Random Dent

Ah I hadn’t heard of Picard before, I’ll take a look!

Personally I just use Nicotine+ to grab whatever I want as a .flac, then use beets to organize them.

I switched over to IVPN, they seem pretty right-on and no scandals that I know of so far.

I switched away from Mullvad because of that. I waited a bit for their response before deciding, but I found their eventual response pretty wishy-washy. Their counter-argument was:

It was a private donation from Daniel the individual. Mullvad or its parent and sister companies did not endorse and were not involved in it.

But his personal money still comes from the company, so if I continued to send Mullvad money I’d know it was still indirectly going to the Örebro party, whose leader called immigrants “parasites”, which (as an immigrant myself, albeit not to Sweden) is not acceptable to me.

Canada is like that. IIRC the maximum fine you can get for piracy is $5,000, meaning it’s pretty much not worth it for any company to come after you. If you live in Canada and use a VPN you’re pretty much golden, but I also know people here who don’t even bother. They get a letter once in a while from their ISP and they just ignore it and nothing ever happens. One of my friends called their ISP to complain and told them to stop sending letters, and they said sorry they have to but if you seed a little bit less then they won’t have to send them lol.

That’s always been my position, IMO - it does have some genuinely useful applications, but we’ve blown it up into this huge thing and tried to shoehorn it into everything, and it’s polarized people into these “AI in everything” and “AI in nothing” camps.

TIL that the CEOs of AMD and Nvidia are first cousins once removed.

That’s what I assume - like if your studio is going under anyway and MS is the only one to make an offer, you might be able to keep the place running for another year of so, give everyone a buffer and maybe finish whatever you were working on. I would figure it’s not a long-term strategy though, more just slowing the collapse.

I would make a very rare exception and pre-order only certain titles, like if there was a new Civ Game, cause I knew I was going to get it immediately anyway and sometimes they’d let you pre-load.

But with the new Civ being nearly $170 CAD for the full version, I’m not even doing that anymore. I look forward to the real Civ VII release date of sometime in the 2027 Steam Christmas sale lol.