Enshittification doesn’t mean “making a good system bad”. It’s a specific process whereby the user experience of a platform is degraded in order to benefit the business partners. Then even the business partners are ripped off to benefit the platform owners.

It wouldn’t, but translating to the currency of the reader is very commonplace.

The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics

The thing is, that’s not what layoffs are supposed to be. That’s effectively firing someone for cause. Maybe in America the difference doesn’t matter, but in the civilised world, at least in theory, it does. But in reality they can somehow get away with this and call it “layoffs”.

If a company does layoffs, they should not be allowed to hire any staff in the same or similar roles for 12 months.

In 6 months no one will have to manually write code anymore

For the last 18 months

No, that’s completely fair. And Dave’s well-publicised admiration for Jimmy Donaldson certainly doesn’t help in that respect. (They also seem like they may have previously had a professional relationship, though the details and extent are unclear.)

But everything he or the other founders have said about Nebula makes it sound like they’re doing the right thing, and they are very deliberately avoiding the number one cause of companies that were once fair ceasing to be fair: venture capital. There’s no outside source that could turn around and demand to get a greater return on their investment against the wishes of those operating the company.

As far as a lifetime subscription to Nebula, I’ve watched way too many sites fail/die to consider a lifetime subscription to anything on the internet. They could shut the site down tomorrow, and now I’m out $500 ($300 if I happen to get a discount from a creator code).

There’s no “happen to”. It’s the default expectation. You can go through literally any creator on the site to get that, it’s not a time-limited thing or anything like that.

As for the rest of it, it’s certainly a possibility. But it will only take 10 years before that lifetime membership becomes strictly better than paying yearly. And the reason they’re doing it is to avoid one of the biggest sources of companies with fundamentally-sound businesses going bankrupt: investors deciding they want to squeeze. They use the lifetime memberships as an alternative to seeking outside investment from venture capital. And from what we’ve seen, it certainly does appear to be a fundamentally sound business. It has seemed to be growing in both the amount and the range of content it offers at a pretty steady rate, and all indications are that their subscriber count is growing along with that.

It certainly is a risk, without a doubt. There’s a reason Nebula themselves say that the objectively best option is the yearly membership. Lifetime membership is directly presented by them as an investment you can make in the company; something to do because you believe in what they’re doing and want to help them, with the potential for some payoff down the line (but honestly not very much).

Oh wow, that’s a pleasantly surprising conclusion.

Out of interest, got any updates?

Yours is the second comment I’ve seen in this thread where someone suggesting 16 wasn’t enough for gaming on Linux, despite multiple comments from Windows users with no issues on 16 or less.

I actually wonder if it could be that Linux ends up requiring more memory than Windows does. Not necessarily because of the OS itself, but that other applications being used are less optimised, plus maybe the Proton layer for gaming costs more than running the game on Windows.

I run 200+ tabs in Firefox and have no problem with gaming. Not super high end gaming, but I could play Baldur’s Gate on reasonable settings, and regularly play the Age of Empires Definitive Editions/Age of Mythology Retold/Age of Empires 4. 16 GB RAM works mostly fine for me, though I do often feel a little constrained with aoe4 specifically.

32 would definitely be my recommended minimum for any power user like myself, but for the average user, 16 GB is enough even without getting into merely “basic user” levels.

I’m still on Windows 10 though, if that makes a difference. Microsoft has decided my processor is one generation too old to be allowed to “upgrade”.

I’ve already moved my gaming group to Matrix. But, and this might shock you, not every server I’m a member of consists entirely of myself and my close friends.

Thanks, but that is a thoroughly unhelpful piece of advice.

Don’t give Discord any info

That’s the idea. I’m hoping people have an idea of some method to bypass it that actually works. Maybe a particular video or game that still works well. Giving them useless data.

Fwiw, they don’t do the age verification themselves. They contract it out to a third party. And as much as I trust neither entity very far, I do trust that the third party probably isn’t handing over that data to Discord. I’m more worried about the third-party being hacked/leaking data, which has already happened.

That feels kinda gross and exploitative. Because it’s not like alcohol. This is something I very well could do myself, but refuse to do on principle, because I don’t want to hand over personal data like that. Paying someone else to hand over their data feels gross.

Some guy put a PR in to the Linux kernal and to systemd, IIRC. The community pushback was huge, despite it literally just being a field users could fill in themselves if they wanted.

I’m not sure if he ended up succeeding. IIRC last time I checked it was in systemd but not Linux, but that could have changed and I could be misremembering.

Anyone know the best way to fool these age verification tools? I’ve got some Discord servers with channels that are marked as NSFW mainly out of an abundance of caution, despite mainly just being open to rude language. And others where it’s just slightly spicy memes.

I am old enough, I just don’t want to give my real face or ID to Discord or their chosen third parties. I don’t trust them. Have tried pointing OBS at videos of people staring straight at the screen, but those don’t quite seem to work.

I agree, letting parents do their job of parenting is the best way to deal with this. But the problem is that that’s very difficult, and they currently lack adequate tools.

The best method would be to make sure operating systems support parental controls that parents can set, and require websites to respect those settings (and browsers to support an API passthrough of the OS setting). That way there’s no need to do any age verification that sends sensitive data like ID or faces to third-parties with sketchy privacy policies.

Unfortunately, when moves were actually taken to implement this kind of solution, reactionaries pushed back and made sure it didn’t happen.

Men’s sheds would be the closest I think.

I’ve heard mixed things about them. It can depend on the individual shed, I think. Because the kinds of people who go to them are often the kinds of people who most need some sort of social support group, at times the reason they need that support group can be because—as one online commenter said—they “had done a pretty good job of alienating all their family and friends through being crusty old codgers from a young age, so now they had a bunch of people just like them to validate their shitty attitudes”.

That’s not always going to be true, and the online commenter who wrote that also said that they now go to another shed with a much more positive environment.

Because if you think that Apple added this port just and only because of the yankable cable, and not to again be purposely be incompatible so they can squeeze more money out of you, then I have a bridge to sell you…

Why would they deliberately leave the ability to charge via USB-C, if that were the case?

I hope that bridge is going cheap.

Macs have had USB-C charging since 2015.

This was, in many respects, a downgrade, since Apple’s proprietary MagSafe was seen by many as a valuable feature. Power cords that pop out rather than yanking the laptop off the desk if someone trips over it are pretty handy.

In 2021 Apple started re-including MagSafe on their laptops. But since doing so, the USB-C ports have also been able to charge the laptop.

So since 2015 they’ve been compliant with this law, and since 2021 they’ve had the best of both worlds, with either option working.