The problem is that when everyone is using their right to deny access to their works to make people give them money, and there is only so much money you can reasonably spend on entertainment and so on per month, people end up abstaining from a lot of things they could otherwise have taken part in for no extra cost.

I think that the things we pirate have a value: music, movies and games have a value because they are cultural products and vulture is important, software like photoshop has a value because it is a useful tool. Putting up barriers to accessing these things means destroying this value. Having a system where the main way to make money of e.g. music is to paywall it has the “destruction” of a lot of value as its outcome. In some ways streaming platforms like spotify are better in this regard but then that means giving the platform a lot of power over music discovery for example. Spotify doesn’t really do a good job of paying its artists either which is its supposed ethical advantage over piracy.

I think that a system where we should abstain from things that are basically free to reproduce (i.e. things you can pirate) is dumb. There are many movies that I probably wouldn’t pay money to but that I’ve pirated. The companies that own the rights to the movie don’t lose any sale they would have otherwise made but I get whatever enjoyment I get from watching the movie at least, so it’s a net win.

When I pay may bills at the end of the month I also put some money towards paying for things that I’ve pirated that I like, usually with a focus on smaller creators. It doesn’t really feel meaningful to pay for a marvel movie for example. It’s not really a perfect system but neither is artificially limiting the access to digital media.

I have a copy that I got from https://github.com/yuzu-mirror/yuzu. Looking at its master branch of the main repo, it has dc94882c9062ab88d3d5de35dcb8731111baaea2, followed by 4 commits related to translation (likely the same as OPs) followed by a couple of commits that only change github urls from yuzu-emu to yuzu-mirror.

Download a popular movie and keep your computer on for a while 🤷‍♂️

Although, seeding stuff that isn’t popular is also important. I don’t know what you’re seeding but if no one is leeching maybe there aren’t a whole lot of other people seeding either. When someone does leech, they might be very happy that you’re there keeping that one torrent alive.

You can have qBittorrent running in mixed mode, which doesn’t give you the privacy of i2p but does give you even more leachers than just using normal ip and helps grow the i2p network. Everyone should get i2p and use mixed mode or i2p only imo.

I don’t think I would use this actually, because I don’t see how an AI could capture the performance. I’m a sub over dub guy anyway, but at least someone making a dub has a sporting chance to make an interesting performance.

qBittorrent can do this for example

If it’s true that pircay nearly destroyed GoT, that means that we as pirates have power. We’re a counter balance against ridiculous payment schemes and arbitrary limiting of content.

Oh okay, so you’re saying that the only way to only allow people to comment with fediverse accounts also involves manually approving all of them? That’s a bummer, hope wordpress fixes that at some point.

Just thinking out loud here, but could only allowing people to comment with their fediverse accounts from elsewhere be a solution?

Well non-federated forums can grow by word of mouth and similar. Being federated does lower the barrier of entry for interacting but it’s still possible to visit the instance the old fashioned way. You probably still need to rely mostly on word of mouth anyway, even if you are federated.

The point being made is that it’s more expensive to borrow, do you dispute this?

We can distribute digital media for almost nothing, yet the way most people and companies make money of digital media is by creating incentives to not consume it. Taking part of digital media has a value and artificially creating barriers to doing this means destroying enormous amounts of value.

This is clearly a very bad system and piracy is a useful strategy for creating the possibility of something better long term and to keep companies from putting up too large barriers short term. The only reason why we have the convenience of e.g. spotify is because of piracy, without pirates we would likely have something more expensive and less accessible instead.

If they don’t have a sustainable business model, they don’t have to operate at a loss for years either. Maybe it’s better to let reddit die and transfer to a model that makes more sense. I think that smaller instances with users and moderators voluntarily paying server costs like in the fediverse seems like a much better solution than companies trying to gain a monopolistic position so that they can then ruin their product in order to make money off of it.

It’s not just the american federal reserve that’s increasing it’s rates. We live in a globally connected economy and almost all countries are impacted by the american economy as well as some of the reasons causing inflation in the US (the pandemic and the war). Most countries are affected by the inflation and most countries are combating it by hiking interest rates.

Hard to generalize about all hackatons?

I have a somewhat cynical view of the crypto community, but

It feels like I’m watching Shark Tank or any show where participants try to sell the idea to VCs, instead of a programming tournament.

Seems like something that might disproportionately might affect blockchain hackatons. There are in my experience a couple of different people who are into the blockchain: libertarians, people hoping to get rich and people really interested in the technical aspects (some overlap may exist).

The “hoping to get rich people” can sometimes be in conflict with the tech people and I think that this might be an example of this. If you’re just interested in getting rich the actual technical details don’t matter, just your ability to build hype around them.

Sometimes it’s better to ban things before they get out of hand than after, tends to be a lot less dramatic at least.