> Only obscure titles get truly lost. They are obscure for a reason.
They can be obscure for many reasons, only one of which are it's quality as a piece of art.
There was an album, "Begin", released by a group of session musicians calling themselves The Millennium. Released in 1968, it was a borderline experimental sunshine pop rock in the vein of Sgt. Peppers and Pet Sounds, with songwriting and production in the same ballpark. It completely flopped, having landed a bit too late, and made virtually zero impact on music history. It only started to get rediscovered by the public after some CD releases in the early 90s, but that mostly got it out of total obscurity into being an extremely deep cut.
But it's fantastic and in spite of it being out of it's time when it released in terms of genre, did a lot of cool experimental stuff that makes it sound shockingly modern. It's seen some greater recognition in recent years, but we're in literally another century. I found out about it through a Spotify recommendation and based on searches, so did a lot of other people. When it got recommended to me in the late 2010s the play count for most of the songs was in the low thousands, but it's gotten a bit higher now.
The album didn't get re-issued because of it's quality, but because CDs were booming and labels were looking for any old junk. There was also a resurgence of interest in baroque pop in that era. If the circumstances weren't just right, it would never have been re-issued, it'd likely have continued to be completely forgotten and I wouldn't have ended up listening to it and loving it.
> This is arbitrarily narrowing the definition of market as far as possible
No it isn't, it's literally a market.
Dominos pizzas aren't created and sold by third parties. If you're going to make a comparison, try something doesn't so obviously miss the point (though if you want to talk about commercial food supply chains and how that's become almost entirely monopolized in the United States...).
The rest of your argument is basically "the law says so". Not an argument I'm interested in discussing since I don't care. I explicitly want legislative changes.
'1: exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
specifically : exclusive control of a particular market that is marked by the power to control prices and exclude competition.'
That definition doesn't define any boundaries on to what market a company has control over. A hardware platform like Playstation only has one store, run by the company who sells the platform; explicit control of the particular market, that market being Playstation games. By going digital only, they now have total command of supply. They also explicitly deny competition from participating. They even have a hand in pricing the games sold on the platforms, an ability they're able to leverage because they hold a vertical monopoly.
The issue isn't me or anyone else defining the word "monopoly" too broadly, it's that the frog has so thoroughly been boiled on what we once considered monopolies that we can no longer see a monopoly for what it is even when it's self-evidently obvious. I agree that anti-trust enforcement has become lax, I'm not arguing that it hasn't... but it shouldn't have. It's been about 30 years of letting big tech and media conglomerates do whatever they want and it is time for that to stop, and not just for video games.
It's interesting how attitudes towards this are so different across industries. Jeff Gerstmann is a fairly well known and well connected video game journalist and he straight up does streams where he plays emulators using romsets clearly downloaded from the internet.
They were using the word correctly, "monopoly" doesn't only mean greatly dominant player in an open market. Current consoles are by definition vertical monopolies.
> It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.
Iran–Contra? Their cyber espoinage tools getting swiped? The self-admission from the US administration that the CIA failed to properly recognize and prepare for the tactics used in 9/11, in spite of ample forward warning?
Like most intelligence agencies, their unaccountable power often gets mistaken for actual intelligence. That power makes them dangerous, but it doesn't make them smart.
> glass-walled skyscrapers really aren't complicated either
Until they become a focusing mirror that turns into a gigantic magnifying glass, see: the Walkie Talkie building. Evidently, glass buildings are hard enough that even with hundreds of engineers, there still ends up being second order effects that are unaccounted for in many designs.
Building a skyscraper with glass windows means understanding the physics of light, geography, the spin of the earth and it's rotation around the sun, materials science etc.
Understanding why pain happens is what allowed for anesthesia and modern medicine, which massively improved the quality of life of our species. Did we need to figure out how to do that? Sure, in the same way we needed to figure out how to create fire, or craft tools.
A stylus is crafted, paper in manufacturered. I suppose you can rip off some bark and scribble onto it, but what are you writing? Words. Do you know every word ever? Do you have comprehension of the meaning of every word? Building a structure of stone requires knowledge, otherwise it'll fall down and the knowledge that allows for that was accumulated over thousands of years. There were people who mastered pottery and nothing else, people who could do a little bit of everything but were master of none.
We only ever think we understand, we never truly do. There's infinite complexity to the universe we live in and there always has been, the illusion of simplicity is a false construct we create to feel more comfortable about our existence.
> You are making benchmarking WAAAY more complicated than it has to be. We're talking about some dude considering a switch to Linux, but isn't sure the performance is on par. Just load up your game and hit the benchmark button. No sane and rational person is going to be clowning around with driver revisions or regedit, because those types of people think that is more fun than playing the games.
Benchmarking is uncomplicated in the sense that you can press a button and watch the pretty things on-screen and get it to spit out a number; but is your room a little hotter than usual today? Was something downloading in the background? Did you have a transient network issue that caused some process to stall and eat some CPU time? Is one of your fans running a little slower than usual? Did you wait for the precomputed shaders to fully compile? What about the ones Steam supplies?
It's not about fun, it's tedious work. But without proper controls in place, data is just noise.
I don't think I was and I think that you're focusing so strongly on a perceived strawman rather than the actual topic is an admission that you're just projecting.
You were talking to an audience of tech nerds, as was the original blog post we're all discussing. All of your counter-arguments in you original post were appeals to that base and merely suggesting that Gmail users outside of the Hacker News sphere exist doesn't really change that.
Given that, bringing up the needs of grandma and her family photos is a non-sequitur. We clearly aren't talking about that, more considering the wider effects of a tech industry having centralized control of and gating access to customer data and processing and the ways that has caused a lot of exploitation and enshittification.
But clearly you're avoiding talking about any of that, which is why the only thing in my post you engaged with is a bunch of handwringing that I misrepresented something you said (I didn't).
I'm grandfathered to get unlimited updates, though if they rugpull on that the drives are just formatted as XFS. It'd be a hassle to move to something like TrueNAS, but I could do it even if the OS stopped working. Even if Lime Technology completely disappear one day and make every Unraid USB stick self destruct, I'll still have physical access to the data.
Cloud services, like everything else in control of rent seeking companies, are getting worse. That was always the obvious, inevitable trap with all of this, with any system where you pay a subscription for remote access to a timeshare computer. Which isn't to say that it isn't useful, I even use it, but I don't rely on it.
You didn't frame your initial post around the market of grandmas, your rhetoric was targeted to those reading your post; "How much of your personal data", "do you still have your email".
Funny you bring up Gmail as a positive example when they reneged on their promise of unlimited storage 5 years ago.
Most of my media is backed up on my Unraid server, the most important stuff is backed up on an external drive and I also have some things that exist in the cloud, which I do not trust, which is why it's tiered as least important.
I'm an Australian and there isn't a single person I know that isn't anti-america at this point, that includes conservatives. This was reflected in the last election, where the party most aligned with the US got absolutely wrecked.
They can be obscure for many reasons, only one of which are it's quality as a piece of art.
There was an album, "Begin", released by a group of session musicians calling themselves The Millennium. Released in 1968, it was a borderline experimental sunshine pop rock in the vein of Sgt. Peppers and Pet Sounds, with songwriting and production in the same ballpark. It completely flopped, having landed a bit too late, and made virtually zero impact on music history. It only started to get rediscovered by the public after some CD releases in the early 90s, but that mostly got it out of total obscurity into being an extremely deep cut.
But it's fantastic and in spite of it being out of it's time when it released in terms of genre, did a lot of cool experimental stuff that makes it sound shockingly modern. It's seen some greater recognition in recent years, but we're in literally another century. I found out about it through a Spotify recommendation and based on searches, so did a lot of other people. When it got recommended to me in the late 2010s the play count for most of the songs was in the low thousands, but it's gotten a bit higher now.
The album didn't get re-issued because of it's quality, but because CDs were booming and labels were looking for any old junk. There was also a resurgence of interest in baroque pop in that era. If the circumstances weren't just right, it would never have been re-issued, it'd likely have continued to be completely forgotten and I wouldn't have ended up listening to it and loving it.