I’m actually OK with games costing a bit more to sell if they cost a lot to make; god knows, the devs deserve to get paid properly. But, one, that money won’t actually make it to the devs, and two, any time Randy Pitchford is for something it’s really hard not to automatically be against it, on the assumption that he’s so consistently wrong about everything, and just such an unbelievable piece of shit, that just assuming he’s in the wrong is the safest bet.

Seriously, why do they let him talk? The man is a walking PR disaster.

Then again, we should all be asking how the hell he’s not in jail for possession of child porn, so I guess this is a pretty minor thing in comparison.

Audiobookshelf for audiobooks, calibre-web for ebooks. Don’t try to get it to get one thing that does both well, you’re better off with two solutions that are both better at their respective thing.

So, from what I’ve read, and you’re welcome to correct me if I’m wrong on any of the facts here, your DAO operates using a governance token that can be traded on crypto markets.

If that’s the case, those are just grey-market voting shares. All you’ve done is create a corporation and sell shares, while avoiding all of the legal protections that would be afforded to your shareholders if you actually went through the process of creating a corporation and holding an IPO.

So, based on those facts as I understand them, I guess I’d say I have two problems.

1. Voting power decided by buying power is about the most undemocratic system possible short of autocracy.
2. Obfuscating the purpose and structure of your organization to either intentionally or unwittingly dodge regulations that would protect your shareholders is not a great look.

I’m a little confused on this point. I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all. It’s some sort of proprietary (edit: apparently open source) peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation? I’m not really familiar with this project so I’m certainly not trying to defend anything, just unclear as to why people are calling it a blockchain project specifically.

Edit: OK, after some more digging I see what people are talking about. The project itself isn’t blockchain based, but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.

Who are definitely real people and not his sock puppet accounts.

Jesus Christ, he’s still alive?! I haven’t heard that name in years.

For those not blessed with the knowledge of our divine Lord and saviour Derek Smart, God’s gift to fame designers, oh boy, grab your popcorn, this is going to be good.

And by “good” I mean that whatever Derek has come up with will manage to be the most objectively terrible version of that thing possible, and he will aggressively defend it as the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of everything, ever.

Actually, it’s fairly likely that the UK is getting the better end of this deal.

First off, the UK is a net importer from the US already. So there’s no reason for Trump to even be chasing after them for a deal in the first place. This whole thing is supposed to be about wiping out the US’ trade deficits, but the US already runs a surplus with the UK. So why is this their first big “success”?

Second, the UK have been desparately trying to write new free trade agreements since 2016 and Brexit. They’ve been trying to hammer something out with the US for years, but neither side could agree on terms.

It’s very likely that what happened here is Trump needed a win, heard that the UK were eager to make a deal, and just told his underlings to get it done (this idiot can’t make it through a security briefing unless they break out the crayons, there’s no way he actually reads these deals), and with the sudden urgency from the White House the UK were able to get through some terms the US had previously resisted.

Of course, it’s possible the UK got ripped here as well. Like I said, they’re badly in need of new trade partners after they fucked their sweet deal with the EU. But the fact that they haven’t signed anything with the US previously, despite the urgency, strongly suggests that what they were being offered before wasn’t good enough.

It’s weird, I could have sworn we negotiated a trade deal with the US back in the nineties, and then renegotiated that same deal about eight years back. Who was the president back then? Oh, right…

Fair enough. If your family are all tech savvy enough that that’s a good solution for them, then congratulations, and I’m jealous.

I like the idea of decoupling from the US. I’m concerned by the idea of putting “economic growth” (which usually means growing the wealth of the wealthy) above everything else.

What we need is to grow our economy from the bottom up, but doing that involves making moves that work against the interests of the wealthy.

Counterpoint: I can access my friend’s Jellyfin servers, and they can access mine, without anyone else in the world knowing what the fuck we’re doing. Saying “It’s necessary” always begs the question “Why did you make it necessary?”

No need to abandon all the user-friendly aspects of a self-hosted streaming platform. Just use Jellyfin. I switched to it from Plex years ago and have never looked back.

Current polling still shows that only 25% of Albertans would vote to separate.

Smith, I think, knows this, and I don’t believe she actually wants a referendum to happen. I certainly don’t think she wants one to pass.

Much like Boris Johnson attaching himself to Brexit, Smith likes the way that supporting “Albertan Sovereignty” gives her an enemy to constantly rail against and blame every problem on. If Alberta seccedes, suddenly all those problems become her problems.

Transforming a province into an independent nation would be an absolutely nightmarish task, and every new problem, every compromise would be hung around your neck forever as a result. Again, look at Brexit, only a thousand times worse.

Smith, I suspect, wants the appearance of fighting for Albertan Sovereignty, but not the reality.

A question I have about this setup, because I’ve been contemplating out myself: If all the traffic flows through the VPS, I presume that will count against any usage limits / cost per GB with the VPS, right? Have you found that to be a problem with large file transfers or video streaming?

No. I have zero interest in your apologies. Not you, not any American whose first instinct is to tell us how sorry they are. I’m sure you’re all wonderful people, but we’re well past the point where that matters.

I never, ever, want to hear the word “Sorry” from any of your lips while I’m living with the reality that people I love might die to American bombs and bullets. I am not obligated to assuage your fucking conscience by dignifying your apologies while you all sit around hanging your heads in worthless shame.

We do not want or need your apologies. We want your rage. Get angry. Get out in the streets. Fucking do something.

And when Trump is gone and every last fascist has been hunted down and your government is run like an actual democracy, and your voters have learned how to value and respect friendships with countries outside of your own… Then you can come to us and say sorry.

I’ve been running Seafile for over ten years. They released version 12.0 just last month. I’m really not sure why people have this impression that it’s not maintained.

Seafile updates slowly because it’s very much intended as an enterprise product. It has minimal bells and whistles, but the core functionality is reliable and works well. It’s more of a BlackBerry than an iPhone.

In the side by side tests I’ve seen it syncs a lot faster than Nextcloud. I keep my entire documents, downloads and picture folders synced there across three different machines, nearly 300GB of data in total, and I can wipe my laptop and sync all my files back in under and hour. File transfers basically cap out at network speed, even with large numbers of small files. I’ve used the desktop client, the drive client and the mobile client and never had any complaints with any of them.

Sidenote, if you create an account on their site they’ll give you a pro license for up to three users, free forever.

The documentation is a bit of a beast, but worth reading thoroughly. Setup is a little fiddly compared to Nextcloud (that’s a major turn off for a lot of people, understandably so). If you have questions message me and I’ll try to help. If you go with the free pro license, be sure to enable offline garbage collection, it’ll help keep your storage use under control.

Anyway, I really like it, works well for me. Definitely worth trying out.

Speaking as a Canadian… Yes, we know.

You guys had the most trustworthy, most reliable ally ever. The faith and trust between Canada and the US was legendary.

That’s gone now. It’ll be a century or more before you can ever rebuild that trust.

And you threw it away for this drooling moron to play tinpot dictator.

Was it worth it?

Oh, for sure, it’s absolutely possible that Trump does not understand the need for refinement infrastructure, or simply believes that its a simple problem that will solve itself. Given his approach to trying to rehome US manufacturing its clear that he has basically no understanding of industry realities.

I want to note on the “mineral deal” thing that access to rare earth minerals has nothing to do with China’s ability to constrain their supply to the US, because getting rare earth minerals is actually relatively easy. They’re found all over the Earth, although some areas do have better naturally occurring concentrations than others. Mostly, though, it’s just a matter of finding a nice large swathe of land that you can easily strip-mine.

The problem is refining them. Digging up a bunch of soil and rock is easy, getting the trace amounts of rare (hence why they’re called that) earth minerals out of the soil and rock is really hard. While it’s true that China does dominate in rare earth extraction, it really wouldn’t be all that hard for other countries to catch up to them on that score if they wanted to. But the reason China controls the worlds rare earth supply is because they also dominate in refining, which is extremely difficult, technically complex, and not easy to replicate due to the highly specialised nature of rare earth refineries.

Trump can get access to all the unprocessed rare earth minerals he likes, but it won’t solve his current problems. First off, even if Ukraine were at peace tomorrow it would take most of a decade to prospect those mineral deposits and begin extracting them at scale. But even then, it doesn’t solve the refining problem. You’d just be selling the raw deposits to China so that they can refine them and sell the refined product back to you at a huge profit.