Linux is a prime example of quality that isn’t paid for. No one forces you to pay for Linux, you can of course support the maintainers and donate, but it’s not a for-profit endeavor.

Advertising, by design, is intrusive. It’s fighting for space in your mind whether you want it to be there or not. We can shelve that topic because it’s a side item here.

The difference between making a big deal of nothing and being completely on-topic is that the article itself goes into the responsibilities of publishers and platforms, how they have a responsibility to make the internet a better connected, more human-friendly place. You don’t see massive sources of misinformation locking down their content, but you will definitely see potentially credible sources of information doing that. It’s counter to the premise of the article entirely.

I don’t believe it’s myopic at all to point out that it’s backwards to expect the internet to thrive when quality information isn’t readily available. Sure you can use a different search engine, seek out free content and resources, all of which require an in-depth dive to find anything worthwhile.

The topic of this post is why the internet is dying, and while I recognize people need to make money to eat I think these news media sites are more than capable of providing for their employees with or without a paywall. Megacorps like Google, Meta, and Microsoft having control over what gets the most clicks is definitely contributing to rapid enshittification. Especially when they’re sending most traffic to articles that either have a paywall or a steady feed of bullshit.

The paywalls restrict the flow of quality information, which happened before LLMs started scraping the web. If you don’t have money to spend on all of these news subscriptions you aren’t allowed to educate yourself. It’s class-based gatekeeping, plain and simple. They could tactfully include ads, but no one ever tactfully includes ads. They introduce pop-ups, fullscreen banners, interjections every 25 words, or the best is the articles that are just slide shows that take you through 30+ webpages.

Edit: I’d also like to point out that this article already has an ad at the beginning. So they are still making ad revenue even if they aren’t giving you complete access.

Laughable that as the article begins to talk about publishers the Atlantic paywall shows up. Definitely not another reason why the web is dying.

American here, proud to see we started a trend. (And that’s pretty much the only thing to be proud of as an American)

At every single company I’ve worked for this has been the accepted form of opening an email. There are hardly any circumstances you should be using “Dear (insert name here),” in a work email.

Our eyes also have the ability to desensitize to higher levels of light input, so the sun at high noon will be really bright but it’s the same as if you were in the complete dark for an hour and walked out into a brightly lit room. The eye gets used to the bright light. The same thing happens walking inside a low-light house from a bright day, it will take a minute to adjust but once you do your eyes have a completely different perception of light intensity.

With the solar eclipse, even 1% of the sun showing still lights an area greater than indoor lighting or perhaps even outdoor lighting, so we perceive it as still somewhat bright. This is sunset-level sunlight but the source is above instead of behind the horizon.

Or Ed is maintaining the servers full-time and doesn’t have time for your desktop/laptop issues

At what cost though? Like a single parachute without an automatic release system costs hundreds, if not thousands. You multiply that by 150 and it’s infeasible. Now include an automatic deployment system, and we’re talking tens of thousands per unit. Not including maintenance and repairs, long-term storage costs, the added weight on the plane. All these costs would be added to passenger tickets at a markup, so that $450 flight across the country is now a $700 flight. The risk also still remains because of depressurization issues, even if you make it to the surface your blood might boil in your body and still cause you to pass.

Logistically, plane accidents that result in loss of life are so rare that it would make more sense to equip every car in production with ejector seats then it would to equip every plane seat with automated parachutes.

I literally thought about this on my flight a couple weeks ago, if the plane loses power in the air most people in the plane are just gonna go down with it. I imagine most if not all passengers have no idea how to properly operate a parachute.

So Ubisoft has just pulled the server plug on The Crew rendering the game useless for everyone who bought a copy? Obviously a ploy to get people onto the new entries but the only issue is that since it’s not an offline game, they have rendered a good inaccessible. This was probably in the TOS, but even so I think one could argue that is a terrible position to put a customer in who may have spent more money on DLC and likely spent a lot of time on progressing in the game.

Arguably, if Ubisoft is going to make profit off DLC, they should be forced to at the bare minimum either refund a fair amount of the purchase back to the users or allow the DLC to be used in a later release, along with giving pre-existing players a discount towards the newer entry. That’s how you treat your customers right.

Pretty damning for the current state of AI, I’m just glad it’s not a hype piece like every other article out there. AI is nowhere close to the same thing as a useful tool, it gains much more from us than we do from it.

No corporation wants to support a progressive party. No one profiting from corporations want to support a progressive party. There goes 99% of the wealth in America.

Yeah, but it could be they live in one of the states driving American inflation at a ridiculous rate and $6500 a month is barely enough to cover rent and bills.

There’s much more value outside of the screen than inside the screen. The internet is finally becoming less an escape from reality and more just an extension of reality. This feels very anecdotal, I wonder how much of this perspective just comes with age.

I love the quirkiness, the way it completely zones me out

Not only a late addition, but purposefully not clarified or explicitly stated at the beginning, or even at the end, of the article. This is like fine print, tucked into the content of the article so that you have to read the entire piece to get that information. Even then, if you are in the midst of the article you might not even consider how it impacts the framing. They also use distancing language there to avoid as much as possible connecting themselves to ownership.

Is Wired owned by Advance? The answer is yes. Condé Nast is a subsidiary of Advance. Advance has a 30 percent stake in Reddit.

This is why they call it “the Internet’s Greatest Authenticity Machine” because we know there’s nothing authentic about that cesspool. There’s even less authenticity behind a biased news article framing itself as disconnected from the subject. Not once do I see mention of Wired’s relationship to Reddit, if your owner has a 30% stake you should disclose that.

Edit: even more important is that Condé Nast itself acquired Reddit in 2006, which is where Advance’s significant stake comes from. Is that supposed to be inferred or understood prior to this article? News media needs to be accountable for this kind of reporting.

Who’s shorting RDDT?