scheeseman486

What I've seen (that doesn't outwardly appear astroturfed) is largely people getting their feelings hurt because of an opinion they've expressed about the qualities of project they're involved in, or just a user/fan of. Their dislike of the Linux kernel or the relative insecurity of desktop Linux projects in general tends to piss people off, even though the negative points they make are invariably detailed and well communicated.

Because of that, instead of refuting the actual argument being made, discussion always swings towards their tone.

What it is, exactly, that is objectionable? Are there personal attacks being made? Yeah. Towards the GrapheneOS developers. It's something I've seen for myself and if you get into these threads on HN early, you can see how the comment deletions pile up. When they say they are the target of organized disinfo and targeted attacks by malignant third parties, it's pretty easy to believe them. It is in the best interests of many, many very powerful people that GrapheneOS is destroyed.

No one who takes infosec seriously cares about GOS' PR filling their communication with tummy rubs and head pats. Infosec is a nightmare, adversaries are everywhere, all anyone should want to know is whatever is as close to the truth as possible.

> Calling all custom ROMs insecure and claiming to be the only one is IMHO 'drama'.

No, what it is is true. microG lets you de-Google a phone, but the resulting phone is provably less secure. If stating the truth causes "drama", the problem isn't the person or entity saying the true thing. If that truth shakes people, if it upsets them, they should look into the problem that truth has revealed (not created, as truth isn't something that exists only after someone speaks it) rather than blame those who are speaking it.

Can you provide evidence that GrapheneOS is less secure than LineageOS or other custom ROMs? Because GrapheneOS (and even leaked documentation from commercial adversarial phone hacking tools) provide a hell of a lot of evidence that it is, in fact, considerably more secure than just about every other phone OS in existence.

> Most of their criticisms are valid, but they seem to be absolutely unwilling to make any compromise at all.

Making no compromise to security is the entire point of it's existence.

Now ya' talkin'

It's easy to get lost in arguments where analogies are used. They're almost always terrible and are the death of nuance and detail. Fuck car analogies, a car isn't a video game console.

Sony host a massive, massive marketplace. That's where their monopoly lies, they have end to end control over distribution of not only their games, but anyone else who chooses to publish on the platform, in addition to control over how those games are played and on what hardware.

This hands them an enourmous amount of power over the third parties that make up the majority of software sales on their store. The way they've constructed their ecosystem and services also greatly disincentivises it's users from switching. Games aren't cross-compatible, so buying in for another console means they have to either keep their console (which they could otherwise have sold) or give up their library. Even keeping both means having to choose for one online service over another. These kinds of decisions might not matter to someone over a certain socioeconomic status, but it still matters to many.

I don't think that a market of it's size should legally be allowed to exist. It's exploitative by default and I would be supportive of the EU recognizing Sony as a "Gate Keeper" under the Digital Markets Act and taking appropriate regulatory action.

Except for the software ecosystem which is the main driver of revenue for consoles and exists largely to support the sale and distribution of products from third parties, all of which is centrally controlled by the platform holder.

Someone else in the thread made the comparison to fuel, I'll go with that. Last time I checked, there was no such thing as petroleum DRM.

Where can I buy an aftermarket optical drive and motherboard?

Valve pivoting away from MacOS is a consequence of choices Apple has made for their platform, many of which made it a more hostile place for Steam to exist. This is baked into the long standing Apple model of software distribution, where API and architectural changes inevitably obsolete software with Apple usually providing only a limited time window for cross compatibility.

You can still play your purchases on an operating system that isn't actively fighting against you running them.

Volkswagen cars aren't a platform that fosters a billion dollar marketplace of third party sellers that contribute the bulk of value delivered by the product.

Physical PC games weren't great in the 2000s. Online activated serial keys, optical disc based DRM that caused problems during both the 9x>NT and XP>Vista transitions, the only thing that made PC gaming tolerable for me was gamecopyworld. Valve (eventually) offered something better than that.

PC games can still be physical. Burn some discs or copy the files onto a USB stick and put it in a box. I think it's crazy that boutique companies like Limited Run Games completely avoid the platform when it's the only one left that isn't actively hostile to the core principles of the company. Admittedly PC does have the image of being a digital distribution only platform these days, but it's illusory and breaking that illusion is a marketing problem.

People were pretty pissed about the xbox layoffs, it's just that things move fast and this was the next thing.

Their plan is to seemingly comprehensively test MTE on the Pixel 11 to see if it's usable for them. I'm not sure how that's "problematic", in fact it seems like it's exactly what they should be doing.

Their real focus is on their Motorola partnership, anyway.

All absorbed light gets turned into heat, infrared or otherwise (I'm not sure why you brought up IR?); solar panels catch some of that spectrum. I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make here, particularly given the second paragraph seems to contradict the first; "extra heating effect" (from where does this "extra" come from?) vs "you could say they move heat if you like" which yeah, not really about what I like, that's just how physics works, can't get any more fundamental than the law of conservation of energy.

You said that AC/heat pumps "generate" heat and if they were powered by fossil fuels, in an roundabout way they do. But if they're driven by solar, there's no long-trapped energy being expelled and therefore no "extra" energy added to the system beyond what the sun is providing.

They don't generate heat in the sense that heat is generated from nothing. If the AC is being powered by solar, then the energy that is powering the heat pump has already hit the earth and has become part of that system. The energy that would otherwise have hit the roofing and been radiated is more focused around the radiators, but as soon as that dissipates into the air the difference to the local climate isn't any different.

If the roof was white and reflective then a lot more of that light would be reflected, but most roofing isn't.

Your logic isn't really compatible with the laws of thermodynamics.

> Only obscure titles get truly lost. They are obscure for a reason.

They can be obscure for many reasons, only one of which are it's quality as a piece of art.

There was an album, "Begin", released by a group of session musicians calling themselves The Millennium. Released in 1968, it was a borderline experimental sunshine pop rock in the vein of Sgt. Peppers and Pet Sounds, with songwriting and production in the same ballpark. It completely flopped, having landed a bit too late, and made virtually zero impact on music history. It only started to get rediscovered by the public after some CD releases in the early 90s, but that mostly got it out of total obscurity into being an extremely deep cut.

But it's fantastic and in spite of it being out of it's time when it released in terms of genre, did a lot of cool experimental stuff that makes it sound shockingly modern. It's seen some greater recognition in recent years, but we're in literally another century. I found out about it through a Spotify recommendation and based on searches, so did a lot of other people. When it got recommended to me in the late 2010s the play count for most of the songs was in the low thousands, but it's gotten a bit higher now.

The album didn't get re-issued because of it's quality, but because CDs were booming and labels were looking for any old junk. There was also a resurgence of interest in baroque pop in that era. If the circumstances weren't just right, it would never have been re-issued, it'd likely have continued to be completely forgotten and I wouldn't have ended up listening to it and loving it.

> This is arbitrarily narrowing the definition of market as far as possible

No it isn't, it's literally a market.

Dominos pizzas aren't created and sold by third parties. If you're going to make a comparison, try something doesn't so obviously miss the point (though if you want to talk about commercial food supply chains and how that's become almost entirely monopolized in the United States...).

The rest of your argument is basically "the law says so". Not an argument I'm interested in discussing since I don't care. I explicitly want legislative changes.

Let's look at Merriam-Webster

'1: exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action specifically : exclusive control of a particular market that is marked by the power to control prices and exclude competition.'

That definition doesn't define any boundaries on to what market a company has control over. A hardware platform like Playstation only has one store, run by the company who sells the platform; explicit control of the particular market, that market being Playstation games. By going digital only, they now have total command of supply. They also explicitly deny competition from participating. They even have a hand in pricing the games sold on the platforms, an ability they're able to leverage because they hold a vertical monopoly.

The issue isn't me or anyone else defining the word "monopoly" too broadly, it's that the frog has so thoroughly been boiled on what we once considered monopolies that we can no longer see a monopoly for what it is even when it's self-evidently obvious. I agree that anti-trust enforcement has become lax, I'm not arguing that it hasn't... but it shouldn't have. It's been about 30 years of letting big tech and media conglomerates do whatever they want and it is time for that to stop, and not just for video games.

For fair amount of time Giant Bomb was owned by CBS and during that time I saw plenty of emulators getting used.

Yeah this is the thing. Everyone seems to be forgetting about economies of scale.

A surprising amount of newer-ish DVD players will play H.264 off a DVD just fine and AVCHD is essentially Bluray formats and file structs on a DVD.

It's interesting how attitudes towards this are so different across industries. Jeff Gerstmann is a fairly well known and well connected video game journalist and he straight up does streams where he plays emulators using romsets clearly downloaded from the internet.

They were using the word correctly, "monopoly" doesn't only mean greatly dominant player in an open market. Current consoles are by definition vertical monopolies.

> It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.

Iran–Contra? Their cyber espoinage tools getting swiped? The self-admission from the US administration that the CIA failed to properly recognize and prepare for the tactics used in 9/11, in spite of ample forward warning?

Like most intelligence agencies, their unaccountable power often gets mistaken for actual intelligence. That power makes them dangerous, but it doesn't make them smart.

> glass-walled skyscrapers really aren't complicated either

Until they become a focusing mirror that turns into a gigantic magnifying glass, see: the Walkie Talkie building. Evidently, glass buildings are hard enough that even with hundreds of engineers, there still ends up being second order effects that are unaccounted for in many designs.

Building a skyscraper with glass windows means understanding the physics of light, geography, the spin of the earth and it's rotation around the sun, materials science etc.

Understanding why pain happens is what allowed for anesthesia and modern medicine, which massively improved the quality of life of our species. Did we need to figure out how to do that? Sure, in the same way we needed to figure out how to create fire, or craft tools.

A stylus is crafted, paper in manufacturered. I suppose you can rip off some bark and scribble onto it, but what are you writing? Words. Do you know every word ever? Do you have comprehension of the meaning of every word? Building a structure of stone requires knowledge, otherwise it'll fall down and the knowledge that allows for that was accumulated over thousands of years. There were people who mastered pottery and nothing else, people who could do a little bit of everything but were master of none.

We only ever think we understand, we never truly do. There's infinite complexity to the universe we live in and there always has been, the illusion of simplicity is a false construct we create to feel more comfortable about our existence.

> You are making benchmarking WAAAY more complicated than it has to be. We're talking about some dude considering a switch to Linux, but isn't sure the performance is on par. Just load up your game and hit the benchmark button. No sane and rational person is going to be clowning around with driver revisions or regedit, because those types of people think that is more fun than playing the games.

Benchmarking is uncomplicated in the sense that you can press a button and watch the pretty things on-screen and get it to spit out a number; but is your room a little hotter than usual today? Was something downloading in the background? Did you have a transient network issue that caused some process to stall and eat some CPU time? Is one of your fans running a little slower than usual? Did you wait for the precomputed shaders to fully compile? What about the ones Steam supplies?

It's not about fun, it's tedious work. But without proper controls in place, data is just noise.

Just like there's LLM-automated vulnerability fuzzing, there's LLM-automated decompilation. Compilation is no longer a meaningful way to obscure code.

It's features work fine without Steam on Linux.

I don't think I was and I think that you're focusing so strongly on a perceived strawman rather than the actual topic is an admission that you're just projecting.

You were talking to an audience of tech nerds, as was the original blog post we're all discussing. All of your counter-arguments in you original post were appeals to that base and merely suggesting that Gmail users outside of the Hacker News sphere exist doesn't really change that.

Given that, bringing up the needs of grandma and her family photos is a non-sequitur. We clearly aren't talking about that, more considering the wider effects of a tech industry having centralized control of and gating access to customer data and processing and the ways that has caused a lot of exploitation and enshittification.

But clearly you're avoiding talking about any of that, which is why the only thing in my post you engaged with is a bunch of handwringing that I misrepresented something you said (I didn't).