Sponsors maybe? Adding features because somebody influential wants them to be there. Either for money (like shovelware) or soft power (strengthening ongoing business partnerships)

I love DeArrow so much. Best addon I’ve ever donated to, very worth it

ESU is inherently bullshit. So they’re going to make security upgrades for the OS millions of people are using, but you only get them if you pay? Even though they’re committing dev time to make and deploy them, the SECURITY upgrades to the OS yhat millions have already paid for?

What a grift. Either you’re paying ESU and there’s no dev work (free moneyyy!) or it’s literally a ‘protection fee’ for dev work they’re doing anyway (nyeehhh nice PC ye got there, be a shame if we extorted you for it)

That’s just the money their making itself. When it comes down to what are we subscribing for, it keeps being ads again. They keep deciding that subscriptions make money by removing ads.

Like, why not subscriptions that actually add something gainful? Subscribe to stream your games to any TV, subscribe to get dog food delivered to your house monthly, subscribe to Socks of the Month Club. Those things exist in other industries, but tech?? Nope, it’s just ads, or subscribe to less ads.

Are techbros so bland that they really can’t think of literally any fucking way to make money that isn’t just ‘ads’?

Thank you, I’m not American but MS has so many ‘features’ that have been destroying my sanity, I will look into this tool when I’m back at my desktop 👍

If you’re in the US,

Is it US specific, or do you just mean if you’re not in the EU?

Reddit is definitely for opinionated people that can’t keep their mouth shut. And has quite a few bigots too. So this chart is unrealistically complimentary of redditors - I’m guessing you found it on reddit, which explains the judgemental opinion about TikTok and Insta.

Isn’t the MO for venture capitalists to run businesses into the ground, make them owe debt to themselves, cannibalise businesses from the inside and then run away with a profit while they bankrupt?

Not surprising to make a decision that kills a business because the entire point is to kill the golden goose

Oh no, the mines will be so bad for my authentic supple human skin, and my favourite mammilian activity of breathing air

The reality is that a person in a cult leaves it quietly. At the start of the process, they have doubts and fears but repeat the mantras about how they’re still absolutely a member of the cult.

And we’re seeing that. We’re seeing people upset about what’s happening, yet claiming they still support him. That’s what a person leaving a cult actually looks like – doubt, self-assurance, and then quietly quesstioning it whilst acting to their peers that they’re still believers. They’re not necessarily aware that this is the beginning of them leaving, many want their leader to reassure them of those doubts, and get slowly unsettled when they don’t.

If you ask them point-blank if they renounce their faith, they’re not willing to admit it publicly. That’s too real. They’ll just slowly fade away, and try to live like it didn’t happen.

Which means if you want people to leave a cult, you have to let them do it quietly. Even if its hard, if you’re angry and want to punish them. If they’re giving up a community they know accepts them, it won’t be to join a community that never will.

I like em dashes. I learned the alt code for en and em dashes just so I could use them easily on a computer. There is a difference between a hypen and an en dash, and a double-hyphen is but a simulacrum of the em dash!

• Hyphen is just for double-barrelled words
• An en dash is useful – at least sometimes – for inserting side thoughts
• ah boy I sure hope an em dash doesn’t interrupt m—

But let’s be real, I type kinda formally, like an AI, sooo

Phone proximity is used, so if your phone is in proximity to his, the algorythm can note a relationship between his interests and yours- or even the interests of people who also interact with him.

It’s possible his behaviour is learned from a narcissistic parent, or that enough of his customers are involved in learning about narcissism. OR you also mightve been at a Cafe near a clinic for long enough your phone tried to ping the office wifi, and you just noticed it because of your interactions with him.

Google also uses your relationships, so maybe a person you know is interested, or you watched a video about (blank) and a lot of those viewers also watched narcissism videos. Your brain is asking the connection to the contractor because it’s an intuitive logical leap.

Phones spy on us in a dozen different ways, mostly pattern recognition. They track location without GPS (by recording wifi pings), and track interests without the microphone. So they can claim they’re not tracking those specific things while still gathering scary amounts of data.

So a loan of $10 million has like $5mil taxed right away? You get $5mil to spend, and still owe the bank like $12mil? Those interest rates are insane, and will definitely affect the working class more than the ultra-wealthy. Specifically businesses, which will increase giants’ monopolies. And you can’t make businesses an exception, because then the ultra-wealthy will borrow through those.

The money is not the problem. Money isn’t real, it’s just a tool that represents power and resources. There’s nothing you can do to tax or control money itself because what wealthy people have is all the resources, and they can leverage them with or without money.

You can’t tax your way out of hierarchal Capitalism. The rich are paying as much tax as the current system legally asks of them - which is very little, when your wealth is in resources and not money.

The poor and workers are more affected by taxes and costs because most of our worth is in money. Once you have enough to start investing and have resources, your worth can grow rapidly.

Well if it doesn’t, sell your stock to yourself a la Elon Musk, who sold X at a loss to XAI (a company he also majority owns). The ‘loss’ of ~6bil in value (iirc) means he can now gain ~6bil from any other sources without paying gains tax.

Billionaires technically don’t have much personal wealth. They leverage their illiquid assets as collateral to take out massive loans. Which they can later cover with taking out even bigger loans.

The liquid wealth of the wealthy is very low, technically in debt. This is another way they can avoid paying tax as they technically don’t have much of anything, and the reason why ‘declining to take a salary’ is typically meaningless.

I’m not. Most people are very passive politically and only know what the evening nees mentions. Most of them probably don’t know who AOC is (or perhaps only knows her by ‘AOC’ and the forms used her full name).

Harris is their default poll vote because they recognise her name

Moat of the teams I see hiring designers are still using Adobe, and printshops take .ai files. But most of the solo designers I know use Affinity, and I’ve heard of one (albeit small) team that has swapped to Affinity for their whole team.

Affinity was just bought by Canva so idk how it might evolve over time, or if v3 will make compromises I don’t agree with. But I got v1 during Covid, loved it, converted to v2 as soon as it was available, still love it. Using all of them on the same file in the same window feels amazing.

Another downside is that designers rarely make asset packs for Affinity. But I’m pretty sure Affinity is able to import brush pack formats from one of the other big names, just not sure which (likely Adboe’s .abr)

I don’t like painting in Photo though, but that might be because I’m so used to Krita, which is designed for illustration in the first place. (They’re great, I might donate to them again actually)

I use Affinity Suite for work. Paid for it once, have it forever. Free updates until new editions, which are discounted if you own an older edition. Buy it for one platform (Windows), that’s a license for that edition of any other platform too. AND they regularly go on special, often to 50% off.

It doesn’t have AI content generation, but it does a few things Adobe doesn’t - like being able to use Photo and Designer from INSIDE Publisher, seamless like its a single program!

Affinity Photo (Photoshop), Designer (Illustrator), and Publisher (InDesign). Then Krita for raster illustration. That’s all I need as a professional

This is what I do, except I would add 700 and 236 at the end.

Well except I would probably add 700 and 116 or something, because my working memory fucking sucks and my brain drops digits very easily when there’s more than 1