I’m not sure why you added a question mark at the end of your statement.

I was questioning whether or not you would see that as a benefit. Clearly you don’t.

Are you also against libraries letting people borrow books since those are also lost sales for the authors, or are you just a luddite?

Because books are used to train both commercial and open source language models?

Even being too lazy to open the weather app, there are so many better and free ways of receiving a message on your phone. This is profoundly stupid.

Though they seem secure behind a paywall, swiping content creators’ explicit photos and videos from subscription-based platforms such as OnlyFans, Patreon, and Fansly is relatively easy. People can download third-party apps for the task, and if those don’t work, a few basic coding tutorials can teach them how to surpass anti-theft technology. These images and videos then proliferate across the internet, on niche forums, Reddit threads, Discord servers, and Telegram groups with tens of thousands of participants. Today, a growing legal consensus considers this activity to be sexual abuse.

I think you deliberately skipped this part.

Damn, I can’t believe I accidentally sexually abused Kate Winslet by pirating Titanic.

I think the risk of losing data naturally leads to people seeking out the most robust storage solution possible when 90% of those people would probably be better off with something simpler with less that can go wrong.

I can’t answer each bullet (and a couple are dependant on other things like drive speed, activity, and network throughput) but I’ve been using shucked external HDDs for over a decade and would recommend it. I used to use OpenMediaVault running in a VM on Proxmox and briefly tried TrueNAS, but I’ve since migrated all of my VMs to LXCs, so now I just have the drives mounted on the Proxmox host directly combined with mergerfs (not managed by Proxmox’s storage pools) and I pass it through to a Turnkey Linux file server LXC via bind mounts to share over SMB/NFS. Less overhead and LXCs can share CPU/memory dynamically while VMs can’t.

You should be able to replace that /mnt/external directory with no issues as long as the structure is the same within.

If Netscape had a large paid install base and still failed because a free browser became ubiquitous, what makes you think doing that now when the free browsers are already ubiquitous would work? Especially when it also has to compete with what is essentially already what you’re describing, Librewolf (or just Firefox + Arkenfox).

That’s any recompilation, the game has to be decompiled manually first.

I haven’t gotten around to spinning it up yet, but I was just looking into this myself and was going to try out Pinchflat. If anyone has used it and has any feedback I’d love to hear it.

I was between it and Tube Archivist.

This has strong “nobody needs a monitor over 120Hz because the human eye can’t see it” logic. Transparency is completely subjective and people have different perceptions and sensitivities to audio and video compression artifacts. The quality of the hardware playing it back is also going to make a difference, and different setups are going to have a different ceiling for what can be heard.

The vast majority of people are genuinely going to hear zero difference between even 320kbps and a FLAC but that doesn’t mean there actually is zero difference, you’re still losing audio data. Even going from a 24-bit to a 16-bit FLAC can have a perceptible difference.

Nobody “needs” to listen to music over Bluetooth at all, but why not make it sound like it’s supposed to?

I’ll just throw out Mull from DivestOS’s third-party f-droid repo as an up to date alternative. The newest versions are incompatible with the main repo but here is their explanation:

Updated Mull to 131.0.0, has 14+1+25 security fixes from the previous 129.0.2 release. In order to resolve the compilation issue introduced in 130, Mull is now compiled using Mozilla’s prebuilt clang toolchain. This however is incompatible with the F-Droid.org inclusion criteria, so these updates (for now at least) will only be available via the DivestOS.org F-Droid repository. Please note, while this adds a prebuilt dependency, the result does still remain FOSS.

How do you aggressively tell someone you’re using a game engine? Are you being accosted on the street?