Meanwhile I ask Gemini “Hey Gemini, can this Google product do X?”

It responds "Here is a list of features for Google’s Product:
… Does W! Does X! Does Y! …

Me: clicks source for listed feature X… gets sent to post on Product’s support forum: “Can Product do X?” “No, it can’t do X.”

Thanks Gemini!

This is particularly, transparently obvious for news sites. News is worthless if it is old. Yet still AI literally reads the work of journalists and then cuts them out of the equation, denying the journalists the revenue that pays them to produce the news. Its like the scorpion and the frog.

I don’t disagree…

Given that the power to support the game is literally the only power we have, there is no moral issue - I agree. I don’t, however, understand what’s wrong with wishing for a system that gives consumers and workers more options.

will be rewarded by being laid off. Not buying it only punishes the shithead management

While I agree with the sentiment, that’s a gross oversimplification.

• While I’m sure the studio will likely downsize and lay off staff, many will stay on.
• Passion and care inevitably went into the game, to some degree. I would be surprised if devs and artists were indifferent to its success, whether they kept their jobs or not.
• It’s hugely different to be laid off after a hit game vs a failure of a game, when it comes to finding new work.
• The art itself, if it was of any quality, is wasted.

Again, I’m not advocating people buy it. I just wish we had the power to fight some other way. I won’t be buying it, but I wouldn’t have bought it anyway. It will also very likely sell like hotcakes, regardless of our posturing.

Not that I personally give a fuck about GTA generally, but it does make me upset that one of the few methods we have to “police” these companies as consumers is to not buy the game. To take a massive project that consumed however many years of work by however many developers and artists just and make it a commercial failure just to… stick it to their bosses? It’s like refusing to buy a musician’s CD because you don’t like the record company they made a deal with. Nobody gets to enjoy the music and the musician makes less money. This system sucks.

It feels like almost everything has become a race to the bottom. Who can cut corners and exploit everyone else the most effectively?

It’s one of the many freedoms we enjoy in the USA. Freedom from law, order, and regulation reigning in the worst excesses of capitalist greed.

I don’t disagree. I’m just frustrated that most of them are big and shitty because they’ve eaten everything else.

My trimmer just died recently. I researched a replacement… best reviewed and best fitting my needs… only available on Amazon. A similar model was available at Walmart or Target… Eventually found one at Best Buy (not aware of whatever horrible shit they’ve done recently). Couldn’t pick it up at any store nearby before I’d need it, but they delivered… using Doordash.

While I make quite an effort to avoid unethical companies, the list has only grown since I started. I suspect the only reason it hasn’t grown exponentially to include the vast majority of companies I still use is that I haven’t dug into every single company to find out how unethical it is.

Run by Technofascists? Run by regular fascists? Supports fascists hoping for quid-pro-quo benefits? Human rights abuses? Exploits workers? Pollutes the environment as much as it can get away with? Busts unions? Dodges taxes? Embraced AI? Exploits customers? Embraces surveillance capitalism? Collects and sells personal data? Heavily enshittified? I could go on and on.

There truly is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

So would reverse engineering and building a modifed version of an app, so that you prevent it from doing things you don’t want it to do, be legal?

The EU laws may not be worded so horrendously. I’m barely familiar with EU law beyond a little of the GDPR.

It was actually forced onto the US by a clever US politician, Bruce Lehman - the Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks under Bill Clinton, who pushed it into an international treaty, the WIPO Copyright Treaty. Europe also approved the treaty and I assume the European counterparts still stand.

The WIPO Copyright Treaty is implemented in United States law by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). By Decision 2000/278/EC of 16 March 2000, the Council of the European Union approved the treaty on behalf of the European Community. European Union Directives which largely cover the subject matter of the treaty are: Directive 91/250/EC, creating copyright protection for software; Directive 96/9/EC on copyright protection for databases; and Directive 2001/29/EC, prohibiting devices for circumventing “technical protection measures”, such as digital rights management (also known as DRM).

Maybe it isn’t so thoroughly abused over there though. Poor Europeans lack the highly sought after freedom (to lose all of your rights to mega-corporations) we enjoy in the USA.

…and civil action if you try to reverse engineer or circumvent the app in any way… because the app’s code is copyrighted. If you do it for someone else or make a post explaining how you did it things can get really spicy. Lord help you if you profit commercially from it.

Yay DMCA, in particular Section 1201!

I don’t think they are talking about the average person. I think they are talking about those in leadership roles.

I should have been more clear. I know they are being manipulated. I don’t blame them for everything.

I’m trying to acknowledge a justified and legitimate frustration, not discourage everyone from focusing on the real source of the problem.

While I agree that those hoarding wealth and power are the primary target, a lot of boomers keep voting for fucking fascists and refuse to acknowledge the leopards eating their faces.

Recently, my Steam shader processes have gobbled up every scrap of my excessive 64GB of RAM and 16GB of swap until the executioner kills it… or kills system monitor or btop or whatever I’m using to monitor or document it like a bloodthirsty monster.

I would also be surprised if the cost of production, now using cheaper ingredients and far more automation, hadn’t also decreased.

I’d be more likely to believe that his staff posts things and he’s only somewhat aware of what it means.

They want a presence on your phone, collecting any data the phone OS allows. They want to send you notifications. They want to prevent you from exerting any control over the experience - you can’t block ads for an app as easily as you can for a webpage… and if you help anyone else mess with an app, you are literally committing a felony.