Possibly, but in my view, this will simply accelerate our progress towards the “bust” part of the existing boom-bust cycle that we’ve come to expect with new technologies.

They show up, get overhyped, loads of money is invested, eventually the cost craters and the availability becomes widespread, suddenly it doesn’t look new and shiny to investors since everyone can use it for extremely cheap, so the overvalued companies lose that valuation, the companies using it solely for pleasing investors drop it since it’s no longer useful, and primarily just the implementations that actually improved the products stick around due to user pressure rather than investor pressure.

Obviously this isn’t a perfect description of how everything in the work will always play out in every circumstance every time, but I hope it gets the general point across.

Gotta love how they saved the literal slot machine for a minute in to the video so it wouldn’t be too obvious.

That’s definitely true, I probably should have been a little more clear in my response, specifying that it can run at startup, but doesn’t always do so.

I’ll edit my comment so nobody gets the wrong idea. Thanks for pointing that out!

To put it very simply, the ‘kernel’ has significant control over your OS as it essentially runs above everything else in terms of system privileges.

It can (but not always) run at startup, so this means if you install a game with kernel-level anticheat, the moment your system turns on, the game’s publisher can have software running on your system that can restrict the installation of a particular driver, stop certain software from running, or, even insidiously spy on your system’s activity if they wished to. (and reverse-engineering the code to figure out if they are spying on you is a felony because of DRM-related laws)

It basically means trusting every single game publisher with kernel-level anticheat in their games to have a full view into your system, and the ability to effectively control it, without any legal recourse or transparency, all to try (and usually fail) to stop cheating in games.

I find it indescribably funny that no matter what, every news site somehow manages to always put a mobile app install screen with the company’s product as the banner image for their articles, even in this case, when I think most people would have probably never even thought of Steam as a mobile app, only as PC software.

I’m not an expert on the process, but anyone making a custom repo should be able to store the F-Droid repo on GitHub.

It looks like you wouldn’t need to make the app open-source either, as it should be capable of just accepting an apk file. (and possibly auto update from any GitHub releases page, not sure on that though)

Again, not an expert, I haven’t made an F-Droid repo yet myself, so I may have understood something wrong, but it looks relatively straightforward according to their guide

This wouldn’t make it available to users through the default preinstalled repo in F-Droid (which is heavily privacy-focused and limited in scale) but it would allow any user to just click a link or scan a QR code to add your repo to their F-Droid app.

I’m not an expert on what automation options they might offer, but I know Aurora Store will essentially just pass through anything you do on the Play Store since it’s just a frontend, and for F-Droid you can host a repo where you place any updated APK to automatically make it available to anyone linked to your repo.

I know alternative payment options are probably a nightmare to properly set up and integrate, so it may not be worth the increased cut of revenue you’d get, but I’m really glad you’re considering it!

I look forward to trying the game when it comes out :)

I love this and I haven’t even used it yet! 😅

A few things:

• I love the idea of paying one-time to play offline, but it’s not currently very possible to do in-app purchases on a ROM like GrapheneOS, which you mentioned in the post as being something users (myself included) have. Will there be a way to pay outside of the in-app purchase dialogue to get access? (i.e. donate through bmac, then link account to app temporarily to confirm) I’d definitely like more of my money to go to you, rather than a play store fee.

  Additionally, will there be a direct APK download at all, or will it only be available through the Play Store? (obviously privacy-preserving frontends like the Aurora Store exist, but it’s nice to have an APK download too 😊)

• Thank you for making privacy the default setting, while still letting users share more if they want to. This is something I always love to see!

I’d 100% sign up for the beta right now, but since my GrapheneOS phone doesn’t have the ability to use the Play Store beta features, I’ll hold off on that so I don’t take someone’s spot :)

Whoops, no clue how that happened, fixed!

And when traditional AI programs can be run on much lower end hardware with the same speed and quality, those chips will have no use. (Spoiler alert, it’s happening right now.)

Corporations, for some reason, can’t fathom why people wouldn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars more just for a chip that can run AI models they won’t need most of the time.

If I want to use an AI model, I will, but if you keep developing shitty features that nobody wants using it, just because “AI = new & innovative,” then I have no incentive to use it. LLMs are useful to me sometimes, but an LLM that tries to summarize the activity on my computer isn’t that useful to me, so I’m not going to pay extra for a chip that I won’t even use for that purpose.

It’s generally not an accurate statement to say that piracy drives down sales, at least when you look at overall measurements. You’re definitely correct in assuming pirates want to support developers (and media creators in general) that they enjoy the works of, because pirates are by far the largest purchasers of content compared to traditional content purchasers

Gotta love this quote from the article: “piracy doesn’t mean a lost sale if the person pirating the game couldn’t afford it in the first place.”

I’ve seen this happen time and time again with people I know who simply couldn’t pay even a single dollar for a game, and had no other options available. They deserve to experience culture and entertainment just as much as the rest of us.