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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • "The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I’m sure they wave away the laws because of “financial security” or some other bullshit. "

    I don’t know as much as I’d like to about the regulatory side of this, but I know that Google and other big tech have done a masterful job of proactively building themselves into systems such that taking action against them is difficult.

    I think that’s part of why the US antitrust case against Microsoft a few decades ago fizzled out into nothing — even though Microsoft was deemed to have been a monopolist, the big question was how do we remedy that in a way that isn’t going to be harmful? The consensus on this amongst people who I respect is that the results of the Microsoft case was woefully insufficient and something that helped to lay the foundations of the big tech dominance that we see today.


  • When I first got into Android (I miss my Nexus 6 T.T ), it felt like I could do so much more with my phone than I can now. I had so much cool automation shit that leveraged stuff like Google assistant voice commands, but now it’s shit on so many levels. It goes beyond the user facing side of things; I used to use the app Tasker for a lot of the automation stuff, and over the years, it seems like the dev has been climbing an uphill battle against Google gating off functionality, and generally making things opaque and difficult for developers.


  • It seems like the relevant section in the Ubisoft EULA says

    “Upon termination for any reason, You must immediately uninstall the Product and destroy all copies of the Product in Your possession.”

    I read this wording of this to be stricter than the BG3 example you shared, because the BG3 one seems to be saying “if you don’t agree to this EULA (or if you agree, but later terminate that agreement), then you must uninstall the game”. Whereas the Ubisoft one seems to include Ubisoft terminating the agreement, rather than just the user. That’s just my interpretation of these snippets though, as someone who is not a lawyer. It’s possible that the BG3 EULA also includes other parts that would mean similar to what people are unhappy about on the Ubisoft EULA












  • I really love how Technology Connections is just living his best life, being so iconically nerdy that he has masses of adoring fans, despite the topics he covers being so ostensibly dull. I remember scoffing when I first stumbled across him; I thought “a 40+ minute video on [boring stuff I didn’t care about] — who would watch that?”. I think I probably started watching it with the expectation that after a few moments my disdain would be validated, and I’d move on. As it happens, I was enchanted by the magic of “passionate nerd explains something in depth”.