That misses the point. The Last of Us Part I is Steam Deck verified, but it consumes far too many resources.

Do note that I’m not just talking about the Deck. Some hardware can run it smoothly, some can’t, but in all cases, it’s an insultingly bloated pig of a port.

Verified or not, I hope it doesn’t require a year’s salary of hardware and a nuclear power plant to run, like the first PC port did.

Long ago, I solved all of the ways in which PHP made me sad…

…by abandoning it.

Nowadays we have better languages that can do the job at least as well.

Do these accept cash, or only ATM cards? (The latter would link your transaction to your bank account, of course.)

What do they give? A printout of a wallet address?

Also, units of fun earned while watching other people play.

One nice thing about an arcade is that you can see regular people (not streamers/professionals/actors) interacting with a game, and notice subtleties that aren’t represented in a list of bullet points or a trailer video.

I think the quote was, “I’m an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git.”

Affiliate links are not business partnerships. Does Heroic have anything more than that with GOG?

EDIT: The answer is no, GOG is not partnered with Heroic Games Launcher.

I would think at least some of it was for historical preservation. The prerelease demo is neither the same as nor included in the released game. Voices are different, for example.

Technically not snake oil.

I think it’d be great to live in a world where this technology required warrants, transparency, and other oversight from the start.

Me too.

It boils down to the fact that this technology is widespread, and will continue to be widespread regardless of my actions

That same reasoning has been used innumerable times throughout history. I suppose each of us must decide whether we think it holds water. It reminds me of an old adage: No single drop believes it is responsible for the flood.

Predator does way more than just ALPR.

I know. I looked it up. I mentioned the name not because I think it represents what it does, but rather to point out that it will affect how people feel about you and your work, even if in subtle, imperceptible ways. It’s up to you to decide whether you’re comfortable with that.

I don’t have a specific suggestion, but here is what comes to mind:

• Violation of human rights and civil liberties in order to gain power over others is always justified with noble-sounding excuses like protecting people and property. The reality does not match the claim.
• Once violated, privacy of information is almost impossible to restore.
• Anything that can be abused to someone’s gain will be abused eventually, if not immediately.
• Relying on a benevolent gatekeeper (even yourself) to prevent abuse of your tech will eventually fail.
• The name V0LT Predator evokes the feeling that it’s something the world needs less of, not more.

Whenever I find myself on a fine line like the one you’re trying to walk, I consider whether I’ll look back on my life and be proud of what projects/causes/changes to the world that I advanced with the time and talents that I have.

Look for an instance with these qualities:

• Does not use Cloudflare or any other large content delivery network. Instances that use thse allow the CDN to monitor everything your read and write on Lemmy, which can reveal a lot about you even if you haven’t used your real name. Cloudflare can then correlate that information with your other browsing habits, and possibly your real identity, because they operate as a middleman for a huge number of popular web sites.
• Maintains a sizable local image cache. Images served from other instances instead of your local one can be abused by remote parties to track what is viewed on Lemmy with your IP address (and sometimes your browser signature). Alternatively, you could block off-site images using a browser extension, but that would mean not getting to see as many pictures.

I think you mean across the internet, but I get your point. You might want to state that in your post.

Its file sharing feature works between any supported devices, including phone-to-phone, and yes, it is intended for connections across a local network.

Why go through someone’s service when you could go direct?

https://kdeconnect.kde.org/download.html

[Citations needed] or it didn’t happen.

I think this mindset is naïve and unrealistic.

People were saying the same thing for decades in response to a small minority warning about government surveillance, often dismissing them with labels like “paranoid”. Eventually, Snowden came along and produced the citations, at extreme risk to himself and his loved ones. It’s an anomaly that they were ever revealed at all.

History is replete with examples of bad stuff going on for ages before irrefutable evidence of it became widely known. In general, if something can be abused to someone’s advantage, it will be, and likely already is.

There’s precious little extra information that a “nefarious” instance can harvest that any basic web scrapper can’t.

You have a point there, but consider also that effective web scraping uses significantly more resources than having the data you want handed to you. Monitoring Lemmy through federation would be much more efficient.

SimpleX has some interesting ideas, but also some shortcomings for people who want a practical messaging service. For example:

• It is funded by venture capital, which calls into question its longevity, and if it does manage to stick around, suggests that it will be leveraged to exploit people once the user base is large enough.
• Its queue servers delete messages if they are not delivered within a certain time frame (21 days by default). Good luck if you take a vacation off-grid for a few weeks.
• No multi-device support. (This means a single account accessed concurrently from multiple independent devices.) The closest it comes is locally tethering a mobile device to a computer.
• Establishing new contacts requires sharing a large link or QR code, which is not always convenient.
• No support for group calls.

I look forward to seeing how its design decisions develop in the coming years, but outside of a few niche use cases, it is not a suitable replacement for Matrix or Signal.

I’d suggest Mint. It’s Ubuntu minus Ubuntu-specific annoyances, so it’s right in your zone of familiarity.

Also, the Mint maintainers have a sound exit strategy (Linux Mint Debian Edition) in case Ubuntu ever goes too far off the rails.

God bless the reverse engineers and emulator developers.