I’ve been seeing a fair amount of discourse lately that Gabe Newell might be the only reason why Steam is a benevolent monopoly, and it’s why I only buy games on Steam when there’s no other option, when they’re not otherwise available on GOG and Itch.io.

Because Steam says for now that they’ll have a failsafe in place to make our games playable even if the company goes under. Steam doesn’t nickel and dime people, for now. Steam is doing important work for Linux, for now. Our profiles are fun and customizable like the internet used to be, for now. Steam’s DRM is so light it hardly exists, for now. But what’s going to happen to our huge libraries when Gabe retires or dies?

I hate that I even have to think this way, but I for one don’t want to have all my eggs in one basket, especially when the competitors’ policies are doing more to protect users right now.

I feel like in the 2000s before the monetization of the internet became the norm, people were more able to share their art and writing in forums. There were entire sites dedicated to grassroots art-sharing without any profit motive.

Yes, grifters exist, but we’re all so cynical these days, not just at the corporations, but everyone. I miss people just sharing things with each other without any suspicion that dark money is involved.

I looked at the blog and it looks like a mere $182 changed hands for the month, and I assume most or all of it goes to Gardiner Bryant and not the OP. Is that comparable Instagram “influencers” hawking Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop in a paid sponsorship deal? Maybe this is just a person who was excited enough about a new console that they decided to write about it, and honestly, good for them.

I’m so happy we’re finally getting a handheld that’s genuinely portable! I watched a disassembly video and really appreciate that the battery isn’t glued down, too. And have you all seen gameplay videos? Ocarina of Time 3D at 7x native resolution looks about as close to those Unreal 5 Zelda tech demos as we’ll likely ever get.

I skipped the Nintendo Switch line, but I’d eventually pick the Thor up to replace my 3DS. (If I don’t hold out for an Ayn Freya 😅 .)

Bangs are helpful, but my problem is that I previously used search engines to find informative articles and product suggestions beyond the scope of Wikipedia, and so much of that is AI slop now. And if it’s not that, Reddit shows up disproportionately in search results and Google is dominated by promoted posts.

Search engines used to be really good at connecting people to reliable resources, even if you didn’t have a specific website in mind, if you were good with keywords/boolean and had a discerning eye for reliable content, but now the slop-to-valuable-content ratio is too disproportionate. So you either need to have pre-memorized a list of good websites, rely on Chatbots, or take significantly longer wading through the muck.

I’m part of the problem. I now use Le Chat instead of search engines because AI destroyed search engines, thanks to all the content mills that make slop. I wish search engines just worked, and it’s a classic example of capitalism creating problems to justify new technology.

And I wonder if it’s just AI. I know some people moved to backing up pre-2025 versions of Wikipedia via Kiwix out of fear that the site gets censored. I know now that I’ve done that, it’s a no-brainer to just do my Wikipedia research without using bandwidth.

I am so glad I had the foresight to use yt-dlp to back up most of my favorite videos. Not all of them, but I just thought we’d get more time.

But yeah, I knew this would happen. The age verification thing was really controversial, so Google would have had to expect that people would try to find other ways to access YouTube. They won’t stop here and will go after Deno and NewPipe.

I’m pretty much done with YouTube. It’s just not what it used to be. All my favorite YouTubers are either gone, have changed for the worse, or are on Nebula. It’s mostly just slop, and I won’t miss it.

Same thing with the idea of “use a monopoly growth model”. What is the alternative? Actively making a product worse because everyone else is? Because that is collusion.

This question really highlights the danger of the growth-at-all-costs model in forcing every company to race to the bottom when one company does. The future of the human race may one day depend on killing technological progress and emphasizing stability over profits.

A huge problem with America’s and many other economic systems is that companies are incentivized to undercut the competition, use a monopoly growth model, acquire or push out competitors, and then screw the customer when the competitors are either gone or irrelevant.

Without guardrails, the bubble will burst and some other “affordable solution” will just show up to replace streaming, and then we’ll start all over again before it enshittifies too. But there won’t be guardrails anytime soon, and most refuse or are unable to vote with their wallets, so we’re just screwed.

I don’t know what the solution is, but as a consumer, I’m exhausted. I wish there were options to just buy products, sometimes more expensive ones to keep a steady, sustainable business model, for piece of mind that the company won’t stab me in the back someday.

Instead of trying to get Google money, I actually wish they would offer a monthly/annual/lifetime membership as the cost of not enshittifying to stay in business. And then severing ties with Google as a company.

A lot of tech companies are holding onto unsustainable business models from 10 years ago to make their products at a loss or “free,” and it’s forcing them into AI, oligarchy, or being beholden to oligarchs. End users paying a fair price to own the products they use is a better alternative than this because it puts the power back in our hands as opposed to tech bros and shareholders.

I’m sorry. I suppose I should have said “I don’t need the internet outside of work.”

No one needs the internet outside of work. The moment I’m forced to show my ID or get my face scanned, I’m done for good.

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There was a few years where I pretty much only used Flatpaks because I was scared of the terminal. But now that I’ve learned how to use the terminal, it’s so much more convenient because I can quickly update all my applications all in one place without having to open a separate app. Plus, some Flatpaks can fall really behind on software updates.

There might be a Linux userbase someday where no one other than developers actually knows how to use the terminal, because users can run everything they want without a command line, but maybe that’s actually a good thing because it’ll drive up how many people use a Linux distro.

With Windows and Mac, there’s a shareholder incentive to enshittify. With Linux, if a distro goes bad and gets commercialized, there’s always another distro people can move to, not to mention there’s no financial incentive. The more people get on Linux, the less power these tech companies have. Personally, that and privacy are what drew me to Linux much more so than being able to tinker or fine-tune my experience.

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This is what I do and have had vastly better experiences than with Bluetooth.

Fairphone has been a really disappointing experiment in so-called sustainable tech over the years. They keep making new phones instead of continuing to support the old ones, which might be greenwashing. (Whereas if you got a legacy Framework 13, it’s still user-repairable and upgradable.) If they wanted to make a non-upgradable device, maybe it would have been wise to make it high-end to futureproof to work until 4G gets phased out. Fairphone still is not making their products available in the U.S., and Murena is a borderline scam company and I am genuinely shocked Fairphone works with them.

And I’ve heard their logic with the headphone jack, but I do think AUX is the lesser of two evils as removing it will just lead to more e-waste with broken bluetooth headphones that rarely last as long as good wired ones. Fairphone’s own bluetooth accessories have gotten negative reviews for their lower build quality, so Fairbuds are likely not the solution to the headphone jack problem.

For the simple fact that non-Europeans can buy them directly off the website, I would sooner recommend feature phones from Sunbeam as it also has user-replaceable batteries and you can send it in for repairs. Or just any phone used.

I would not recommend Murena for U.S. customers. I attempted buying a FP4 from them, and they put $6000 in charges to my credit card. Their message-only customer service was terrible and tried to blame me. Had to get my bank involved.

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