Ah yes, the litteral destruction of culture and physical media for a centralised subscription service. I love the liberal world of techno enclosures of our new overlords, viva el free market economy.
> But what happens when sales numbers don't meet projections? The book is discounted. Then, at the publisher's discretion, the bookstore will receive a directive to rip the covers off the books, recycle the remainder of the book to be "pulped" or turned into other forms of paper, such as notebook paper and toilet paper. The bookstore is expected to mail the book covers to the publisher as evidence that the book has been destroyed.
That's an American take. In Latin America they sit in boxes and you can see it, because the pages will have been discolored after so many years of sitting somewhere waiting to be sold. They're only recycled if they're given away at book exchange events and no one wants them.
Looks to me, going by this reporting, that LATAM treats books identically to the US (The first headline, translated, is literally "If not sold or donated, books can become toilet paper")
In central America for example I went to Panama's book fair and you could see old books for sale. There's a lot of fear among booksellers that a book will not sell, because they purely resell them so any losses fall entirely on booksellers. They do not have any partnerships with publishers
The point of capitalism is to accumulate resources and to indefinitely seek growth in a finite world. It means making things cheaper to produce (e.g. via dematerialization, automation, cheap labor through immigration or globalization, mass production, intensive agriculture, self check out, cheaper ingredients for recipes, lowering standards, etc.) and generating higher revenues (e.g. via subscription services, ads, selling your data, shrinkflation, reducing everything to the lowest common denominator to appeal to the masses rather than the niche, etc.).
Even more than being the point of the game they cannot survive without it due to higher stakes and competition.
A comorbidity ridden cancer we might hope to find a cure for someday.
My problem with AI is not that they aren't useful, John. Like everything else in life the question is what we shape ourselves to be as a culture, as a community, what is the path we want to take. It's not on the same scale than ditching assembly instruction for a C compiler.
I get why most people get with the flow of what competition taught us: if you can't fight them join them. Yet I think it's demoralising we're forced to live the life forced upon us by a few techbros without real collective intelligence about the use of our resources and goals for the future. Again, it always has been a bit like that but never at this scale.
Yeah, but every activity is a human activity, so you could ditch the adjective.
And then the thing with exponential growth is that the last thing is worth than the previous one for its potency for destruction. While it's true that, all things considered, the curve started to explode with the use of fossils fuel we've never limit ourselves with efficiency gain, aka Jevon's paradox.
That's nice however I'll be surprise you can patent a few transformation matrices for an effect present in the public Zeitgeist since more than a decade. The core of the technique being Gaussian Splatting I guess I wonder how you'll get the data, except maybe SFM-ing your way through a worldwide collaborative effort.
I suppose Google could do something like that with their own data.
I am the same, the sad reality is that companies don't (really) aim to change our (old folk tech peoples) behavior, they are aiming to make a new normal for the next generation of consumers.
Like for an espresso machine or a printer, the incentive is put on the consumables. Peoples trust Steam and their frequent sales, not so much XBox and the rest of the platforms, so if you want to frequently buy a plethora of games, old and new and indie and AAA, it would probably still be cheaper to get a steam machine than the next console with their limited catalogue and fixed prices.
The new games tend to cost the same on both. Some do prefer gaming PCs, others have consoles for cost or ease. Steam Machine doesn't change that, it's another PC, actually a bit harder to use for this cause you're dealing with Proton unless you install Windows.
Wait, you can't play Minecraft on GNU/Linux anymore? I've bought the things for 10 bucks when it was still an alpha on TIGForum, it's been decade since I played the game but it never required us to be on a proprietary platform then.
I think they just meant that Microsoft owns Minecraft and you need an account with them these days. Java Edition stills runs on GNU/Linux last I checked.
>it's been decade since I played the game
Unfortunately you may have lost access to your account and thus copy of the game if you didn't do the two mandatory time-limited account migrations.
Tangential but I've recently discovered that an app I've written and published on F-Droid has been forked and put on Google Play with ads on by some Chinese forefront along side a lot of other open source apps without any mention of their GPL of course (and Google making it ridiculously difficult to take down thoses for normal folks, having to use a legally binding DMCA form).
Thoses marketplaces are filled with cheap softwares made to make a quick buck by any means without a thought for the whole user experience, with no way to flags grifters for a better community driven experience.
