I feel like this comment is ignoring a whole bunch of cat TikTok. Plus a whole bunch of grocery haul Youtube, for good measure.

I mean, canonically they aired a live birth and then just had a 24/7 babycam. I'd watch.

What I don't get is how they got through the 5-15 period, because there are plenty of real world parents that tune out for that already.

Wait, we don't?

I mean, I was there when the discourse around Diablo 1 was "it's not a real RPG, it's mostly just Gauntlet with loot", so "not ARPGs" and "Diablo-likes" have been in my lexicon from the ground floor.

Why is it a problem, indeed? You're the one taking issue with someone pointing it out, even though it's a pretty uncontroversial observation.

I mean, there's more: there's the NFT-like marketplace of trading cards, which itself is a spinoff of their monetized tradable asset marketplace, some of which is based on user-generated content. There's the ongoing acquisition and monetization of mods. There's their original plan for "Steam Machines" being basically a spec sheet and a certification badge they would sell to hardware manufacturers. And this is more insidery, but they are definitely not beyond sending marching orders to indie devs on how to spend their budget to get store placement...

Some of those I think are good ideas, some of those I don't like at all. But they are definitely crowdsourcing effort in order to run the largest online gaming store on PC with a skeleton crew. That is not really up for debate. I don't even think Valve would argue that's not their approach.

And it is, very much, a techbro-y mildly abusive gig economy thing they do. They pretty much invented it. Valve is one of the earliest digital transformation media startups, right there with Amazon itself and very much a trendsetter for the Spotifys and Netflixes. This isn't an attack, it's a thing that happened.

Nobody thought Disinformationandpropagandabotprogrammer would be a good governor of California, but he ended up being more moderate than expected.

I think you're misrepresenting the point. Valve's hypothetical point, which would be "do DISPROPORTIONATELY better IN MY PLATFORM if you want a better public image", but also my point. Valve has a looong history of moving key parts of their platform to either automated or crowdsourced solutions, with very mixed results. The greenlight process, the review process, the curator system, the controller mapping library... The techbro approach isn't about "don't fuck over the customer", it's about "use gig economy processes to run the service and its features with a skeleton crew".

That's a thing. You can like their approach to customer support practices and still acknowledge that is a trend.

"The prefix "from" is how you know a family comes from the old middle class. Rich families used "the", as in "Jane TheCeo or Peter TheChairman."

"Working class families just don't get a prefix. That's why there are so many James Burgerkings out there".

Oh, you guys are thinking small.

Peter Executive (a vassal of Andy CEO). Mary Anesthesiologist. Alice S. Theorist. William Credit Authorizer. James M. Researcher.

The worst part is that, fun as this is, I'm having flashbacks of every time I've said something along the lines of "Matt from HR" and realizing that's how that has always worked.

Oh, no, I'm mostly joking. It's just... celebrity "lifestyle brands", you know? Or maybe you don't know. I'm certainly the type of person that buys "deodorant" brand deodorant, I may be the outlier here.

By the power of a quick search, I'm told that 3.6 OZ is actually 102 grams, while 3.3 OZ is 93.6. 96 grams is 3.38 OZ, so one has to assume they're starting from grams and rounding down (even though they'd be justified to report 3.4 instead, honestly). It's not fluid ounces because that'd be somewhere in the region of 5, again according to search.

So most likely, it's a typo of some sort, or proof that non-metric systems should be banned by all humanity. This is also how European basketball players grow several centimeters when they start playing in the NBA.

Interestingly, pictures of the product online alternately show 104 and 96 grams. Volume wouldn't have to change, because you can just pressurize the can less to include less product. Oh, and yet another search tells me the reported net weight should not include the weight of the propellant.

Also, what are you doing buying Beckham's spray deodorant? Multiple times? I mean...

Hm. I wonder who is "unhappy", exactly. The industry is super reliant on Steam data across the board, I can't imagine Ubi's own people would love to lose the ability to track competitors, even if they also buy estimates from other sources.

I can see how they'd be annoyed that their more console-focused games and games that have a chunk of players on non-Steam platforms, like Outlaws look worse when the only info people see is from Steam. I don't know that the answer is to get Valve to close API access as a matter of policy. I personally would love to get similar info from Sony or Epic, which I bet would make Ubi look at least a bit better right now.

Of course, from Valve's perspective there is no downside here. Right now I bet they have a rep telling Ubi "hey, you want to look good for investors? Prioritize Steam sales to look better on public data", which is exactly the kind of mildly abusive crowdsourcing techbro stuff Valve loves to do.

I feel the way you construct your hypotheticals makes my point for how this issue is perceived among... let's say "privacy preppers" and how it differs from the mainstream.

I mean, I sure hope your brave freedom fighter is putting more dilligence on operational security in other areas than they do in data security, because man, they certainly aren't trying very hard if they're being thwarted by accidentally uploading their super secret freedom fighting documents because they were storing them in a OneDrive-enabled "My Documents" folder. In this scenario, do they have their name and address stitched on the outside of their freedom fighitng uniform?

For the record, Microsoft has no way to access my local stored data. They at best can access my synced OneDrive folders... which they don't. It's an annoyance that they insist on attempting to have OneDrive active by default, but they don't do that to mine my medical records, they do that in a fruitless attempt to sell me a OneDrive storage subscription. I am as afraid of Microsoft perusing my hard drive as I am of DropBox, in that both sell services that will store my data somewhere else, both are probably are doing a better job of securing it than I do myself and I use neither.

Now, on what level of privacy and security is reasonable, I will clarify that I don't think physically securing my files is unachievable. On the contrary, it is trivial for me to rip all my hard drives off my devices, put them in a box and bury them in my basement, where my Fallout New Vegas save games will remain fairly secure for the foreseeable future, free from judgemental Microsoft employees.

What I'm saying is that is not a reasonable or practical expectation of privacy because it also renders my data unusable. Like me being listed on a phone book, the state of my data privacy is always going to be some balance of functionality, convenience and security. What balance makes sense depends on what I do. Your fictional tech-illiterate freedom fighter sure would benefit from very secure data, at significant convenience cost. Many a careless normie is happy to let Google know every time they have a bowel movement for the convenience of their services. Most people will be somewhere in the middle.

But it's the government's job to set a floor to that range. To establish the rules for a) what data it's not fine to solicit, b) what the default proesses for soliciting and opting in and out should be, and c) how to properly handle that data once it's been collected. That is a legitimate, structural issue that we all should care about, reagrdless of our personal needs for privacy and security.

Ah, if privacy was violated and nobody heard it, did it make a noise and all that.

Again, you're off topic on this one, so this is a bit of a non sequitur to the objections I proposed earlier. I'll say that I don't typically assume major illegal behavior unless I have at least a hint that it's at play, or at least a reason to attempt it. And yes, there are plenty of ways to "catch them" in that companies don't steal data to bask in the glory of data, they take it to sell or otherwise profit from it.

I feel like the implications of "privacy" have gotten entirely out of proportion or any practical application, to where it's become less a concern about being profiled or annoyingly targeted for marketing and it's become more a matter of abstract principle. Not of whether the data is somewhere or being used for something, but about whether it could have been in some parallel reality, where nothing short of making the data physically impossible to access is a valid outcome.

I suppose that's why every now and then you get a thread along the lines of "can you believe people used to dox themselves and put their name, addresses and phone numbers in a book they sent out for free?" and so on.

It's a weird conversation to have in these terms, because yeah, no, I agree with you in principle: you should know what data is going to be collected and be able to make an informed decision about it with opt-out as a default. Agreed there. But there's a magnificent leap from there to "Microsoft is probably secretly accessing your cloud stored data for shits and giggles, and even if they aren't you wouldn't know if they did, so they're probably lying about it", which is... not a thing, not how this works and would lead to the mother of all fines, immediately followed by the mother of all lawsuits.

You don't need that scenario to take issue with the choices and policies MS actually deploys. Like, out in the open. They tell you about it. You don't need the conspiracy theory to have a stance on that. They are not particularly subtle.

Most normal people will sign off all of that if asked nicely and given the lightest of dark patterns on a consent form. Pretty sure Microsoft legal would at least lightly discourage colluding to perform the largest violation of data privacy regulations in human history when a simple settings toggle buried in the privacy section would achieve pretty much the same result. I don't know what they do at Microsoft, but I assure you with no doubt or ambiguity that the average software company won't leave the toilet seat up without first asking legal if it's a GDPR violation.

Still off topic for the thread, though.

Every single time anybody has had to take remote control of a work computer while I watch feels like a violation and/or some sort of supernatural haunting.

Looking over someone's shoulder while they clearly engage the interface wrong I have a much easier time doing. It's the disembodied element that gets me.

OK, but that's not what the thread is about. The thread is about the OP arguing that end users shifting away from Windows is not a solution because companies and other users who interact with them are using Windows and that's a vector that will compromise their data.

Which is not really a thing, as far as I can tell.

Also, no, it's not "pinkie promise", their data protection obligations are regulated (differently depending on where you are, but they are) and even in scenarios where you're solely relying on their terms of service they may be liable if they are negligent about it. I don't trust MS. I don't trust any company. I do business with them and if they bone me as a partner or a customer I have whatever recourse my government's regulations grant me.

I don't need to be a digital prepper with every single picture of my dog secured by my own hand, personally. And even if I chose to be that guy, as the OP says, it's a systemic problem. I shouldn't have to rely on my own tech skills to secure my information, this should be a regulated space where normal people don't need full end-to-end control to be kept reasonably safe. Yes, even when using Windows, or Android or whatever other service corporations are providing to them.

You keep mixing up concepts, though.

Yes, MS embeds OneDrive into its OS in annoying ways. OneDrive sucks and that sucks.

But that's not a security issue when you work with a company that uses Windows to handle your sensitive data. If the company you're working with is using a default Windows image that accidentally stores your sensitive, legally protected records in a default OneDrive that's not a Windows issue, that's an issue with giving your medical records to what seems to be an IT department run by somebody's cousin who knows computers. If they aren't savvy enough to avoid that issue they're not savvy enough to keep your data secure in a Linux system either. And, once again, there is definitely no indication that OneDrive is systematically not secure or that data stored in it is being manipulated or accessed by Microsoft for commercial purposes. I mean, it's widely used professionally, so I imagine if that was the case Microsoft would get sued to hell and back.

Does that mean I like Microsoft's choice? Nope. I loathe OneDrive. As I kept telling MS in their annoying user surveys when I was forced to use it for work, it is the one piece of software that cost me the most hours of productivity, bar none, and I dropped it like a rock the moment I didn't have a contractual obligation to use it.

But holy crap, that absolutely isn't a valid reason why it'd be a security OR privacy problem that a vendor you use is running Windows.

And that's the thing, you don't need to equivocate, make up stuff or jumble concepts like this to point out the ways in which Windows' implementation of things is sub-par. There are plenty of legitimate examples. Granted, may of those examples are definitely not dealbreakers and plenty of Windows users are aware of them and don't particularly mind. Just like many MacOS users or Linux users don't mind their own quirks. But the quirks and shortcomings do exist. You don't need to make them up or be hyperbolic about them.

This just makes you sound paranoid and kind of unreasonable. It makes it easier to dismiss the legitimate arguments because man, a lot of that is clearly not a reasonable argument, so why would you assume some of it is?

Not a pop culture thing, it just sounds... self deprecating, I suppose.

Like, was that his legal name? Because man, that's ballsy.

Anyway, I mostly agree with you, I am more at home here than on all the microblog platforms. I do feel Bsky does a better job at being that than Masto. Masto is insular and man, I hate to say it, but the way its firehose "Home" feed works convinced me that you need at least some options to handle post sorting beyond raw chronological. I don't hate it, but if I wanted a social network entirely predicated on arguing about Twitter I'd be on Twitter (and for people in denial about the popularity of their open source alternative we have the Linux forums here, so I'm good there, too).

Holy crap, that was a hard pivot. Is your neck OK?

I mean, Bluesky is a private company, it seems to be incorporated in Delaware as a PBC and they claim it is owned by members of Bluesky itself. It's unclear if that means Dorsey divested from it when he left the board or not, and since they're not a public company they don't have an obligation to say. You know as much about Bluesky as you do about Valve or Ikea.

I don't actively support them or root for them, but it's not a particularly huge mystery, and my paticipation on it doesn't imply my moral support to their board members (who are public and known) or their investors.

You can bridge them together and call it a day. Otherwise, presumably because a bunch of the interesting people who left Twitter are there and not on Masto.

I mean, don't ask questions you don't want to hear the answers to, I suppose.

It would be preferable for Europe overall for Romania to be, say, not as corrupt, and consequently not as poor. It'd make Europe stronger.

Oh, agreed. And much as the EU has taken that position fairly actively, that's ultimately an issue of internal Romanian politics and why it's worth being at least vaguely aware of what they look like, at least around elections.

I'm not even sure that I'm not taking an atlanticist position here. At this point in the game I'm not even sure what that means anymore, because for the second time in a decade we're in a scenario where the US isn't "atlanticist" as a matter of policy. I don't take issue with a defense pact among the surviving liberal democracies, it's just hard to visualize what that looks like if the US is not on the list.

Short term it looks a lot like the EU, assuming their liberal and social democracies hold up. Longer term I have no idea. A larger thing involving parts of Asia and South America but not the US and Israel? I certainly hope that set of alignments isn't put to the test militarily, but who the hell even knows anymore.

Oh, and for the record, I am not Romanian myself and, at least as far as civil society goes, I'd dispute that the East isn't being ignored, beyond using Orban as a culture wars icon.