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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 11th, 2023

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  • I’m kind of a generalist in terms of interest in the IT sector and have a surface level understanding of most things (professionally I’m just a fullstack webdev), one big crater in my knowledge is about how drivers work, really want to do something like this in my free time (next year because I’m pretty much drowning in tasks now). The closest (but still pretty far) to this I’ve done is write a small service that increases / decreases volume through pulseaudio based on ACPI events (windows tablet volume buttons weren’t working properly under linux).

    Reading my comment back, excuse my writing style (too many brackets lol).







  • I’m completely aware of the financial issues YouTube is facing, but they got themselves into this mess (and most other companies as well, who provide a service for “free”). They make users accustomed to a level of service, build a userbase and ride on investments with the expectation that they’ll figure out how to make money when they reach mass adoption.

    The fact that youtube premium took years to even conceptualize is a massive failure on their part. Or how 1080p+ video wasn’t a paid feature to begin with. Making your users get used to a level of service, then making their experience more miserable and selling a solution to the problem they made does not bode well with people who have been on the platform before “things turned to shit”.

    It also doesn’t help that the first course of action was to increase the amount of ads, increase retainment, “enshifficate” the platform in order to increase the time people spend on the site (=more ad revenue). Now I’m at a point that I can’t use YouTube without uBlock, sponsorblock, return youtube dislikes and Revanced (includes the latter two extensions for mobile), turning useless features off (or with the case of dislikes, back on) and stopping the bombardment of ads.

    Youtube premium would still provide me with a worse experience, so why would I switch? They should figure out how to provide people additional value for their money, and shouldn’t have accustomed people to a level of service that they 100% knew wouldn’t be sustainable.



  • The answer to your question is the indie market. Lots of unique ideas, ton of games that are a product of passion and not profit chasing.

    My personal recommendation because I don’t see it mentioned a lot is Pathologic 2. Product of decades of work and one of my favorite RPGs where every single choice you make does matter. It’s a pretty bleak and heavy game that has about a 30 hour runtime and it’s really stressful so it’s not for everyone but I personally loved it.








  • My problems with telemetry:

    Scope: if you provide a service which is a “wrapper” for doing other things, I do not want you to collect usage data. Example: an entire fucking operating system

    Opt-out by default (or completely unable to turn it off) even if the service or software I’m using is paid: I want to have the ability to say no. Communicate properly what you collect when I get access to the service, allow me to say no and don’t hide it in 300 pages long TOSes. I don’t want to become your free UX tester when I already pay for the service.

    Telemetry-driven development: I absolutely hate this both as a user and a developer. We see there are thousands of users using a feature, but it’s a low % in general, so lead decides we need to remove it from our product. I know that those x thousand people will be annoyed, and so am I when I’m on the receiving end of this.

    Another reason that is not universal but service specific is making decisions that purposefully keep you on the platform, over optimizing the interface for maximizing profit.