting laws). Passing new laws and restructuring how IP law works is the job of the legislature, not the judiciary.

IA then made this worse by taking the already super tenuous “fair use” argument and throwing it out the window by removing the lending limits during Covid. It was waving a red flag in front of IP holders and begging them to take aggressive action.

I’d be all for altering definitions in a way that enables them to do stuff like the controlled lending system (also just digitizing shit generally).

But I think the law is pretty clear, and a precedent calling their use case fair use would be mind blowing. You need new, much more common sense IP legislation that redefines consumer rights in a digital world.

How the GPL works is that anyone who buys the game is fully entitled to share the source code with anyone else completely legitimately (modified or unmodified), provided they include the license.

It’s not piracy to do so.

That’s not a different or added risk vs a website.

The only change is that it’s significantly easier to keep an archive going.