TehPers

Not the original commenter, but that looked like sarcasm to me.

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.

Ditto.

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.

I swear I’ve seen an ad on it before, but I may be misremembering. Either way, I haven’t seen the text in ages anyway, so it doesn’t bug me much.

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.

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.

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).

Yep, I’ve been gifted it once. I wasn’t really sure what the point was though, did it actually mean anything relevant?

My favorite was a doctor who told two separate people in my wife’s family to apply tiger balm to the affected area until the pain goes away. After a second diagnosis, the first issue turned out to be an issue with the growth plate in their wrist, and the second issue was a broken leg. Both required surgery.

Doing just about anything that isn’t going to the first doctor would have been a more productive use of time. At least a crappy chatbot could tell them to use tiger balm right away without leaving the house.

Because US politics might actually become less about who gets the most likes on social media. Look, I don’t know, but I can say after our previous presidency that the platform can’t be entirely beneficial to the US.

Yep, bias exists everywhere. There’s no avoiding it. Reddit does have the benefit that biases tend to change from sub to sub though. Lemmy instances that I’ve seen (not defederated ones) tend to hold the same FOSS bias, but the intensity of it varies from instance to instance.

This is one of the reasons I like what Beehaw does. Your options are upvote, no vote, and report. Anything worthy of a downvote is worthy of a report.

Agreed, feels like the vast majority of people here are FOSS enthusiasts, which isn’t a bad thing necessarily if you align with them, but definitely a bias and could put off people who genuinely don’t care about FOSS or tech in general.

Are there any good non-Apple equivalents for health tracking? Something that does pulse-ox for example, but isn’t stuck in the walled garden.

We’ve been trying to contact you regarding your car’s extended warranty.

Used exa on Windows despite the bugginess (there was a PR making it work on Windows that I’d cargo install directly), and I’m glad to see it forked and in active development. These days I use nu and its ls command, but I would highly recommend exa for people using more standard shells.