I think the phrasing they wanted was “The person with the least disincentive to do the ethical thing”.

These people aren’t inherently more ethical. They simply have the fewest barriers standing in the way of turning it into action.

It’s not states blocking porn sites. It’s states treating porn site companies similarly to bars. “If we catch you serving minors, we’re gonna sue the shit out of you.”

The only legally airtight way to know you’re not serving minors is to check valid IDs for every visitor. Just like a bar. But since doing that for a website is a huge burden and still a tremendous risk, companies like Pornhub aren’t playing ball. Instead of complying with the new laws, they’re simply choosing to refuse service to any user from one of these hostile states. Can’t get in trouble for serving minors from certain states if you don’t serve anyone from those states at all.

Technically all you need is a DNS server.

No computer knows where <whatever.tld> is located, unless that route is hard-coded in a host file somewhere. It always has to ask a DNS server for that information. If that DNS server doesn’t know, it will probably try asking some other DNS server, and so on up a chain. Eventually, it reaches a master DNS server that either has the answer on-hand somewhere in a database, or it says, “lmao, that doesn’t exist”. All the DNS servers and your PC down the chain take that answer. They might memorize it for a little while and hand it out to anyone who asks them, but after a while they’ll ask their way up the chain again to see if the answer has changed since the last time they asked.

In order to “create” a TLD, all you have to do is make a DNS server that doesn’t ask up the chain. Just pre-program the list of valid domains yourself. You can make them anything you want. You can even “steal” existing domains and make them point to anywhere you want. Nothing is stopping you. Your DNS server will confidently report its pre-programmed answers to anyone who asks.

The catch is that any Internet-enabled device that you want to be able to use your fancy new custom domains needs to be configured to ask your DNS server in particular. People would have to manually set your DNS server as their master server to ask, or they’d have to set it to ask some other DNS server that is itself pointed through some chain up to your DNS server. This is an explicitly opt-in system, and getting a significant mass of people to do that voluntarily is practically impossible. But it’s not technically impossible.

The only reason you don’t have to do this manually with every single device you buy is because most devices either come from the manufacturer with a hard-coded list of DNS servers they should trust by default, or a device on the local network whispers in their ear and tells them who the local DNS server is and the device just goes along with it. It’s still technically an opt-in system; devices are simply either already “pre-opted in”, or there’s a system running on your network that auto-opts-in every device that connects, and most devices are designed to accept that auto-opt-in the moment they detect it.

Provided you manage to get the devices you want to listen to your DNS server, you may additionally want to set up a root certificate authority. The thing that makes the little padlock show up in your browser URL box to let you know the connection is secure. Kind of like the DNS server thing, this is also very simple–just run a cheeky little OpenSSL command or two and you can be a root CA in no time–but it suffers from the same “opt-in” problem. You have to manually configure any device you want to use your system to trust your certificates. Most devices just come with a list of “acceptable authorities” built-in, and those defaults are all most people are using. But nothing is stopping you from adding anything you want to that list at any time. You’re just limited to doing it on a device-by-device basis.

At my company, we’ve set up our own custom DNS server and our own root CA. We serve internal websites at a custom TLD we made up, and we sign them with our custom certificates to keep the connections secure. But that only works because we’ve manually configured our workstations to ask our internal DNS server for DNS requests, and we’ve manually configured all the workstations to trust our root certificate authority. A random device that connects to our network that isn’t configured with either of those things will not resolve any of our custom domains, nor will it securely connect to them. It also breaks if the configured devices aren’t on the local company network, since the DNS server isn’t reachable from the public web. Which is fine for us, since those internal websites aren’t reachable on the public web either. But yeah, that’s an example of the limitations.

If you want to create a TLD that will be auto-accepted by everyone who is already running the default chains of trust (which is probably what most people actually mean when they ask something like this), you have to seek out the big daddy at the root of that chain of trust and ask them to poof your TLD into existence for you. That would be ICANN, and they probably won’t do anything like that without a big fat check and a lot of corporate lobbying.

tl;dr - The tech is built in such a way that nothing is stopping you from making your own toy, and anyone can play with your toy without needing to do much. But if you want your TLD to “just work” for everyone in the world without asking every single one of them to explicitly opt-in, which is probably what you actually want, then no, you basically can’t do that.

There’s lots of software out there that is available to use without payment, but is still license restricted in such a way that you are not permitted to redistribute, modify, use for commercial purposes, etc. To many, these rights are the far more important facet of “free” software, above what it costs.

But since the English language has the same word for all of these concepts, we have all these yucks running around with zero-cost but right-restricted software wearing the “FOSS” badge thinking they’re part of the club. So some people add “Libre” to the acronym to explicitly disambiguate.

Does it even count if you’re advertising on your own platform? If I’m able to see the “ads” in the first place, I’m already using it.

I also wouldn’t exactly call a donation drive “advertising” either. They’re not trying to onboard more users to the service, they’re nagging people who already use the service to give them money. Which is itself leaning a bit on the wall of what is and isn’t “free”.

Show me a Wikipedia ad that they paid money for?

Correct. It’s not a scam. Because it’s not free. The sandwich had a price posted, you paid it, you received the product. Valid business model.

What would you think instead if you saw a NYT front page ad taken out for Free Sandwich Mart, the all-you-can-eat totally free sandwich emporium?

Or in this case, a free browser extension that paid to sponsor five thousand YouTube videos that promises to help you pay less money to every store you activate it on at no cost to you?

Humans are famously garbage at comprehending statistics, and most Darwin Award winning conservative behaviors are born of it.

Take any mundane thing that was part of a status quo of a previous era in recent memory. Anything at all. Research comes out suggesting that thing has a small, but non-negligible risk to be quite harmful. So we collectively shift to a new behavior that tries to eliminate the risk. A shift that, in most sane and civil peoples’ opinions, is so unobtrusively small that any theoretical benefit we’re trading away is probably well worth the risk elimination.

But oh, a certain group of people will bitch and moan and scream and piss all over themselves in rage over how you dared to take away something so integral to their culture and lifestyle! The risk aversion is never worth the vain fringe benefit of whatever perceived quality was lost because the risk is completely invisible until it actually hits them personally.

Milk used to taste so great! God’s gift to the world! Then we all started boiling it and now it tastes worse! And for what? Because a couple of weak-bodied cosmic lottery losers were getting a few tummy aches? The vast majority of us are all suffering over nothing! Life was so much better when we weren’t all scared of things that won’t happen! We did it for millennia and we turned out just fine!

Then you point out all the people actually getting hospitalized from pathogens in raw milk, the very thing we were trying to avoid in the first place, and if they even believe you at all they simply consider it an acceptable price to pay. Better to live in a rich and interesting society where you’re free to risk harming yourself and others than a milquetoast one where imperceptible threats have been preemptively eliminated at great cost.

And then they turn around and work to ban books that mention trans people or ban porn websites to save the children or some other dumb shit.

There is no such thing as a free and benevolent product with an advertising budget.

Sure, sure. Just don’t want you to wait forever for a bus that won’t come. :)

Factorio never ever goes on sale, out of principle. The devs have stated on multiple occasions. They know what their game is worth and they’re upfront about asking every player to pay the same price for it.

If you’re interested in Factorio at full price, no harm in buying now. If you will never buy it at full price, you will never buy it.

I also don’t think it comes pre-installed anymore, you have to get it through Microsoft’s meme store that no one uses.

it’s a venture capital-backed startup that has been very eager to exit its growth phase and enter its aggressive monetization phase so it can start making its shareholders some money. They’ve already tried a few things that didn’t work, like trying to turn it into a Steam competitor.

The service to date is mostly fine. If you’re like most people who don’t mind exchanging some privacy and control for access to an app that has a nonzero professional UX design budget, it’s pretty fantastic. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time that enshittification is near on the horizon. It’s not a question of if, but how soon.

I remember grinding my way through Pokemon Conquest, having a decent time but also kinda wanting it to reach its conclusion. I get to the end of the main campaign, scroll the credits, and then it tells me on next boot that there’s now some more content to play.

“Oh cool, a postgame,” I thought.

No. There was not a postgame. There were something like eighteen new campaigns to play.

To a certain kind of person this must’ve felt like Christmas morning. I put the game in a drawer and didn’t turn it on again out of sheer intimidation.

Average Familiarity

You’ve probably given them a new revenue stream idea.

Assuming you’re not being sarcastic, “visit” in this context is talking about the patient themselves going to and using the ER, not a bystander visiting a patient who is already there.

Charging at them directly where they want you to charge, their designated fall guys, sounds like a superbly inefficient strategy. You are pinching a huge amount of bystanders caught in the middle to for a proportionally negligible effect.

Yes, if someone who is desperately asking for a proverbial (maybe literal?) bullet in their head puts a hostage between you and them, can you still plow right through the hostage and get them that way? Exhaust everyone they can possibly field to eventually break through to them? Sure, in principle. That can balloon to an absurdly high casualty count, though. Is it really all worth it?

It’s a lot more efficient to, wherever possible, sidestep around the hostage, get behind them and strike directly at the problem. That’s exactly what Luigi Mangione did, and its effectiveness is exactly what’s being applauded.

If your rebuttal is that what Luigi did is far more of a risky path to take, you don’t wish to take a risk like that, and you’d rather faff about kicking low level grunts instead because that’s an easier, lower-consequence option for you that theoretically makes progress, okay, I guess. I personally think you’re just wasting your time and energy pissing off only the wrong people. Only big stunts are gonna move the needle, in my opinion.

Regardless whether you support her general conduct, I think we can all rally around one tenet here:

Don’t harass a shitty company’s T1 support out of priciples against the company in general.They’re in no better position to effect change in the system than you are. They exist only to be slightly more competent phone robots, turning your whiney noise into itemized actions, and filter those actions down to a restricted subset of system commands the company permits them to do.

If anything, they’re on our level of the totem pole. Any outrage directed at them for actions of their broader company are a gross misdirection and wholly counterproductive.

I don’t know who this lady was speaking to on the phone. But if it was some minimum wage phone bank slave who is just the ablative frontline of the customer support hotline, I don’t support her threat in that context.

I’ll do ya one further: Copyright should have the same lifespan as a patent. 20 years max. No extensions, no exceptions. I’d even cosider less time than that.

If you retained the unilateral rights to copy your idea for 20 fucking years and you haven’t made your healthy profit on it already in that time, tough. Your work will forcefully enter the public domain so people who were likely actually still alive when it was culturally relevant get a shake with it.

There is no reason why something created during my childhood ought to still be languishing locked up in trust of some dead man’s corporation by the time I’ve withered away of old age and my grandkids have done the same. The severe generational lag of culture and accessible technology created by copyright in its current form is absurd.

If you want to chase your golden goose forever, keep making new iterations of it that have their own copyrights that fairly compete against everyone else’s in the marketplace of ideas. Get off your laurels. Get on your toes. Keep making new, inspired things. Earn your goddamn right to continue being seen as the rightful creator to follow up what you’ve previously made in the past.