Apple wants to make sure they get a 30% cut if you spend money on anything within their ecosystem — that's all they really care about.
There are several reports of people having their entire accounts banned, effectively losing access to everything they paid for. And it's basically impossible to get your account back.
Those aren't competitors of Spotify/Netflix; they're alternatives for people who are willing to tolerate small inconveniences to have full control over their library.
Of course it's not as easy as signing up for Spotify/Netflix, but setting them up is easier than ever (even easier for tech people).
Yup, the key word for me is control. And over time, considering the continual loss of control, more people will adopt self hosting, and things will get better and easier. For now, i only recommend it to hobbyists or people with free time and money. It does take quite a while to get it all running smoothly.
To me, it starts to feel like work when I have to rebuild large parts of my factory because I didn't leave enough space to expand. This process feels exactly like having to refactor a bad codebase (where you feel the urge to just start from scratch).
If you plan your build properly, you can avoid this, but it takes a few runs to learn the best strategies.
Factorio makes me realize that I don’t really like solving problems for the sake of solving problems (or optimization, for that matter). I like solving them for a tangible reason or because I I’m making someone’s life better.
Problem solving and optimizing in Factorio is different than a grind in some game like Diablo. That sort of grind uses a completely different part of your brain (movement and in-the-moment decision making), and I find that I need that kind of change after a week of real-life problem solving.
I imagine people who gravitate to Factorio are probably better problem solvers and optimizers than me because that’s what they truly enjoy for its own sake.
I think the new expansion helps a lot with the rebuild issue, since you're expected to have have many different bases on different planets instead of just one big base.
Once you buy a game on Steam, you don't need to pay any kind of subscription to play it. The vast majority of games sold there are, in fact, one-time purchases. The games stay in your library even if the developer/publisher decides to delist them.
There are games like MMOs that do require a subscription, but that has nothing to do with Steam itself.
It's a great tool when you can actually read and understand the code AI is feeding you. When you don't really know how the language works or don't know programming in general, you end up getting stuck trying to guess why this valid piece of code (that looks like it should do what you asked the LLM for), is not working properly.
UNIX etc has all file access start from /. DOS/Windows has separate trees starting with different letters. I think having it all in one tree structure has some advantages. All paths can be expressed as relative paths, for instance.
Windows kind of does have that. They call it the global catalog or Win32 Device Namespaces.
somehow C: is easier to type than \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolume2\ or \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\Harddisk0\Partition2\ or even \\?\Volume{1ab2d2f9-230f-4c63-bc25-163c085334df}\ though.
VMS is a good example of a system that uses very un-UNIX-like file naming conventions, with ::, :, [], ., and ; used as separators for different path components:
I think having one tree is a huge advantage. take the windows registry, on paper it sounds like a great idea. "lets make a single unified database to hold all config values" In reality, it sort of sucks. One of the reasons it is so unpleasant to use. Is that now you have another tree with different special access patterns and programs that are incompatible with your main tree(or trees in the case of windows).
I really like the plan 9 ethos here, which can be summed up as "does it vaguely look like a tree? if yes, put it in the file system". My favorite one was html "Hmmm... An html document is tree structured.... hey guys lets make our web browser a filesystem driver. (enthusiastic clapping)". Having said that, having no mainstream browser on plan9 is what usually keeps me from using it. I keep telling myself that avoiding the web drivel that requires a mainstream browser would make me a happier person, but I keep coming back for more.
Well, me too, but it is 2024 and we have half a dozen technologies that let us put a few terabytes of non-volatile directly-accessible memory on the CPU memory bus.
Isn't it maybe time we relegated the technology of sequentially-accessed disk storage -- including SSD -- to legacy status, like tape drives, and stopped thinking about files and folders at all?
We are one quarter of the way through the 21st century. "Disk drives", including flash memory pretending to be disks, is legacy tech. We do not need filesystems any more. Let's move on and banish this to VMs holding legacy OSes for backwards compatibility with existing workloads.
A "filesystem" is really just a key:value store, in the unix system the key is hierarchical and each value can have more than one key. The real unix innovation was to combine all such stores present on a system into one tree. The point is to have a nice human accessible address to get your data at.
Now, theoretically, all memory access on the system could be done via one simple api. and as plan9 showed most IO can be done via that same api. It is sort of like having all networks be IP or all protocols be HTTP. The implementation may not be ideal but having that narrow waist is a huge quality of life improvement.
Realistically, it is only used for items that need to persist outside of a processes run cycle.
There are useful simplifications, and over simplifications.
As in a cartoon I once saw: two cats are talking, and one says of the human they're looking at: "it's a box of electronics, and when he presses buttons on the front, it flashes little coloured lights on that panel at him. It keeps him occupied for hours."
It's true and 100% accurate, but it's not at all precise.
It doesn't matter what kind of store it is. What matters is that it is an indirection mechanism designed for computers which were unable to access large amounts of directly-addressible non-volatile store.
Computers no longer suffer from this restriction, but all current OSes are built around this abstraction, and it cripples them.
There are several reports of people having their entire accounts banned, effectively losing access to everything they paid for. And it's basically impossible to get your account back.