In practice, patents don't really restrict the availability of a technology, from a consumer perspective. Patent holders regularly licence the use of patents. The only purpose of a patent is to fund research costs by creating some guaranteed revenue stream for the patentor.

The only time what you describe happens is if a company ignores its prime directive to generate profit. Such benevolent companies are a very rare thing.

Those who make peaceful protest impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

Also, the media cheered the killing of terrorists. Get off your hypocritical high fucking horse. Clearly there is a line where killing is deemed acceptable.

Not voting is an act of renouncing your voice and your rights. It's not a protest. It's at best complicity with the status quo, and at worst going to support a candidate that will be far far worse for the issues you are "protesting". You don't get to complain when you don't vote. All you get to do is sit down, shut up, and continue your inaction.

Protest voting doesn't work when the candidate you are protesting is the least worst option. Democrats that will not vote out of principle have been conned as badly as MAGA republicans. End of story.

You use the word "hobby", but I think this is a unique problem to hobbies involving collections. Personally I stay away from collection hobbies because they inevitably devolve into a binder full of stuff you don't use or enjoy because you already own it, and a rat race to obtain stuff you don't have. That's not my idea of a good time.

Granted, most hobbies are money pits or conversely time sinks, but that's kinda the point. As long as it brings you joy or personal fulfillment.

The software is not the problem. Software breaks all the time. The problem is monocultures and centralization. Building entire industry ecosystems all around a single point of failure. This is the just-in-time manufacturing supply chain disruptions and fragility all over again.

Who knew, a diverse ecosystem was a strength, not a weakness.

Triple AAA games are usually very polished. But polish doesn't make games fun. Polish is important with accessibility, and it's easy to see why accessibility is important for a big studio casting a wide net.

But fun? That comes from creativity and innovation. Big studios are averse to risk taking, and struggle to attract creative individuals, because the corporate culture seeks to stamp out individuality in the name of process and procedure.

So yeah, more evidence of this. My money is going to Indy devs who prioritize fun over polish. (But polish is good to have too).

The SCOTUS and other institutions will not save democracy.

This bears repeating. The SCOTUS and other institutions will not save democracy.

Institutions are corruptible. SCOTUS has been corrupted. That is where the US is.

Only citizen action can safeguard democracy.

3rd party app support...

There are many other reasons, but let's be real. A lot of us ditched reddit because they dropped support for third party apps. Having an interface that isn't trying to constantly milk you for all sorts of monetization schemes matters a lot, as it so happens. Enough to say goodbye to a lot of familiar and large communities with otherwise good information.

This wouldn't pass PR review and automated tests, unless they were a senior dev and used elevated privileges to mess with things behind the scenes.

In theory, yes. In practice, not necessarily.

I found that the images were not very representative of typical AI art styles I've seen in the wild. So not only would that render preexisting learned queues incorrect, it could actually turn them into obstacles to guessing correctly pushing the score down lower than random guessing (especially if the images in this test are not randomly chosen, but are instead actively chosen to dissimulate typical AI images).

Just yesterday here on Lemmy, I mentioned the dangers of violating privacy, and some commenters went on about "what dangers?" Implying there were none...

Is it not enough to gesture broadly?