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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Depending on the context, it could just be who’s doing it. Star Wars was originally specifically an allegory for the Vietnam War, which was a war of Western imperialism because the two countries making it a war rather than a country gaining its independence were France (who’d conquered Vietnam as part of their empire and weren’t happy that the Vietnamese didn’t want to be in their empire) and the US (who wanted to stop communists gaining power anywhere), both of which are Western countries. It was about that war in particular rather than imperialism in general because that war in particular was the one that was a big deal for the target audience at the time - if Lucas had been Japanese and making the film decades earlier, maybe he’d have made it an allegory for something else, but he wasn’t, so he made the film he made.





  • Whether or not that’s true at the moment (obviously, the status quo has changed because in 2020 UPlay changed to Ubisoft Connect, so the alleged incident happened years ago, and it’s alleged that Ubisoft were forced to stop selling something, so they wouldn’t still be selling it), the article specifically says:

    Uplay featured a $15 USD Rainbow Six Siege Starter Pack, but this version was not available on Steam, making the cheapest option on Valve’s platform much more expensive.

    The obvious way of parsing that is that it was the UPlay version of the game, but even if not, it’s generally not viable to sell Steam keys for things not available on Steam. The only time you can is when a game’s delisted but you’ve already generated keys for it, and then Valve can just wait for Ubisoft to run out rather than making the alleged threat.



  • It’s a fairly common sentiment that ‘good billionaires’ like Newell will demonstrate that seeking profit by making things people want to buy is more profitable than ruining things people were already buying so margins are higher, thereby making the bad billionaires want to copy them, and then capitalism will start working for the common people, and that therefore seizing the means of production is unnecessary as long as they praise gaben. Pointing out that he’s still accumulating the value of other people’s labour as quickly as he can and he’s just less short-sighted about it, rather than aiming to do good, can be helpful.










  • That’s a proprietary software problem rather than a being connected to the internet problem. One of the send-a-notification-when-it’s-done devices I set up took about as much effort as setting the right time on a phone alarm about ten times because the device’s firmware was open source with no companies’ bullshit involved, so all I had to do was navigate to the right page in Home Assistant and pick the right phone from a dropdown and the right even for the notification to trigger on from a dropdown. That’s not wildly different from picking the right time from a dropdown on a phone.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldFuture
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    3 months ago

    Again, that’s specific to it being proprietary software. I’ve got some devices in my home that are connected to the local network (but not the internet), and have configured Home Assistant (which I’ve got running on an old desktop PC) to send a notification to my phone when it detects that those devices report that they’re finished with what they do. That’ll keep working until I turn off the Home Assistant server or replace the devices.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldFuture
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    3 months ago

    That’s more effort per wash instead of being something that only needs setting up one and then will work forever. Also, it’s common for post-90s appliances to include sensors and vary the cycle time based on how dirty the water gets. Except for the data privacy and security concerns, which are mainly because it’s proprietary software rather than inherent in Internet-connected devices, there’s no advantage to using your phone timer over getting a notification.