To be clear, I'm not against piracy as a whole, but at its core if a potential buyer pirates something, then that is an opportunistic loss, and thus there exists a value to what was pirated (or rather the sale of it).
digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.
There are a number of ways to price digital content. You could price it based on cost of production split among an estimated number of sales plus a premium, or based on what others in the industry price it at. Regardless, to the creator of that digital content, each sale of that content has value, and while the copy itself might not, the transaction does.
Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale.
I "demoed" Minecraft before buying it, and you can bet I recommended it to others as well. There are plenty of instances where piracy can be a good thing, however I was never trying to state otherwise. In my original response, I had called out that piracy by people who would not otherwise purchase a product was less clear. There are also people who "pirate" content they've already purchased, and those who pirate like I did to demo a product before buying it later. In your case, you also have a justification for it when it comes to music. However, the point was that piracy can be harmful (as is shown by my extreme example of everyone pirating something), and therefore the sale of the content being pirated has value. They aren't charging just because they feel like it, they're charging because they're selling a product, and the product had a cost to produce, even if it was mostly just an initial cost.
The debate around digital product ownership is an important one, and if you're voting with your wallet by pirating the content, then by all means I won't stop you. However, the idea that you aren't "stealing" because you pirated digital content rather than purchasing a license to it is a distraction from the real problems of digital ownership that the article covers extremely well, most of which stem from lack of control over your copy of the product. Using piracy to try to effect change makes sense, but only because that piracy can harm the creators/distributors. If it didn't harm them, then they wouldn't care about the piracy and wouldn't be interested in changing.
Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.
If you pirate a movie, they haven't lost anything.
Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value? Otherwise if everyone pirates the movie, then they lose nothing and have no incentive to enforce that people purchase it before watching it.
There are a lot of ways to justify pirating digital content. Pretending as though digital content has no value is not one of them, unless you really and truly believe that creators of digital content deserve no compensation.
This post seems to be largely about the value of product ownership and the harm that DRM brings to the end user, and does a great job at making that point. However, the title seems to have caused a different discussion to spawn in the comments about whether piracy of digital content is justified. This is just a casual reminder to read the article before replying in the comments.
If everyone who would buy a digital product pirates it instead, then it's clear that they have been harmed by the piracy. This whole "own" vs "rent" vs etc argument is completely tangental as is the definition of "steal", unless pedantry is the purpose of this post. It's clear that piracy can be harmful.
"But they lost nothing physical" is an extremely shallow argument that ignores that not everything with value is physical. If I copy your idea as-is and make a product out of it before you, you can always come up with new ideas, right? It's not like you lost something physical. Clearly you haven't been harmed, right?
If someone who wouldn't purchase a digital product pirates it, then it's less obvious whether the creator got harmed by it. Also, to be clear, the discussion over digital ownership is still important.
Case and point? If they're not being compensated, they have no obligations to anyone. "Free testing" isn't compensation unless they plan to monetize it later using improvements from that testing.
The spotlight lock screen also has ads, but you can set it to any other lock screen to disable it. There are also ways to keep spotlight and disable the ads, and the ads are at least hidden behind a mouse hover and not immediately visible by default.
I have not seen start menu ads aside from the default bloat, but I also replace it with Start11 so I rarely see the default start menu anymore.
Still, if I'm going to own a $200 license for an operating system, I want no ads at all.
Some friends and I once went to visit one of their families for spring break back in college. We made the mistake of starting a server.
The spring break ended. We left the room maybe twice a day to eat food, around 7pm and 4am. The factory grew. I think there was a family there, I can't remember though.
Been using Freetube, and I even get watch history on it without needing to enable a "use my watch history for advertising" setting. No issues so far, but I don't watch in higher resolutions so no idea if that would cause any issues.
Someone else already mentioned LibRedirect, I have that setup to link to Freetube.
Given Discord's history with certain kinds of content being shared on it, it's hard to fault them for doing this. But I agree, most FOSS enthusiasts are looking for something a little more private and in their control.
For very simple backends, it's very unlikely you'll get any significant number of bugs with an experienced team, and if performance isn't really a concern, then Rust being faster isn't really relevant. For anything more complex than a simple backend, I'd agree that Rust becomes a lot more appealing, but if you just need to throw together something that handles user profiles or something in a very simple manner, it really doesn't make a difference what language you do it in as long as you write a few tests to make sure everything works.
My favorite tests are the ones I don't need to remember to write. I haven't needed to write a test for what happens when a function receives null in a while thanks to TS/mypy/C#'s nullable reference types/Rust's Option/etc. Similarly, I generally don't need to write tests for functions receiving the wrong type of values (strings vs numbers, for example), and with Rust, I generally don't even need to write tests for things like thread safety and sometimes even invalid states (since usually valid states can be represented by enum variants, and it's often impossible to have an invalid state because of that).
There is a point where it becomes too much, though. While I'd like it if the compiler ensured arbitrary preconditions like "x will always be between 2 and 4", I can't imagine what kinds of constraints that'd impose on actually writing the code in order to enforce that. Rust does have NonZero* types, but those are checked at runtime, not compile time.
they actually have to reference the function by string name.
This is true of a lot of the opt-in language features though, isn't it? For example, you can just make an .Add method on any IEnumerable type and get collection initializer syntax supported for it, even as an extension method. The same works for Dispose on ref structs I believe, and I remember there being a few other places where this was true (GetAwaiter I think?).
I think one of the things holding back some of the more impactful features we could see in C# is the need to also update the CLR in many cases to handle things like new kinds of types, new kinds of expressions, etc. TypeScript has the benefit of being executed by a dynamic runtime, but C#'s runtime is unfortunately statically typed, meaning it also needs to be updated with the language. It's also used by multiple languages, for what it's worth.
That being said, if they redirected some of their efforts towards improving the CLR as well, I think they could put out all the cool features they've mostly sidelined, like DUs and some form of their extension everything proposal.
I essentially got Starfield for free (bought a laptop and it came with a code). For $0 it was worth every dollar spent, but I do feel bad for the people who pre-ordered.
I can't imagine why someone would pre-order a game like this one though, these devs don't exactly have a great track history. At least for the people who pre-ordered Starfield, we know Bethesda will at minimum deliver a game lol.
This highly depends on what it is you're trying to build. If it's a simple CRUD backend + database, then there's really no reason to use Rust except if you just want to. If it's doing heavy computation, then you'd want to benchmark both and see if any potential gains by writing it in Rust are worth the effort of using Rust over Node.js.
Practically speaking, it's really uncommon to need to write a backend in Rust over something like JS or Python. Usually that's only needed for high throughput services (like Cloudflare's proxy service which handles trillions of daily requests), or ones performing computationally expensive work they can't offload to another service (after benchmarking first of course).
Even if you take my spending (which was in the hundreds) on Warframe into account, it was still worth the thousands of hours I put into the game. It's really just a matter of whether you enjoy the game enough to justify the spending.
I'd be curious to see evidence that it's possible to simulate an entire universe. Considering a universe is infinite, it would take an infinite amount of memory to store the state of everything in the universe, let alone an infinite amount of compute to calculate steps in the simulation. I guess if you don't simulate things that aren't being observed (which I believe there is support for), there's still a theoretically infinite number of observers.
I think the reason people refer to LLMs as generative comes from the term GPT, which is short for generative pre-trained transformer I believe. At its core, it generates new outputs based on previous ones, and its purpose is to create new content. There are plenty of models that are not generative, like dedicated classifiers (think sentiment analyzers, models that try to identify what an object is, etc).
To be clear, I'm not against piracy as a whole, but at its core if a potential buyer pirates something, then that is an opportunistic loss, and thus there exists a value to what was pirated (or rather the sale of it).
There are a number of ways to price digital content. You could price it based on cost of production split among an estimated number of sales plus a premium, or based on what others in the industry price it at. Regardless, to the creator of that digital content, each sale of that content has value, and while the copy itself might not, the transaction does.
I "demoed" Minecraft before buying it, and you can bet I recommended it to others as well. There are plenty of instances where piracy can be a good thing, however I was never trying to state otherwise. In my original response, I had called out that piracy by people who would not otherwise purchase a product was less clear. There are also people who "pirate" content they've already purchased, and those who pirate like I did to demo a product before buying it later. In your case, you also have a justification for it when it comes to music. However, the point was that piracy can be harmful (as is shown by my extreme example of everyone pirating something), and therefore the sale of the content being pirated has value. They aren't charging just because they feel like it, they're charging because they're selling a product, and the product had a cost to produce, even if it was mostly just an initial cost.
The debate around digital product ownership is an important one, and if you're voting with your wallet by pirating the content, then by all means I won't stop you. However, the idea that you aren't "stealing" because you pirated digital content rather than purchasing a license to it is a distraction from the real problems of digital ownership that the article covers extremely well, most of which stem from lack of control over your copy of the product. Using piracy to try to effect change makes sense, but only because that piracy can harm the creators/distributors. If it didn't harm them, then they wouldn't care about the piracy and wouldn't be interested in changing.
Ditto.