I’m not sure. Mullvad is still a good product, but what it funds is not.

If I’m entirely honest, I mostly see VPN services as a predatory market, inflated by their own marketing campaigns about the risk of personal privacy. There are some products who are true to their word, like Mullvad, but most are looking for a quick buck from the average user who might forget they have a running subscription if they keep the cost low enough.

Frankly, after seeing what’s happened with Proton and Mullvad, I’m not inclined to believe anyone in this market amounts to more than a paranoid libertarian at best.

I think there’s something to be said between mobile app stores and what Valve offers through Steam though.

There’s an argument to be made that yes, developers are functionally giving up an entry fee to Steam’s userbase, but Steam also does run a very compelling platform. If it was just a storefront, I’d agree about rent seeking. But you get a pretty elaborate set of features that are legitimately what sets Steam apart from other stores:

• Steam community forums
• News feeds to make publishing patch notes easier
• Steam workshop for easy integration of community content
• A robust social network, with integration into the game for an easy means of inviting, hosting and joining games to meet parity with Consoles
• Steam’s whole CDN/versioning depot
• a swath of marketing tools, Proton for multi-platform compatibility, etc.

For both its users and the sellers, Steam is a consistently improving platform. I think they’ve made some less great decisions over the years, or fail to enforce their own guidelines, but largely they continue to innovate and make it clear there’s an interest in making it as complete and accessible am experience as possible.

To your second point, agreed. I despise the loot boxes and I think Valve is pulling some horseshit there. There’s also no forgetting they had virtually no customer support for longer than they’ve had it. Refunds weren’t even an option until 2015, and only came about as the result of multiple consumer rights suits. To their credit, they’ve made a point of doing that as well as they can too, but I still think there’s room for improvement.

There was some drama after one of Mullvad’s cofounders was outed for donating considerable sums of money to right wing organizations. It’s fallen out of favour as the default recommendation as a result

A blockchain doesn’t actually provide control over a transaction, it just verifies that it happened. It’s supposed to be a long, immutable record of every transaction that has ever ocurred, which is precisely why transactions can’t be reversed. The work of verifying those transactions is performing by miners, or some other “proof of” design where you have an authority in the chain that confirms it.

Basically, it’s nothing more than a fancy receipt.

Grinch mug

I remember back when 3DM started stripping away Rockstar’s DRM on GTA V back in 2015. That was in crazy demand in pirating circles

I have 2.5G N100 and it works wonderfully at that rate. I think higher might be tough, but it still pushes that throughput even with IPS enabled in OPNsense.

The complained about heat is right though. I stuck a noctua fan on the top and it’s been happy since. It lives my closet, so noise isn’t a facto anyways

Well, no native Linux build then. But it should work reasonably well with Wine/Proton

Unless it’s changed substantially in the last few months, it really isn’t. I tried half a dozen different clients, from the bog standard to the bleeding edge and all of them seemed to implement features unevenly or not at all.

There’s points of friction that just make it worse to use, which isn’t something I can sell most of my friends on. Fluxer seems like a far better option for a 1:1 experience.

It’s a lot easier I think, to be one person working on two games that are both passion projects, than to be a large studio working to support a multi-faceted project where the work is distributed across several departments and teams. In that environment, there’s no single person who knows the full ins and outs of the game, so when that post-launch skeleton crew gets to squashing bugs and adding features, they’ve already lost most of the knowledge required to do more unless that post-launch support was intended from the start.

ConcernedApe is also a crazy exception, even for indies. Most games of that scale do depend on at least a few different people, but the guy is a savant for game dev. Stardew being a solo project is absurd.