You have a lot more faith than I do that companies paying security researchers will not try to cut corners by directing the researchers they employ or hire to look at stuff that they aren't even about to install.
Neuroplasticity. Seems better than the damage caused to your lungs and cells from smoking.
I mean, do you have any evidence that the brain is irreversibly damaged by social media? I have not seen any, but I have seen evidence that there is permanent cell damage from smoking.
To play devil's advocate, there are good studies linking social media use to depression.
While you can somewhat mitigate the negative health effects of smoking by stopping and then making healthy decisions like doing sports and paying attention to what you eat, depression isn't something you can just stop having.
But are you saying that social media causes irreversible and permanent depression that neuroplasticity cannot ever reverse?
There is also a healthy side to social media, but not really a healthy side to smoking.
Social media helps me make and keep in touch with friends. I have not found any negatives personally. My feeds are pretty much just posts from friends. I have removed everything else by now.
This who conversation seems a bit simplistic and reductionist.
Sure the brain grows and changes but just pointing to 'neuroplasticity' -- a concept none of us really understand and saying 'it's all good' -- isn't that insightful because it's too one dimensional. At the end of the day we can say that this must have some permanent effect on the brain because people remember their time on social media, right? Yes, it's a mixed bag with some positives from social media but at the end of the day there's an opportunity cost for the time that they spent on social media in the form of times shared with loved ones, the formation of positive relationships in the real world, and perhaps career opportunities.
With that said the bigger issue to keep in mind is that the people who push this kind of technology on society do so knowing that it has negative consequences for individual users and society as a whole and yet they push it anyways for personal profit. And more than just pushing it they actively lobby the government to change laws or prevent regulations from being enacted that would stop them from doing so.
This is odious behaviour and it should be stopped and the people involved should face personal consequences for damaging society so casually.
I think parent commenter meant that what's insane is that js runtime is not treated as an utility which should never be monetized. It's as if GCC developers haven't figured out how to monetize, but they are willing to at some point.
GOG has a strong anti-DRM stance, but unfortunately not all of the games GOG sells are truly DRM-free if you consider things like online services and online service requirements and live patching/live service. Often considered the worst offender is Sony published games with some of the worst root kit anti-cheat installs still bundled in the GOG edition, with mandatory online "data collection" for the game to run, even for single player games.
GOG will still give you an offline capable installer file for that game, and hasn't entirely compromised its values on that aspect of DRM-free, but the game won't boot up offline and/or without agreeing to the data collection terms and installing the rootkit.
I like GOG and the criticisms here are only because I'd love to see GOG do better, but I also know GOG alone can't fight "the cloud" and even single player games from major publishers having "required" online services. It's a DRM of a different sort (and remains a long term archival issue, because few of the companies like Sony will ever unlock the game or open source the service at the end of the games' commercial lives and would seem to prefer to just leave those games unplayable).
Wine wrapped installers for ... which distro? They ship a shell script that extracts the linux game binaries to user's home dir. Works on all linuxes.
GOG ships what's available. If game devs never made any linux binaries, then there won't be any linux binaries. What? You expected GOG to make a linux port of the game?
Games with wine don't require any special installers. Just open the wine desktop and install the windows game from there, like any other windows program you use in Linux. If you think that's too hard, then get a PS/Xbox and see my original reply, the one with the "we're doomed".
BTW, you can set up your linux to directly execute Windows binaries using binfmt_misc, but that may also be too hard for some...
I don't see why that should matter. It's games, you'd practically have to ship your own libraries anyway.
>If game devs never made any linux binaries, then there won't be any linux binaries. What? You expected GOG to make a linux port of the game?
Personally I couldn't give less of a shit, I'm an adult and have better things to do than play videogames.
I certainly do think it's not an unreasonable wish, and it wouldn't even be particularly hard. If GOG wanted to, they could provide pre-configured wine-wrapped installers for games that just work.
I do not know whether or not this would make financial sense for them, but Valve seems to think so, and I suspect GOG could do with a few cheap European software engineers wrapping games for them. Hell, they could even cut costs further by just open-sourcing their wrappers and largely relying on user-submitted patches for maintenance.
>Games with wine don't require any special installers. Just open the wine desktop and install the windows game from there, like any other windows program you use in Linux.
If you'd ever used Wine you'd know how fiddly it is, there'd obviously be a lot of value in having someone else handle that fiddling for you.
> If you think that's too hard, then get a PS/Xbox and see my original reply, the one with the "we're doomed".
I don't know if GOG shares your poor attitude, but that certainly wouldn't be a good way to run a business. Try coming out of the basement every now and then.
The question for grown-ups with things to do in their lives is usually not whether or not something is too hard, but whether or not it is worth spending their time on. If I ever wanted to play a game, looking up some workaround for a wine-related crash is the last thing I'd want to spend my time on.
I think "UK citizen" should have been replaced by "person acting from within the UK". This is how it is defined in the context of GDPR - the nationality doesn't matter, what matters is where you are when you are provided services.
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