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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The tricky part here is that many of these reviews aren’t about how they feel about the game but rather how they feel about the developer or publisher, often based on wildly inaccurate speculation. Valve has a particularly tight rope to walk on this one because it does seem problematic to dogpile some game because of a perceived opinion that has nothing to do with the actual game itself.

    One possible solution would be to add a category system to reviews that let’s reviewers correctly categorize their reviews, purchasers exclude categories they don’t care about, and Valve only removes miscategorized reviews. Categories could be something like “game contents”, “game bugs/technical issues”, “drm”, or “publisher/developer opinions”. Maybe make an entry form on the review itself for each category and you can just leave any category you don’t care about blank in your review.

    This might also help solve one of the more long standing problems with Steam reviews which is that reviews of early buggy builds often linger long after those bugs have been fixed and can provide a somewhat inaccurate impression of the current state of the game.


  • There’s already a compatibility layer and it works really well. Most android apps run fine on Linux. The big problem is Googles security layer which is also what causes problems for alternative Android builds like GrapheneOS or PostmarketOS. That prevents you from running certain apps (mostly banking but notably also includes Google Wallet preventing tap to pay) on devices with unlocked bootloaders as well as Linux. Any non-official version of Android, or even an official version running on a device with an unlocked bootloader is going to have a problem.

    Beyond that having tried a Linux phone as of a couple years ago it had significant usability problems such as unacceptably high battery drain and the inability to receive push notifications when the screen was locked. Some of these issues may have been solved since the last time I tried it, but at the time the experience wasn’t one I would recommend to anyone nevermind the average person.


  • As always piracy is a symptom not the problem. People pirate when a) they don’t have enough money or b) the experience for paying customers is significantly worse than for pirates, or c) the price of services far exceeds their perceived value. Piracy was down for a while because Netflix and Hulu were relatively cheap (or free), ad free, and the economy was doing OK so most people had a little disposable income.

    Now that we’re in a recession that’s starting to look like it might turn into a depression and Netflix and Hulu (and others) have cranked the prices of their services up and stuffed them full of ads, yeah I’m not in the least surprised to see piracy surging. Every time you turn around there’s another email from some service letting you know they’re raising prices another couple bucks a month, and a bunch of people cancel their subscriptions and start sailing the high seas.


  • Keepass (and its client variants, like KeepassXC which is pretty great) is even more secure because there is no server, just an encrypted file you can store anywhere.

    And simultaneously less secure because it’s up to you to handle keeping your vault synced between various devices and most people are significantly worse at keeping systems secure than the professionals at the password managers.

    Self hosting a server of some kind or using something like Keepass on a single device (with offline backups) is the most secure option, but as usual with security doing so trades significant convenience for security. For most people who are uninterested in making sure their servers are kept up to date week to week letting professionals handle it is the better option.