danielquinn

Via CatTrigger on Mastodon.

Tim Hickson is one of my favourite creators on Nebula and YouTube. I think he's hit the nail on the head here.

• Nebula link if you hate ads and have access
• Another video he made recently that I thought was excellent

Evelyn Woods (aka eevee) has posted some venerable takes over the years (she also wrote my personal favourite rant of all time: "PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design"), but this one, where she connects industry's generic idea of "content" to what she refers to as a "Whatever machine" is really quite excellent.

I think a lot of people out there are fundamentally misunderstanding the reasoning behind the big tech companies (and their investors) pushing AI into everything. We want to believe that it's just tech bros trying to woo idiot investor cash into their systems — and it is that, a little bit anyway — but the big players: Microsoft, Google, Meta, and even Visa know exactly what they're doing and it's not good news for the rest of us.

Anyway, I wrote this a few days ago to break down the problem as I see it. I'm hoping it proves helpful.

I've been a Steam customer for a very long time, having spent a few thousand dollars over the years with them. Like many of you, I've got a (small?) group of games that I bought and barely-if-ever played, and I'm cool with that. As they say, piracy is a service problem, and Steam is just... easy.

That was until I bought my Deck. Suddenly, I had two devices on which I could play my games: my proper gaming rig upstairs and my Deck is plugged into the TV downstairs.

I also however, have a kid that likes video games, so sometimes I let her play a few games on the TV... and that's where everything breaks down. If she's playing Lego Marvel on the Deck, my copy of Dyson Sphere Program flakes out upstairs with a warning that "someone else is playing a game, so this game will have to shut off" or some nonsense like that.

I'm suddenly face to face with the fact that I don't actually own my games and those few thousand dollars weren't spent on what I expected. It's... enraging to put it gently.

I can appreciate that there would be an attempt to prevent me from playing the same game on two devices (though I think that's bullshit too), but to prevent me from playing two different games on two different machines when both are legally purchased running on my own hardware.

This is what I see in both Firefox and Chromium

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/33126960

...so I found out how to fix it

My father is 75 and not very capable on a computer. He's got an old MacBook Air at home behind a typical ISP router for which he has no access controls (so no port forwarding).

My immediate need is actually not his machine at all, but the Raspberry Pi I installed at his house before I left the country and forgot to enable cron on so it's not doing what I need yet. However, it would be really nice if I could also do one of the following as well:

• VNC (or something) into his computer whenever something "isn't working" rather than doing the talk-him-through-it dance over Skype.
• Install a new OS (the Mac is no longer supported by MacOS). I don't know how plausible this is though.

My current plan is to email him a shell script that should create a reverse SSH tunnel to a server in Montréal or something and then I can shell into his Mac through there. It's not ideal though since we're still talking shell scripts and he's easily frustrated.

I know that in Windows land there are all sorts of tools scammers use to take over a machine remotely. Does Mac allow for the same thing? Note that I only have Linux machines available to me on this side of the Atlantic.