• 0 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2023

help-circle

  • I don’t subscribe to any streaming services. I have vinyls and tapes. If I want to listen to music on the go, I use my walkman with music I’ve recorded from vinyl or, in very rare cases, YouTube.

    My 9 year-old has a walkman too and it’s the greatest thing ever. She doesn’t have a smartphone, but the walkman enables her to listen to her own mixtape when we’re traveling. She loves it.

    Actually, I’ve seen quite a few people with feature phones around lately, a walkman would be perfect for them for the same reason.

    Also, making mixtapes is still as great as it was back then. A playlist is not the same, not by a long shot. I made one for my little sister recently and it was all kinds of fun to make sure both sides were filled, that the mood and energy was cohesive, that it was tracks I genuinely believed she would enjoy but also tracks that I knew she wouldn’t seek out on her own. (Fuck algorithms for recommending music — they won’t challenge you or surprise you.)

    Edit: Also, releasing on cassette isn’t even that new this time around. For instance, all of Mac Miller’s stuff has been available on cassette for at least a few years. Like, check out HHV’s listing of cassettes: https://www.hhv.de/en/records/catalog/filter/tape-D2M74N4U9 and https://imusic.dk/exposure/8138/kassettebaand has a surprising number of metal albums on cassette.








  • I’m a big Mega Man (mostly Classic) fan. I think MN9 was judged way too harshly. It’s not a bad game in its own right, not markedly great either, but certainly a passable and enjoyable one nonetheless.

    People were hoping for another Mega Man X but of course it was never going to be exactly that. They need fangames and ROM hacks for that, not someone who could lose pretty much everything (job, work, money) if they stray too close to Capcom’s IP. I don’t know exactly how much Comcept promised and how much was hype built up by fans, but somewhere along the way expectations became misaligned and people were pissed and disappointed.

    But yeah, going into it without any big expectations certainly helped me enjoy it.






  • I have no idea how accurate this info on FindLaw.com is, but according to it, you don’t need a lawyer in small claims court (in the US). And according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_claims_court there are many other countries with similar small claim courts: “Australia, Brazil, Canada, England and Wales, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Greece, New Zealand, Philippines, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Nigeria and the United States”. I know the list of countries is not even close to covering a large amount of Steam users, but I suspect that us Europeans are covered in other ways, so there’s that.

    The Wikipedia page also mentions the lawyer thing, by the way:

    A usual guiding principle in these courts is that individuals ought to be able to conduct their own cases and represent themselves without a lawyer. Rules are relaxed but still apply to some degree. In some jurisdictions, corporations must still be represented by a lawyer in small-claims court.

    And I don’t think you need to sue Valve in the US. I think they’re required to have legal representation in the countries in which they operate, which should enable you to sue them “locally” in many cases. Again, not an expert, so I’m making quite a few assumptions here.



  • If, for example, I want to return a game in accordance with the rules and they won’t let me, I’m not gonna lawyer up and sue them from the other side of the Atlantic.

    While supposedly being a lot cheaper than litigation, arbitration isn’t free either. Besides, arbitration makes it near-impossible to appeal a decision, and the outcome won’t set binding legal precedent. Furthermore, arbitration often comes with a class action waiver. Valve also removed that from the SSA.

    I’m far from an expert in law, especially US law, but as I understand it, arbitration is still available (if both parties agree, I assume), it’s just not a requirement anymore [edit: nevermind, I didn’t understand it]. I’m sure they’re making this move because it somehow benefits them, but it still seems to me that consumers are getting more options [edit: they’re not] which is usually a good thing.



  • Enterprise licensing for self-hosted setups is priced per chunk of 64 GB of RAM in your cluster. I.e. if you run Elastic on 2 machines of 32 GB RAM each, you pay for 1 node. It sounds like there may have been some poor communication going on, because they definitely don’t base the pricing for self-hosted setups on the number of employees or anything like that.

    They’re also not super uptight about you going over the licensing limit for a while. We’ve been running a couple of licenses short since we scaled our cluster up a while back. Our account manager knows and doesn’t care.



  • I think they vastly underestimate how many things Meta tracks besides ad tracking. They’re likely tracking how long you look at a given post in your feed and will use that to rank similar posts higher. They know your location, what wifi network you’re on and will use that to make assumptions based on others on the same network and/or in the same location. They know what times you’re browsing at and can correlate that with what’s trending in the area at those times, etc.

    I have no doubt that their algorithm is biased towards all that crap, but these kinds of investigations need to be more informed in order for them to be useful.