Crucial and Samsung have good reputations.

If they exposed the specific reasons for each rating, that would expose how arbitrary it all is.

It also would have been perfectly fine to name the company in the headline. There is plenty of room for it. But that’s Business Insider for you.

However, I have a strong suspicion that video game subscription services will end up following a similar trajectory to TV/movie streaming services at some point… Gamepass doesn’t really have any major competitors, and has been priced very aggressively in order to build market share, and it reminds me a lot of Netflix in its early digital stages.

Netflix pricing has always had a lot of pressure on it because the company has no product diversity. All Netflix offers is Netflix, so all of its revenue comes from there. Meanwhile, MS has Office as the world’s default productivity suite, and it rakes in billions from corporate Windows licensing and cloud services. As of about a year ago, gaming was actually less than 10% of their annual revenue. So they can support narrow margins on Game Pass pretty much indefinitely. And they are motivated to do so as the heavy underdog to Sony, whose consoles consistently outsell theirs by a ratio of about 2:1.

The issue with the donation has multiple stages. Stage 1 was the donation itself. Stage 2 was the intellectually insulting way that Brendan Eich defended his actions. Stage 3 is the negative impact that Proposition 8 had on California for many years, during which time millions of dollars in taxpayer money was wasted on legal proceedings to walk back the amendment banning marriage for people who dared to be of the same gender.

And we did actually hear a lot about the people who donated millions to Proposition 8. There was a lot of coverage of the millions that Mormons donated to get this type of marriage banned. It was a political decision that haunted the LDS church for years. Example 1, five years later. Here’s some more coverage from just last year. We’ve been hearing about those people for years. Because California remembers the damage that they wrought.

Looks like they’re using a bullshit excuse to funnel people into their mobile app.

There’s always been a sociopolitical rift between artists and the corporations that hire them. The corpos would like nothing more than to send the hippies packing, and the corpos are the side with the money and the lawyers.

It begins with things like book covers and movie posters. And at some point, AI is trained on animation as well as artwork. Individual actors become created by AI, voices included. Feature film CGI sequences get produced by digital brains. It will be rough at first, but less and less intervention will be needed as the training models are refined, until it gets good enough to satisfy the suits and their bean counters.

Popular music as we know it will probably also come under threat. Various types of writing will also be tested. Anything that an AI can be made to sufficiently emulate is going to be tested by someone who wants to make more money – or pocket more of the dividends instead of sharing it with stakeholders with a pulse. “Made by people” becomes a rallying cry for the creators who push back.

If I recall, it was a ghost town because Google was very stingy with its invitations. I don’t know if they were having problems scaling, or if they were trying to generate hype. But progress was so slow that Google Plus was unable to reach critical mass.

Reddit was the front page of my internet for about 15 years. It’s felt like breaking up with an abusive partner. I get by now on a mixture of Lemmy and Discord. I also check out Apple News and Google News, but it seems like the bulk of the content is behind paywalls these days. On the bright side, I’ve found a new hobby as a visual novel developer. There’s suddenly so much more free time to try things like that when I’m not surfing Reddit all the time.

I think Lemmy and other federated social platforms of this type will really take off when the mobile apps start popping up. I just hope that the moderation tools can keep up with the influx, and that people will have the appetite to donate to keep these instances running.