Ottomateeverything @ Ottomateeverything @lemmy.world

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Class struggle is race struggle and vice versa. You can't help or hurt all poor people without helping or hurting a lot of people of color and anyone who's paying attention knows that.

Yes, totally agree.

The rich and powerful disproportionately abusing the working poor doesn't inspire anywhere near as much righteous indignation as them disproportionately abusing people of color, even though the actions themselves are identical.

While I agree, I think this is where we differ. I don't think we should then just limit our "fighting back" as being about race. I won't be satisfied by this bill if all it does is makes sure that ISPs fuck over people in certain areas, but do it equally across races. ISPs could fuck white people harder so then it's not a race problem. Or they could fuck people of color slightly less, but still have drastically different pricing in Kentucky than in California. At that point race is no longer a real argument, but the class war continues and the problem still exists.

I just don't think we should reduce the arguments to an argument of race. While that may fire people up more in the current climate, it's narrowing the issue.

even though the actions themselves are identical.

If that's the case, than we can fight this as a class war and still solve the other issue. The underlying issue is class and financial fleecing, which is itself also racist, but solving the race problem doesn't solve the whole issue. People need to see this for what it is to solve it, and "distracting" away from the core of the issue makes it harder to solve.

Why not both?

Yes, but the racism is a smaller portion of the overall problem so labeling it as race discrimination narrows it. While it transitively is racist, labeling it as such narrows it to only a portion of the problem. It's unlikely the execs of the companies are saying "let's charge white people less", they're doing it by area and income. If that unintentionally becomes racist, going after them for racism won't get anywhere.

If two people in neighboring communities are paying drastically differently for the same service, but they're both the same race, there's still a problem but it's not racist.

We should be trying to just give all Americans equivalent internet options, regardless of race. The race part is just one piece of the overall problem and the outcome of of a different problem.

It came out in the past 15 years. Most "common" formats like png and jpg came out in the 90s. Others like tif, bmp, and gif are from the 80s.

So yeah, it is "new", it's just very relative.

"No one supports it" because support doesn't just happen overnight. These things happen slowly. Same way they did with jpg and png.

Sure, part of the "better" is the audiophile "better quality" thing. But the major point is that it's objectively a better compression. Which means less data needs to be transfered, which means things go faster. Sure people claim they "don't notice" an individual image loading, but you rarely load one image, and image loading is often the bulk of the transfer. If we can drop that by 30%, not only does your stuff load 30% faster, but EVERYONE does, which means whoever is serving you the content can serve MORE people more frequently. Realistically, it's actually a greater than 30% improvement because it also gets other people "out of your way" since they aren't hogging the "pipes" as long.

This is how every new thing starts though. You don't just get better standards overnight. Jpg and png didn't happen overnight either. PNG had this problem for quite a while.

It's not a problem with WebP. It's a problem with tooling that aren't moving forwards to objectively more effective formats.

While I agree cops looking for money to fund their departments is bad, people willfully endangering those around them is objectively worse.

Speed limits are put in place to keep roads safer. Tickets are a thing meant to incentivize you not to do the dangerous thing that can hurt those around you.

This is literally a tool to help you avoid said punishment, which assists you in doing the dangerous thing with impunity.

I agree cops can be bad. I agree they sometimes are searching for a problem. I agree they often cause other problems.

But speed limits literally and undeniably enforce safety. Something that allows you to circumvent them without recourse literally assists people in doing the unsafe thing.

Sure, cops can be bad. But speeding is unsafe and therefore bad too. It's not black and white.

You know how else you can stop cops from making this money back? Without assisting in dangerous road behavior? Literally obeying the fucking driving laws. They can't give you a speeding ticket if you're not fucking speeding.

I really don't understand how this shit is even legal.

"Tell me where I can and can't break laws that were literally put in place so I don't accidentally fucking kill someone".

It's literally built to help people avoid the punishment made to keep people from doing something that's literally dangerous to the people around them.

What do you mean? Is it a bad idea to prompt people driving vehicles moving over 70 mph as to whether there was a speed trap? But then how will the next people know that need to stop speeding for the next couple miles before they can speed again without recourse?

Seems like monopolistic practices rather than competing on services.

It literally is? They're literally not competing on services, they're competing via artificial scarcity.

This is the most asinine approach IMO.

"Let's release a worse product. Hey, no one likes it. Okay, let's spend money on games so THEY can essentially force people to use our software. Hey, still, no one really likes it. Okay, let's try to give away stuff for free. Hey, people use our thing for the free stuff but still no one likes it for any other reason."

They just keep spending money to up their numbers and their product is still missing features and inferior to competition. They spend big money on exclusivity, but that is only temporary - if that's how you're getting your customers, you're going to have to keep doing it forever to retain them. If people only use you for free stuff, you're just going to have to keep giving stuff away at a loss to retain them.

This model is not sustainable. You're not doing anything that aligns value with your customers besides just throwing free stuff at them. That's not a business.

What's especially sad to me is they could literally have just spent that same money to improve their launcher and have an actual product. Instead they've invested in temporary stats. They're essentially bankrolling other devs on games with temporary popularity instead of in their lifelong product.

Using other games exclusivity as sway into your ecosystem only works when you have a good product the person would be interested in but they haven't seen it yet. EGS is currently something people are essentially coerced into using but no one really gets any real value out of it other than "well I couldn't buy this game anywhere else"

I don't know about any of the others, but at least Rocket League and Fall Guys are great examples here.

Both games already existed and were extremely successful on Steam.

Both games got bought by Epic and we were told they were going to get continued support.

Both games were then REMOVED from Steam.

Both games then started suddenly having objectively worse monetization. Both communities grew a pretty negative opinion of the changes.

Both games are objectively less popular now, though at least some of this is just age/fads.

But both games are just objectively in a worse spot than they were before. All Epic did was make them objectively worse.

Lots of phone/laptop repair shops have to dispose of batteries anyway, some will just take them for you. May want to call ahead and such though. I've had some luck with best buy etc too.

Yeah, I feel like tons of people hearing about this and looking up ad blockers is going to be miles more of a problem for Google than the minority of people using ad block previously. This is a problem Google is unlikely to solve ENTIRELY and it seems that the attention that this has brought to the fact that ad blockers exist is likely bigger than any other gains they've made along the way.

The only way this could really be considered to have backfired is if people were stopping using YouTube entirely, which isn't really happening.

I wouldn't even call that backfiring. If those people were using ad block, how much were they contributing to YT anyway? Watching videos doesn't get Google anything besides server costs unless they manage to sell an ad to that user. You could argue usage statistics help them, but they have no competition to way that against either so even that is moot.

Honestly, it probably always looks like that. That one just seems to look worse because the flash seems to be coming from the bottom left and it highlights how ridiculous it really looks.

I'm sure Google isn't surprised either. And if they get everyone moving to the same fewer and fewer ad blockers, they have fewer and fewer to work against.

If you're an engine developer, it's a reasonably common problem.

If you're a game developer using a cross platform engine, it's pretty uncommon, as the engine developer has already accounted for most of it.

If you're somewhere in the middle, it's probably somewhere in the middle.

It surprises me how many indie devs avoid some of the higher level / more popular engines for this reason alone. But I assume they just must enjoy that sort of stuff much more than I.

I was writing up a pretty similar comment at the same time... I totally agree here.

I'd say they were more killed by Chromebooks than anything else. They were both cheap, generally small, and fulfilled approximately the same use cases. Chromebooks basically just did what ASUS was trying to do but better, and with more choices in models.

The one thing is finding 7 inch Chromebooks was harder, they landed more around 10 or 11 so they were more after the larger EEEs, but IMO that was what killed them.

I'd agree with most of this, but I don't think I'd argue they were ever replaced by anything else, just that the use case is too narrow.

Tablets are generally larger, have flappy keyboards if keyboards at all, are way more expensive, don't have a built in mouse and often don't support mice well, and they run a mobile OS, not a desktop OS. They are very different products solving very different problems. If you argue netbooks were just for playing movies, sure, but that's not how I viewed them at all, especially since there were portable DVD players in the same form factor available for many years before netbooks existed. If that was the use case, there'd be no reason to run windows or have a keyboard.

I don't see how they replace a large phone at all - a large phone is a much smaller screen and fits in your pocket. And makes calls. And is a touch screen. And has mobile internet access. They're no where near the same thing.

Ultra books I think is the closest "replacement" here, but I'd argue it's more of an evolution and/or a hybridization with a regular laptop.

I'd actually argue Chromebooks were the killer here. They still take notes well, are portable, cheap, have first party mouse support, are generally smaller and lighter weight, and are more type-able than both netbooks and tablets.

I'm really unsure of how this will play out. Gen Z seems to be way more okay with stuff like this and I think it's just a general mindset shift that I don't really see changing. Gen Z tends to constantly share their location with every acquaintance, on snapchat, etc all the time.

As much as stuff like this freaks me out and seems many steps too far, younger generations don't, so I feel this is going to get worse over time, not better.