So because VPN works for you, it’s impossible for it to not work for literally anybody else?

How do you propose these “open source journalists” make a living? Corporate grants or straight-up corporate jobs just like a huge chunk of Linux development, landing us right back at square one, if not even somewhat behind it? At least independent media exists nowadays, but if the assumption is that all news has to be freely available, like acastcandream said that’d just lead to journalism being very effectively locked out as a career path for anyone who’s not independently wealthy or somehow able to make people actually donate or pay for a subscription despite the content being available for free – and that hasn’t worked out too well for most publishers so far.

no one ever tactfully includes ads

This is pretty patently hyperbole; I’ve run into many sites, including news, with non-intrusive ads.

Whether it’s class-based gatekeeping is another matter entirely. For-profit media employees have to eat too, and in the current economic system most can’t just give people access to content for free without any sort of monetization mechanism and with a voluntary subscription, because that’ll very often lead to income dropping off a cliff. Unfortunately people are very loath to pay for online services except for some more niche cases like the Fediverse where instances run on voluntary donations – although I’ve seen a couple of moderately popular instances struggling with upkeep being higher than what people are willing to donate (and it’s not just services either; open source developers face similar issues.) In some countries we at least have public broadcasting companies, although eg. here in Finland the current extremist right-wing government is looking to reduce its funding by quite a bit and possibly even entirely dismantle it if they get their way.

While I definitely agree that news should be available for free, railing against a for-profit publisher’s paywall is, frankly, myopic; like it or not, in the current system even content producers have to make a living. None of us really has a choice in whether we want to live in this system or not

Well, whatever the solution to this problem is, I’m fairly sure “put a blockchain on it” isn’t going to be it. Distributed ledgers do potentially have some uses, but using them to carry “proof of humanity” information doesn’t make much sense

Well, for many publishers the choice is either ads or paywalls. The fact that people feel entitled to get everything for free is a part of why things are going to shit, because ads bring with them a whole slew of perverse incentives (eg. optimizing for ad views instead of content quality)

is not a reasonable prospect.

Not that that’s stopped 4chan before

Reddit surfed through the years of cheap vc money but going public could kill it.

Wonder which fascist tech billionaire will buy it when it finally implodes

Because it turned out so damn well for the UK when they did let the average person decide on policy that they have no fucking clue about, didn’t it?

With Comic Sans I can maybe buy that claim; it was never hard to read, people just think it looks silly (especially in more official contexts.)

At least to me Radon, however, actually is hard to read. I don’t know if it’s my slight dyslexia, but it feels like it’s purposefully doing the opposite of what the fonts like Comic Sans etc. did. It’s not quite Tengwar-bad but it’s still a bit of a jagged easily-confused mess that’s noticeably slower to read

Reading some marketing blurb about how these fonts are totally like state of the art and will make everything better is different from buying into what it claims, I guess?

Personally I’m not all that convinced that these’ll be as revolutionary as they make them sound – and Radon is so bad that it makes me question whether the claims about readability and whatnot have any connection to the fonts they published – but I’ll have to give them a whirl anyhow.

Yeah, I looked at the first couple of fonts, then read all that stuff about readability this, state of the art that, expressive palettes la-di-da and I thought “ok maybe they have an idea here”.

Then I looked at the rest of the examples and ran into that… thing. Like, the fucker’s so aggressively irritating to read that you could use that font to hide eg. backdoors in code, and reviewers would instinctively skip over those parts just to avoid the pain.

That’s actually a bit tricky for me especially via text, I’ve got a touch of the 'ole autism (like I have an actual diagnosis from a real medical doctor and not TikTok), but I get what you mean. I have a bad habit of assuming the worst about people

Heh, I think you have much more faith in people than I do

Why is there more matter than antimatter?

Because everybody has to know that they’re mommy’s special little munchkin who doesn’t use Gnome

Shit, the EU’s really on a roll with these draconian laws. There’s also the “chat control” bullshit that’ll wreck end-to-end encryption (see eg https://mullvad.net/en/chatcontrol for a list of sources)

No no, that’s ketamine, you’re thinking of the horse dewormer ivermectin.

And yes yes I know it’s used for humans as well, but the reich-wingers were getting it from veterinary suppliers since you can’t get the human version without a prescription. The idiots didn’t come to think that the dose used for horses is much bigger than what’s used for humans so they took ridiculously high doses, shat out their gut lining and thought that was a sign it was helping.

I’d withhold judgement before we see whether they vote their idiot back in next year, and there’s a scarily high probability of that happening.

Why are you being an ass about this?

Welcome to the intersection of gamers and Linux users

I do all my gaming on my Steam Deck and I haven’t run into anything that didn’t work – even “unverified” games. But I also eg. don’t play any multiplayer games so I don’t have troubles with anti-cheat systems which are apparently still a big pain point for Linux gaming and might be one reason for your bad experiences