What a brilliant way to put it, “theft from the public domain”. I’m gonna have to remember that one.

I’m not against nuclear power, but could they have concocted a worse set of motivations? Restarting Three Mile Island to power Microsoft’s AI ambitions? Shit reads like something a super villan would cook up.

I’ve also ran into some issues simply accessing youtube through my vpn, but that’s been going on for a while.

Absolutely. So much of the right wing media space is inhabited by, funded by, and glorifies grifters that they’ve created a constant chunk of their audience that is vulnerable to their tactics. Values or policy prescriptions don’t even really need to come into it, if you are a grifter it’s just a smart business decision to start drifting to the right. It opens up those audiences to you because you are “one of them”.

A little off topic but I’m kinda new to Linux myself, why do you dislike Gnome?

This… this is news to people?

That’s not a dumb question. Of the ones you listed I’ve only ever used Obsidian and Notepad++. I’m not sure notepad++ can do that, but Obsidian can I think. Obsidian has a core plugin (expansions made and supported by the developers that ship with the program by default) that allows for audio recording and embedding in your notes. I think that by default you have to go and turn it on in settings, but once you’ve done that you should be good to go.

This is why they’re losing advertisers left right and center.

Fixed that for you.

I’m already planning to. I run Windows 10 and as soon as that stops receiveing security support (or really as soon as I have the time) I’m gonna be swapping over to Linux for good.

Eh, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. As people have said above the infinite free money is drying up. That’s a fact that all these corporations have to contend with. The only difference between Twitter and Facebook or Unity and Google is that Twitter and Unity have made their dumb decisions already. Facebook, Google, and others have navigated this fairly well so far. But they are feeling the same pressures that Reddit and Unity did and eventually they will bend to them too.

Obviously not a lawyer, but I’m not 100% certain that the billing terms would stand up to legal scrutiny. It’s been kinda hard to keep up with this story so my apologies if any of this is wrong, but I believe that they said they were wanting to use an “aggregate proprietary model” to determine downloads. What that basically means (I think) is “we’ll tell you how much you have to pay us but we can’t independently justify any individual charge”.

Again, I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know of anything off the top of my head that’d make that illegal, but it also doesn’t really feel like it’d square with how things work. I mean if companies could just make up a number and say you owe them that much without being able to say why or whether or not that number comports in any way with reality, then what’s stopping every company from doing that? What’s stopping a magazine for example from coming back to you and saying “Yes, you paid us for the magazine. But our proprietary aggregate model that totally reflects reality promise tm suggests that you might have shown that magazine to two or three other people after you purchased it from us. So that means you have to pay us three instances of the review licence fee.”?

I don’t know. Obviously this is all scuzzy and morally wrong. It’s just that even factoring in that this is a subscription service and that they are a corporation with an army of lawyers who’ll likely win any challenge to it, I can’t really shake the feeling that there’s something fundamentally legally wrong about that aspect of it in particular that wouldn’t hold up in court. Even for them.

Honestly the FTC should be handing out antitrust suits like candy. Late stage capitalism has created a bit of a target rich environment, if only the FTC could take advantage.