Besrotheq's recent activity
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Comment on What kind of game did Cyberpunk 2077 turn out to be, anyway? in ~games
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Comment on What are your thoughts on piracy? in ~talk
Besrotheq Link ParentAre you me? This post describes me almost down to a dot. The one thing that irks me is that one the one hand, I 100% agree that "If I could pay one service for all streaming needs, I wouldn't need...Are you me? This post describes me almost down to a dot.
The one thing that irks me is that one the one hand, I 100% agree that "If I could pay one service for all streaming needs, I wouldn't need to pirate". On the other hand, I was raised with the conviction that monopolies are bad, and they stifle innovation. So as much as I hate that others are trying to compete with Netflix or Steam (and thus some movies disappear from Netflix), on the other hand I know that competition might be good for the market. I'm not sure yet what to make of this observation.
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Comment on What are your thoughts on piracy? in ~talk
Besrotheq Link ParentI used to have similar views, but they changed over time, mainly because I have gotten more insight into how actual financials work over time. While yes, there are definitely people getting richer...I used to have similar views, but they changed over time, mainly because I have gotten more insight into how actual financials work over time. While yes, there are definitely people getting richer than they should be, I think "it's the distributors that suck out all of the money, leaving the true artists with pennies on the dollar" is too easy. The true situation is far more complicated.
I can't speak for the music or movie industry, but I have some experience in the pharma industry (both through working as a researcher in the field as well as having friends who still work there): everyone is very quick to blame "Big Pharma" for getting rich by charging outrageous prices. But the truth is that developing drugs is outrageously expensive. Like, unbelievably so. Most drug research is unsuccessful. Even worse, most of the time you have a candidate drug, and a lot of people spend years (or even decades) to develop a compound. Only to discover in a Phase 3 Trial (i.e., the very last safety trial of a drug) that 0.1% of the people have a very bad reaction to it. That's easily billions of dollars down the drain. So yes, when you actually DO find a new drug, it has to cost more than the ~0.30$ that the ingredients themselves cost. It has to cover the cost of the thousand other drugs that failed to get to market. And the people who guide these companies get very well compensated because it's terribly hard to make decisions that involve these amounts of money, and making them every day. (Of course, there are assholes in that industry same as everywhere, I don't doubt that there were some greedy fucks involved in e.g. the opioid crisis. But that's beside my point).
While I don't know for sure, I assume the entertainment industry is the same: If you give the artist 90% of the actual revenue for each stream (or sold album), then the producers won't have the money to finance all the less successful bands that can't make it on their own. My gut feeling is that for every successful band that actually rakes in money, you likely have 10-100 more that you spend more money own than they'll ever make. You have to scout all the talent, sign it, manage it, record it, post-process it, and market it, and potentially fight for their rights in court (artists get sued a lot). All of that costs a lot of money and involves lot more people getting paid than the 3 people that make up the band. So I think it's very fair that the artist doesn't get the lion share of the money. How much should they get? I have no idea. But I'm sure the situation is a lot more nuanced than what it seems. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for paying the creators, and incentivizing them to be creative. And I'm sure "the suits" are looking out for themselves first and foremost. But I do think that there is a lot of value in the whole supporting industry, and if the artists think they can live without a record company or a stream affiliate, then in this day and age, nothing would stop them. They might think the game is rigged against them, but I think their view is slightly warped because they don't understand the full economics behind it.
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Comment on What do you self host? in ~comp
Besrotheq LinkI've recently switched my setup recently to outsource some previously self-hosted services. Currently I have a small server running in my home that runs Fileserver: I was running on Seafile, but...I've recently switched my setup recently to outsource some previously self-hosted services. Currently I have a small server running in my home that runs
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Fileserver: I was running on Seafile, but now switched to Syncthing. There was no real upside to the switch, but also no real downside. I lost the ability to have a web interface that I could access from my phone (e.g. to show peoplpe funny vacation pictures every once in a while), but that wasn't working perfectly before due to misconfigured DNS anyways.
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VMs that are hooked up with VPNs. I do all my private browsing over those VMs, so I don't leak privacy info. Every VM has it's own "user identity", with their own email accounts and passwords.
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A git repository collection
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I plan on setting up Pihole on the server, but haven't gotten to it yet.
Things I don't self-host anymore:
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I recently outsourced email to protonmail. Email is too important a service to not get it right, and my own setup was too unreliable. This reduced my downtime and made it easier to access email from my phone. The switch was way less painful than I thought.
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I switched from having a VM that would run torrents over VPN to using a seedbox (that I still control over a VPN-backed VM). I moved to a country that has stricter IP laws than before, so the extra layer of security is worth the price.
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I replaced my offsite backup storage with just uploading my encrypted backups to Google Cloud Storage. Their archival storage is dirt cheap, and this is a much easier solution to backup. Should've done this ages ago -- I store a few Terabytes of backups for a few dozens of cents a month.
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If you haven't played the game, then frankly, you don't know what you're talking about: the game very plainly was not ready for release. Of course most games will have some bugs here and there. I'm a software developer, I understand. But Cyberpunk was something else entirely! I've played it some weeks after it came out, on a solid desktop machine, and the flaws were just incredibly obvious (and obnoxious) . Things that will have jumped at every play tester within an hour of playing (e.g. background objects floating through the scene or very weird car mechanics). I won't even speak to the more-in depth issues (e.g. weird/nonsensical/bad writing in some of the story line). The game deserved every ounce of blowback it received, and more, I think. This was very, very, VERY obvious that this game was not ready to be released. The fact that the publishers decided to release it in its half-finished state unashamed is, quite frankly, insulting. It was a quick money grab: it was obvious that the game was going to sell even in it's half-baked shape, so they decided to release it as-is and deal with the backlash later. As customers, we should not accept this, and I think it's good that there was such an outcry about it.The game had the potential to be one of the best games of the decade, to be one of these eternally awesome games. And the fact that they refused to give the game another half year and call it quits and cash in is... very sad.